The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations 0367000709, 9780367000707

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Contributors
1 Introduction
On the “Hindu” and “Christian” in “Hindu–Christian relations”
Intersectional analyses of caste, race, nationality, and gender
Caste
Ethnicity, race, and class
Gender
Hegemony, resistance, and the enduring legacy of the colonial encounter
Conversion
Hegemony and scholarship in a postcolonial era
Hindu–Christian relations as a site for fruitful theological exchange
Notes and acknowledgments
Bibliography
Part I Theoretical and methodological considerations
2 The formation and mutual re-formations of “Christianity” and “Hinduism” as “religious” categories
The early formations of “Christianity” in relation
To be or not to be
The British dispensation
Caveats and conclusions
Bibliography
3 The emergence of modern Hinduism
The Western influence on modern Hindu self-understanding
Did the British invent Hinduism?
“Indian philosophy means Vedānta”
“Vedānta philosophy means the Kevalādvaita of Śaṁkara”
Hegelian versus perennialist interpretations of Vedānta
Hindu inclusivism
Note
Bibliography
4 Western philosophy and Christian theology in twentieth-century Hindu thought
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Advaita Vedānta
Idealism
Mystical traditions
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Mādhva Vedānta
Creation
The nature of God
Conclusion
Bibliography
5 Orientalism and postcolonial theory in Hindu–Christian encounters
Setting the stage: orientalism, subaltern voices, and postcolonial theory
Hindu universalism and the theology of difference
Global spiritualities, cultural appropriation, and liberation
Bibliography
Part II Historical interactions
6 Syrian Christians and dominant-caste Hindus
A history
Education: dominant-caste politics
Conclusion
Bibliography
7 Hindu–Jesuit encounters
Francis Xavier and the beginnings of Hindu–Jesuit encounter
The golden age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Cautious new beginnings
The Society of Jesus as an Indian society
Other venues for Hindu–Jesuit relations
Hindu views of Jesuits
The global scene
Note
Bibliography
8 State power in the relations between Catholics and Hindus
There is no Hinduism, but the Indian state is its prophet
The Catholic formation of Hinduism
The Indian national movement and Catholicism
Catholic elites and the Indian national project
Conclusion
Bibliography
9 Hindu–Protestant encounters
Bibliography
10 The East India Company, Christianity, and Hinduism
A Godless company?
Pressure intensifies
Soldiers of Christ
Indian hostility
1813 renewal of the Company’s charter: the Pious Clause
Center versus periphery: the power of “the man on the spot”
Implications of the new ecclesiastical establishment
The Company and Christian education
Lord Bentinck and Hinduism, 1828–1835
Hinduism under siege
Conclusion: a Hindu or a Christian Raj?
Note
Bibliography
11 Hindu–Christian debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Bibliography
12 Critiques of Christianity from Savarkar to Malhotra
Predecessors: V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966), Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940), and M.S. Golwalkar (1906–73)
Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948)
Ram Swarup (1920–1998)
Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003)
Arun Shourie (1941–)
Ashok Chowgule (1948–)
Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015)
Radha Rajan (1956–)
The Hindu American Foundation
Rajiv Malhotra (1950–)
Consensus and conclusion
Bibliography
Part III Contemporary exchanges
13 Anti-conversion laws in post-Independence India
Defining conversion
The “foreignness” of religious conversion in the Indian context
The Constituent Assembly Debates
The state missionary enquiry reports
The first wave of anti-conversion legislation
The second wave of anti-conversion legislation
Conclusion
Bibliography
14 Hindu–Christian relations through the lens of caste
Caste: two preliminary considerations
Precolonial caste-based antagonisms
Epistemological and tactile collusions
Colonial Christian self- and other-understandings
Which (and whether) Hindus?
Colonial Hindu self- and other-understandings
Dalit agency and anti-conversion laws: a lens to understand Hindu–Christian relations
Accidents in objectifying subjects: after-effects on Hindu–Christian relations today
Bibliography
15 Race, representation, and Hindu–Christian encounters in contemporary North America
Histories of migration and interconnection
Hindu communities and Protestant narratives of nation-building
Advocacy and the racialization of religion
Conflicts and controversies
Diversifying Hindu voices
Bibliography
16 ISKCON–Christian encounters
Common cause
Condescending comparison
Shared devotional interlocution
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
17 Hindu–Christian relations in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific
Historical background
Pluralism and internal diversity in the indentured communities
Relations between Hindus and Christians in the colonial Indian diaspora
Trinidad
South Africa
Fiji
Concluding comments
Bibliography
Part IV Sites of bodily and material interactions
18 Popular religious traditions and shared religious spaces
What is a shared religious space?
Shrines as shared religious spaces
Shared spaces as shared indigenous cultural universe
Shared spaces and human objects
Shared spaces and common rituals/ritual objects
Shared spaces as sites of ritual dialogue
Shared space as loci of shared deities
Shared spaces and the collapse of religious and social boundaries
Shared space as a liminal space
Domestic spaces as shared religious spaces
Conclusion
Bibliography
19 “Religion” and Hindu–Christian relations after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
I.
II.
III.
Bibliography
20 Gender and the social boundaries between “Hindus” and “Christians”
Gender relations during the Company Raj: attractive and porous boundaries
Colonial era—drawing and transcending firm boundaries
Conclusion
Bibliography
21 Ritual and ritualization in Hindu–Christian relations
Ritual material: Hindu and Christian theologies of sacrifice
Ritual means: hybrid practice and embodied dialogue
Ritual metaphor: Hindu–Christian Studies as a ritualized practice
Notes
Bibliography
22 Aesthetics, art, and visual culture in Hindu–Christian relations
Global contexts
Part 1
Part 2
Selections of current scholarship
Emerging trends
Conclusion
Note
Bibliography
23 Christian and Hindu responses to Christian yoga practice in North America
Roots of Christian responses to yoga: colonial Orientalism, missionary zeal, and the Romantics
Christian anxiety toward yoga
Christian ambivalence toward yoga
Christian acceptance of Christian yoga
Hindu perspectives on Christians practicing yoga
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part V Significant figures
24 Rammohun Roy
Rammohun’s life
Rational theism
Rammohun and Hinduism
Rammohun’s relations with Christians
Rammohun’s legacy
Bibliography
25 Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda’s life
Swami Vivekananda’s teachings
Swami Vivekananda on Christianity
The nature of God
Prophets, avatars, and other religious leaders
The evolution and development of religions
Critique of Christian missionary efforts
Bibliography
26 Mohandas K. (“Mahatma”) Gandhi
Gandhi’s encounters with and assimilations of Christianity
Gandhi’s thought on the prospects of Hindu–Christian relations
Christian responses to Gandhi and his work
Bibliography
27 Raimon Panikkar
Bibliography
28 Abhishiktananda
Life
Thought
Importance
Bibliography
Part VI Comparative theologies
29 A theology of Hindu–Christian relations
The in/adequacy of speech
One and many
Narrative and presence
The particularity of encounter
Conclusion: on the “mystical”
Bibliography
30 Rethinking the One and the many in Advaita
Introduction: the tradition of Advaita Vedānta
The problem of the One and the many
The many as illusion
Rethinking the One and the many
The not-two (Advaita) relationship of the One and the many
Intentionality and deliberation in self-multiplication
Ontological singularity and uniqueness
Advaita: dual mode of seeing
“That from which all words return”
Some comparative thoughts
Bibliography
31 Creation, cosmos, ecology
Immanent presence of the divine
Inherent goodness of nature and of nonhumans
Cosmic and planetary order
Conclusion
Bibliography
32 Competing philosophies and theologies of the human person
The creaturely dependence of the human person
The ontological divinity of the human person
The dependent reality of the human person
Hindu–Christian engagements with the category of the “human person”
Conclusion
Bibliography
33 Divine embodiment in Hinduism and Christianity
Infinite absolute, finite particular
God as person, God as body
Celebrating personal embodiment as divine
Could the Christian God be personally embodied?
Body of the Goddess, body of the woman
To celebrate the female body
The menstruating Goddess
Is the Goddess a feminist?
Embodiment as avatar, embodiment as incarnation
Descent without modification
Seeming to descend
Descent as incarnation
The God-forsaken God
Wounds that scar, scars that heal
The infinitely compassionate God
Bibliography
34 Truth and salvation in Hindu–Christian encounters
Caught between Ganga and Galilee
An overview of Hindu and Christian approaches to the question of truth or salvation
Inclusivist–fulfillment approaches
Keshub Chandra Sen: confluence of the fulfillment and bhakti approaches
Krishna Mohun Banerjea: the preparatory value of Hinduism
John Nichol Farquhar: the inclusive Christ, the crown of Hinduism
Pluralistic–Vedantic approaches
Swami Vivekananda: between pluralism and hierarchical inclusivism?
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: the intersection of pluralism with the bhakti and jnana margas?
Bhakti-based experiential approaches to salvation among Indian Christians
Karma marga approaches to the question of truth
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: a pragmatist approach to the truth of the other
Stanley Jeddiah Samartha: the convergence of jnana marga, karma marga, and pluralism
M.M. Thomas: karma marga of humanization and justice
Truth and self-identity: multiple religious belonging
Between Ganga and Galilee: the journey today
Bibliography
35 Inculturation
Mateo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili
The Indian story
The Second Vatican Council: a challenge to change
The Church in the modern world
Inculturation
Who? And what?
Contemporary Indian sites for inculturation
Popular religiosity
The quest for an Indian Christian spirituality
Indian Christian art
Indian praxis and theology of liberation
Conclusion: Indian Christian theologies
Note
Bibliography
36 Peace and conflict
Theoretical considerations
The Mahabharata
St. Augustine
Hindu–Christian conflict: a survey of two millennia
India’s indigenous Christians
The colonial era
The nationalist movement
Independent India
Note
Bibliography
37 Contemporary Hindu–Christian dialogue
What kind of Hindu–Christian dialogue? Formal or informal?
Formal, intentional dialogue
Conditions: loyalty and openness
Diverse understandings of dialogue
The justification of dialogue
Understanding and the reduction of tension
Common social concern
Common humanity and the shared ideal of community
Understanding and the quest for truth
The promotion of religious growth
Common or complementary religious experience
Asymmetries and impediments
Missions and conversion, violence and Hindutva
The future of Hindu–Christian dialogue
Note
Bibliography
Part VII Responses
38 Response: shared and contested spaces: Hindu–Christian relations through a performing arts lens
Prelude
Introduction
Part 1: Encounters and shared spaces of theology and rituals
Contiguous communion: moving between the cowherd and the shepherd
Part 2: Conversion, government management of Hindu temples, and the uniform civil code
Conversion
Government interference in Hindu temples’ financial affairs
A uniform civil code
Part 3: Performing arts—shared spaces or contested territory?
Conclusion: cultural appropriation, continuity, and conversion
Bibliography
39 Response: The Handbook in light of the past and future of Hindu–Christian relations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HINDU–​CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

The historical interplay of Hinduism as an ancient Indian religion and Christianity as a religion associated (in India, at least) with foreign power and colonialism, continues to animate Hindu–​Christian relations today. On the one hand, The Routledge Handbook of Hindu–​Christian Relations describes a rich history of amicable, productive, even sometimes syncretic Hindu–​ Christian encounters. On the other, this handbook equally attends to historical and contemporary moments of tension, conflict, and violence between Hindus and Christians. Comprising thirty-​nine chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into seven parts: • • • • • • •

Theoretical and methodological considerations Historical interactions Contemporary exchanges Sites of bodily and material interactions Significant figures Comparative theologies Responses

The handbook explores:  how the study of Hindu–​Christian relations has been and ought to be done, the history of Hindu–​Christian relations through key interactions, ethnographic reflections on current dynamics of Hindu–​Christian exchange, important key thinkers, and topics in comparative theology, ultimately providing a framework for further debates in the area. The Routledge Handbook of Hindu–​Christian Relations is essential reading for students and researchers in Hindu–​ Christian studies, Hindu traditions, Asian religions, and studies in Christianity. This handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as anthropology, political science, theology, and history. Chad M. Bauman is Professor of Religion at Butler University, USA and a Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and American Culture. Michelle Voss Roberts is Professor of Theology and Principal at Emmanuel College, a multireligious theological school in the University of Toronto, Canada.

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Routledge Handbooks in Religion

The Routledge Handbook of Muslim–​Jewish Relations Edited by Josef Meri The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism Edited by Donald A. Crosby and Jerome A. Stone The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife Edited by Candi K. Cann The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics Edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender Edited by Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petry The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender Edited by Justine Howe The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Journalism Edited by Kerstin Radde-​Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities Edited by Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards The Routledge Handbook of Hindu–​Christian Relations Edited by Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Handbooks-​in-​ Religion/​book-​series/​RHR

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HINDU–​ CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

Edited by Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts

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First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Bauman, Chad M., editor. | Voss Roberts, Michelle, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Hindu–Christian relations/edited by Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037356 | ISBN 9780367000707 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003139843 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hinduism–Relations–Christianity. | Christianity and other religions–Hinduism. Classification: LCC BR128.H5 R68 2021 | DDC 294.5/152–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037356 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​00070-​7  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​13984-​3  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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CONTENTS

List of contributors 

ix

1 Introduction  Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts

1

PART I

Theoretical and methodological considerations 

15

2 The formation and mutual re-​formations of “Christianity” and “Hinduism” as “religious” categories  Kerry P.C. San Chirico

17

3 The emergence of modern Hinduism  Hugh Nicholson 4 Western philosophy and Christian theology in twentieth-​century Hindu thought  Martin Ganeri 5 Orientalism and postcolonial theory in Hindu–​Christian encounters  Stephanie Corigliano PART II

29

41 54

Historical interactions 

67

6 Syrian Christians and dominant-​caste Hindus  Sonja Thomas

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Contents

7 Hindu–​Jesuit encounters  Francis X. Clooney, SJ

79

8 State power in the relations between Catholics and Hindus  Jason Keith Fernandes

90

9 Hindu–​Protestant encounters  Arun W. Jones

102

10 The East India Company, Christianity, and Hinduism  Penelope Carson

114

11 Hindu–​Christian debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries  Richard Fox Young

127

12 Critiques of Christianity from Savarkar to Malhotra  Chad M. Bauman

139

PART III

Contemporary exchanges: conversion, caste, and the diaspora 

153

13 Anti-​conversion laws in post-​Independence India  Ian Richards

155

14 Hindu–​Christian relations through the lens of caste  Sunder John Boopalan

169

15 Race, representation, and Hindu–​Christian encounters in contemporary North America  Sailaja Krishnamurti

180

16 ISKCON–​Christian encounters  Claire C. Robison

193

17 Hindu–​Christian relations in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific  Pratap Kumar Penumala

206

PART IV

Sites of bodily and material interactions 

217

18 Popular religious traditions and shared religious spaces  James Ponniah

219

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Contents

19 “Religion” and Hindu–​Christian relations after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami  Kristin C. Bloomer

230

20 Gender and the social boundaries between “Hindus” and “Christians”  Eliza F. Kent

243

21 Ritual and ritualization in Hindu–​Christian relations  Reid B. Locklin

257

22 Aesthetics, art, and visual culture in Hindu–​Christian relations  Patrick M. Beldio

268

23 Christian and Hindu responses to Christian yoga practice in North America  Christopher Patrick Miller PART V

280

Significant figures 

295

24 Rammohun Roy  Dermot Killingley

297

25 Swami Vivekananda  Robin Rinehart

307

26 Mohandas K. (“Mahatma”) Gandhi  Bradley S. Clough

316

27 Raimon Panikkar  Erik J. Ranstrom

326

28 Abhishiktananda  Catherine Cornille

334

PART VI

Comparative theologies 

343

29 A theology of Hindu–​Christian relations  Michelle Voss Roberts

345

30 Rethinking the One and the many in Advaita  Anantanand Rambachan

355

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Contents

31 Creation, cosmos, ecology  Daniel Scheid

369

32 Competing philosophies and theologies of the human person  Ankur Barua

381

33 Divine embodiment in Hinduism and Christianity  Jon Paul Sydnor

392

34 Truth and salvation in Hindu–​Christian encounters  Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar

404

35 Inculturation  Michael Amaladoss, SJ

417

36 Peace and conflict  Edward T. Ulrich

430

37 Contemporary Hindu–​Christian dialogue  Bob Robinson

443

PART VII

Responses 

457

38 Response: shared and contested spaces: Hindu–​Christian relations through a performing arts lens  Vasudha Narayanan

459

39 Response: the Handbook in light of the past and future of Hindu–​Christian relations  Francis X. Clooney, SJ

476

Index 

485

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CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Amaladoss, SJ, from India, has a PhD in Sacramental Theology from Paris. He has been a Professor in the Vidyajyoti Institute of Theological Studies in Delhi and has taught in many centers in Asia, Europe, and North America. He is the Founder-​Director of the Institute of Dialogue with Cultures and Religions, Chennai, India. He is the author of 34 books and about 500 articles in many languages. Ankur Barua’s primary research interests are Hindu Studies and the comparative philosophy of religion. He studies various historical, philosophical, and conceptual aspects of the Hindu traditions, and, in particular, works on the traditions of Vedanta. An integral part of his research relates to the question of whether Christian terms such as “grace” have any Hindu analogues and whether Hindu terms such as dharma have any Christian equivalents. Chad M. Bauman is Professor of Religion at Butler University and a Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and American Culture. He is author or co-​editor of four books: Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–​1947 (Eerdmans, 2008), Constructing Indian Christianities (Routledge, 2014), Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-​ Christian Violence in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Anti-​ Christian Violence in India (Cornell, 2020). Patrick M. Beldio is a scholar in theology and religious studies, instructor at Montgomery College, Maryland, professional sculptor, and Catholic who follows a Sufi practice founded by Meher Baba. His current book project, Forming the New Creation: The Integral Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in Art and Creativity, is unique in examining the role of the Mother in equal measure to Sri Aurobindo and their teaching in art. Kristin C.  Bloomer is Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She is the author of Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India (Oxford University Press, 2018). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana, Missoula. Prior to entering academia, she worked as a journalist.

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Contributors

Sunder John Boopalan, Assistant Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Canada, is a Dalit theologian. In his book, Memory, Grief, and Agency: A Political Theological Account of Wrongs and Rites (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Boopalan draws from anthropological and ethnographic data particularly pertaining to caste and race. He recently signed a contract with Fortress Press for a co-​authored book project, Dalit Theology: A Global Introduction. Penelope Carson was born in an American mission hospital in Burma in 1948 while her father served as a British infantry advisor to the newly independent Burmese army. Since gaining her PhD on the early evangelical missionaries to India in 1988, she has published numerous articles and reviews. Her book, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–​1858 (The Boydell Press), was published in 2012. Francis X.  Clooney, SJ, is the Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. His scholarship focuses on commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. He is a committed practitioner in the developing field of comparative theology. He has written widely on the Jesuit missionary tradition in India. Recent books include The Future of Hindu–​Christian Studies (Routledge, 2017), Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics (University of Virginia Press, 2019), and Western Jesuit Scholars in India (Brill, 2020). Bradley S.  Clough is an independent scholar who has taught previously at Bard College, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Montana. He has researched widely on Buddhist monasticism and soteriology in South Asia, including for the monograph, Early Indian and Theravāda Buddhism:  Soteriological Controversy and Diversity (Cambria Press, 2012). His chapter here is his third published piece on the religiosity of Mohandas Gandhi. He also co-​edited Humanist Perspectives on Sacred Space (The American University in Cairo Press, 2008). Stephanie Corigliano is a lecturer for Gwynedd Mercy University and Humboldt State University. She is the editor for the journal TARKA, which is published through Embodied Philosophy, where she co-​directs an online Yoga Philosophy certificate program. Her 2015 PhD from Boston College is in Comparative Theology. Mother of two active boys, she also maintains a rural homestead in Northern California where she keeps bees and grows a variety of fruits and vegetables. Catherine Cornille is Professor of Comparative Theology at Boston College, where she holds the Newton College Alumnae Chair of Western Culture. Her areas of research focus on Theology of Religions, Interreligious Dialogue, Hindu–​Christian Comparative Theology and Religious Hybridity. She is the author of The Im-​Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (Crossroad Publishing Company, 2008) and Meaning and Method in Comparative Theology (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2020), and she has edited numerous books in the area of interreligious dialogue. Jason Keith Fernandes is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), at ISCTE-​Lisbon University Institute.Trained in law, the sociology of law, and anthropology, he has more recently developed an interest in Catholic theology. His monograph, Citizenship in Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa, is forthcoming from Orient Blackswan, India. Martin Ganeri is a member of the English Province of the Order of Preachers (Dominican Order) and a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. He has an MA in Classics x

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Contributors

and Oriental Studies, an MPhil in Ancient Indian Archaeology at Cambridge, and a DPhil in Theology at Oxford. At Blackfriars he teaches courses in Sacred Scripture, Phenomenology and Theology of Religions, and Archaeology. His recent book, Hindu Thought and Western Theism: The Vedānta of Rāmānuja (2015), was published by Routledge. Arun W.  Jones is the Dan and Lillian Hankey Associate Professor of World Evangelism at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He received his BA and MDiv from Yale University (1980, 1988), and PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary (2001). He has authored numerous articles and book chapters. His most recent monograph is Missionary Christianity and Local Religion:  American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836–​1870 (Baylor University Press, 2017). Eliza F. Kent is Professor of Religion at Skidmore College. A scholar of religious pluralism and its side effects, she is the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Sacred Groves, Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013). With Tazim Kassam, she co-​ edited Lines in Water: Religious Boundaries in South Asia (Syracuse University Press, 2013). Dermot Killingley taught in the Department of Indian Studies, University of Malaya, and in the Department of Religious Studies, Newcastle University. He is joint editor (with Simon Brodbeck and Anna King) of Religions of South Asia (RoSA). He has published research on ancient Indian thought, and on its modern interpreters, particularly Rammohun Roy and Vivekananda. His books include Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition (Grevatt & Grevatt, 1993), and Beginning Sanskrit (Grevatt & Grevatt, 2009). Sailaja Krishnamurti is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. She has a critical race feminist approach to questions of religion, representation, and identity in the South Asian diaspora and in transnational media cultures. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on a range of topics, and is a founding member of the Intersectional Feminist Hindu Studies Collective. Reid B.  Locklin is Associate Professor of Christianity and the Intellectual Tradition at the University of Toronto, a joint appointment with St. Michael’s College and the Department for the Study of Religion. His research focuses on a range of issues in Comparative Theology and Hindu–​Christian Studies, particularly the engagement between Christian thought and Advaita Vedanta. He is author or editor of five books, including Liturgy of Liberation (Peeters, 2011) and Vernacular Catholicism,Vernacular Saints (SUNY, 2017). Christopher Patrick Miller is the Bhagwan Mallinath Assistant Professor of Jainism and Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of a number of articles and book chapters concerned with the history and practice of modern yoga, yoga and politics, yoga philosophy, and Jainism and ecology, and is co-​editor of the volume Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington Books, 2019). Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor, Department of Religion, at the University of Florida, and a past President of both the American Academy of Religion (2001–​2002) and the Society for Hindu–​Christian Studies (1996–​1998). She was educated at the Universities of Madras and Bombay in India, and at Harvard University in the United States. She is the author xi

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Contributors

or editor of seven books and numerous articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries. In addition, she is also Associate Editor of the six-​volume Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Hugh Nicholson is Professor of Religious Studies at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford University Press, 2011) and The Spirit of Contradiction in Christianity and Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). His latest book, A Revolution in Our Self-​Conception: Buddhism, Cognitive Science, and the Doctrine of Selflessness, will appear later this year. Pratap Kumar Penumala is Emeritus Professor of Hinduism and Comparative Religions in the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-​Natal, South Africa. In addition to several scholarly essays and articles, his publications include Hinduism and the Diaspora:  A South African Narrative (Rawat Publications, 2013). His edited volumes include Religious Pluralism and the Diaspora (Brill, 2006), Contemporary Hinduism (Routledge, 2013), Classical and Contemporary Issues in Indian Philosophy and Religion (DK Print Publishers, 2013), Indian Diaspora: Socio-​cultural and Religious Worlds (Leiden, 2015), and Contemporary Issues in the Indian Diaspora of South Africa (Serials Publications Pvt. Limited, 2016). James Ponniah is Assistant Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Madras. His publications include The Dynamics of Folk Religion in Society: Pericentralisation as Deconstruction of Sanskritisation (Serials Publications, 2011), Identity, Difference and Conflict: Postcolonial Critique (Asian Trading Company, 2013), and Culture, Religion and Homemaking in and beyond South Asia (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2020). He was conferred a Collaborative International Research Grant by the AAR (2015) and the Best Researcher Award by the University of Madras (2018). Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar is Program Coordinator for Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation with the World Council of Churches and Professor at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey. He edits Current Dialogue, the WCC’s journal for interreligious dialogue (published by Wiley). His most recent publications include Many Yet One:  Multiple Religious Belonging (WCC, 2016), co-​edited with Joseph Dayam, and an edited volume, Asian Theology on the Way (Fortress, 2012). Anantanand Rambachan is Professor of Religion at Saint Olaf College, Minnesota. His books include: The Advaita Worldview: God,World and Humanity (SUNY, 2006), A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not-​Two Is Not One (SUNY, 2014) and Essays in Hindu Theology (Fortress Press, 2019). His scholarly interests include the Advaita (Non-​dual) Vedanta tradition, Hindu ethics, liberation theology, and interreligious dialogue. He has delivered a series of 25 lectures on Hinduism that the British Broadcasting Corporation transmitted around the world. Erik J. Ranstrom has a PhD in Comparative Theology from Boston College, where he wrote his dissertation on the work of Raimon Panikkar. He is co-​author, with Bob Robinson, of Without Ceasing to Be a Christian: A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar (Fortress, 2017). He is also published in scholarly journals and collected volumes in the areas of interreligious dialogue, theology of religions, and contemplative spirituality. Ian Richards received his PhD in Religion from the University of Toronto in 2017. He currently teaches Religion at King’s University College, Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. xii

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Robin Rinehart is Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania. She is the author of One Lifetime, Many Lives:  The Experience of Modern Hindu Hagiography (Scholars Press, 1999), Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and Practice (ABC-​CLIO, 2004), Debating the Dasam Granth (Oxford, 2011), and, with Mary Pat Fisher, Living Religions 10th Edition (Pearson, 2017), as well as articles on Punjabi Hindu, Sufi, and Sikh literature. Bob Robinson is Senior Fellow Emeritus of Laidlaw College, New Zealand. He lived and taught in Singapore for some years and is author of Christians Meeting Hindus:  An Analysis and Theological Critique of the Hindu–​Christian Encounter in India (Regnum Books International, 2004); Jesus and the Religions:  Retrieving a Neglected Example for a Multicultural World (Cascade Books, 2012); and joint author of “Without Ceasing to Be a Christian”: A Catholic and Protestant Assess the Christological Contribution of Raimon Panikkar (Fortress Press, 2017). Claire C. Robison is an historian and ethnographer of South Asian religions with specializations in Hindu and Islamic traditions. Her research examines how religious identities are being redefined in urban India in relation to changing understandings of family, gender, class, and regional identity. Her work also traces the influence of transnational religious networks on lived religion, raising questions about how religious authority is constructed and mediated in new urban environments. Kerry P.C. San Chirico is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He holds a doctorate in Religious Studies (South Asian religions) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recent publications include “Scorsese’s Kundun as Catholic Encounter with the Dalai Lama and His Tibetan Dharma,” in Christopher Barnett and Clark Elliston, eds., Scorsese and Religion (Brill, 2019) and the co-​edited volume, with Rico P. Monge and Rachel J.D. Smith, Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions (Bloomsbury, 2016). Daniel P. Scheid is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He received a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College, an MA from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and an AB from Princeton University. His theological interests focus on interreligious ecological ethics, and in addition to multiple book chapters and journal articles he is the author of The Cosmic Common Good:  Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics. Jon Paul Sydnor teaches world religions and interreligious relations at Emmanuel College in Boston. He publishes in the areas of comparative theology, theology of religions, and Vaishnavism, and is the author of Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology (Pickwick Publications, 2011). When not teaching and writing, Jon Paul serves as theologian-​in-​residence at Grace Community Boston where his wife, Rev. Abby Henrich, is pastor. Sonja Thomas is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Colby College. She is the author of Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India (University of Washington Press, 2018). She has written on religious minorities and brahmanical patriarchy in India, on race and immigration, and on tap dance in Asia. She is currently writing a book on South Asian missionary priests entitled Indians and Cowboys: Indian Missionary Priests in Rural America. xiii

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Edward T. Ulrich is a Professor of Theology at the University of St.Thomas, where he teaches world religions. He also designed and led (four times) a study abroad course in India, which focused on the Hindu, Muslim, and Syrian Christian religions. Much of his research focused on Swami Abhishiktananda. Currently, he is comparatively exploring the roles that Aurobindo Ghose and Mahatma Gandhi played in India’s freedom struggle. Michelle Voss Roberts is Professor of Theology and Principal at Emmanuel College, a multireligious theological school in the University of Toronto. Her published work in comparative theology includes Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion (Fordham University Press, 2014), which received the Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion, and Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress Press, 2017). Richard Fox Young holds the Timby Chair in History of Religions at Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, New Jersey). An Indologist by training, he works primarily in Hinduism studies, world Christianity, and contiguous subject areas. A recent article of relevance to readers of this volume appeared in 2018 in the International Journal of Asian Christianity:  “Was the Sanskrit Bible the ‘English Bible-​in-​Disguise’? Postcolonialism Meets Philology in William Carey’s Dharmapustaka (1808).”

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1 INTRODUCTION Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts

It is significant that the title of this volume centers Hindu–​Christian relations. Ours is not a volume interested merely in Hindu–​Christian dialogue, nor a volume solely focused on the more academic exercise of comparative theology, law, or philosophy, nor a volume focused exclusively on the history and politics of Hindu–​Christian relations around the world. Rather, it is a volume that unites investigation of all of these aspects of Hindu–​Christian relations with efforts to think critically about how we study (and should study) the interaction of Hindus and Christians, as well as about what we even mean when we say “Hindu,” “Christian,” and “Hindu–​Christian.” In the heterogeneity of its chapters, the volume accurately reflects the diversity of scholarly work in the field of what in North America (and elsewhere) has come to be called Hindu–​Christian Studies. (In the United States, there is both a “Society for Hindu-​ Christian Studies” and a Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies, with which we, along with many of the volume’s authors, have been associated.) We did not incorporate these diverse elements of Hindu–​Christian Studies purely for strategic reasons having to do with the nature of the field, however; as with all forms of dialogue and comparison, the juxtaposition of these varied elements of Hindu–​Christian relations also reflects historical and socio-​political realities. Likewise, the social and political, as they pertain to interreligious relations, are always in part informed by the forms of knowledge and epistemologies that are generated within always ongoing processes of interreligious dialogue and comparison. It is also important to highlight the word “Handbook” in the volume’s title. Unlike the many thematically focused edited volumes produced by scholars primarily for other scholars, and limited in their accessibility by technical scholarly jargon, our desire in producing the Handbook of Hindu–​Christian Relations was to create an entrée into various aspects of the field for established scholars and graduate students, while at the same time doing so in a manner that was accessible to undergraduate students armed with little or no technical understanding of it. In the interest of accessibility, but also to ensure the greatest breadth possible within the limitations of length with which we worked, we intentionally kept each chapter short. The depth of the volume emerges primarily in the aggregate and through the many cross-​references we have included within individual chapters. Because this is a handbook, most of our authors were asked to write chapters providing an overview of their given topic. In a few select cases, however, and to demonstrate provocative or emerging topics in the study of Hindu–​Christian relations, authors developed more argumentative theses. 1

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The positioning of this volume in a series by Routledge Press also has bearing on the kind of scholarship it contains. Our project of charting major features of Hindu–​Christian relations reflects the norms of the academic discipline of religious studies, which include historical, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical-​theological methodologies. Contributors to this volume have been trained in, and write in the styles and modes of analysis characteristic of academic publishing in the West. The contributors represent a subset of scholars in this field: they are both willing and qualified to write not only on Christianity or Hinduism alone, but on specific aspects of the relationship between them. As we and the respondents to this collection discuss below, this orientation means that the volume, while fairly comprehensive in terms of its scope and the perspectives discussed, also does not include every perspective on the relevant themes. A volume such as this is valuable as a snapshot of a field at a particular time and place, and the assembling of it provides an opportunity to reflect both on perennial and on emerging themes. Under the five headings below, we highlight the themes that cut across the various essays in the volume. The meanings of the terms “Hindu” and “Christian” in “Hindu–​Christian Relations” is a recurrent theme, as is the importance of paying attention to the intersect of religion with caste, race, nationality, and gender for understanding religious identities and interreligious relations. The enduring legacy of the colonial encounter emerges as a theme across the volume as well, including in the shifting appearances of power and resistance to various forms of hegemony. Two important sites of contestation and controversy, within these shifting constellations of power and resistance, are conversion and the academic study of Hindu traditions itself. Throughout this project, we have endeavored to take seriously the variety of perspectives and voices in both religious traditions. A final theme, then, recognizes the ongoing and fruitful theological exchanges that occur as Hindus and Christians consider, and reconsider, in the presence of one another, questions of human meaning and religious truth.

On the “Hindu” and “Christian” in “Hindu–​Christian relations” Twenty-​five years ago, a volume of this nature would not have included essays on the construction of religious categories like “Hindu” and “Christian.” In the intervening years, however, scholars have recognized more clearly than before both that such categories are malleable and perspectival and that they have a history that is traceable, a “genealogy,” to use the Foucauldian term brought forcefully into religious studies by Talal Asad’s monumental Genealogies of Religion in 1993.The fact that there are many ways and many perspectives from which to define “Hindu” and “Christian” is one of the reasons why a volume such as this is so important. Because of this, as Kerry San Chirico argues in the chapter that opens the volume, we must pause before engaging in an exploration of “Hindu–​Christian relations” to ask what these categories mean, and how they mean different things in different contexts. Among the important points that San Chirico makes is that all religious categories emerge relationally and discursively. The earliest Christians, for example, defined themselves primarily (eventually) in contradistinction to Judaism, whereas India’s first Christians defined themselves primarily as a separate caste in relation to other South Indian castes. Christians in India today, however, define themselves and are defined by others in relation to yet another set of interlocutors, and in yet another historical and political context. What it means to be “Hindu” similarly varies across time, space, and social location. The mechanisms by which groups define themselves in relation to one another vary. Sometimes, competitive rhetoric serves to delineate self and other, as in Claire Robison’s observations of ISKCON–​Christian discourse. At other times, philosophers and theologians 2

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Introduction

resort to metaphysical questions, sacred texts, and authoritative teachings as criteria for distinguishing one tradition from the other. For example, Richard Fox Young’s chapter elucidates polemical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christian missionary critiques of Hinduism provoked responses from a variety of shastric thinkers in India, who invoked their own scriptural, ethical, soteriological, and epistemological criteria for religious truth. As Hugh Nicholson’s essay demonstrates, from among India’s diverse theological traditions, one strand—​the Advaita Vedanta of the seventh-​century theologian Shankara—​came to represent the heart of Hinduism for many Western philosophers, as well as for the self-​understanding of many modern Hindus. Over time, the Orientalized conception of Hinduism in the minds of Western scholars shaped how influential Indian intellectuals represented themselves to the West, and vice versa. Theological comparisons do not occur in a vacuum but relate to historical, political, and cultural conditions. For example, Stephanie Corigliano’s engagement with postcolonial theory shows how the popular notions of Hindu universalism that accompanied the elevation of neo-​ Vedanta under colonial rule has had the effect of minimizing theological and social differences of India’s diverse population. Constructions of self and community continue to be constrained by the dualisms of the colonial imagination. Subaltern and postcolonial perspectives are beginning to articulate other possibilities. While the focus of this volume extends beyond India, we need look no further than the Indian subcontinent to recognize the importance of social factors in the definition of religious traditions. In his contribution to the volume, for example, Jason Fernandes highlights the way in which contemporary constructions of “Hindu” and “Christian” take place within the context of caste dynamics, largely following a logic determined and imposed by the dominant castes, in part because of the way in which the nature of the independence movement, and the rising tide of Hindu nationalism that accompanied and survived it, favored dominant castes. Still, while at the rhetorical level, such dynamics may contribute to an ossification of the terms and a hardening of purported differences, at the level of practice, as James Ponniah’s chapter indicates, a blurring of Hindu and Christian religious distinctions remains, for many, very much the norm. Reid Locklin’s chapter similarly demonstrates that, while theories of ritual may be a topic for debate, ritual practice is a lively site of exchange and participation across religious boundaries. Different contexts and different vantage-​points therefore produce divergent conceptions of what it means to be “Hindu” and “Christian.” It should be obvious enough, then, that there is no single, homogenous, transculturally and transhistorically stable “Hinduism” that meets and can be in relation with a single, homogenous, transculturally and transhistorically stable “Christianity.”This is true even in typical times, but as Kristin Bloomer demonstrates in her chapter, momentous events like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami can reconfigure religious identities and relations in remarkable and enduring ways. The incomprehensible human toll of the disaster (which struck southeastern India particularly viciously) initially leveled distinctions of caste and religion. All were part of a single, suffering, bereaved humanity. Afterwards, however, the propensity of relief organizations to discriminate on the basis of caste and religion led to the recalcification of these and other differences.

Intersectional analyses of caste, race, nationality, and gender Analyses of caste have always featured prominently in Western scholarly work on South Asian religion and society. On the one hand, the prominence of this category in Western analyses is related to and manifests Orientalist stereotypes regarding the putatively inherent and perpetual 3

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backwardness of South Asian society. These stereotypes were of course deployed to justify the colonial subjugation of South Asians by Europeans who, inadequately self-​critical and often overlooking injustices in their own society, considered themselves a more enlightened race. We should be wary of perpetuating such stereotypes, and of asserting that any religion or society is inherently anything. On the other hand, even a cursory investigation of Indian politics today demonstrates the continuing valence of caste identities. The same is true with regard to the investigation of religion in South Asia. Intersectional feminists, however, have ably demonstrated the inadequacy of social analyses focusing exclusively on a sole element of individual and social identity (e.g., gender, class, or race), and authors in this volume offer intersectional analyses of Hindu–​Christian relations that add much-​needed complexity and nuance to those of an earlier era. While we begin below by isolating the element of caste in Hindu–​Christian relations, therefore, we do so in full knowledge that caste does not operate independently, but rather within a tangled web of social forces that includes race, nationality, and gender (among other vectors of social identity). We return to these other social forces in subsequent sections.

Caste As Sunder John Boopalan notes in his contribution to the volume, dominant-​caste communities in India have historically tended to use the organizing principle of caste to order other communities in relation to themselves and each other. This has been true not only of dominant-​caste Hindu communities, but also of dominant-​caste Christian communities. However, the power of these communities to objectivize others in these ways is not absolute, leading to attempts by lower-​caste communities, sometimes successful, to alter or undermine their objectification through social and political movements, conversion, and the like. These attempts, and other social factors, have contributed to divergent and disputed conceptions of the inter-​caste order. As Boopalan indicates, perhaps the most prominent of these disputes over the last century or so has been over the question of whether Dalit castes (i.e., the lowest-​caste communities) should be considered “Hindu” or not (another example of shifting and contested definitions of what it means to be Hindu). In the first half of the twentieth century, some figures, such as Swami Shraddhanand (1857–​1926), argued that since most Hindus considered Dalits non-​ Hindu, Hindus should remove practices like untouchability to ensure the Dalits would convert to Hinduism and not some other religion (like Islam or Christianity). However, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–​1948) insisted instead that Dalits should be recognized as always already Hindu. One’s view on the matter affected one’s perspective on Christian proselytization, as Boopalan and Ian Richards both discuss in their chapters: were Christian evangelistic efforts among the Dalits a form of acceptable competition with Hindus for Dalit souls, or a kind of underhanded raid on the Hindu flock that could only result in its diminished size and political power? The fact that Gandhi’s view (the latter) slowly became the prevailing one, particularly among dominant-​caste elites, helps explain why proselytization has become such a controversial issue in independent India. If this were the only way in which caste configured Hindu–​Christian relations in India, one could be forgiven for presuming that the relationship between Hindus and Christians was one inherently characterized by competition. As the chapters by Boopalan, Fernandes, and Sonja Thomas demonstrate, however, such a view is incomplete and overly simplistic. All three highlight the fact that dominant-​caste Catholic and St. Thomas Christians have periodically had an uneasy relationship with their Dalit coreligionists. Dominant-​caste Christians 4

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Introduction

have often preferred to keep the company of, adopt the cultural norms of, and advance the social and political interests they shared with fellow dominant-​caste non-​Christian communities, even when these political interests conflicted with those of Dalit Christians. It is important to underscore this point, as Thomas argues, since the prevailing narrative of Hindu–​Christian relations in contemporary India is one of interreligious division and conflict. It is plainly not that simple. It is also important to insist, in the analysis of Hindu–​Christian relations, that conceptions of caste, like conceptions of religion, have a genealogy and differ according to time and place. In his chapter on the history of Protestant–​Hindu interactions, Arun Jones discusses the shifting attitudes of European Protestants with regard to caste. Boopalan and Francis X. Clooney do the same with regard to European Catholics. Very generally speaking, while the earliest European Christians in India perceived caste as a matter of social organization and attempted to accommodate themselves to it or even exploit it for their own purposes, those who followed came, over time, to consider caste an evil that was so interwoven with Hinduism that rejecting the latter required also rejecting the former. Even when they did reject caste distinctions, however, European Christian missionaries rarely succeeded in convincing their congregations to put that rejection into practice. Conversely, as Pratap Kumar Penumala’s chapter shows, while caste survived as a matter of identity and status among diasporic Hindu communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, many of the prejudices and practices related to it in India were sloughed off in the process of both indentured and free migration. In such contexts, therefore, caste has often been a less salient factor in Hindu–​Christian relations than race. Not surprisingly, these shifting and disparate conceptions of caste and its relationship to Hinduism and Christianity contribute to shifting and distinct configurations of Hindu–​Christian relations, as the chapters by Penumala, Jones, Boopalan, and Clooney reveal.

Ethnicity, race, and class As adumbrated in the previous paragraph, Penumala’s chapter in this volume contends that in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, Hindu–​Christian relations are configured by conceptions more of race and ethnicity than of caste. In many cases, all Indians (regardless of religion, region, or caste) in diasporic contexts are pitted by these conceptions against some differently racialized group–against white South Africans, for example, or indigenous Fijians, or Afro-​Trinidadians. As Penumala demonstrates, this racialization of Indian communities in the diaspora has tended to promote interreligious (including Hindu–​Christian) solidarity among diasporic Indian communities, despite enduring debates within them about issues such as conversion. Religious identity is not meaningless in the diaspora, however. In some diasporic contexts, such as Trinidad and Fiji, the Christian faith of the majority is constructed as an essential element of national identity. Still, even here, race remains a factor. While Christian Indians in diasporic contexts characterized by a prevailing Christian nationalism might feel united by their religion with other Christians across racial and ethnic divisions, it remains the case that Christians within the majority ethnic or racial community continue to perceive them as something “other” as a result of their racialization. Race also complicates Hindu–​Christian relations in North America, as Sailaja Krishnamurti illustrates in her chapter. By the time substantial numbers of South Asians began arriving in North America, the Jim Crow era had taken root in the United States, and anti-​Black racism informed segregationist policies in both the United States and Canada. Initially, South Asian immigrants in North America were not clearly racialized as white or non-​white. Eventually, 5

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however, white Christian concerns about immigration from Asia led to the racialization of South Asians as non-​white. Between 1908 and 1924, this racialization informed the passage of a variety of laws in Canada and the United States barring immigration from Asia. When South Asians were again allowed to immigrate to North America beginning in the 1960s, their reception, though not exceptionally warm, was facilitated by the fact that the earliest immigrants in this era were overwhelmingly well-​educated professionals who generally lived middle-​and upper-​class lives, as well as by the growing hippie-​era fascination with Eastern religions. What this history demonstrates is that in North America, as elsewhere, Hindu–​Christian relations are never purely a function of how Hindus and Christians evaluate each other’s religion; rather, they emerge through complex processes related to always shifting conceptions of ethnicity, race, caste, and class.

Gender In addition to consideration of caste, race, and ethnicity, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that any proper consideration of Hindu–​Christian relations must attend as well to gender. As Eliza Kent outlines in her contribution to the volume, the regulation of sexuality was an important means by which the British colonial regime—​both in the era of the British East India Company and after the imposition of direct British rule—​created boundaries and constructed hierarchies not only between the colonizer and colonized, but also between and among different classes within the British community. For example, while wealthy officers often established households in long-​term relationships with native women, lower-​class soldiers were encouraged, instead, to seek out the Indian prostitutes living outside the walls of many British forts. More central to the theme of this volume, however, is how the ruling British maintained difference and hierarchy between the colonizers and the colonized through the regulation of sexuality. We must immediately add that such regulations never functioned in a vacuum, but instead interfaced with and were informed by other considerations, including religious identity. For example, as Kent shows, one could increase the chances of having the children born to Indian mothers and British fathers recognized as “white” and “British”—​an important recognition in the context of British inheritance law—​if the mother had converted to Christianity. As British aspirations in South Asia grew, so too did their inclination to impose sexual regulations on those residing in India, whether native or British. The sexual relations between Indian women and European men that were common in an earlier era slowly became taboo, and in the early nineteenth century, the British passed a series of regulations on practices pertaining to gender and sexuality—​against widow immolation and enforced widowhood, for example, as well as against child marriage. Slowly, the ostensibly “barbaric” treatment of Indian women became a central standard by which Europeans deemed Indians diametrically different, ultimately inferior, and deserving of colonization by a superior race. These regulations had a deleterious effect on Hindu–​Christian relations at the time, and affect them still today, since many Hindus consider a kind of compulsive meddling in the moral and religious affairs of others an inappropriate but inextricable and essential element of Western/​Christian colonial and neo-​colonial ambitions. The element of gender in Hindu–​Christian relations deserves still more attention than it has received in this volume. As reflected by the chapters contributed by Kent and Jones, who both discuss the lives of Pandita Ramabai and Raja Clarinda, a critical mass of scholarship on women in the context of Hindu–​Christian relations is beginning to emerge. Future editions of a handbook such as this one will no doubt need and be better positioned to devote entire chapters 6

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Introduction

to historically significant women like Ramabai and Clarinda (and their analogues within the Hindu tradition), who forged for themselves important roles in the context of Hindu–​Christian relations despite the discomfort of Europeans with their audacious and assertive endeavors.

Hegemony, resistance, and the enduring legacy of the colonial encounter India’s St. Thomas Christians interacted with their Indian neighbors for over a millennium before the arrival of European Christians. However, as San Chirico’s chapter argues, the historical evidence suggests that the most salient category of identity in the encounter of these St. Thomas Christians with their Indian neighbors was caste, not religion. Only at the end of this millennium of interaction, and partly as a result of the colonial European encounter with peoples around the globe, did Europeans or Indians even begin to conceptualize religion and religions in ways resembling how we conceptualize these categories today. For this reason, what we call Hindu–​Christian relations, in a modern sense, emerged and developed fully only after the beginning of the colonial period. The colonial situation of most early Hindu–​Christian interactions has had significant and enduring effects. Above, we discussed how Christianity’s association with British colonialism, and especially British colonial interventions in religious and social affairs, tarred and continues to tar the reputation of Christianity in the view of many Hindus. The extent and complicated nature of that association is the subject of Penelope Carson’s important contribution to this volume. It is simply a fact, however, that the colonial era was characterized by vast disparities in the wealth and power of European Christians vis-​à-​vis Indian Hindus. The colonial context has had an enduring impact on the way that Hindus and Christians relate.We can see an example of this in the development of forms of Hindu–​Christian violence. European colonial regimes were established and expanded in South Asia through violence and force. Moreover, at various times in the history of India’s colonialization by Europeans, political and ecclesiastical violence commingled freely (as it did most egregiously during the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa). Not surprisingly, then, Indian rebellions against colonial rule often also targeted Christians who had no particular connection to colonial administration. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, for example, involved attacks not only on British military targets, but also on Indian and European Christians who were neither soldiers nor colonial officials. In fact, just as we cannot speak of “Hindu–​Christian” relations in the modern sense until after the arrival of Europeans in India (as discussed above), we really cannot speak of “Hindu–​Christian violence” until the colonial period. While there were violent skirmishes between St. Thomas Christians and their non-​Christian neighbors before the arrival of Europeans, the organizing identity in these skirmishes appears to have been caste. As Edward Ulrich’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, however, from the colonial period until the present day, Hindu–​Christian violence has been a recurring feature of Hindu–​Christian relations. Overwhelmingly, India’s Hindus and Christians have managed their differences without resort to violence, and violence between Hindus and Christians has never in Indian history approached the level of that between Hindus and Muslims. Still, as both Ulrich and Jones note in their respective chapters, this violence has occurred, and has been particularly likely to occur in the context of 1)  the passage of colonial policies perceived to intrude in Hindu religious affairs, 2) public and assertive forms of evangelism and/​or mass or high-​profile conversions to Christianity, or 3) the intentional production of conflict by politicians intent on increasing the unity and political power of Hindus by cynically constructing religious minorities as a threat to Hindus and the nation. That there has been a demonstrable increase in anti-​ Christian violence since the late 1990s in India can be partly explained by two developments 7

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that may not be entirely unrelated: the increasingly visible presence of more aggressively evangelistic Christians and the rising political fortunes of India’s Hindu nationalists. The legacy of the colonial Hindu–​Christian encounter extends well beyond India. In his contribution to the volume, for example, Christopher Miller notes that colonial and Orientalist ways of categorizing Indian yogis (as sinister or relatively benign) established patterns of thinking about and appraising various forms of yoga that still affect Europeans and Americans today. These enduring patterns of thinking about yoga in turn influence which forms of yoga those in Western Christian contexts embrace, and how they conceptualize the relationship of popular postural (asana) oriented forms of yoga to Hinduism. The same is true with regard to how Hindus variously appraise Christians’ engagement with asana yoga practice. While some Hindus in the colonial era considered the adoption of yoga by non-​Hindus an inappropriate expropriation of India’s riches, reform-​oriented organizations like the Brahmo Samaj participated in the construction of a universalized form of yoga for export, and thereby enabled and encouraged its diffusion beyond the boundaries of indigenously Indian religions. These competing colonial-​era perspectives remain operative. As both Miller and Corigliano point out, while some Hindus today reject the non-​Hindu adoption of yoga as a form of misappropriation, others instead take pride in it as a sign that non-​Hindus appreciate the value of Indian religious traditions. The preceding paragraphs have emphasized the colonial imbalances of power in which modern Hindu–​Christian relations developed.While these imbalances clearly favored European Christians in ways that increased Hindu resentment and periodically provoked violence, no hegemony is complete. Appropriately, then, various chapters in this volume pay special attention to some of the Hindu individuals and communities that resisted the tendency of Christians in the colonial era (and still today) to create hierarchies subordinating Hindu people, cultures, and religious ideas to their European and Christian counterparts. Dermot Killingley’s chapter on Rammohun Roy (1772?–​1833), Robin Rinehart’s on Swami Vivekananda (1863–​1902), and Bradley Clough’s on Gandhi each consider Hindu reformers who had many Christian friends, and who knew and embraced certain elements of Christianity, but who remained steadfast in their Hindu faith and frequently interpreted the meaning and value of Christianity in ways that ran counter to orthodox Christian hermeneutics. Because of this, Christians, for their part, were by turn appreciative of and disconcerted by these prominent figures’ engagement with their faith. Similarly, chapters by Young and Chad Bauman highlight Hindu–​Christian apologetics, debates, and polemics from the eighteenth century to the present day, describing Hindus such as Krishna Shastri Sathe, Somanatha Vyasa, Haracandra Tarkapancanana, Nilakantha Goreh, V.D. Savarkar, M.S. Golwalkar, Gandhi, Ram Swarup, Arun Shourie, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Radha Rajan, and Rajiv Malhotra (among others), who, to use a phrase popularized by Malhotra, “reversed the gaze” on their Christian interlocutors. They did so in varied ways. Some absorbed Christianity into an all-​encompassing form of Hinduism as a lower step on the evolutionary march toward greater spiritual insight. Others relativized Christ in Hindu terms as but one among many avatars. Still others challenged the racist tendencies of Western Christians whose Jesus was portrayed as white and entangled with white notions of racial supremacy. And still others criticized Christians for their compulsive proselytization and the global imbrication of Christianity with neo-​liberal Western social visions (perpetuated through human rights talk, etc.). All of them refused to allow Christians to construct and engage in the comparison of Hinduism and Christianity on the latter’s terms, and freely criticized Christianity and Christians both for their perceived deficiencies of doctrine

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and practice, and for the entanglement of Christianity with Western colonial and neo-​imperial ambitions. As the existence of such figures suggests, we must be careful not to over-​emphasize the legacy of the colonial encounter. Moreover, the transnational nature of both Christianity and Hinduism today prevent us from neatly placing these religions into categories like “Western” or “Indian.” As Robison’s chapter notes, the global diffusion of Hindu religious traditions like A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) enables Hindu–​Christian encounters that completely break this mold by featuring, for example, Caucasian American Hindus in dialogue with Indian American Christians. But even here, traces of the colonial encounter remain. As Robison demonstrates, Bhaktivedanta’s apologetics were informed in significant ways by well-​established, colonial-​era Indian criticisms of Western civilization perpetuated by Vivekananda, Gandhi, and other figures discussed above. Bhaktivedanta may even have been mimicking Christian missionaries in India (though in reverse) when—​as he often did—​he critiqued a somewhat caricatured Christianity in order to use it as a foil in his articulation of Krishna consciousness and its superiority. Therefore, though colonial-​era hierarchies and arrangements of power never wholly subordinated Hindus to Christians, and though the transnational diffusion of both Hinduism and Christianity has added complexity to the racial and political dynamics of Hindu–​Christian encounters, the legacy of the colonial development of modern Hindu–​Christian relations endures.

Conversion The St. Thomas Christians who lived in India for a millennium before the arrival of Europeans evinced no particular enthusiasm for evangelism. For several centuries after Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498, however, and particularly outside of the southern Indian pockets where St. Thomas Christians primarily resided, the first Christian encountered by Hindus, particularly Hindus in the rural hinterlands, was often a European or native evangelist. Just as the association of Christianity with colonization has tinctured Hindu–​Christian relations in enduring ways, so, too, has the association of Christianity with proselytization. Hinduism is not entirely devoid of an impulse to expand the faith, though intentional attempts to spread Hinduism in the manner of Christian missionaries have been exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, Hinduism had spread around the world (e.g., along the coastlines of Southeast Asia) through processes of migration, assimilation, and royal patronage long before Europeans first arrived on India’s shores. Still, as Bauman’s chapter in this volume suggests, many Hindus conceive of religion as something tied intimately to ethnicity and see potential for spiritual progress in all religious traditions. Better to stick with your ancestral religious traditions, then, both out of respect for those traditions and because of their intimate connection to your community’s cultural heritage and norms. Such a conception differs markedly from that which predominates among Christians, who, since the moment of Pentecost, have tended to conceive of Christianity as a religion for all peoples, and the only viable vehicle for ultimate spiritual success (i.e., salvation).This difference has been consequential in the context of Hindu–​ Christian relations, as many Hindus have conceived of Christian proselytization at best as small-​ minded and annoying—​think of how many contemporary Europeans and Americans treat the arrival of Jehovah’s Witnesses on their doorstep, for example—​and, at worst, as a politically motivated intrusion warranting regulation, prohibition, or even a violent response. As Richards argues in his chapter for the volume, Hindu–​Christian relations have been strained by divergent understandings of why people convert and how it happens. While

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some Hindus, at least, understand conversion as something done to someone else, others, and many Christians, understand conversion as something one does to oneself. These divergent understandings came to be embodied, during the debates of the Constituent Assembly (1946–​ 1950) tasked with drafting India’s Constitution, in divergent legal positions, some emphasizing the right of individuals not to be converted, and others emphasizing the right of citizens to preach and proselytize (that is, to try to convert others). As Richards demonstrates, while the Constituent Assembly tried to balance these positions in the Constitution, the former view eventually won out in many state legislatures, resulting in the passage of various state laws regulating proselytization and conversion. Despite the passage of such laws, Christian proselytization continues to cause strain between Hindus and Christians. This strain periodically manifests in violence, as noted above, and particularly in the context of public and aggressive forms of proselytization, mass movements, or high-​profile conversions to Christianity, or the stoking of interreligious conflict for political gain by Hindu nationalist politicians. Tensions regarding conversion run particularly high in India, but they also appear in more subdued form among diasporic Indian communities, as Penumala’s chapter suggests. In the example of conversion, therefore, we have yet another demonstration of the inadequacy of analyses of Hindu–​Christian relations that do not seriously attend to the social, political, and historical context.

Hegemony and scholarship in a postcolonial era Amid and despite the complex negotiations discussed here, Hindu–​Christian relations on the global stage have tended and still tend to take place primarily (but not exclusively) in the context of imbalanced global political arrangements that favor Christians, particularly white European and North American Christians. Among many other effects, this disparity has privileged and continues to privilege Western and Christian ways of knowing in the encounter of Hindus and Christians, as well as in the academic study thereof. Krishnamurti’s essay highlights how resistance from some Hindu organizations to the study of Hinduism by non-​Hindus—​an endeavor in which this very volume is implicated—​involves concerns about self-​representation as well as a perception that there is an unfair “white Christian hegemony over the production and consumption of knowledge about Hinduism, a problem which of course is traced back to European colonialism and the orientalist acquisition of knowledge” (p. 187 of this volume). Such problems endure to this very day and haunt not only Hindus who feel misrepresented in and offended by the academic study of Hinduism, but also the non-​Hindu scholars who study Hinduism with a sincere desire to understand the world as it is constructed and experienced by Hindus, but who at the same time know that a perfect understanding of others’ subjectivities is ultimately an impossibility. Such limits are inherent in our scholarly field itself. For example, the authors of this volume speak the academic language of religious studies, a field of study common in Western universities, but nearly entirely absent in the Indian university context. This helps account for why so many of our authors are located in Western universities, and why so few, regrettably, are located elsewhere. It also accounts for why a higher percentage of Indian scholars had to decline our invitations to contribute to the volume. Indian scholars who speak the language of religious studies fluently are in high demand, and in addition often lack the institutional support for research that their Western colleagues enjoy. The very fact that this volume conceptualizes Hindu–​Christian relations through a religious studies lens privileges Western and Christian ways of knowing (though the privileging of “Christian” ways of knowing is more a function of the historical influence of Christianity on Western scholarship in general, since many of our authors are not themselves Christian). 10

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How might such a volume have been conceptualized and presented differently if it had been produced in India? If more of its authors had been Hindu? If conservative Christian authors rejecting Hindu–​Christian dialogue and Hinduism altogether had been included? At the very least, such questions require us to be humble about the limitations of this project. While we consider it an excellent reflection of the state of Hindu–​Christian Studies today, we are also aware of the parochially Western nature and limits of the field, its methodological conventions, and its thematic preoccupations. So were our authors, however, and we were pleased with how so many of them attempted to address the issue in one way or another. Moreover, our list of topics—​including, for example, rather straightforward descriptions of self-​assured critics of Christianity—​was constructed in part to ensure that voices traditionally left out of the field might be heard, at least to some degree.

Hindu–​Christian relations as a site for fruitful theological exchange As discussed above, one important focus of this Handbook is how constructions of Hinduism and Christianity have emerged in the interactions between them. The encounter between two groups throws into relief certain features that might remain unremarkable in other contexts. If political contexts demand hierarchy, then any number of features—​theology, gender, caste, ritual practice—​can serve as grounds for distinction between self and other. Power remains a feature of any social encounter, but power does not only manifest as dominance or capital. The force of attraction—​curiosity, mutual interest, and even love—​also draws Hindus and Christians to develop mutual understanding in one another’s company. A final theme of this volume, then, is the fruitful exchange that has occurred and is occurring as Hindus and Christians join in the human search for meaning and find common cause. Killingley’s chapter on Rammohun Roy illustrates the generative thinking that has arisen at the confluence of these traditions. Roy’s interest in Enlightenment views about religion led him to affirm a rational theism that drew together Indian reformers and Western thinkers. His approach provoked reforms in both traditions, both on social practices that diminished human dignity and on theological issues that obscured the unity of God. Martin Ganeri likewise shows how twentieth-​century Hindu thinkers experimented with current trends in Western philosophy, idealism in particular, to develop new modes of debate between the three major schools of Vedanta. Ganeri engages in his own assessment of these projects, concluding that while the comparisons drawn by his predecessors were less successful than they had hoped, a more fruitful point of comparison with these schools lies in certain strands of classical Greek, Patristic, and Scholastic Christian theology, where mystical themes provide significant common ground. From another angle, Patrick Beldio attends to aesthetic experience and creativity as sites of encounter between the traditions. Spaces such as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram have provided opportunities to explore themes such as beauty and justice through non-​discursive modalities. The close reading of particular Hindu and Christian thinkers alongside one another stands in contrast to the generalities about each of the traditions that characterized earlier iterations of comparative religion. Hindu–​Christian Studies has been the site for the emergence of a new (or re-​invigorated) practice called comparative theology, which self-​reflectively responds to the Orientalist history and politics of these encounters. Although some nineteenth-​century thinkers had used the term “comparative theology,” it came to flower again in the work of Francis X.  Clooney, a contributor and respondent to this volume. Recognizing that the purported neutrality of religious studies has cloaked both colonial power and Western Christian hegemony, comparative theologians work explicitly from a position of religious commitment (as complicated as this may be to define over time). Recognizing as well that too many theologians 11

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have pronounced on other religious traditions without knowing much about them, a comparative theologian engages in a prolonged process of understanding aspects of another tradition and reflecting anew on aspects of her own tradition.This kind of study has the potential to alter the theologian’s framework, as when Locklin’s reflections on ritual in Hindu–​Christian relations inspires him to posit Hindu–​Christian Studies itself as a kind of ritual activity (see Locklin’s chapter in this volume). Since 1994, the Society for Hindu-​Christian Studies, of which Clooney was the founding President (and our other respondent, Vasudha Narayanan, the founding Vice President and second President), has devoted approximately half of the panels at its annual meeting to discussions of this sort, in which individual scholars conduct focused theological comparisons, or a panel addresses aspects of a theological or philosophical theme from particular standpoints in the two traditions. We have observed the importance of Advaita Vedanta and neo-​Vedanta in Hindu–​Christian relations, both in the Orientalist imagination of Christian scholars and in the Hindu universalism that is prominent in the self-​understanding of many Hindus. One interpretation of this tradition, for both Hindu interpreters and Christian critics, presents the world as ultimately unreal and liberation as disengagement with it.The relation of the one and the many has spawned vigorous debate within and between Christian traditions and Hindus from a variety of theistic and nontheistic schools of thought. Anantanand Rambachan’s chapter in this volume counters the illusionist understanding of the Advaita Vedanta philosophy, which he argues is a misreading of Shankara and the Upanishads. He presents an alternative interpretation of the one and the many with a view to the flourishing of all beings. Michelle Voss Roberts connects this theme to other dialectics, such as between the universal and the particular, or between describing divine reality with words and the position that the divine reality is beyond conception. These dialectics have generated fruitful exchanges between theologians of the two traditions. The relation between ultimate and contingent reality has ramifications for other important themes. Daniel Scheid’s chapter surveys how contemporary concerns for ecological sustainability have inspired Hindu and Christian re-​readings of the cosmos and nature. Ankur Barua’s draws a contrast between competing views of the human relation to divine reality, placing traditional Christian views of the ontological distinction between created human beings and God on the opposite end of a spectrum from nondual and even theistic Hindu traditions, in which the human is always part of the divine reality. Then, in his chapter, Jon Paul Sydnor further considers the divine relation to finite, particular existence in terms of divine embodiment (avatars, incarnations, goddesses and female embodiment) in both traditions. One particular instance of divine embodiment—​what Christians call the incarnation of Jesus Christ—​has been the focus of much Hindu–​Christian reflection. The religious status of Jesus has been understood variously by Hindu thinkers. The essays by Young and Bauman trace rejections of Jesus (for example, as a “false avatar”) as well as appreciation, even in critics of Christianity like Gandhi, of Jesus as an ethical teacher. Engagements with the Christian claim of Christ’s divinity in Hindu–​Christian dialogue have sometimes resulted in creative uses of theological principles from both traditions. As discussed in Rinehart’s chapter, this was an animating feature of the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, who viewed Jesus in terms of Krishna’s teaching that he (Krishna) manifests himself in a manner suited to each age. Thus, Jesus was an avatar or prophet sent to the Jews; he was also essentially an “Oriental” teacher who has been distorted by Christianity in the West. Catherine Cornille’s chapter describes how the Christian monk who took the name Swami Abhishiktananda similarly came to see the incarnation not as an exclusive event but as an experience of divine sonship that is both available to everyone and palpably manifest in realized individuals such as Ramana Maharshi. In his chapter, Erik Ranstrom presents Raimon Panikkar as a particularly creative synthesis of Hindu and Christian 12

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orientations. Panikkar’s similar belief that human beings through meditation can share in Jesus’ participation in the divine life was undergirded by non-​dual and Trinitarian themes. Panikkar writes of the “unknown Christ of Hinduism” found in the interplay of Silence and Word in the two traditions and in the cosmic Christ of the Gospel of John. The inclusive Christologies that have developed at the confluence of Christian and Hindu traditions have had a major impact on broadening Christian views of the salvific possibilities in other traditions. For instance, the chapter on inculturation by Michael Amaladoss demonstrates how a theology of the incarnation enabled European and Indian Christians to disentangle the Christian message and practice from European cultural norms and experiment with adapting them to a variety of Indian cultural contexts. Furthermore, experiences of genuine saintliness in Hindu figures and appreciation of Hindu theological frameworks have enabled Christians to retrieve and reclaim strands within their own biblical and theological traditions that affirm the universality of divine salvific activity. To be sure, both Christian and Hindu views of the other still run the gamut from complete exclusion of one from the truths of the other to various versions of universal salvation. Readers will find many variations along this spectrum as they peruse these pages. In an effort to right the imbalances of earlier scholarship, this collection attends to a greater range of Hindu voices on this issue. And while conservative Protestant voices are relatively absent from among the contributors, the essays reflect the fact that such Christians are very much involved in on-​the-​g round Hindu–​Christian interactions in India and in the Hindu diaspora. Nevertheless, the range of Hindu and Christian ways of thinking about the status of other religious paths receives special attention in Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar’s essay on truth and salvation in Hindu–​Christian relations. Rajkumar modifies the “exclusivism–​inclusivism–​pluralism” paradigm popular in Christian theologies of religion through an exposition of how a range of Indian thinkers—​both Hindu and Christian—​have combined and played variations on those themes to reflect the Indian context. Likewise, Bob Robinson observes in his chapter that informal Hindu–​Christian dialogue has long been occurring ahead of and alongside formal attempts to bring the groups together. He notes that participants bring varying levels of openness and commitment to the task, which continue to animate vigorous debate within and between the religious communities.

Notes and acknowledgments A volume such as this necessitates certain stylistic choices. On spelling, we defaulted to US American spellings, following Merriam-​Webster, and italicized words of Indian origin only if they did not appear in the version of Merriam-​Webster’s dictionary that can found online (at m-​w.com). Each decade, more and more words of Indian origin appear there, and the list now includes, inter alia, karma, dharma, puja, Brahman, atman, and sati. We did italicize such words, however, if the author had given them with diacritics, and on the matter of diacritics generally, we deferred to our authors’ preferences. For this reason, the reader will find spelling discrepancies on terms or names like Shankara (which also appears as Śaṁkara, Sankara, Śaṅkara, and Śaṃkara),Vishnu (also Visnu and Viṣṇu) and Shiva (also Śiva), among others. We are indebted to so many for the successful completion of this volume. First, and foremost, we must thank the authors who agreed to write chapters for the volume, and who did so with such care and diligence.This is particularly remarkable because, in the months leading up to our final deadline, many of them were—​because of the global Covid-​19 pandemic—​locked down in home offices, and without easy access to their libraries or administrative support. Rarely do volumes like this come together with so few requests from authors for extension or withdrawal. 13

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In addition, several of our authors contributed chapters despite being given particularly short deadlines, and we wish to thank Christopher Miller and Bradley Clough for providing critical chapters at a relatively late stage. Our respondents, Frank Clooney and Vasu Narayanan (using here the less formal names by which they are better known by colleagues), also worked rapidly to complete their concluding essays—​the writing of which required reading carefully through this entire volume—​within a few short weeks of receiving the full manuscript. For helping us achieve the rare feat of submitting an edited volume more or less on time even in the midst of a global pandemic, therefore, we acknowledge and express our appreciation to every single contributor. Wendy Cranston, a doctoral student at Emmanuel College, helped us with the meticulous work of bibliographic formatting. Amy Allocco, Frank Clooney, Arun Jones, Eliza Kent, Reid Locklin, Brian Pennington, Kerry San Chirico, and Richard Fox Young all graciously offered excellent counsel on what topics should be included in the volume. A blind reviewer assigned by Routledge suggested the elegant section headings and organization we eventually adopted. Rebecca Shillabeer, Amy Doffegnies, and Gabrielle Coakeley, our eminently capable handlers at Routledge, provided us with precisely the right amount of advice, support, encouragement, freedom, and flexibility, and it was Rebecca Shillabeer who first planted the seed of this volume in our minds. For the support and assistance of people such as these, then, we are grateful. In their concluding responses to the volume, both Clooney and Narayanan (respectively, as mentioned above, founding President and Vice President of the Society for Hindu-​Christian Studies, or SHCS) contextualize the production of this volume within the history of Hindu–​ Christian Studies as a field. The ability even to contemplate undertaking a project like this requires the presence of an already established scholarly community, and this project clearly benefited from the existence of several supportive and collegial academic societies. As Clooney notes in his essay, most of the authors featured in these pages have presented at conferences sponsored by the SHCS, and/​or published in its journal, the Journal for Hindu-​Christian Studies. The SHCS has enjoyed a warm relationship and has regularly co-​sponsored conference panels with another important organization:  the Dharma Association of North America. There are many dysfunctional academic environments in which ambitious projects such as this could never be attempted. These societies, however, are not among them. We therefore thank our colleagues and predecessors in the field of Hindu–​Christian Studies for helping construct an academic domain conducive to the production of such excellent scholarship.

Bibliography Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

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PART I

Theoretical and methodological considerations

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2 THE FORMATION AND MUTUAL RE-​F ORMATIONS OF “CHRISTIANITY” AND “HINDUISM” AS “RELIGIOUS” CATEGORIES Kerry P.C. San Chirico

Over the last three decades, much has been written on the legitimacy of the term “Hinduism” to describe the predominant “religion” of India. Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? (2005) distills the debate into the form of a now well-​worn question.The argument tends to be marked by some common junctures, largely elicited by both postmodernity and postcolonialism. We are reminded that “Hindu” was first used by Achaemenid Persians as a geographical referent for those people around the Indus River (as a borrowing from the local term “Sindhu”), and was, a millennium later, used by Muslim Persians to denote those in the same region who were neither Muslim nor Christian (Hawley 1991). We are additionally reminded that the term “Hindooism” was not employed in English until 1787, replacing the earlier blinkered English-​ language category of “Heathenism” (Morris 1904), and the prior ironic—​if telling—​Portuguese term “Gentoo,” or Gentile. In this discussion we might also be reminded that the contemporary Indian Constitution defines a Hindu (and, by extension, Hinduism) negatively—​as neither Muslim, nor Christian, nor Parsi, nor Jew. Yet here is where paths tend to diverge. So-​called constructivists reject “Hinduism” as a foreign imposition of dubious parentage, one without a proper unitary referent in South Asian history (Hawley 1991). Meanwhile, indigenists argue for the term’s legitimacy, based on the fact that there was a there there before there was a name for it (Lorenzen 1999), even as interaction with the West contributed to the nature of its contemporary, ever-​developing contours. Meanwhile, understandably indignant, self-​identified Hindus might insist upon the legitimacy, coherence, indigeneity, and antiquity of the religion we call Hinduism while rejecting both the terms “Hindu” and “religion” (perceiving that latter category, correctly, as a rather procrustean Western imposition with its own genealogy) in favor of sanātana dharma, the eternal dharma—​ not a “religion” at all, but rather a “way of life.” Hindu nationalists of the soft and hard variety tend to treat Hinduism as the effervescence of non-​material ideals, first cognized by rishis in the primordial past, emerging as the Vedas with Brahmins as their proper custodians. Thirty years into this debate, and in an encyclopedic essay such as this, it would perhaps be more agreeable to synthesize such views.That, sadly, is mostly impossible.There are certain facts 17

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to contend with and certain vantages that bring light to said facts precluding synthesis. But modifications can be made, necessary historical and theoretical clarifications offered, and certainly more effective metaphors employed. This essay examines the historical process by which Christianity and Hinduism came to be understood as discrete religions, the process by which the categories of “Hindu” and “Hinduism” developed in relation with other “religions” (i.e., with Muslims and Christians, as well as among Hindus), and the ongoing processes by which Hinduism and Christianity continue to shape each other in ways both explicit and hidden in contemporary India and beyond. We thus meander processually through the advent and development of Christianity and Judaism dialectically as discrete religions, then turn to Hinduism and Christianity in the twenty-​first century. I argue that both the substantives, “Christianity” and “Hinduism,” are, in their own ways, and as with all social categories, constructed, imagined, and reconstructed in relation, and that this nevertheless makes them neither illegitimate nor fake.

The early formations of “Christianity” in relation I take it as a theoretical first principle that David Chidester is right when he argues that religions, no less than nations, must be invented and imagined (1996). I would add that religions represent interdependent processes of the ideational and the material—​that is, a dialectical combination of ideas and the institutions that embody or concretize them. While what we now identify as religions have their own genealogies (Asad 1993, Smith 1998), they are also constructed in relation to one another. They are, as Chidester continues, “intrareligious and interreligious networks of cultural relations” (quoted in Boyarin 2003, p. 66). The challenge for the scholar is to tease out these relationships with perceived others, since religions borrow, steal, adopt, and adapt—​usually without footnoting. Through much of the twentieth century, the relationship of early Christianity and Judaism was characterized as a mutual “parting of the ways,” wherein the parent “Judaism” gave birth to “Christianity,” which then spread, outstripping its parent tradition largely through its connection to the Roman Empire. Judith Lieu (2015) has more recently challenged this view as still problematically beholden to Christian dogmatics. The parting-​of-​the-​ways theory tends to accept the differentiated representation of Christian and Jew as self-​evident in the minds of all parties from too early a period and fails to account for real differences geographically and temporally, often conflating fourth-​and fifth-​century Roman imperial realities (from a time when Christianity had become an imperial religion), with first-​through third-​century phenomena (for which the sources are much murkier). How then might we better understand the development of what would one day be understood as “Judaism” and “Christianity”? Of special use here is the work of scholars such as Jacob Neusner (1985), Seth Schwartz (2001), and Daniel Boyarin (2003), particularly when this work is coupled with Saussurean semiotics. From these sources we can derive the provocative thesis that the fourth century is, properly speaking, the first century of Judaism and Christianity (Boyarin 2003, p. 77). Boyarin takes great pains to demonstrate that in the first century “people in the Mediterranean area seem most often to have named themselves in ethnic terms, and not as adherents of what we would call a religion” (Ibid., p. 67). While the term Ioudaismos existed before the Common Era (e.g., in Maccabees 2:22, written in the second century BCE), it did not signify a belief system tied to institutions as much as “Jewishness,” the way of life of the Judeans, and “a total pattern of practice and adherence” (Lieu 2015, p. 44). And, critically, Ioudaismos was juxtaposed with Hellenismos, the Greek way of life, purported to be incompatible with the Judean way of life, a position later adopted by Paul (see, for example, Galatians 3:28). 18

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Saussure helps us understand the way that categories tend to emerge in relation by reminding us that signifiers function differentially within a signifying system like language (Boyarin 2003, p. 70). Boyarin applies this insight to the history of religions when he points out that in ancient West Asia, the dominant semantic tendency, when referring to what we now call “religions,” was to include them within the semantic field of the nations or peoples (ethnoi) with which they were presumed to be inextricably connected. It was unthinkable, at the time, for a nation to lack an attendant cultus.What Christianity effectively brought to the world, especially when attached to empire, was what Schwartz calls “disembedding,” the disentangling of cult from culture, thereby giving rise to the emergence of “religion” as a discrete category of human existence (Ibid., p. 72). In this severing of cult from culture we have, in incipient form, the development of what would much later be called “world religions.”Yet, to apply the category of “religion” to this early time is simply anachronistic: It is, therefore, meaningless semiotically as well as historically to claim that Judaism existed before there was another term in the semiotic system, the names of religions, for it to be or not that, and there is no point in even attempting to define a pre-​ Christian “Judaism” or “Judaisms.” In other words, Ioudaismos in the sense of Judaism could only appear after Christianismos had appeared. Christianismos too, can only appear as the name for another religion, and that…had important material consequences. (Ibid., pp. 70–​71) While Christianismos as a proper religion may be the product of the fourth and fifth centuries, it had its own emic genealogy, as did Christianos, or Christian, which likely was an etic descriptor (cf. Acts 11:26b). Early followers of Christ designated themselves simply as followers of “the Way,” suggesting (with similar Indian terms like marga or panth) a path leading toward salvation in which Christ is both the soteriological means and the teleological end. After twenty centuries it is easy (if mistaken) to assume that that Christian believers from Judea were easily discernible from fellow Judeans from Pentecost onwards (see Acts 2). Certainly, to a gentile Roman (or Indian) living in the middle of the first century, distinguishing between a Judean who had put his trust in Yeshua bar Youseph (“Jesus, son of Joseph”) as the Anointed (“Messiah,” “Christ”) and a Judean who did not would have been nearly impossible. In The Gospel According to Luke, Jesus tells his disciples to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem, where “they [which presumably here refers to all Judeans, and not merely those who followed Christ] were continually in the temple blessing God” (24:53). In other words, believers’ ongoing faith in the risen Christ did not lead them out of their prior Judean ritual lives. On the contrary, the temple was the natural locus for their ongoing worship of Jesus as Messiah, and it continued to be so even when later the relationship with their native Ioudaismos had become strained, a tension clearly evident throughout Paul’s epistolary corpus. Much changed in the six decades between 70 CE, when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed, and the years 132–​135 CE, when most of the Judean community was banished due to the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The banishment of Judeans from Judea scattered both the earliest Judean Christians and those who would be responsible for the development of rabbinical Judaism to regions beyond. Concurrently, Gentiles were beginning to outnumber Judeans in the nascent Christian community. By the end of the first century, certain gentile Christians were forging a two-​pronged defense against Jews and Greeks, insisting on the distinctiveness of their Christian identity as neither Judean nor Gentile.The anonymous writer of the Letter to Diognetus speaks of Christians as a “third race.” And in roughly the same period, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch (died c. 110) employs the word Christianismos (for the first time known to historians) in his letters 19

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to the Magnesians, Philadelphians, and Romans. Significantly, these letters draw a stark divide between Ioudaismos and Christianismos, in a way similar to the juxtaposition of Ioudaismos and Hellenismos in the book of Maccabees three centuries earlier. In Magnesians 10, for example, we read, “It is ridiculous to profess Jesus Christ and to Judaize; for Christianity [Christianismos] did not believe in Judaism [Ioudaismos], but Judaism in Christianity into which every tongue that has believed in God has been gathered together.”Throughout these letters, the relationship between the two substantives, “Christianity” and “Judaism,” is generally as a juxtaposition of new to old, good to evil, true to false (Pearson 1997, p. 12). Clearly, the early bishop thinks that nothing short of the integrity of the gospel message, and thus salvation, is at stake in marking such strong contrasts.Yet the very fact that he feels the need to make such claims suggests that not all in his congregations held the same view. And, in fact, this perceived need to demarcate communities is a common Christian activity for the next several centuries, particularly among those who would later be designated saints. In the fourth century, no less a figure than the patristic giant Archbishop (St.) John Chrysostom (d. 407) still feels the need to remonstrate against those in his flock who continue to visit synagogues. Meanwhile, for their part, Judean elites who did not follow Christ had been anathematizing those deemed outside the fold, minim and Notzrim, or heretics and Nazarenes, from the early second century onwards. Certainly, therefore, religion as actually lived in late antiquity exhibits ongoing fuzziness around the emergent categories of “Christianity” and “Judaism,” and demonstrates not only that religions develop in relation to one another, but also that religious distinctions may begin to develop in the minds of adherents before they come to be objectified or materialized in the world through law, custom, geographical spatial relations, and architecture. Such, then, was the process by which Christianity developed as a substantive religious category:  from the development of a Ioudaismos juxtaposed with Hellenismos in the third century BCE, to the advent of the label Christianos in the first century, to the birth of the word Christianismos as “way of life of the Christians” in the second century, to the oppositional juxtaposition of this Christianismos with the older Ioudaismos, to the emergence of Christianity and Judaism as “religions” in the fourth-​and fifth-​century Roman Empire, to the extension of these categories and (semantic fields) through the spread of a religion, Christianity, that had successfully severed cult from culture. By the time of Islam’s advent in the seventh century, these semantic fields had developed to such an extent that the existence of discrete “religions” was presumed and instantiated through religious norms, laws, histories, and—​significantly—​political power. In other words, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had become social facts; Jews, Christians, and Muslims had become, in West Asia, at least, mutually exclusive religious identities. Which brings us back to India, for on the Malankara coast, thousands of Nazrani (“Nazarenes”) had made a home for themselves sometime between the first and fourth centuries. According to traditions recorded in Malayalam and Syriac, St. Thomas arrived on Kerala’s Malabar Coast in 50 or 52 CE. Twenty years and at least seven churches later, he is said to have been martyred by Brahmins in the area of present-​day Mylapore, a suburb of Chennai in Tamil Nadu. The stories of Thomas are legendary, though certainly believable, as Judeans had been present in the region for centuries due to trade along well-​trodden Arabian Sea routes. History becomes far less hazy in 345 CE, when a pious merchant known as Thomas of Cana arrived in Travancore with 72 Judean Christian families and a few hundred Syrian believers. Subsequently, he and his co-​travelers were granted privileged trading rights by the local ruler, eventually founding the seaport town of Cranganore. As the story of Thomas of Cana attests, during these centuries when varna was perhaps more malleable than now, the community was granted land and incorporated into Kerala’s hierarchical class structure, occupying a place similar to upper-​caste Vaiśya landowners, the 20

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Nāyars, with whom they inter-​married. For our purposes, the most significant fact is that the Thomas Christians were not identified primarily by what we would call a religious category. Rather, because they had been able to form reciprocal relationships with local powers through maritime trade and commerce and warfare, and had within a short period accepted indigenous notions of purity and pollution with attendant commensality and endogamy rules, the dominant identity marker appears to have been caste-​based and not religion-​or cult-​based. Within a short period, the community had become thoroughly acculturated while simultaneously continuing their connections to Syriac patriarchates in Mesopotamia (hence the moniker of “Syrian Christians”). The Thomas Christian case is significant because it demonstrates that the social worlds formed in late antique West Asia, as described above, cannot be superimposed onto South Asian terrain. When we compare West to South Asia we see that despite the connecting thread of Christian doctrine and a self-​conscious, living ecclesial connection between Syrian Christians in the two regions, “Christian” identities were configured and constructed differently due to differences in place and time. For this reason, “Hindu–​Christian” interactions across nearly two millennia do not follow a single semantic, socio-​political, or religious pattern. The context of encounter matters a great deal. What we can say with great confidence, then, is only that identities are multiple and relational. “Who” one is depends on where one is, on who is asking the question, and on the particular context in which the question is posed. By the time the Portuguese arrived on the same Malankara coast in 1498, their working socio-​religious categories had been set for centuries. Cult may have been severed from culture, but many cultures had adopted the same predominant Portuguese cult and formed “Christendom.” As is well known, Iberians like the Portuguese by then divided the world into five major “religious” categories:  Catholic, heretic/​schismatic, Jew, Turk/​Muslim, and pagan. As years went by this framework necessarily expanded, especially due to the encounter with Asia. The category of “pagan” proved particularly malleable. Though the framework could be adjusted, it represented a relatively stable and coherent way of conceiving of patterns of global religiosity.While such conceptions were relatively stable and coherent for the Portuguese, however, they were not necessarily shared by those with whom the Portuguese interacted. Which brings us back to Hinduism.

To be or not to be Robert Erik Frykenberg offers what could be considered a representative example of the view that “Hindu” and “Hinduism” are modern constructs without basis in South Asian history. He explains, there has never been any such a thing as a single “Hinduism” or any single “Hindu community” for all of India…Furthermore, there has never been any one religion—​ nor even one system of religions—​to which the term “Hindu” can accurately be applied. (Frykenberg 1989, p. 82) To make their argument, constructivists like Frykenberg tend to argue from absence in the historical record, maintaining that Hindu was an operative term only from the nineteenth century, when colonizers, missionaries, Brahmins and “Brahmanized Non-​Brahmans” “did most of the defining, the manipulating, and the organizing of the essential elements of what gradually became, for practical purposes, a new religion” (Ibid., p. 89). As the argument goes, prior 21

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to this period there simply is no evidence that “Hindu” was used as a self-​designation, or that “Hinduism” referred to some unified religious system (“religious” as understood in the modern West). Unfortunately, Frykenberg, like many scholars, disproportionately privileges materials from the British period, and he makes the epistemic mistake of assuming that a novel signifier necessitates a novel signified. In short, the view that Hinduism is an etic construct is clearly contradicted by a preponderance of the evidence. Lorenzen (1999) and Sweetman (2001), for example, show convincingly that pre-​British colonial Western visitors to India reporting on the religions of the “Gentili” (Gentiles), described them with what have become standard descriptions of Hinduism today, including with reference to recognizable deities, the Puranas, beliefs, practices, and sects. If these were merely the “inventions” of so many disparate foreigners separated by time and space, we would be forced to admit the miraculous. Lorenzen explains, The fact that virtually all European accounts—​whatever the language or period in which they were written, and whether or not they are likely to have mutually influenced each other—​follow this same general outline suggests that the European writers were in fact “constructing” Hinduism directly on the basis of what they observed and what they were told by their native informants. These informants were in turn simply summarizing a construction of Hinduism that already existed in their own collective consciousness. (Lorenzen 1999, p. 646) To be clear, the point is that at least somewhat coherent phenomena later designated “Hindu” and “Hinduism” existed before words like “Hindu” and “Hinduism” existed to signify them. Thankfully, one need not rely on evidence from European researchers, for indeed autochthonous writings exist in medieval Sanskrit and vernacular literatures demonstrating the same. In his work on medieval Indian doxologies, Unifying Hinduism (2010), Andrew Nicholson traces the process by which philosophers made sense of unity and diversity of thought as they delineated insiders and outsiders.This process involved a delicate practice of inclusion and exclusion among Sanskrit thinkers who were forced to come to terms with differing, often contradictory, philosophical and theological visions in their midst. Nicholson argues that between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, “certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanisads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the ‘six systems’ (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy” (Ibid., p. 2). In other words, insiders were themselves identifying the elements of “Hinduism” mentioned by foreigners later in the second millennium. Nicholson agrees with Lorenzen when arguing that this new self-​reflexive turn was in fact instigated by sustained contact with the other of Islam—​not that Sanskrit intellectuals referred to Muslims directly in the early second millennium (that happened only much later). Rather, they first employed recognizable foreign ethnic terms to those who had arrived in India a millennium earlier—​i.e., yavanas (Ionians), turuṣkas (Turks), and śakas (Scythians). Eventually, they re-​used earlier terms of derision (e.g., nāstik for Buddhist or Jain), to denote these newest deniers of Vedic authority. “The logic of medieval Indian xenology followed patterns of doxography and śāstra generally, applying categories from a millennium earlier to changing sociocultural conditions without concern for their descriptive adequacy” (Ibid., p. 192). This explains, according to Nicholson, why Buddhists and Jains are mentioned even when they had become largely irrelevant and unthreatening to Brahminical elites.

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Nicholson’s argument is convincing, but we need not rely on it completely, since Sanskrit writing and the elite culture that produced it represents only a sliver of the culture (or cultures) at large. From a popular perspective, one need look no further than medieval bhakti (devotional) poetry to see that sustained interaction between Hindus and Muslims was common enough to allow for rather detailed knowledge of the other’s thought and practice. Medieval bhaktas (devotees) and sants (poet-​saints) such as Kabir, Eknath, Anantadas, Tulsidas, Ravidas, Nanak, Dadu,Vidyapati, and many more, all betray knowledge of such difference. Here, for example, is a passage from Kabir, the Banarsi weaver who lived between 1450 and 1520 CE, in which the poet demonstrates detailed knowledge of what are perceived as two different religious systems, with their respective gods, exemplars, scriptures, and elites: Brothers, tell me where these cosmic rulers [Jagdīsa] came from? Tell me, who drove you mad? Named Allāh, Rāma, Karīmā, Kesava, Hari, Hazrat, So many jewels, but from one gold—​in essence, not double. For conversation’s sake we speak of them as two—​one does namāz, one does pūjā. This one called Mahadev, that Mohammad, this Brahmā, that Ādam, this Hindu, that Turk—​both dwell on the same soil. One studies the Vedas, the other Friday sermons, these Maulvis, those Pandits, named as though separate—​both pots of one clay. Kabir says, nobody can find Rāma. One slaughters goats, one cows, they squander their birth in argumentation. ( The Bījak of Kabir, śabd 30, translated by the author, from the Hindi in Kabir 1933, pp. 43–​44) A few points bear mention: First, evident here is not merely knowledge of differences between two religions, but exasperation regarding their contentious relationship.The cantankerous Kabir famously places a pox on both houses as he sings of his own more ecumenical, nirguṇa Divinity identified as “Ram.” Second, note that Kabir clearly refers to what he perceives to be two distinct religio-cultural systems, that of the “Hindu” and the “Turk.” This would simply not have been possible if there had not been, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hundreds of years of sustained interaction between what we now comfortably call “Hindus” and “Muslims”—​and all this prior to the arrival of the British Empire. As we shift our attention, it is fitting that I give the penultimate words between constructivists and indigenists to Lorenzen, who has done the most to clarify the issue: If Hinduism is a construct or invention, then, it is not a colonial one, nor a European one, nor even an exclusively Indian one. It is a construct or invention only in the vague and commonsensical way that any large institution is, be it Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, communism, or parliamentary democracy. In other words, it is an institution created out of a long historical interaction between a set of basic ideas and the infinitely complex and variegated socio-​religious beliefs and practices that structure the everyday life of individuals and small, local groups. (Lorenzen 1999, pp. 654–​55) We must note that, ultimately, the terms “constructivist” and “indigenist” are misleading, for in fact, as Lorenzen avers, institutions are always constructed. The proper question, then, is 23

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not about the legitimacy of these constructions, but rather the manner in which they were constructed, the forces involved in the process, and the descriptive efficacy of the identified construct. To summarize:  by the late medieval period identities were congealing, understandings of the nature of difference were increasing (and being contested), and borders were hardening into patterns that remain recognizable today. Certainly, these developments continued into the British period, as Indians were faced with a religio-​cultural onslaught of great magnitude that would affect Britishers and Indians alike.

The British dispensation The British penchant for accumulating knowledge in order to manage and control the Indian subcontinent is fairly well understood.That the British decennial census, begun in India in 1872, helped to reify religious and caste hierarchies has also become fairly common knowledge. For his part, Nicholas Dirks has argued that the caste system as it came to exist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is largely a product of colonial reduction of all the variegated social forces of pre-​colonial India to the sole category of religion (Dirks 2001). This is overstatement to be sure (and another instance of overestimating British power and prowess), but Dirks’s work and that of others does demonstrate the process by which religious categories and other classificatory identity markers were employed and came to be accepted by the late nineteenth century, as well as how these categories would come to be enshrined in the Indian Constitution, reflecting the fact that the initial misgivings Indian elites expressed about the legitimacy of census categories turned into an acknowledged means of asserting the agendas of their own communities (Christopher 2014, p. 589). In the movement for the indigenous franchise in British India, with representation determined by community size, the census would prove a valuable tool in fortifying what would one day be called “vote banks.” What occurred during the British period, in processes involving colonizers and native Indians, was the steady dissemination across British India (by the 1920s) of the substantives “Hindu” and “Hinduism” as religious categories. These were not, however, processes free of contentiousness and confusion. From the beginning, “Hindu religion” was understood to be a vast rubric that “embrace[d]‌religion, race, country and social organization” (Census of India 1911, quoted in Christopher 2014, p. 66). What was “Hindu” and “Other” was not easily distinguished, such that a census official could lament, “[I]t is very difficult to draw the line between Hinduism and the rude religion of some of these tribes, and very possibly many have been classed under the one, when they might have been ranked in the other category” (Census of India 1911, quoted in Ibid., p. 67). Even the first census, in the late nineteenth century, involved nearly one million enumerators, across 1.5 million square miles, who would eventually document the existence of 171,860,386 persons living in 37,041 households (Ibid.). Fearing rebellion, census officials in the first census sought only eight pieces of information, only one of which had to do with religion. Significantly, only five religious choices were offered: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Other. These changed little over subsequent decades. How one was determined to be one or the other varied from province to province. It should come as no surprise that during the nineteenth century, when so-​called Orientalists, Anglicists, and Evangelicals sought to remake India, Hindu elites attempted to pattern Hinduism along largely Protestant Christian lines. At various times and in certain quarters, Krishna and Ram were promoted as pan-​Indian deities equal to Jesus—​in fact, better than Jesus because prior. Similarly, the Bhagavad Gita came during this period to be elevated in importance as a

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sacred text to rival the Bible, while niṣkāma karma—​righteous action without attachment to results—​was proffered as a universal ethic to rival the Golden Rule. Also during this period, new voluntary societies emerged, some of them founded expressly in the mold of (and to compete with) Christian denominations and what we would now call faith-​based organizations. Some aspects of this reformulation were genuinely novel; more often, Hindus used what already existed—​deities, doctrines, scriptures, and institutions—​to create new configurations within a new socio-​political and economic matrix. As when Islam’s rise shaped configurations of an earlier Hinduism in the medieval period, a “modern” or “neo-​Hinduism” emerged during this period that was more middle class, more puritanical, more explicitly political, and more self-​ consciously concerned with erecting and defending perceived borders with the religious other. Romila Thapar (1997) has christened the culmination of this process “Syndicated Hinduism.” This configuration of Hinduism was born in the colonial period, but is still very much with us today (with the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva constituting one of its variants). As significant as these “religious formations” have become in the context of Indian majoritarian politics that pit “majority” Hindu versus “minority” Muslim and Christian, for our purposes, the more important issue regards what began to be taken for granted in the midst of these processes of classification: that religious identities are stable (but for the possibility of conversion), that they are mutually exclusive, and that religious difference is a primary marker of difference.

Caveats and conclusions In the years following India’s independence, religious categories fortified during the Raj were enshrined in the Constitution. In fact, the definitional issues described in this chapter have never gone away, with Hindus and non-​Hindus alike arguing over what exactly constitutes “Hinduism” and who can be considered a pakka (authentic) Hindu. Article 25 of the Constitution adopts a clever apophatic approach, describing Hindus by process of elimination, that is, by delineating those who are not included in the category. Nevertheless, the contested nature of religious categories does not negate them, but rather reveals the ongoing contingent, cross-​cutting, and conflictual processes of definition and description. We may question the authenticity of “Hindu” and “Hinduism” as categories, but when we find ourselves, often against our will, continuing to use these words, we are stumbling across the stubborn fact of a concept’s continuing usefulness. Given the rather procrustean and flattening nature of religious categories, we must note that they have never done justice to the variegated forms of life encountered on the ground in India. In contemporary Banaras, for example, there exists a growing hybrid community of those whose cultic allegiance is to Jesus and to the Catholic devotional tradition, but who unselfconsciously, matter-​of-​factly identify themselves as Hindu when asked to do so by census officials (San Chirico 2014). One of the questions surrounding this community is not merely “What are they?” but, given their anomalous hybrid identity in the age of Hindutva and entrepreneurial Pentecostalism, what will they be allowed to be? Here, simple recourse to categories like “Christianity” and “Hinduism” fails to account for the complex negotiations and nuances of their unique existence. As Nathaniel Roberts has shown, there are often other and better categories for examining human lives. In To Be Cared For (2016), he invents the category “slum religion” to more adequately describe and interpret shared Hindu and Christian ways of life in a Chennai slum, shedding light on contemporary Hindus and Christians to be sure, but also adding interpretive nuance in the necessary subversion (or transcendence) of these religious categories by recourse to another novel one.

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In the development of terms like “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” and “religion,” more generally, Hindus and non-​Hindus were mapping the territory while creating it—​or creating new territory in the process of mapping it. In other words, map helps create territory. And we must note again, borrowing from José Casanova (1994), that before such mapping takes place discursively (in words, speech, and law) and materially (in brick and mortar), it first congeals in human consciousness. Yet as we employ these substantives, we must keep in mind that they can serve to mask hybrid practices, beliefs, and identities, as well as histories that are variegated, conflict-​laden, and full of ambiguity and ambivalence. For this reason modifiers like “Brahminical Hinduism,” “Popular Hinduism,” “Bhakti Hinduism,” “Syndicated Hinduism,” “Modern Hinduisms,” “Iberian Christianity,” “Pentecostal Christianities,” etc., are wholly useful and necessary for focusing our attention on particular instantiations of religious phenomena, adding precision to our descriptive and interpretive apparatuses. I have argued throughout that the substantives “Christianity” and “Hinduism” are both, in their own ways, constructed religious categories, that they are historical, ideational, and material processes of time and space. I have accepted with Asad and others that Christianity and religion are coeval. And I have argued that Christianity and Hinduism are legitimately classed as “religions,” while maintaining that religion is itself a construct—​which is not the same as saying it is fake. This is not to suggest, however, that Christianity and Hinduism are religions in the same way. The act of “disembedding” religion from culture had profound effects on what we deem Christianity and religion to be, which is why conceiving of Hinduism as “religion” has seemed not quite satisfactory to Hindus and non-​Hindus alike. Admittedly, Christianity, even with all its diversity, can be more easily defined than Hinduism, even though we can rightly speak of both complexes in the plural. Recourse to Wittgensteinian family resemblance or to what Eichinger-​Ferro-​Luzzi (2005) calls the polythetic-​prototype approach that couples overlapping similarities with prototypical features seems to do more justice to the complexities of Hinduism than looking for underlying unity or denying the existence of Hinduism altogether. With typical aplomb,Wendy Doniger argues that Hinduism is best described in terms of a Venn diagram, with connections between caste, karma, dharma, renunciation, devotion to various gods, and to people: Different Hindus may accept or deny different elements of this scuttlebutt, and while all Hindus pay lip service to certain ideals, relatively few truly embody them. But all Hindus have been part of the same conversation: all Hindus know about these things, as we know about Adam and Eve…Categories have to be recycled, like newspapers or tin cans; they are ladders that we climb up and then kick out from under us. The Venn diagram of Hinduism is constantly in motion, because it is made of people, also constantly in motion. But it is there. No matter what we, or they, choose to call it. (Doniger 1991, p. 41) Regardless of how we work to adequately re-​conceptualize Hinduism in all its diversity, it is clear that we need to revise our metaphors for how religions develop—​and for much else—​ because studying unstable historical processes is admittedly more difficult than studying immutable essences. (Processes are much more unwieldy.) To say that something is constructed or fashioned or invented and to also argue that it is real is not to live in contradiction. It is an acknowledgment that all reality is constructed (Berger and Luckmann 1966), which is to say nothing more nor less than it is a product of time and space. That that is not enough suggests that for all the postmodern discourse and its attendant curse upon essentializing, too many of 26

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us are still hard-​bitten Platonists. We seem to need our categories to be somehow rooted in a metaphysical world of forms for them to be “real.” Why that is so takes us beyond the purview of this essay. The simple fact, verifiable in the historical development of religions, is that they emerge in relation over time. For Christianity, it was the others of Hellenismos and Ioudaismos, construed monolithically. Most significant for our purposes, from the perspective of global history, was the de-​linking of cult from culture brought about by Christianity as it traveled across cultures in its attachment to vast political units. Islam later adopted this profound epistemic shift, eventually introducing it into the Indian subcontinent as part of imperial power. As we have seen, following Nicholson and Lorenzen, the congealing of what we call Hinduism occurred among Hindus and in relation to Islam. Later, it would be further configured vis-​à-​vis Western Christianity. Of course, this process of Hindu–​Christian interaction is ongoing in India, as it now is throughout the world. Christianity has long been shaped by its interaction with Hindu traditions in South Asia, making Indic Christianities anything but uniform. Meanwhile, the Hindu process of self-​ definition continues, as, for example, when Hindu nationalists attempt to “Hinduize” Dalit communities, when there is recrimination against foreign scholarly representations deemed inaccurate and demeaning, and when the Supreme Court rules it illegal on the basis of gender discrimination to prohibit women from entering the Ayyappan temple in Sabarimala (as it did in September of 2018). Finally, we must recall that the complexes “Christianity” and “Hinduism” have never been the primary locus of concern for either Christians or Hindus. Christian attention has focused instead on Christ, saints, and the Church, while Hindus have trained their gaze on local and ultimate deities; great gods and fickle godlings; gurus, sants, and their lineages; and the responsibilities of jāti. For both Hindus and Christians, however, to say even this is to say too much (or too little), for in fact both were and are simply trying to make it through the day, equipped with the tools at their disposal, some of which, from our particular historical and cultural vantagepoint, we deem religious.

Bibliography Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Baum, W. and Winkler, D.W. 2003. The Church of the East:  A Concise History. London: Routledge Curzon. Bayly, S. 1989. Saints, Goddesses and Kings:  Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–​1900. Cambridge South Asian Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Knowledge:  A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books. Boyarin, D. 2003. “Semantic Differences; or, ‘Judaism’/​‘Christianity’.” In Becker, A.H. and Reed, A.Y. (eds.). The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 65–​85. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Christopher, A.J. 2014. “The ‘Religion’ Question in British Colonial and Commonwealth Censuses 1820s–​2010s.” Journal of Religious History 38(4): 579–​96. Dirks, N. 2001. Castes of Mind:  Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Doniger, W. 1991. “Hinduism By Any Other Name.” Wilson Quarterly 15(3: Summer): 35–​41. Eichinger Ferro-​Luzzi, G. 2005. “The Polythetic-​Prototype Approach to Hinduism.” In Sontheimer, G. and Kulke, H. (eds.). Hinduism Reconsidered. New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 294–​304.

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Kerry P.C. San Chirico Frykenberg, R. 1989. “The Emergence of Modern ‘Hinduism’ as a Concept and as an Institution:  A Reappraisal with Special Reference to South India.” In Sontheimer, G. and Kulke, H. (eds.). Hinduism Reconsidered. New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 82–​107. Hawley, J.S. 1991. “Naming Hinduism.” Wilson Quarterly 15(3: Summer): 20–​34. Hawley, J.S. and Juergensmeyer, M. (trans.). 2004. Song of the Saints of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kabir. 1933. Bījak: Satgurū Kabīr Sāheb Kā. Allahabad: Belvedere Printing Works. Lieu, J. 2015. Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Lorenzen, D. 1999. “Who Invented Hinduism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(4): 630–​59. Morris, H. 1904. The Life of Charles Grant. London: Murray. Neusner, J. 1985. The Three Stages in the Formation of Judaism. Brown Judaic Studies. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Nicholson, A.J. 2010. Unifying Hinduism:  Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History. New  York: Columbia University Press. Pearson, B.A. (ed.). 1997. The Emergence of the Christian Religion. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Pennington, B. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. The Anthropology of Christianity 20. Oakland: University of California Press. San Chirico, K.P.C. 2014. “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region.” In Bauman, C.M. and Young, R.F. (eds.). Constructing Indian Christianities: Culture, Conversion and Caste. New Delhi: Routledge, pp. 23–​44. Schwartz, S. 2001. Imperialism and Jewish Society from 200 B.C.E. and 640 C.E. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, J.Z. 1998. “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Taylor, M.C. (ed.). Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 269–​84. Sweetman, W. 2001. “Unity and Plurality:  Hinduism and the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship.” Religion 31(3): 209–​24. Thapar, R. 1997. “Syndicated Hinduism.” In Sontheimer, G. and Kulke, H. (eds.). Hinduism Reconsidered. New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 54–​81.

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3 THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN HINDUISM Hugh Nicholson

“There are Hindus,” writes the historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith,“but no Hinduism” (Smith 1991, p. 65). There is, in other words, no “Hinduism” in the sense of a unified and identifiable system of religious discourse and practice. Derived from the term that the Persians at the beginning of the second millennium used to denote the inhabitants of the region of the Indus river, “Hinduism,” rather, is little more than an umbrella term designating a rich variety of religious discourses and practices that happen to be indigenous to India. Smith recommended abandoning the term on the grounds that it represents an illegitimate imposition onto the lived reality of Indian religion. And while most have found it impractical to follow Smith’s lead in this regard, they have nevertheless conceded Smith’s point that there is no essence to “Hinduism” in the sense of a core set of beliefs and practices shared by all the various traditions so designated. This scholarly consensus stands in marked (and self-​conscious) contrast to most popular presentations of Hinduism that do effectively posit such an essence to Hinduism, albeit more as an unexamined assumption than as a consciously held claim. Typically, this putative essence is provided by the Vedānta philosophy, specifically, the idea that the innermost core of the personality, the true self or ātman, coincides with the Absolute, Brahman. Thus Huston Smith, in the chapter dedicated to Hinduism in his immensely popular introduction to the religions of the world, writes that underlying man’s personality and animating it is a reservoir of being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is without limit in awareness and bliss. This infinite center of every life, this hidden self or Atman, is no less than Brahman, the Godhead. (Smith 1958, p. 34) In his comprehensive introduction to Catholicism, Richard McBrien, to take another representative example, writes concerning Hinduism that salvation is possible only through mystical absorption in the knowledge of the one true reality, the Absolute, brahman, the ultimate source and goal of all existence. Brahman causes all existence and all beings to emanate from itself and is the self (atman) of all living beings. (McBrien 1994, pp. 372–​73) 29

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From an historical point of view, it is curious that one particular Indian theological tradition, one that was elitist in a strong sense of being restricted to a tiny, high-​caste and literate stratum of the population, would come to define the religious identity of a huge population of people, few of whom have any familiarity with the highly particular ritual, intellectual, and meditative disciplines characteristic of the Vedāntic tradition. The restriction is actually even narrower than that. For it is not simply Vedānta in general but in fact one particular school of Vedānta, namely, the Non-​dualist or Advaita Vedānta of the great seventh-​century theologian Śaṁkara, that has come to represent the essence of Hindu religion in the minds of many. It is the aim of this essay to analyze the curious emergence of the modern Vedānticized concept of Hinduism that has figured prominently in the representation of Hinduism in Western philosophy and theology.

The Western influence on modern Hindu self-​understanding The exaggerated role of Vedānta in the Western representation of Hinduism is not simply a matter of Western writers like Huston Smith and Richard McBrien misunderstanding or misrepresenting, either through ignorance or through prejudice, the religious traditions of India. In his survey of the religions of the world from which I quoted above, Smith cites, among others, the great nineteenth-​century reformer Swami Vivekananda and the twentieth-​century philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan as sources for his presentation of Hinduism. Even if the modern Vedānticized concept of Hinduism gives a distorted picture of the religious landscape of premodern India, it has nevertheless become, for good or for ill, part of modern Hindu self-​understanding, or at least an influential current thereof. That does not mean, however, that the Vedānticized concept of Hinduism is free of characteristically Western preoccupations and values. For the self-​understanding of influential modern Hindu thinkers such as Rammohun Roy,Vivekananda, M.K. Gandhi, and Radhakrishnan was profoundly shaped by the encounter with Western thought. Thus, the solicitude of a Western author like Smith in basing his depiction of Hinduism on the testimony of authentic representatives of the tradition does not guarantee that his depiction is therefore free of Western influence. Nobody has argued for the thesis that modern Hindu self-​understanding is irrevocably shaped by the encounter with Western thought more forcefully and provocatively than the German Indologist Paul Hacker. Hacker argues that the intellectual formation of the chief proponents of what he calls “Neo-​Hinduism” was “primarily or predominantly Western” (Hacker 1995a, p. 231). The Western intellectual tradition thus provided the interpretive framework through which Neo-​ Hindu thinkers like Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Radhakrishnan appropriated their native tradition. And, to the extent that Western thought forms the interpretive filter through which the collective wisdom of the tradition is applied to the contemporary situation, Hacker argues, the Neo-​Hindu movement represents a break in continuity with the Hindu tradition (Hacker 1995a, p. 232 and passim). Put differently, Neo-​Hinduism, on Hacker’s interpretation, stands outside of what the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer would call the effective history of the classical tradition. Now one could argue that Hacker’s negative assessment of modern Hinduism, a judgment which reflects his conversion to a particularly doctrinaire form of Roman Catholicism (Halbfass 1995, pp. 15–​18), underestimates the critical and creative dimensions of the modern Hindu appropriation of Western thought.The invidious contrast he sets up between Neo-​Hinduism and what he calls “surviving traditional Hinduism,” moreover, trades on a dubious conception of a religious tradition as a self-​originating and self-​ contained system of thought. Nevertheless, Hacker’s analysis, if we disregard some of his tendentious value judgments, does usefully foreground the extent to which the modern Vedānticized

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concept of Hinduism is irrevocably shaped by the historical encounter with Western thought. We can therefore posit two moments in a cross-​cultural dialectic. In the first, Christian missionaries and, later, orientalist scholars articulated an understanding of Indian religion that reflected characteristically Western interests and presuppositions. In the second moment, this “orientalized” concept of Hinduism was critically appropriated by an influential segment of India’s intelligentsia who engaged creatively with Western thought.

Did the British invent Hinduism? Most scholars would agree that the modern concept of Hinduism with a putative essence defined by Vedānta philosophy was profoundly influenced by the historical encounter with the West. Scholars sharply disagree, however, on the more general question of whether there is any basis in premodern India for the notion of a pan-​Indian concept of religious identity that roughly corresponds to the present concept of Hinduism. One school of thought, influenced by W.C. Smith’s critique of “reification,” Edward Said’s critique of “orientalism,” and the postmodern concept of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1984), maintains that the very notion of such a common religious identity—​and not simply a particular conception or specification thereof—​was a Western invention. As Heinrich von Stietencron states this thesis, “the concept of a common Indian religion—​whatever its name—​did not originate in India. It was introduced from the West, and its history goes back to a period when Western knowledge about distant India was still very meagre” (Stietencron 1995, p. 72). On the basis of a study of a late eleventh-​century Śaiva ritual text and the community whose religious worldview it reflects, von Stietencron argues that Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism were conceived as independent and indeed mutually exclusive religious paths, and not, as they would come to be seen in the modern period, as two sects of the same religion (Ibid., pp. 53, 66). Nor, moreover, does he see evidence that this Śaivite textual community recognized any significant difference between their Vaiṣṇava rivals, on the one hand, and their Buddhist and Jain rivals, on the other, that would suggest a sense of affinity with the former (Ibid., p. 66).The concept of a unity of Indian religion, von Stietencron argues, has its origins in medieval European typologies of religion, which relegated all non-​Abrahamic traditions to the undifferentiated category of heathenism (Ibid., p. 74). Only in the eighteenth century, he asserts, did Europeans begin to distinguish between the various forms of heathenism, and then only on the basis of geography (Ibid., p. 75). Although von Stietencron concedes that the “different Hindu religions” drew closer together during the Mughal period in response to the loss of patronage and cultural influence that they suffered under the ascendancy of Islam, it was only in the nineteenth century that a unified concept of Hindu identity emerged as an expression of nationalist sentiment (Ibid., pp. 74–​75). Another school of thought has challenged, or at least severely qualified, the strong form of the “invention of Hinduism” hypothesis put forward by scholars like von Stietencron. David Lorenzen (Lorenzen 2005) and, more recently, Andrew Nicholson (Nicholson 2010, pp. 196–​ 201 and passim) have argued that evidence for a conscious sense of Hindu religious identity can be found as early as the twelfth century, thus long before the arrival of the British. Lorenzen compares the representation of Hindu beliefs and practices of European missionaries writing before 1800 with that of British orientalist scholars writing after this date. Since the latter group was generally unaware of the writings produced by the former—​most of the pre-​colonial missionaries wrote in languages other than English, and many of their works were unpublished—​ the fact that both groups generally describe the same set of beliefs and practices argues against

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the hypothesis that Hinduism was a post-​1800 colonial invention (Lorenzen 2005, pp. 62–​63). Lorenzen draws attention to the role of native informants in the formation of the West’s knowledge of Indian religion. “If Hinduism was invented,” he writes, “it was invented by European and Indian scholars working in tandem” (Ibid., p. 61). According to Lorenzen’s analysis, a key factor in the emergence of a consciously held sense of Hindu identity was the Muslim presence in India after 1200 or thereabouts. It was thanks to the presence of a non-​Hindu religious Other that Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas, Smārtas, and others forged a sense of common identity, without effacing, of course, an awareness of their mutual differences (Ibid., pp. 69–​70, 53; cf. Nicholson 2010, pp. 199–​200). Andrew Nicholson draws attention to a significant manifestation of this emerging consciousness in the history of Indian philosophy. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the previously fluid doxographical distinction between “affirmers” and “deniers” (āstikas and nāstikas, respectively) begins to align with the familiar distinction between the six “orthodox” schools of Indian philosophy, on the one hand, and “heterodox” schools of Buddhism and Jainism, on the other (Nicholson 2010, pp. 200, 168–​84). Like many scholarly debates, this disagreement on the emergence of Hindu identity might ultimately boil down to a difference in emphasis or in definition, at least when historical analysis moves beyond the disagreement between unqualified, attention-​g rabbing thesis statements like “the British invented Hinduism.” As mentioned above, von Stietencron concedes that the various Hindu sects drew closer together during the Mughal period, albeit not close enough to efface their mutual sense of independence. And when Lorenzen, for his part, declares that the authors of modern academic textbooks on Hinduism “have not invented or constructed anything radically new” (Lorenzen 2005, p. 59; italics added), he leaves open the possibility of a mode of construction that is not so radical. At any rate, one can maintain that the encounter with Western thought during the colonial period prompted significant changes in the self-​ understanding of Hindus (scholars like Lorenzen and Nicholson would readily admit this much) without, however, claiming that the idea of a unified Hindu identity was a pure fiction foisted upon India by Europeans. Put differently, that the concept of Hinduism was the product of “a process of selective emphasis” (Ibid., p. 59) rooted in indigenous patterns of thought does not exclude the idea that it marked the emergence of something genuinely new.

“Indian philosophy means Vedānta” “Indian philosophy means Vedānta,” writes the philosopher and Marathi scholar S.R. Talghatti, “and Vedānta philosophy means [the] Kevalādvaita [“pure non-​dualism”] of Śaṁkara” (Talghatti 2000, p. 566). As we shall see presently, the usage of the term “philosophy” in this quotation reflects a long history of cross-​cultural encounter. “Philosophy” here refers to “the essence or decisive part of religion” (Halbfass 1988, p. 293). “Indian philosophy,” accordingly, refers to the essence of “Indian religion” or Hinduism. Talghatti’s quote suggests a convenient way of analyzing the emergence of the modern Vedānticized concept of Hinduism. I will first look at the factors behind the emergence of the idea of Vedānta as the essence of Hinduism. Then I will narrow my focus and examine how it was that the Advaita school in particular came to epitomize Vedānta, and therewith “Hinduism.” The British orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made a sharp distinction between “popular Hinduism”—​the religious practices, pūjā and the like, observed among the people of India—​and “philosophical Hinduism,” the teachings contained in the ancient writings of the Brahmins. The former was summarily dismissed as idolatry and superstition and therefore deemed unworthy of study (Marshall 1970, p. 43; Inden 2000, pp. 97–​98). “An early division of the Hindu system,” writes the great orientalist H.H. Wilson, 32

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separated the practical and popular belief from the speculative or philosophical doctrines. Whilst the common people addressed their hopes and fears to stocks and stones, and multiplied by their credulity and superstition the grotesque objects of their veneration, some few, of deeper thought and wider contemplation, plunged into the mysteries of man and nature, and endeavored assiduously, if not successfully, to obtain just notions of the cause, the character and consequence of existence. (Wilson 1976 [1846], p. 1) It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that this textual bias in the study of Indian religion was recognized as such and subjected to criticism; throughout the formative period of the Western encounter with the culture of India, the distinction between popular and philosophical Hinduism was basically taken for granted, even by the most open-​minded and charitable of Western interpreters. The Western preoccupation with the literary tradition of the Brahmins over the practices of popular Hinduism can be traced back to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Indians. Already in the early seventeenth century, the great Jesuit missionary Roberto de Nobili (1577–​ 1656), in an effort to establish an indigenous foothold for the promulgation of the Christian gospel, undertook a serious study of the sacred writings of his South Indian Brahmin hosts. In the concept of Brahman de Nobili saw evidence of a natural religion, a pristine monotheism, that could form the basis for a conversion to Christianity (Halbfass 1988, pp. 40–​42). De Nobili presented Christian conversion to his Indian conversation partners not as the acceptance of an alien faith tradition but rather as the rediscovery and fulfillment of the forgotten wisdom of their own (Ibid., p.  42; also see Clooney, this volume). And although de Nobili’s strategy of inculturation was ahead of its time, it established a dominant pattern for Christian, both Catholic and Protestant, missionary activity for generations afterwards. Later missionaries, such as the Lutheran Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–​1719), saw the first task of Christian missions as fostering a discernment of the one true God behind the multitude of heathen deities (Jeyaraj 2003, pp. 48–​49 and passim; Halbfass 1988, p. 47). Christian conversion thus rested on an indigenous natural theology: “The South Indians know from the light of nature that there is one God. This truth does not need to be taught to them by Christians at all” (Jeyaraj 2003, p. 48). The missionaries perhaps naively assumed that the second step in their conversion strategy, the acceptance of the Christian gospel as the fulfillment of the monotheism rediscovered in the ancient writings of the Brahmins, would happen more or less as a matter of course. Much to their disappointment, however, the dominant Hindu response was to stop short at the first stage. No one better exemplifies this partial response than the great early nineteenth-​ century Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy (1772–​1833), the so-​called “father of modern India.” Roy’s effort to separate the putative Vedic belief in the “invisible Supreme Being” from the ritualism and image worship (“idolatry”) of popular Hinduism—​a reform program that was profoundly influenced both by the work of the British orientalists and by the Deism of the Enlightenment—​was initially greeted by some missionaries as a providential realization of the first stage of their conversion strategy (Halbfass 1988, p.  209). And yet Rammohun had no inclination to exchange his reformed vision of Hinduism for the Christian gospel. Indeed, reformed Hinduism constituted for him a medium of cultural self-​assertion (see Killingley, this volume). A generation or so later, the unified,Vedāntically based concept of Hinduism that Rammohun helped to establish would serve as an expression of burgeoning nationalistic sentiment, as epitomized in the work of Swami Vivekananda (see Hacker 1995b). The distinction between the philosophical Hinduism found in the earliest Brahminical literature and the popular Hinduism observed among contemporary Indians was part and 33

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parcel of a grand narrative of cultural degeneration and decline. The Christian missionaries subscribed to a theological version of this narrative according to which an indigenous natural theology or an original revelation, subjected to the baser inclinations of human beings, in time became overrun with superstition, ritualism, and idolatry. In the nineteenth century this narrative of cultural decline received a new foundation and a new function. The epoch-​making discovery of a genetic relation between Sanskrit and the classical and modern languages of Europe—​a discovery announced in a famous address by Sir William Jones before the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786 and developed by the linguist Franz Bopp in the second decade of the following century—​suggested that the strategic alliance that missionaries and, later, orientalist scholars and colonial administrators forged with the Brahminical elite rested on an underlying affinity of language and thought. Given the widespread belief at the time in an integral relation between language and race, it was perhaps inevitable that the Indo-​European or “Aryan” hypothesis was taken to support the idea of a racial consanguinity between Europeans and the ancient sages of the Vedas. With the Aryan hypothesis, a racial theory of miscegenation replaced the biblical notion of a regressive tendency from monotheism to idolatry as an explanation for the putative decline of Indian culture (Metcalf 1995, pp.  82–​83). According to this theory, the Aryan ancestors of the European peoples “lost their purity of race by intermingling with the aboriginal races, and by the innate decay of enervation by the climate” (Ibid., p.  83, quoting the nineteenth-​century civil servant George Campbell). This notion of a consanguinity between Europeans and the Vedic Indians provided an ideological justification for the colonialist enterprise that could either undergird or replace the original Christian idea of bringing the gift of salvation to the lost souls of India. According to the Aryan hypothesis, European orientalists, thanks to their cultural affinity with the sages of ancient India (see, e.g., Tull 1991, pp. 40–​41), were ideally situated to reacquaint a benighted India with the cultural riches of her largely forgotten past. A symbol of the European claim on Vedic culture was the figure of Friedrich Max Müller. The great philologist, known principally for his work on India’s most ancient document, the Rig Veda, was recognized as the leading Victorian authority on Indian culture, this despite the fact that he had never set foot on the subcontinent (see Inden 2000, p. 105). The myth of India’s degeneration and decline goes a long way in explaining why the Vedānta philosophy, among the various schools of Brahminical learning, came to represent the essence of Indian religion. As the philosophical school that maintained the strongest link with India’s Vedic past—​the claim of Vedānta’s sister school, the school of ritual theory or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, was never seriously considered—​the Vedānta was the least subject to the putative forces of cultural adulteration and decline. I hardly need to mention that this understanding of Vedānta rests on a very selective reading of the Vedic corpus. Nineteenth-​ century Indologists, betraying a decidedly Protestant anti-​r itual bias, sharply distinguished the “theological” hymns of the Rig Veda from the ritual portion of the Veda, the brāhamana texts (Tull 1991, p. 39 and passim). For H.H. Wilson, this distinction between the ritual and knowledge portions of the Veda (the karma-​kaṇḍa and jñāna-​kaṇḍa, respectively) replicated, within the Veda itself, the distinction between popular and philosophical Hinduism (Wilson 1976, pp. 1–​2). It was assumed that the ritual portion of the Veda already manifested the process of cultural decay. By contrast, the later speculations of the Upaniṣads, which were taken to evince a critical attitude toward ritual, were seen as hearkening back to the pure spirituality of the Rig Vedic hymns. Thus, according to Max Müller, the Vedānta—​the Upaniṣads as interpreted by the tradition of Bādarāyaṇa and Śaṁkara—​was “clearly the native philosophy of India…the first growth of philosophical thought on the ancient soil of India” (Müller 1903, p. 115). 34

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“Vedānta philosophy means the Kevalādvaita of Śaṁkara” In the popular mind, the core tenet of Vedānta is the identity of the innermost self, the ātman, with the Absolute, Brahman. Brahman is an indescribable impersonal principle, although it often manifests itself as the personal Lord (Īśvara) for the benefit of human beings still mired in dualistic patterns of thought. Brahman in his/​its transcendent (nirguṇa) aspect, moreover, coincides with being itself, such that there is no reality, strictly speaking, apart from Brahman. The phenomenal world, therefore, is a mere appearance of Brahman; the phenomenal world qua phenomenal, in other words, is illusory, māyā.The liberating knowledge of ātman–​Brahman, moreover, excludes ritual activity, inasmuch as ritual action presupposes a duality between the doer and the deed. The principles enumerated in the paragraph above—​the unqualified identity of ātman and Brahman, the impersonal nature of the latter, the world as a mere appearance of Brahman, and the exclusion of ritual activity from the highest knowledge—​are specific and contested tenets of one school of Vedānta, the Advaita. Most schools of Vedānta, in fact, are theistic and realistic. In conscious contrast to the Advaita school, the theistic schools maintain that the personal Lord coincides with the highest Brahman, not a lower manifestation thereof; that the personal soul or ātman is a portion or aspect of the divine reality, but not coextensive with it; that the phenomenal world is a real transformation (pariṇāma), not a mere appearance (vivarta), of divine reality; and that the knowledge of Brahman not only does not exclude, but is in fact conditional upon, the performance of Vedic rites. And so, to restate the question I posed at the outset of this essay, why did the Advaita interpretation of Vedānta in particular attain special prominence in the modern representation of Hinduism? Part of the answer is that Advaita Vedānta answers to long-​standing Western preconceptions about India and the Orient.The notion of that the world is an illusion and that salvation consists in a mystical identification with the divine was part of the Western image of India long before Europeans knew much of anything about Vedānta. In his article on “Brachmans” in his 1697 Dictionaire, Pierre Bayle cites the Jesuit Ch. Le Gobien: The Brachmans [Brahmins] assert that the World is but an Illusion, a Dream, a Deceit… It is, they say, that profound drowsiness of the Mind, that Quiet of all the Powers, that continual suspension of the Senses, which makes the Happiness of Man: in that State he is no more subject to change; there is no Transmigration in him, any Vicissitude, any Fear of Things to come, because, properly speaking, he is nothing, or if he is anything, he is Wise, Perfect, Happy, in a word, he is God, and perfectly like the God Fo: which certainly comes somewhat near to Folly. (Bayle 1735 [1697], p. 118) Bayle’s curious reference to the Chinese name for the Buddha (fo) betrays a confusion between Brahminism and Buddhism. The mix-​up dramatizes the point that Bayle’s overall account of Brahminical teaching, which is derived from a combination of missionary writers like Le Gobien and classical authors like Strabo and Clement of Alexandria, probably tells us more about long-​ standing Western preconceptions about India than it does about the Brahminical tradition. Generally speaking, the earlier missionary writings, despite their obvious Christian prejudices and evangelical motivations, stand closer to the original sources of Brahminical teaching than those of the Enlightenment philosophers writing in Europe. One of the earliest European accounts of the māyāvāda of Advaita Vedānta is found in a letter of the French Jesuit J.F. Pons. In the context of a summary of several schools of Brahminical 35

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learning—​g rammar, mathematics, logic (nyāya), and so on—​Pons credits “Sankrācāry” (Śaṁkara) with being the founder of the school of Vedānta. Its central teaching is “the simple unity of an existent being, which is nothing other than the ‘I’ or the soul” (Aimé-​Martin 1840 [1743], p. 646). In order to reconcile this teaching with human experience, the Vedāntins posit another principle, albeit a purely negative one devoid of being, namely, māyā (Ibid., p. 647). Pons does not hold back his negative opinion of the Advaitic understanding of salvation:  “These false sages must ceaselessly repeat to themselves, with a pride more excessive than that of Lucifer, [the claim] that ‘I am the supreme Being’ (aham ava [sic] param Brahma)” (Ibid., p. 647). Needless to say, Pons’s reading of Vedānta is tendentious in the extreme. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a depiction of Hinduism based on such a reading of Vedānta, as Richard King puts it, “provided an easy ‘monistic’ target for Christian missionaries wishing to engage the Hindu religion in debates about theology and ethics” (King 1999, p. 132). And yet, while one can certainly fault Pons for not being more nuanced and charitable in his interpretation of the Vedānta of which “Sankrācāry” was the founder, one cannot assume that he deliberately suppresses or overlooks the realist and theistic schools of Vedānta, such as those of Rāmānuja and Madhva, that would be less vulnerable to the charge of Luciferian hubris. He mentions at the outset of his remarks on the Vedānta school that he believes that one can no longer find “saniassi” (sannyāsinas, renunciants) outside of this school today (Aimé-​Martin 1840, p. 646). It is unclear whether this remark applies to Vedānta in general or Śaṁkara’s Advaita Vedānta in particular. Indeed, Pons seems to be genuinely unaware of the distinction. It is possible that Pons’s contacts in India represented the Advaita school exclusively. In that case, Pons’s conflation of Vedānta with Śaṁkara’s school would be innocent.Thus, his Christian bias would pertain to his interpretation of Advaita doctrine, but not to his choice of Śaṁkara as a representative of Vedānta. The work of the great British orientalist H.T. Colebrooke, writing some eighty years after Pons, lends indirect support to this conclusion. As Andrew Nicholson observes, Colebrooke’s comprehensive survey of the schools of Indian philosophy is “remarkable for how much it adheres to the accounts of his Sanskrit primary sources, and how rarely he misinterprets or misrepresents the texts he was reading” (Nicholson 2010, p. 128). Unlike Pons, Colebrooke was well aware of the many commentators and sub-​commentators on the Brahma-​Sutra—​Bhaskara, Rāmānuja, Vācaspati Miśra, and Vijñānabhikṣu, among others (Colebrooke 1977 [1837], pp. 332–​37). Nevertheless, he recognizes Śaṁkara as the most distinguished commentator “in modern estimation” and the sect that he founded, namely the Advaita, “as yet one of the most prevalent” (Ibid., p.  332). Colebrooke, accordingly, relies on Śaṁkara’s interpretation (Ibid., p. 370), deeming him more reliable than rival commentators like Rāmānuja and Bhaskara (Ibid., p. 334). Despite this reliance on Śaṁkara’s commentary, the doctrine of māyā is conspicuously absent from Colebrooke’s exposition of Vedānta doctrine. “The notion, that the versatile world is an illusion (māyā),” he writes, …that all which passes to the apprehension of the waking individual is but a phantasy presented to his imagination, and every seeming thing is unreal and all is visionary, does not appear to be the doctrine of the text of the Vedānta. I have remarked nothing which countenances it in the sutras of Vyāsa [i.e., the Brahma-​Sūtra] nor in the gloss of Śancara. (Ibid., p. 377) A reliance on Śaṁkara’s works, therefore, does not in itself account for the orientalist picture of Vedānta, let  alone Hinduism, as a doctrine of illusionism. Colebrooke’s conclusion therefore would tend to support the thesis of scholars like Ronald Inden and Richard King that 36

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the orientalist image of Vedānta as an illusionist pantheism was, at least in part, a product of the Western imagination. However, Colebrooke himself concedes that the doctrine of māyā is prominent in the post-​Śaṁkara commentarial literature of the Advaita school (Ibid., p. 377). If, as Colebrooke and, later, Paul Deussen suggest (Deussen 1907, p. 46), the vast majority of Vedāntins in India identified with Śaṁkara’s Advaita school, and, moreover, the doctrine of māyā figured prominently in the self-​understanding of these informants, then the projective hypothesis would have to be qualified, at least with respect to Vedānta.

Hegelian versus perennialist interpretations of Vedānta Even if the māyā doctrine played a much less prominent role in the Vedāntic tradition than many in the West have thought, there is a doctrine found at the very heart of Vedānta that nevertheless does support the Western image of Vedānta as a kind of pantheism, if not an illusionist pantheism. This is the doctrine of Brahman as the material, as well as the efficient, cause of the universe (cf. Colebrooke 1977, p.  347). This notion of the world as, in a sense, the body of Brahman answered to the lively interest in pantheism among nineteenth-​century philosophers and theologians, particularly in Germany. Prominent voices in the Romantic movement, such as J.G. Herder, Novalis, and (the early) Friedrich Schlegel, were fascinated with the idea of the unity of all things in God, a notion they believed represented the core of Indian thought (Halbfass 1988, p. 70). The philosophy of Vedānta thus gave expression to the idea of an unbroken unity and wholeness that they believed had been lost in the disenchanted world of Enlightenment rationality (Ibid., p. 73). More ambivalent and critical attitudes toward India and pantheism emerged among the philosophers who were heirs to the Romantic movement. Among the most critical was G.W.F. Hegel (1770–​1831). For Hegel, the Vedāntic concept of Brahman represents an aborted and deficient stage in the Weltgeist’s (World Spirit’s) career of historical self-​realization. In Brahman Spirit fails to make the vital transition from being-​in-​itself to being-​for-​itself, through which it would attain subjectivity and recognize itself in the world (Hegel 1995, pp. 119–​21). Unable to reconcile itself with the world from which it abstracts itself, Spirit as Brahman remains a lifeless abstraction devoid of both content and subjectivity (Ibid., p. 112–​ 13). Diametrically opposed to this understanding of the Vedāntic Brahman as a stunted and deficient Absolute is the tradition of perennial philosophy associated with Hegel’s younger contemporary and nemesis, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–​1860). Schopenhauer held that the sages of India’s Upaniṣads, the Buddha, and a Christian mystic like Eckhart voice the same fundamental philosophical insight, albeit encumbered by various forms (and degrees) of “mythology.” Rather immodestly, Schopenhauer declares that only in his own philosophy does this core insight attain complete clarity. Like Hegel, Schopenhauer’s knowledge of Indian philosophy was limited. A better representative of the perennialist position, then, at least with respect to Hinduism, might be a disciple of Schopenhauer who was thoroughly familiar with the Indian philosophical tradition. The German Indologist Paul Deussen argued that Parmenides and Plato in Greece, the sages of the Upaniṣads and Śaṁkara in India, and Kant and Schopenhauer in Germany all express the same metaphysical insight, namely, that the phenomenal world of plurality and change is mere appearance and not reality itself (Deussen 1966, pp. 41–​42, 226–​27). For Deussen, only Śaṁkara’s Advaita Vedānta, of all the systems of India philosophy, gives adequate expression to this perennial philosophy of Idealism. Even the other great interpreters of the Vedānta—​Rāmānuja, Madhva,Vallabha—​f all away from the pure idealism of Śaṁkara as they make concessions to the coarser realist habits of the human mind (Deussen 1907, p. 46). 37

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Proponents of modern Hinduism like Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan enthusiastically embraced this perennialist line of interpretation. The view of Advaita Vedānta as the expression of a timeless and universal core of religious insight receives its most succinct formulation in Radhakrishnan’s memorable remark that the Vedānta “is not religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance” (Radhakrishnan 1973, p. 18).

Hindu inclusivism The universalist conception of Vedānta as expressing the core not only of Hinduism but of religion itself served as a powerful expression of Hindu apologetics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Neo-​Hindu” authors such as Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan extend the Advaita distinction between the absolute and manifest forms of Brahman to the relations among the religions of the world. They are thus able to recognize, from an Advaita standpoint, the absolutes of other religions as so many manifestations of the transcendent Brahman. “Every God accepted by Hinduism,” writes Radhakrishnan, “is elevated and ultimately identified with the central Reality which is one with the deeper self of man” (Radhakrishnan 1973, p. 34). Thanks to this ability to recognize and incorporate the truths of other religions into its system, Vedāntic Hinduism is wonderfully free of the sectarianism, intolerance, and fanaticism that have plagued the religious history of humankind. The flip side of this spirit of inclusivism, however, is a hierarchization of the various religious systems, with Advaita Vedānta predictably at the top: The worshippers of the Absolute are the highest in rank; second to them are the worshippers of the personal God; then come the worshippers of the incarnations like Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha; below them are those who worship ancestors, deities, and sages, and lowest of all are the worshippers of the petty forces and spirits. (Ibid., p. 24) Inasmuch as this Vedāntic framework gives expression to a claim of Hindu superiority, “tolerance” might not be the most appropriate term to describe it. In the context of late nineteenth-​century Hindu apologetics, the claim of universal tolerance takes on an ironic, even a self-​refuting, character. Hinduism’s spirit of tolerance distinguishes it from religions like Islam and Christianity with histories of intolerance. Just as humility when made self-​conscious turns into something else, namely, a kind of vanity, so too tolerance, when taken as a mark of superiority, becomes something other than tolerance, a particularly insidious form of intolerance perhaps. Paul Hacker coined the term inclusivism (Inklusivismus) to denote this strategy of identifying the central tenet of another religion with this or that central tenet of one’s own, but with the overall effect of relegating that religion to a subordinate position (Hacker 1983, p. 12). Hacker saw this strategy of inclusivism as a long-​standing characteristic of Indic religions, evident in the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad-​Gītā, and the Pūraṇic literature. He distinguishes it sharply from tolerance (Ibid., pp. 11, 14, 16). With this principle of inclusivism we return, finally, to the question of the extent to which the modern Vedānticized concept of Hinduism is a modern invention. As epitomized by Vivekananda’s memorable address before the delegates at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the notion that Hinduism, with its Advaitic core, embodies a principle of spiritual unity resonated powerfully with the late nineteenth-​century idea of a universal or “world” religion that would at once free religion from sectarianism and bring it into the ambit of science.Vivekananda’s Hindu vision of religious unity and tolerance mirrored the Christian universalism of the Parliament’s liberal Christian organizers. And yet, while the neo-​Vedāntic 38

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vision of religious unity gave expression to the liberal sentiments of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has roots in pre-​colonial conceptions of Indian religion. In particular, the notion of Advaita Vedānta as fulfilling the partial truths found in other Indian philosophical systems is a common theme in medieval doxographical works, the most influential of which was Mādhava’s fourteenth-​century classic, the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (Compendium of All Schools). Mādhava profiles sixteen philosophical systems in a hierarchical series, with each successive system correcting a limitation in the one that came before. At the top of Mādhava’s hierarchy stands Advaita Vedānta as an expression of the highest truth (Nicholson 2010, pp. 158–​62). Orientalist scholars relied heavily on the medieval doxographical literature, and the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha in particular, in their study of the schools of classical Indian philosophy, particularly before the primary texts of those schools became available.The medieval doxographies do not classify the philosophical schools from a neutral standpoint. In fact, the extant medieval doxographical literature is the product of only two schools, one of which is Advaita Vedānta (Halbfass 1988, p.  351).1 As we have seen with Mādhava, the Advaita doxographies arrange the rival schools in an inclusivist hierarchy with Advaita on top. On one level the preeminent position of Advaita Vedānta in the orientalist concept of Hinduism might simply reflect the uncritical use of Advaita doxographies like the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha on the part of orientalist scholars like H.H. Wilson and (later) Paul Deussen. One can argue, of course, that their own predilections were operative in the selection of such texts in structuring their knowledge of Indian religion; this was certainly true in Deussen’s case (Halbfass 1988, p. 350; Nicholson 2010, p. 159). On the other hand, these texts expressed the sentiments of many of the Indian scholars who served as the orientalists’ informants.

Note 1 The other school is Jainism. The Jaina doxographies, the most important (and earliest) of which is Haribhadra’s Saḍdarśanasamuccaya, use the enumeration of the various schools to illustrate the Jaina principle of perspectivalism.

Bibliography Aimé-​Martin, M.L. (ed.). 1840, 1743. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses concernant l’Asie, l’Afrique et l’Amérique. Paris. Bayle, P. 1735, 1697. The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle.Vol. 2. 2nd ed. London. Colebrooke, H.T. 1977, 1837. Essays on the History, Literature, and Religions of Ancient India. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. Deussen, P. 1907. Outlines of Indian Philosophy. Berlin: Karl Curtius. —​—​—​. 1966. The Philosophy of the Upanishads. Geden, A.S. (trans.). New York: Dover. Hacker, P. 1983. “Inklusivismus.” In Oberhammer, G. (ed.). Inklusivismus: Eine indische Denkform. Vienna: Gerold, pp. 11–​28. —​—​—​. 1995a. “Aspects of Neo-​Hinduism as Contrasted with Surviving Traditional Hinduism.” In Halbfass, W. (ed.). Philology and Confrontation. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 229–​55. —​—​—​. 1995b. “Vivekananda’s Religious Nationalism.” In Halbfass, W. (ed.). Philology and Confrontation. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 319–​36. Halbfass, W. 1988. India and Europe. Albany: SUNY Press. —​—​—​. 1995. “Introduction: An Uncommon Orientalist: Paul Hacker’s Passage to India.” In Halbfass, W. (ed.). Philology and Confrontation. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 1–​23. Hegel, G.W.F. 1995. On the Episode of the Mahābhārata Known by the Name Bhagavad-​Gītā by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Herring, H. (ed. and trans.). New Delhi: Indian Council on Philosophical Research. Hobsbawn, E. and Ranger,T. (eds.). 1984. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inden, R.B. 2000. Imagining India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jeyaraj, D. 2003. Genealogy of the South Indian Deities. New York: Routledge.

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Hugh Nicholson King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East”. New York: Routledge. Lorenzen, D.N. 2005. “Who Invented Hinduism?” In Llewellyn, J.E. (ed.). Defining Hinduism: A Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 52–​80. Marshall, P.J. (ed.). 1970. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McBrien, R. 1994. Catholicism. Revised ed. New York: HarperCollins. Metcalf, T.R. 1995. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, F.M. 1903. The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company. Nicholson, A.J. 2010. Unifying Hinduism:  Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History. New York: Columbia University Press. Radhakrishnan, S. 1973. The Hindu Way of Life. New York: MacMillan. Smith, H. 1958. The Religions of Man. New York: Mentor Books. Smith, W.C. 1991. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Stietencron, H.v. 1995. “Religious Configurations in Pre-​Muslim India and the Modern Concept of Hinduism.” In Dalmia,V. and Stietencron, H.v. (eds.). Representing Hinduism. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 51–​81. Talghatti, S.R. 2000.“Advaita in Marathi.” In Balasubramanian, R. (ed.). Advaita Vedānta. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, pp. 544–​68. Tull, H.W. 1991. “F. Max Müller and A.  B. Keith:  ‘Twaddle’, the ‘Stupid Myth’, and the ‘Disease of Indology’.” Numen 38(1): 27–​58. Wilson, H.H. 1976, 1846. “A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus.” In Essays and Lectures on the Religions of the Hindus. New Delhi: Asian Publication Services.

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4 WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN TWENTIETH-​C ENTURY HINDU THOUGHT Martin Ganeri When we encounter modern Indian scholarly writing, it is at once striking that English has become the norm for academic writing in India and that such writing conforms to the genres and format found in Western academic writing. The high degree to which it engages explicitly with Western philosophy, as well as with Christian theology and spirituality, is also evident. These features reflect, of course, the impact in India of English as the dominant language of administration and education from the second half of the nineteenth century and the encounter of the educated elite in India with Western philosophy, with the genres of Western academic writing, and with Christian missionary work during this period. Western philosophy comprises both ancient Greek and Roman as well as modern European and American forms.The educated elite in India were exposed in particular to modern Western philosophy. As an intellectual discipline, modern Western philosophy, as it developed from the seventeenth century onwards, with the seminal figure of Descartes (1596–​1650), consciously departed from and defined itself against the dominant rationalist form of Western philosophy and theology, especially found in Scholastic tradition, which used ancient philosophy, along with its interpretation by medieval Jewish and Arabic thinkers, as a resource for a rational enquiry into Christian faith. In the works of modern Western philosophy itself, we find many points of comparison between modern Western philosophy and Hindu thought and religion. Modern Christian theological writing also contains many comparisons between Christian theology and spirituality and Hinduism. Very often such comparisons have taken the form of a negative contrast between the two and the assertion of the superiority of Western philosophy or Christianity. In responding to this, Hindu scholars have been concerned to give their own account of similarities and dissimilarities between Western philosophy or Christianity and Hinduism. Moreover, they have also sought to show the equality or superiority of Hindu thought and religion to its Western counterparts and to show that Hinduism can make a positive contribution to common philosophical and theological problems and to the wider religious needs of humanity. This chapter concentrates on the twentieth century, beginning with the work of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–​1975), whose work is often depicted as a bridge between East and West, and continuing to P.N. Srinivasachari and B.N.K. Sharma. Beyond substantial engagement with 41

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Western philosophy and Christianity by individual Hindu scholars, we can also see the evolution of an intra-​Hindu intellectual polemic, which echoes and builds upon earlier and traditional Hindu intellectual polemics through such engagement. Radhakrishnan’s own work served as an important catalyst for this development. His influential two-​volume Indian Philosophy (Radhakrishnan 1929a and 1929b) ostensibly imitates a Western genre of academic writing, but within it he also produces a modern version of a traditional Indian doxography, a polemical account of the different traditions of Indian thought ranked in favor of one tradition, in which he argues for the supremacy of Advaita Vedānta over all other Indian traditions, especially other Vedāntic schools. Radhakrishnan’s status both as a scholar and as a statesman meant that his work and his views tended to dominate Indian academic writing and Western perceptions of the relationship between Western, Christian, and Hindu thought well into the twentieth century, yet his work was also open to considerable challenge. Hindu scholars belonging to other Vedāntic schools, in particular, wrote their own accounts of their own traditions, responding critically both to Radhakrishnan’s account of their schools and to the Western parallels he put forward. They offered their own positive engagements with Western and Christian thought, presenting their own schools as the pinnacle of Hindu religious thought and a better bridge between East and West than the Advaita put forward by Radhakrishnan. In assessing such engagements, it becomes apparent that the positive parallels drawn between modern Western philosophy and Hindu thought are often quite problematic, while parallels with classical Greek or Christian Patristic sources, and Scholastic thought that uses such classical works, are more successful. Because of the prestige attached in this period to modern Western philosophy, engagement with it was inevitable; but this has tended to obscure rather than illumine common ground between East and West.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Advaita Vedānta Like many of the Hindu elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Radhakrishnan’s exposure to Western philosophy and to Christianity went back to his childhood and early adulthood, when he attended a series of Christian educational institutions. The negative portrayal of Indian religion and thought he encountered served as an incentive for him to undertake scholarly study of Indian traditions, something that led eventually to him becoming the first Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford. Radhakrishnan did not see himself as merely the scholarly exponent of Indian traditions, but rather as a creative philosopher who drew on both Indian and Western traditions, and who was concerned to address the needs of contemporary men and women in both East and West. For Radhakrishnan philosophy is not simply the speculative exercise of intellect, but an instrument for changing lives: My conception of a philosopher was in some ways similar to that of Marx, who proclaimed in his famous Theses on Feuerbach that philosophy had hitherto been concerned with interpreting life, but that the time had come for it to change life. Philosophy is committed to a creative task. Although in one sense philosophy is a lonely pilgrimage of the spirit, in another sense it is a function of life. (Radhakrishnan 1952, p. 6) Writing in the period leading up to, and then in the aftermath of, the Second World War, Radhakrishnan argues that modern human beings are in a state of anxiety, faced by the forces of 42

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materialism, dictatorships, and mass warfare. However, for Radhakrishnan the most significant and promising feature of the modern period is in fact the meeting of cultures, which presents the opportunity to develop a philosophy that is universal in character and sets forth a common set of spiritual values that could give contemporary human life meaning, purpose, and hope: The prominent feature of our time is not so much the wars and the dictatorships which have disfigured it, but the impact of different cultures on one another, their interaction, and the emergence of a new civilization based on the truths of the spirit and the unity of [humankind]. (Ibid., p. 7) The “truths of the spirit” form the content of the philosophy Radhakrishnan promoted, which he calls the “religion of the Spirit,” a phrase which forms part of the title to the essay, “The Religion of the Spirit and the World’s Need” (Ibid.), in which Radhakrishnan sums up his whole approach as it had developed over the previous decades. It was to identify and promote this religion of the Spirit that Radhakrishnan engaged with Western philosophy and Christianity. His engagement with Western philosophy is far ranging, with reference to the work of many different philosophers from ancient to modern times. Moreover, Radhakrishnan has a similarly wide-​ranging engagement with Christianity, treating the Bible and the work of Christian theologians, mystics, and saints. In particular, Radhakrishnan argues that we find a universal religion of the Spirit present in the mystical traditions found in East and West, which converge in their spiritual vision and ethical teaching, and which promote a unity or fellowship within humanity, centering on the self-​transformation of each person through openness to the universal divine Spirit: The mandate of religion is that human beings must make the change in their own nature in order to let the divine in them manifest itself. It speaks of the death of human beings as we know them with all their worldly desire and the emergence of the new human being. This is the teaching not only of the Upaniṣads and Buddhism, but also of the Greek mysteries and Platonism, of the Gospels and the schools of Gnosticism. (Radhakrishnan 1952, p. 80) Despite the apparent neutrality of such universalistic language, for Radhakrishnan the supreme manifestation of the religion of the Spirit is to be found in the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta. His engagement with Western philosophy and with Christian thought and spirituality serves the more particular goal of promoting Advaita Vedānta as a superior and universally relevant tradition. In fact, the wider encounter of Western and Hindu thought in the modern period has influenced this choice of Advaita Vedānta. Although Advaita Vedānta had been in decline in India, in the nineteenth century it rose to new prominence. Western accounts of Indian thought depicted Advaita as the nearest parallel in Indian thought to modern Western Absolute Idealism and as the high point of Indian thought, just as the idealisms of Hegel and Bradley were seen as the high point of Western philosophy (see Nicholson, this volume). At the same time, many Western philosophers, Indologists, and Christian missionaries made very negative appraisals of Advaita Vedānta, contrasting it with Western philosophy and Christian thought and spirituality. Advaita was depicted as having an illusionist cosmology and teaching a deep pessimism about human life, having no positive ethics to offer. Radhakrishnan’s own account of Advaita is a somewhat creative rendering of traditional Advaita Vedānta, a neo-​Advaita Vedānta, meant to refute the negative portrayal found in Western 43

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accounts. Radhakrishnan identifies the supreme reality taught by the Upaniṣads and the Vedānta tradition, Brahman, as the Spirit. This is the force that produces the world and drives it on to realize its highest goals: The Upaniṣads believe that the principle of Spirit is at work at all levels of existence, molding the lower forms into expressions of the higher. The splendor of Spirit, which in Greek philosophy was identified with the transcendental and timeless world of Ideas, or in Christian thought is reserved for the divine supernatural sphere, is making use of natural forces in the historical world. The highest product of cosmic evolution, ānanda or spiritual freedom, must also be the hidden principle at work, disclosing itself. Spirit creates the world and controls its history by a process of perpetual incarnation. Spirit is working in matter that matter may serve the Spirit. (Ibid., p. 31) This Spirit, the divine, is also the inner self within every human being, and hence the force with which each individual should align its purposes and goals. For Radhakrishnan, Advaita Vedānta does not advance an illusionist view of the world but teaches that the world is real. Its reality, however, is very different from the reality of Brahman. The world is changing and has no existence apart from Brahman, being dependent on Brahman at all times. This Radhakrishnan characterizes as phenomenal reality. Brahman, on the other hand, is immutable, transcendent, and self-​existent being (Radhakrishnan 1940, pp.  86–​90; Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 532 ff., 581–​85).This is ultimate reality.This Brahman is the unchanging Self behind the changing and empirical self of each individual (Ibid., pp. 475–​85).

Idealism The parallel that Western scholars drew between Advaita and Western Idealism was based on a number of apparent similarities. In traditional Advaita the sacred texts of the Upaniṣads are taken to reveal that the unchanging Brahman is the sole reality with which the finite human self is really identical. On the other hand, the world of ordinary life is marked by a diversity of changing material entities and the many finite selves. Since Brahman is the sole reality, then the world must be the manifestation of Brahman. In order to reconcile this with the revelation of Brahman as the sole existent and unchanging pure consciousness, the world of ordinary human life is taken to have a lesser reality and to be the product in some sense of error, superimposed on Brahman. Although Western Idealism takes different forms, a characteristic issue is the epistemological gap between human knowledge of the world and the extramental reality of the world. The tension between these two is most apparent in the Idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804) and Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–​1924). Kant labels the knowledge human beings gain as phenomenal reality, a grasp of the world that is shaped by human subjectivity, while the external world is other than and unknown by human knowledge, which Kant calls the noumenal. For his part, Bradley characterizes the distinction between subjective human knowledge of the external world as one between appearance and reality. Many forms of Idealism put forth a monist or pantheist cosmology, emphasizing the unity of all things as the goal of human striving. This is evident in Hegel’s account of the dialectical evolution of the world through history. The subjective and objective become intertwined and increasingly united, as humans come to know the world through the exercise of reason. The World Spirit becomes manifest, the objective world as a whole as known to subjective human spirit. Bradley likewise depicts the Absolute as the 44

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point where the subjective and objective become identical in the knowledge of the harmonious unity of all things. Thus, there is an apparent similarity in both the epistemological problems and the cosmology found in Advaita and Idealism. Radhakrishnan picks up on these as he affirms parallels between East and West, while at the same time arguing that Advaita is the superior account (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 512–​13, 521–​24). In general, Radhakrishnan takes it that modern evolutionary cosmologies, such as those found in Idealism, are Western parallels for his Advaitic account of the Spirit as the driving force behind the evolution of the world to its highest goals (Radhakrishnan 1952, pp. 34–​38). Radhakrishnan identifies Bradley’s theory of knowledge and cosmology as coming closest to his own version of Advaita. He takes Bradley’s distinction between appearance and reality as parallel to the Advaitic distinction between phenomenal reality and ultimate reality (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 521–​24) and Bradley’s idea of the Absolute as the goal as closest to the goals of the Spirit in Advaita (Radhakrishnan 1952, p. 47). Yet even here Radhakrishnan asserts the superiority of the Advaita, claiming that it lacks the tension present in Bradley between appearance and reality in human knowledge (Radhakrishnan 1929b, p. 524). In terms of appraisal of such engagement with Western Idealism, it is clear that the impression of common ground is often created in part simply by an assimilation of Advaita into the terminology of Idealism. Radhakrishnan adopts the characteristic Idealist use of the term “Spirit” for the Absolute and identifies it with Brahman, the unchanging, transcendent reality that is the ground of the world. Likewise, he takes from Kant the term “phenomenal” and identifies it with the changing, finite reality of the world, especially when viewed wrongly as being the only reality or as enjoying a separate existence. As Bradley argues that the world of appearance is marked by contradictions, Radhakrishnan both identifies the phenomenal world with Bradley’s language of appearance and likewise depicts it as marked by contradictions (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 561–​78). When it comes to a comparison of the fundamental concerns and contents of the two accounts, however, the differences are apparent, which makes the assimilation of the two accounts in this way superficial and misleading. A fundamental concern for Bradley’s Idealism is the tension between appearance and reality. Appearance is the world as known through discursive thought or metaphysical reasoning. This leads to a world conceived of as irreducibly multiple, as made of finite entities, distinct things with qualities.Yet, for Bradley this account of reality includes contradictions and does not hold up to critical scrutiny (Bradley 1897, pp. 19–​ 34). Instead, Bradley asserts that reality, or ultimate reality, the Absolute, is an organic unity, a harmonious whole. Reality is a whole that comprises all appearances but is free from the contradictions imposed on them by discursive thought (Bradley 1897, pp. 144–​61). For Bradley, on the pre-​reflective level an individual does have a sense of reality to some extent, when he or she has a sense of the unity of the many. Thus, he talks of reality as experience. By analogy, he talks of the Absolute as absolute experience, not meaning that the Absolute is an entity that is conscious of reality as a whole, but rather that reality as a whole is a harmonious unity. The tension for Bradley is that, because on a reflective level the individual cannot get free of discursive thought, he or she can never overcome appearance as marked by contradiction and thus can never come to know reality, never reach the Absolute (Bradley 1897, pp. 455–​501). Radhakrishnan argues that Advaita lacks the tension in Bradley between appearance and reality in that it allows for an intuitive realization of Brahman and hence of the unity of all things grounded in Brahman. This is certainly true, but it serves only to show how the two accounts differ in what they consider to be the problems and possibilities in human knowledge. Both accounts emphasize the shortcomings of discursive knowledge, but in Bradley’s account, 45

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there is no scope for an intuitive grasp of reality except on a pre-​reflective and partial level. More fundamentally, the Absolute of Bradley’s Idealism is very different from the Brahman of Radhakrishnan’s Advaita. Bradley’s Absolute is not an unchanging reality, nor is it transcendent being of the sort that Radhakrishnan’s Brahman is. Moreover, whereas in Radhakrishnan’s version of Advaita, there is a strong teleological or eschatological dimension, this is lacking in Bradley’s account. For Bradley, reality is always there, but it simply remains unknown by human beings (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 524–​26). (Radhakrishnan’s evolutionary cosmology is itself a radical departure from traditional Advaita. In traditional Advaita, the world of ordinary human life has no teleological purpose, but only serves to obscure ultimate reality. The goal is to realize strict identity of the individual self and Brahman, which comes about through renunciation of the world and which renders the world, whatever its ontological status, irrelevant.) In effect, Radhakrishnan’s creative adaptation of Advaitic cosmology has more in common with the evolutionary cosmology of Hegel than with Bradley. But despite many echoes of Hegel, Radhakrishnan eschews any explicit affirmation of a positive parallel. This is because Radhakrishnan draws a negative contrast between human cognition or rationality and intuition as forms of knowledge. As we will see in the next section, Radhakrishnan asserts that the parallel for Hegel is to be found in another Vedāntic tradition,Viśiṣṭādvaita.

Mystical traditions In fact, modern Western philosophy is much less important to Radhakrishnan and for his promotion of a universal religion of the Spirit than the mystical tradition, which he asserts is to be found in both East and West. In the West, he argues, this is particularly manifest in Plato, Plotinus, and the Platonic dimension of Christian theology and spirituality, which he takes to be convergent with Advaitic monism (Radhakrishnan 1940, pp. viii–​ix, 244–​47). Radhakrishnan argues that Christ, as represented in the Gospels, moves from promoting a Jewish, nationalist form of religion to teaching a more mystical and universalist form of religion, as evidenced in the Johannine Scriptures. Picking up on contemporary speculation in some Western scholarship, Radhakrishnan argues that such convergence is not simply incidental, but represents the direct influence of Indian thought on the West and Christianity: Plotinus journeying to the East with Emperor Gordian and possibly coming into contact with Hindu thinkers (Radhakrishnan 1929b, p. 521); Hindu influence on the Essenes and then John the Baptist and Christ; Gnosticism as a deliberate attempt to fuse Greek Platonism with Hindu elements (Radhakrishnan 1940, p. 198). Pointing to the great saints in Christianity, such as Augustine, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross, Radhakrishnan claims that a universal feature of such mysticism in East and West is the goal of direct experience of the Spirit (Radhakrishnan 1940, pp. 60–​63). Radhakrishnan sees this as going hand in hand with the tradition of apophatic theology in Western spirituality. This is held to correspond to Advaita emphasis on the spiritual goal as experience of the Supreme Brahman behind the personal God of ordinary religious thought, an experience that is a matter of intuition rather than intellectual or cognitive and conceptual knowledge (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 535–​41). For Radhakrishnan the mark of the religion of the Spirit, found in mystical traditions in both East and West, is that it is universal, with a convergent spiritual vision and ethics, and that it promotes a unity and fellowship within humanity.This he contrasts with what he calls dogmatic religion, found in the historical traditions of Catholic and Protestant Christianity that have been taken over by Western values. Contrary to the religion of Christ himself, such dogmatic

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religion, he contends, leads to exclusivism, hatred, and warfare, the problems facing contemporary human beings (Radhakrishnan 1940, pp. viii–​ix, 272–​90; 1952, pp. 19–​20). Whatever we make of such contrasts, Radhakrishnan’s realistic Advaita would certainly seem to have more in common with the Western Platonic tradition and with classical Christian theology and spirituality than with modern Western philosophy. Indeed, when it comes to a Western parallel for the Advaitic doctrine of the Supreme Brahman, it is in fact the Scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas, not Idealism, to which Radhakrishnan points, including Aquinas’s doctrine of the immutability of God and the non-​distinction between existence and attributes in God (Radhakrishnan 1952, pp. 38–​39). Moreover, although he draws general parallels between Idealist and other modern Western evolutionary cosmologies and Advaita, he also criticizes these for diminishing the transcendent immutability of God in contrast to the account given by Aquinas. As we will see in subsequent sections, the recognition that the Scholastic tradition, rather than modern Western philosophy, is a better parallel for Vedāntic thought is something to which scholars upholding the thought of other Vedāntic schools have also come.

Viśiṣṭādvaita Radhakrishnan’s modern doxography of the Indian traditions ranks the different Vedānta schools in terms of how close they come to the pure monism of Advaita Vedānta and by extension its Western counterparts. This applies to Viśiṣṭādvaita (non-​duality of what is differentiated) Vedānta, whose primary teacher was Rāmānuja. Radhakrishnan categorizes Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as a lower, modified form of monism. It is a theistic and realist school, identifying the Absolute as the personal God, distinct from the world of finite selves and material entities. There is a unity, or non-​duality, in that the world remains at all times dependent for its existence on God, but the differentiation between God and world is also maintained. As such, Radhakrishnan asserts that it remains on a lower level of conceptual thought rather than reaching the intuitional knowledge of the Absolute of Advaita, beyond all concepts (Radhakrishnan 1929a, pp. 36–​40). Radhakrishnan questions the intellectual coherence of Rāmānuja’s account. At the heart of Rāmānuja’s cosmology is the doctrine that the relationship between God and the world is to be characterized as that of the subject of attributes and the attributes, or that of self and body. For Radhakrishnan this is incompatible with maintaining also that God is immutable and perfect, free of any suffering, since God must be subject to the change, imperfections, and suffering found in the world, as his attribute or body (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 700, 713–​15). Such an evaluation of Rāmānuja’s account is somewhat questionable. Rāmānuja clearly understands the relationship between God and the world as a relationship between two substantial entities, not a single substance as Radhakrishnan implies. Hence, it is coherent to maintain that God remains unaffected by conditions affecting the world. In terms of comparison with modern Western philosophy, Radhakrishnan aligns Rāmānuja’s account in various ways with that of Hegel, as parallel forms of modified monism and conceptual or rationalist accounts (Radhakrishnan 1929a, p. 36–​40). He states that both Rāmānuja and Hegel hold that the world is a real modification or the self-​expression of the Absolute (Radhakrishnan 1929b, p.  586). He likens Rāmānuja’s cosmology to the Hegelian account of the concrete universal, which he also criticizes as unable to reconcile the perfection of the Absolute with the ongoing process of the world (Radhakrishnan 1929b, p. 717). In terms of Rāmānuja’s account of the finite self and its embodiment, Radhakrishnan argues that Rāmānuja is unable to give a satisfactory account of how the self can have an enduring and unchanging identity and yet also be related to a succession of changing and temporary bodies. Here again he

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links Rāmānuja to Hegel, stating, “As in Hegel, we have here an identity of process, an identity which is said to persist in and through difference” (Radhakrishnan 1929b, p. 719). Not surprisingly, modern Viśiṣṭādvaitic scholars writing in English have responded critically both to the ranking and to the assessment of their school in Radhakrishnan’s Indian Philosophy, including the parallels he draws with Western positions. Thus, Srinivasachari in The Philosophy of Viśiṣṭādvaita (1943) engages with the particular parallel between Rāmānuja and Hegel within an extended examination of parallels between Western philosophy, Christian theology and spirituality, and the Vedānta in general, alluding to the kind of parallels drawn by Radhakrishnan, other neo-​Advaitic scholars, and Western Indologists and philosophers. While accepting the value of comparative study in general, Srinivasachari stresses the differences between modern Western philosophy and classical Hindu thought. He argues that the convergences put forward by neo-​Advaitins establish parallels only by a kind of creative selectivity that ignores more fundamental differences. Srinivasachari finds parallels between modern Western Absolutist philosophy and the Vedāntic schools superficial and misconceived. The nearest parallel to such thinkers as Hegel or Bradley, he argues, is the Vedāntic school of Bhedābheda, not Viśiṣṭādvaita nor Advaita, whereas the concerns and content of Hegel’s thought are fundamentally different from that of Rāmānuja (Srinivasachari 1943, pp. 71–​76). Srinivasachari also rejects the way Western accounts commonly describe Viśiṣṭādvaitic cosmology as pantheistic.When used in these accounts, pantheism either means the identity of God and world, or it means cosmic illusionism, but neither form of pantheism accurately describes Viśiṣṭādvaita (Srinivasachari 1943, p. 77). Srinivasachari does not elaborate on why a parallel between Rāmānuja and Hegel is mistaken, but he is very right to say that it is. Radhakrishnan’s own use of Hegel serves to confuse any proper understanding of Rāmānuja, since the accounts are so different. Although Hegel himself uses the language of God to describe the Absolute (e.g., Hegel 1988), and some Hegelians have argued that his account is compatible with Christian theism, another and more widespread interpretation of his account is that the Absolute is not considered to be a transcendent entity. Instead, the Absolute is the Totality, everything that exists objectively. The concrete universal is this Totality. The Absolute is described as the World Spirit in the sense that in and through the operation of the human spirit, as manifest in human history and culture and above all through the operation of reason, there comes to be a consciousness of the Totality. This is a teleological process that takes place in the course of human history and the ongoing exercise of philosophy. In this way the subjective and the objective are united. This consciousness transcends the limitation of any individual spirit and indeed any particular nation and culture, but it is not independent of the finite spirits, nations, and cultures that manifest it. A central concern for Hegel is how the finite can relate to the infinite, without either losing their distinct identity. This comes about through the finite spirit, present in individual human beings and found collectively in human history and culture, coming to the level of the World Spirit. If theological language is used of this account, Hegel’s account is more accurately described as a form of pantheism, rather than theism in any traditional sense.There is a unity in difference between the finite and infinite. Radhakrishnan seems at different points to affirm both interpretations of Hegel. However, he aligns the more pantheistic interpretation with Rāmānuja’s account, and this causes the confusion to arise. In reality, Rāmānuja’s account is properly theistic, affirming the transcendence of God within his two-​substance account of the relationship of God and the world either as subject and attribute or self and body. Rāmānuja affirms a cyclical cosmology, in which the world of finite selves and matter remains always distinct from Brahman but periodically becomes manifest in the form of the diverse world with all its saṃsārically embodied finite selves, in a manner quite unlike the dialectical process found within Hegel (Ganeri 2015, pp. 105–​31). 48

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For Rāmānuja the human goal is the realization of the proper relationship the finite self has with God, which finally takes the form of knowledge and love of God, released from saṃsāric embodiment, rather than a process whereby the Totality becomes conscious of itself in and through the exercise of the finite consciousness (Rāmānuja 1956, pp. 171–​73). For his part, Srinivasachari does not simply critique parallels with modern Western philosophy. He also wants to stress the positive relationship that can exist between Indian Christianity and Viśiṣṭādvaita, as what he describes as two historic religions of redemptive love. Echoing Radhakrishnan, though adapting the argument in favor of a convergence of Christianity and Viśiṣṭādvaita, Srinivasachari states that the two traditions meet in mysticism, in a personal hunger for God and for realizing God directly, rather than in terms of the supernaturalism or exclusive historical claims of the doctrinal traditions (Srinivasachari 1943, p. 569–​70). In keeping with the wider concern of Indian scholars to promote the equality or even superiority of Indian thought, Srinivasachari argues that Indian Christianity will be strengthened by a positive encounter with Vaiṣṇava religion and with Viśiṣṭādvaita. As he puts it, In India, with its spirituality and genius for Vedāntic life, the Sermon on the Mount will find its philosophical justification in the Divine Song on the chariot and its Vedāntic experience will afford the rational and spiritual basis for Christian mysticism. (Srinivasachari 1943, p. 570)

Mādhva Vedānta Although Radhakrishnan is very critical of Rāmānuja and Viśiṣṭādvaita, he does at least give this school a reasonable amount of space in his Indian Philosophy. The same cannot be said of the other Vedāntic schools, which are dealt with in a few pages each within a section on “Saiva, Sākta, and Later Vaiṣṇava Theism” (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 722–​65). Of these other Vedānta schools, the most important is that known as Mādhva Vedānta, often called Dvaita (Dualist) Vedānta. Like Viśiṣṭādvaita this form of Vedānta is realist and affirms the existence of Brahman identified with the personal deity, Viṣṇu, along with the finite selves and material entities. Central to the ontology of this Vedānta is the distinction between independent and dependent being. Brahman alone is independent being, while the finite selves and material entities are dependent on Brahman. At the same time, another characteristic of this school is the denial that Brahman is the material cause of the world. Rather, finite selves and material entities exist eternally, distinct from, though dependent on, Brahman. Radhakrishnan characterizes this form of Vedānta as “implicit monism,” since finite selves and material entities are dependent on Brahman, the sole independent being (Radhakrishnan 1929a, pp. 31, 40). As with Rāmānuja, he ranks it as a lower form of Vedānta. He also criticizes the coherence of the account. He questions whether Brahman can be said to be perfect being on the grounds that if Brahman wants or desires to create the world, then Brahman is limited. He argues that the relationship between God and the world and between independent and dependent being is not clear or satisfactory, on the grounds that for Brahman to be independent being, there cannot be an external world, since this would limit Brahman’s being, whereas if the world is dependent being, it would lack substantiality, since substances are completely self-​ explanatory (Radhakrishnan 1929b, pp. 749–​50). Both the summary nature of the treatment given to Madhva’s account and the criticisms of this school of Vedānta led to a reaction on the part of modern Mādhva scholars.They too began to produce accounts of Mādhva Vedānta in English and in a Western academic format, which 49

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set out the thought of the school as well as their own arguments for parallels with Western philosophy and with Christianity theology and spirituality. The work of B.N.K. Sharma is an outstanding example. In his Philosophy of Śrī Madhvācārya, first published in 1962, with the second edition coming out in 1986, in the Preface to the first edition, he notes the summary treatment given to Mādhva Vedānta by Radhakrishnan and other neo-​Advaitins who follow his views. Sharma states that his own study of Mādhva Vedānta is intended both to set out in detail what the teaching of the school is and to show how this teaching contributes to universal issues in philosophy and theology. In support of this, he intends to draw parallels with a number of Western thinkers, “including Christian thinkers like St.Thomas Aquinas, Ralph Cudworth, Dawes Hicks, Albert Schweitzer, Alexander Campbell Fraser, and others” (Sharma 1986, pp. xxvi–​xxx). Sharma’s work serves, then, to refute Radhakrishnan’s criticisms and demonstrate the wider value of Madhva’s Vedānta. The cover of the book claims that Sharma’s work “brings to light for the first time the striking parallelisms of thought between Madhva and his Western contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas.” He is concerned to demonstrate positive parallels between Madhva’s account and that of Thomas Aquinas, partly also as a counter to earlier negative appraisals of Madhva’s thought by Catholic Thomist Indologists working in India. Arguing that the most important issue for philosophy or theology is the distinction between independent and dependent being, Sharma draws a substantial if complex parallel between Mādhva Vedānta and Thomas Aquinas’s doctrines of creation and the nature of God (Sharma 1986, pp. 10, 323ff).

Creation In relation to the subject of creation in Mādhva Vedānta and Thomas Aquinas, Sharma writes, God is not merely an artificer of the universe, but the very source of its being and becoming (BSB 2.2.5). This is sufficient to show how particular Madhva is in maintaining the metaphysical independence of God. Save for the difference in terminology, his position is the nearest Hindu approach to the Christian standpoint. (Sharma 1986, p. 325) In particular, Sharma argues for a parallel between the Mādhva account of the periodic production of the world and Aquinas’s concept of eternal creation. He notes that an important causal concept in the Mādhva tradition is that of parādhīnaviśeṣāpti, the acquisition of an attribute (viśeṣa) dependent on another. Sharma states that this is the way the eternal existence of the world can be reconciled with the Vedāntic doctrine that God is the source of all things, the one who produces all things. The concept of parādhīnaviśeṣāpti is that God is the one who brings about all changes which occur in the periodic production of the world and these are dependent on God as cause. Sharma calls this the Mādhva doctrine of creation and argues that it is this concept which is convergent with Aquinas’s concept of the eternal creation of the world (Ibid., pp. 222–​32). Sharma thus answers a review of his work by a Thomist Indologist by arguing, In light of this new theory of creation, it cannot be said that Madhva “finds it impossible to reconcile the traditional Hindu doctrine of the eternity of the world and souls, with their creation’ or that ‘it is a pity that the teaching of St.Thomas on the possibility of Eternal Creation, never reached his ears.” (Sharma 1986, p. 223, quoting Dandoy 1943)

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Such a parallel with Aquinas’s concept of an eternal created world does stand in need of some qualification. Aquinas’s doctrine of the eternal creation of the world is that the world could be created (i.e., dependent for the whole of its being at all times on God) and yet be without a beginning (i.e., not created in time or de novo). Aquinas distinguishes two senses of the term creatio ex nihilo: after nothing (de novo) and from nothing, i.e., no pre-​existing matter (Aquinas 1964–​81, 1.45.1–​3, vol. 8, pp. 26–​29). The world can be created in the second sense without having a beginning in time. Parādhīnaviśeṣāpti, on the other hand, denotes mutation or change rather than creation as such. Nonetheless, there would seem to be a parallel between the Mādhva account of the world as dependent being and the Thomist doctrine of creatio ex nihilo generally speaking, irrespective of what account is given of the periodic production and dissolution of the world.

The nature of God Sharma also draws a parallel between the Mādhva account of the nature of God and that found in Aquinas: Madhva’s concept of substance as an identity in difference, maintained by the selfdifferentiating capacity of intrinsic Viśeṣas [attributes] enables him smoothly to preserve the integrity of being of the Supreme Person, in and through His numerous attributes which are an expression of His Being and not so many external trappings attached to Him. Madhva’s view of the attributes of God is the same as that of his close western thinker, the great Christian thinker St.Thomas Aquinas that “in God the distinction between existence and essence must fall away. God can have no nature or essence distinguishable from His actual existence. Here (and here only) the distinction between existence and essence would have no meaning and consequently the distinction between an attribute and that which is subject of the attributes would be meaningless also. Of the Divine Being we can say (as of no other) that it is its own goodness. Its goodness is not adjectival to it because in it, it is all one –​to be and to be good.” (Sharma 1986, p. 345, quoting Hicks 1937) Here, then, a strong parallel is drawn between the Mādhva concept of God having numerous attributes and Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine simplicity in which all the forms of ontological composition found in creatures are denied of God (Aquinas 1964–​81, 1.3, vol. 2, pp. 18–​47). This parallel also stands in need of some qualification.The Mādhva tradition is talking about the relationship between any substance and its attributes, whereas Aquinas is talking about the unique case of God. The lack of composition between nature and existence is unique to God because God is the uncaused first cause, subsistent existence itself. The “identity in difference” of the Mādhva account, on the other hand, does not tell us about whether the substance is self-​ existent or not. At the same time, when we take the Mādhva account of God as independent being, combined with the insistence on the immutability of God, we do find a parallel for the doctrine of divine simplicity in Aquinas. For, if God is wholly independent being, and if God is immutable, then God must be incomposite in the sense meant by Aquinas. He is self-​caused existence, and His attributes cannot be realizations of potentialities within Himself but must represent eternal aspects of the fullness of His perfect existence. So, the parallel does hold, if not for the exact reason put forward.

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For Sharma, then, it is Mādhva Vedānta, not Viśiṣṭādvaita, and certainly not Advaita that is the nearest parallel in Indian thought to Christian theism, in the sense of its theological account of God and creation. Notably, Sharma also picks up on Radhakrishnan’s argument that mysticism, in the sense of an experiential, direct knowledge of the transcendent, as found in the different religions, is the religion that corresponds to the religious needs of contemporaneous human beings, East and West. For his part, however, Sharma argues that it is Madhva who gives the best account of mysticism in his teaching about devotion to God and divine grace (Sharma 1986, p. 419).

Conclusion This has necessarily been a very brief and selective survey of twentieth-​century Hindu engagement with Western philosophy and Christian thought. It was inevitable that Hindu scholars would seek to engage with modern Western philosophy, given the prestige given to it in this period and the negative contrasts made between it and classical Hindu thought. However, positive parallels made with modern Western philosophy turn out to be quite problematic. In fact, convergences are much more evident between classical Hindu thought and ancient Western philosophy, or with Christian Patristic and Scholastic thought. In effect, the ways in which modern Western philosophy moved away from ancient philosophy and Patristic and Scholastic thought are precisely the ways in which it shows dissimilarities with classical Hindu thought. We have noted in particular the positive parallels drawn by scholars aligned to contemporary Vedāntic traditions and the Scholastic work of Thomas Aquinas. For centuries the work of Aquinas had been the main representative of the Scholastic approach, and in the modern period from the end of the nineteenth century his work was also made the norm of all Catholic Christian theology. It was undoubtedly because of the dominance of modern Western philosophy in the encounter between Hindu scholars and Western and Christian thought, and because of the way modern Western philosophy tended to oppose the Scholastic approach, that Hindu scholars generally did not have a great deal of exposure to Scholasticism and did not explore the relationship between the Scholastic tradition and classical Hindu thought more fully. Radhakrishnan did encounter the work of Aquinas in the course of his wider and far-​ reaching engagement with Western and Christian traditions. It is certainly remarkable that, alongside all the other parallels he draws, it is with Aquinas’s doctrine of God that he finds the nearest parallel to the Advaitic concept of Brahman. For his part, Sharma came into direct encounter with Catholic Thomist Indologists working in India, and this served as the basis for his much more sustained parallel between the work of Madhva and Aquinas. Certainly, insofar as different Hindu scholars did engage with Scholastic thought and the work of Aquinas, they found a point of convergence and the basis for a fruitful engagement.

Bibliography Aquinas, T. 1964–​81. Summa Theologiae. Gilby, T. (ed).Vols. 1–​61. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Bradley, F.H. 1897. Appearance and Reality. 2nd ed. New York: The Macmillan Company. Dandoy, D. 1943. “Svatantrādvaita or Madhva’s Theistic Realism.” Light of the East 21(2): 31. Ganeri, M. 2015. Indian Thought and Western Theism: The Vedānta of Rāmānuja. Abingdon: Routledge. Hegel, G.W.F. 1988. Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Hodgson, P.C. (ed.). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Hicks, D. 1937. Philosophical Bases of Theism. London: Allen and Unwin. Kant, I. 1929. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kemp Smith, N. (trans.). London: Macmillan Press. Radhakrishnan, S. 1929a. Indian Philosophy.Vol. 1. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Western philosophy in Hindu thought —​—​—​. 1929b. Indian Philosophy.Vol. 2. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 1940. Eastern Religions and Western Thought. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 1952. “The Religion of the Spirit and the World’s Need (Fragments of a Confession).” in Schilpp, P.A. (ed.). The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, pp. 3–​82. Rāmānuja. 1956. Vedārthasaṃgraha.Van Buitenen, J.A.B. (ed. and trans.). Pune: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute. Sharma, B.N.K. 1986. Philosophy of Śrī Madhvācārya. 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Srinivasachari, P.N. 1943. The Philosophy of Viśiṣṭādvaita. Madras: Vasanta Press, The Theosophical Society.

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5 ORIENTALISM AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY IN HINDU–​C HRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS Stephanie Corigliano Postcolonial theology in the Hindu–​Christian encounter looks at faith and the formation of self in light of the colonial experience in India. In this context, decolonized people, along with feminist and subaltern voices, examine power imbalances as well as the ways that the decolonized may replicate the hegemonic structures from which they once sought to free themselves. The literature within the Hindu–​Christian encounter is especially important in that it reveals many ways that the colonized influenced and transformed the colonizers. This process is exemplified in the Christian ashram movement and in the continued popularity of Hindu contemplative practices and yoga in the West. This essay will examine the work of several leading scholars of postcolonial theology in the Hindu–​Christian context and also offer some suggestions for how postcolonial theology relates to interreligious learning and specific acts of cultural appropriation. To engage in postcolonial theology with a primary focus on Hindu–​Christian dialogue is to enter a challenging construct. Postcolonial theology is not exclusively derived from one context, and the theories that have been developed over the last sixty to eighty years come from a variety of countries and, largely, from the diaspora of people whose nations and families were at one time divided by a colonial experience. Thus, this essay is by no means a comprehensive overview of postcolonial theology. In the first part of the essay, I explain some of its basic precepts, drawing from several important thinkers, both from India and beyond. My primary focus is to lift up the distinctly Hindu-​Indian voices from the field of postcolonial theology and then to reflect critically on what cautions, implications, and ideas might be especially helpful for the ongoing dialogue between Hindu and Christian people. Certain basic elements of postcolonial theology should inform, on some level, all work that is done in studies of South Asia and of India in particular. Western academics, a population that is still primarily Caucasian, male, and brought up in Judeo-​Christian contexts, need to hear Indian counterparts, especially those voices who critically reflect on postcolonial theology. This includes a constant effort to refocus and question what counts as authoritative and canonical. “Postcolonial” indicates that we are talking about the end of colonial rule, yet the relations of power, knowledge production, and economic dependence continue. Attention to these constructs and how they shape religious faith, religious studies, and interreligious dialogue 54

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is essential to learning new modes for teaching, practicing, and existing in a more peaceful global community.

Setting the stage: orientalism, subaltern voices, and postcolonial theory Colonialism is the occupation of land, control over people, and exploitation of resources. This practice is far less frequent and widespread than it once was on a global scale, and its effects lessen with the end of colonialization. However, as social theorists from every former colony have recognized, a second, internal form of colonization survives decolonialization. Key terms and strategies that provide a basic foundation and widely influence postcolonial theory include subaltern, orientalism, the Third World, and empire. Postcolonial theology in India is shaped by Subaltern Studies and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, founded in 1963 by Rajni Kothari. “Subaltern” refers to those individuals who are socially, politically, and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure. It is a term first coined by the Italian, Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–​1937) and later taken up Ranajit Guha and others, who founded the Subaltern Studies Group at the University of Sussex around 1979. Gramsci described the subaltern as people who are not in a position to give orders; they only receive them. According to Guha, subaltern identity denotes a space that does not have social or economic mobility. Adding to this, Gayatri Spivak insists that “Subaltern is not just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie.” Rather, it is a “space of difference” that is to be overcome (Spivak 1992, pp. 27–​29). In her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that speaking is a transaction between speaker and listener. The essay provides a highly nuanced analysis of sati, the final act of a widow who commits suicide on her husband’s funeral pyre. She writes, The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice…The rite was not practiced universally and was not caste-​ or class-​fixed. The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men.” White women—​ from the nineteenth century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly—​have not produced an alternative understanding. Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: “The women actually wanted to die.” (Spivak 1979, p. 93) Spivak notes that in neither case is the woman’s voice heard.The two perspectives, “White men are saving brown women from brown men” and “The women wanted to die,” Spivak argues, seem to legitimate each other (Ibid.). Both sides interpreted the women’s deaths in a way that serves a greater ideological mission. Thus, from one perspective, sati sanctioned a woman’s desire. Support for this ritual underscored an allegiance to traditional Hindu values over and above British norms. For the Hindus, this was an inverse reading of the situation that supported the woman’s autonomy despite cultural circumstances that otherwise denied it. For the British, the situation underscored the need for the civilizing missions that, in part, were used to justify their colonial expansion. The woman, in this circumstance, is subaltern. She cannot speak, and even in her dying act, she is not understood or properly acknowledged. Spivak further argues, “There is, then, something of a not-​speakingness in the very notion of subalternity” (Spivak 1996, p.  289). 55

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The objective of Subaltern Studies is not to lift up subaltern voices, but rather to eliminate subalternity as a space of being. The term subaltern should also be understood in light of Spivak’s criticism of “the Third World,” as a signifier of postcolonial empire. She writes, To think of the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation helps the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the discipline. (Spivak 1985, p. 248) Spivak looks carefully at the colonial construction of history, or what she terms, “the fabrication of representations of historical reality” (Ibid., p. 271). In this sense, the Third World, as described by Spivak, is a subaltern space. It is a way of categorizing, which inherently furthers an imbalance of power and authority. Spivak’s critique of the Third World is shaped, in part, by another formidable influence in postcolonial theory, Edward Said, especially his 1978 book Orientalism (Said 1978). The Palestinian author argues that the common understanding of the “orient” is based upon its juxtaposition with the “occident,” with layers of implicit and explicit dynamics of power and domination. Thus, the idea of European/​Christian superiority influenced early knowledge about the orient, and this bias carried over into the structure and analysis of the so-​called oriental religious traditions. For example, certain forms of Hinduism were interpreted as orthodox and authentic, whereas other forms of Hinduism were delegated to a lesser status, meaning that the texts, practices, and traditions of this latter group went untranslated and were generally misinterpreted. To this point, the prioritizing of neo-​Vedanta as the quintessential expression of Hinduism will be further discussed in the next section. Said specifically recommends “contrapuntal reading,” an idea he explores in his 1994 Culture and Imperialism (Said 1994). In this work he looks at Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park and the relatively unexplored character of the servant “Nanny.” Said suggests that one approach to undoing subaltern spaces is to explore these side characters with greater depth, adding a heretofore ignored aspect to a classic narrative. This approach features prominently in the work of the Indian activist and author Mahasweta Devi in her reading of obtuse characters from the Mahabharata, specifically looking at the countless foot-​soldiers who were killed in the “holy war.” She builds a narrative that explores the lives of the widows who survived the battle and who reject the widely accepted idea that all who died in Kurukshetra automatically went to heaven. These women were never a part of the epic narrative, but rather only exist on the periphery, a necessary part of the collateral damage implied in the story. In contrast to the rajavritta widows (those formally married to royalty), who are obliged to mourn for the rest of their lives, the widows of the foot-​soldiers come to the battleground to confirm the loss of their loved ones and perform funerary rituals, and then they return home to re-​marry and work. In Devi’s narrative they wait for the monsoon rain to cool the burning ground left after the thousands of funeral pyres. These women are not of the rajavritta, women of royalty, nor are they servants or attendants. These women are from the families of the hundreds of foot soldiers—​ padatiks—​from various other little kingdoms. They had been slaughtered every day, in the thousands, their function being to protect the chariot-​mounted heroes.They were issued no armour. So they died in large numbers. 56

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As the warriors are cremated, the skies above Kurukshetra are dark with circling birds of prey. Reek of rotting flesh. Row upon row of oil-​soaked wood pyres piled high with decomposing bodies. They are set alight. The pyres burn for days. (Devi 2005, p. 1) Devi posits a cutting critique of the canonical epic, denouncing the idea of a dharmayuddha, or holy war: “We know of quarrels—​jealousies—​r ivalries too. But such a war for just a throne? This, a holy war?! A righteous war?! Just call it a war of greed!” (Ibid., p. 3). Colonial power, especially in the modern era, aligns with empire. Devi’s engagement with the narrative of royalty, righteous action, and religious hegemony in the Hindu context makes a critique of power that is relevant across borders. Indian postcolonial studies highlight a dual critique of the colonizer and the ruling elite. This important nuance acknowledges a common ground between different forms of oppression and also takes into account the various ways that colonization occurs before and after occupation. Tunisian author and postcolonial pioneer Albert Memmi made the explicit comparison between different forms of ruling classes in his 1965 book, The Colonizer and the Colonized. In particular, he suggests that both the elite and the colonizer share a need to imagine that the ruling class is needed because of an inherent deficiency on the part of the lower/​subaltern class. In this way the colonizer can interpret occupation as an act of charity and the gross acts of violence needed to maintain occupation as necessary, even merciful, on account of the inherent laziness and primitive, animal-​like status of the colonized. The greater the imbalance between the colonizer and the colonized, the more each is disfigured by the process. Memmi explains, The bond between colonizer and colonized is thus destructive and creative. It destroys and re-​creates the two partners of colonization into colonizer and colonized. One is disfigured into an oppressor, a partial, un-​patriotic, and treacherous being, worrying only about his privileges and their defense; the other, into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat. (Memmi 1965, p. 89) Memmi goes on to caution that the end of colonization can easily lead to a reduplication of the power structure that maintains oppression. According to Memmi, the decolonized, having accepted tropes such as laziness and backwardness, experience a kind of inner colonization and risk mimicking the former colonizer in an effort to overcome existing stereotypes. As such, the decolonized remain under the psychological influence of the former colonizer. This work highlights the dangerous possibility for the freshly decolonized to replicate the very structures of hierarchy and injustice that they sought to overthrow with a new, ruling elite in charge instead of the former ruling colonizer. Early works (e.g., Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) by the French West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon explore the inner colonization of Black people who desire whiteness and thus inadvertently perpetuate their own subjectivity. Fanon urged the colonized to turn entirely away from the colonizer. In particular, the allure of European culture had to be not only rejected, but utterly ignored. He argued that colonization not only altered the current and future identity of the colonized, but it had the ability to erase and alter memories from the past. Thus, Fanon focused, in part, on revaluing that past in order to establish a cultural identity for the decolonized that was independent from the experience of colonization.Years later the Jamaican born, British sociologist Stuart Hall addressed this idea of inner colonization as “otherness,” that is, an inner compulsion to be what one is not. Hall, responding to Fanon, recognized the importance of 57

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retrieving a sense of historical “wholeness,” yet he argued that “wholeness” in identity needed to be further “produced” in dialogue with the current circumstances of postcolonial hybridity and diaspora (Hall 1990). Though arising from the context of Caribbean-​European political and social activism, these ideas are relevant for understanding postcolonial self-​recovery in the Hindu–​Christian context. For example, Gyan Prakash compares the anti-​colonial strategies of M.K. Gandhi and Fanon. Gandhi’s 1908 Hind Swaraj criticized British rule in India and the violence of colonialism. Prakash notes the irony of Gandhi’s writing, where the “philosophy of nonviolence is overwritten by a language bristling with violent criticism” (Prakash 1995, p. 6). Fanon is famous for his analysis of violence in the colonial context, the suggestion that violence is the defining characteristic of the colonizer, and the idea that the only real way for a subjected people to overcome the mental and physical oppression of colonization is through a violent, cathartic rebellion. Violence here is effective in physical resistance to oppression and also as a means to regenerate and wake up the mental and spiritual dignity of the colonized. Interestingly, Gandhi’s radical emphasis on non-​violence managed to create a national movement and catharsis similar to that which Fanon describes. Postcolonial thinker Leela Gandhi argues that, despite a concerted effort to turn away from colonial culture, both M.K. Gandhi and Fanon sought “creative autonomy” rather than a “nostalgic and uncritical return to the precolonial past” (Gandhi 1998, p. 19). Fanon, like Memmi, avers that the natural reaction of the oppressed is the desire to become the oppressor. Perhaps in light of this, both Fanon and Gandhi were particularly concerned with the situation of the lower socio-​economic classes. Thus, both looked critically at their past in addition to looking critically at so-​called “Western” accomplishments, and both suggest that a postcolonial reality could become more civilized and sophisticated than the European civilizing mission. L. Gandhi makes the following comparison: It is with this agenda in mind, that Gandhi and Fanon rewrite the narrative of Western modernity to include the repressed and marginalized figures of its victims. In this revised version, industrialization tells the story of economic exploitation, democracy is splintered by the protesting voices of the suffragettes, technology combines with warfare, and the history of medicine is attached relentlessly by Fanon to the techniques of torture. (Ibid., p. 21) In this Indian context, Gandhi’s lifework (seen, for example, in the emphasis on home-​spun khadi cloth and the rejection of imported clothing) lifted up values and practices indigenous to India, both as a form of resistance to British ways of life and as a means to reinstall pride and a sense of dignity to Indian people. An important counterpart to Gandhi’s social activism is found in the work of B.R. Ambedkar (1891–​1956), an activist born as an Untouchable, as determined by the Hindu varna (caste) system. As part of Gandhi’s work toward the liberation of India from British colonial rule, Gandhi sought better conditions and justice for those lowest in the caste system, the Untouchables, renaming them harijans, or children of God; he did not reject the caste system per se. Ambedkar, in many ways echoing Fanon, vehemently critiqued the various charitable gestures and political campaigns that Gandhi pioneered in favor of granting Untouchables access to political representation, education, permission to share local wells, and entrance to Hindu temples. For Ambedkar, Gandhi’s underlying acceptance of caste stratification meant that Untouchables were to remain at the mercy of upper-​caste Hindus. Both physically and mentally, 58

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they would not attain an equal or dignified status. Throughout his work Ambedkar uses the term Untouchable—​not harijan—​to underscore the injustice that lower-​caste people face. Both Gandhi and Fanon were aware of the need to reimagine a postcolonial alternative rather than a return to precolonial hierarchies, yet according to scholars like Arundhati Roy, Gandhi’s emphasis on non-​violence and his tacit acceptance of Hindu hierarchy (even as he sought justice) may have stifled the movement necessary to impose more systematic and radical change. Roy’s introduction to the reprinting of Ambedkar’s famous essay “Annihilation of Caste” outlines the ongoing travesty of caste-​related violence in India. She also argues that an accurate study of Gandhi or Ambedkar requires an analysis of both leaders (Roy 2017 [2016]). Ambedkar’s essay was originally a speech prepared in 1936 for the Jat-​Pat Todak Mandal, or the Forum for Break-​up of Caste, and was rejected by the Forum prior to delivery. In this essay he argues that the religious category “Hinduism” is a colonial construction and that those that uphold a notion of caste do so because it is part of their sacred texts. He counters Gandhi’s hope for reform by stating, “The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the shastras” (Ambedkar 2016 [1936], p. 287). Ambedkar himself converted to Buddhism, and throughout his work he maintained a rigorous dialogue with Gandhi over the issue of caste that ultimately went unresolved.

Hindu universalism and the theology of difference While social inequality manifests in the public sphere, many of the authors discussed here would agree that it is equally established as an internal sense of self. Ashis Nandy’s landmark work, The Intimate Enemy, first published in 1983, explores the issue of postcolonial identity and empire through a critique of secular hierarchies and habits of binary thinking.When “modern” cultures are valued above so-​called “non-​modern” cultures and traditions, scientific research and secular values appear as more neutral, and therefore more universal, than indigenous ideas. The contrast between colonial, Christian, Enlightenment-​informed values and the colonized and non-​ Christian accords with what Nandy describes as a worldview which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. (Nandy 2009 [1983], p. x) This worldview is enshrined by implicit power dynamics that divide the self and society into eviscerated parts, rather than complementary facets of a whole. In this way, Nandy writes about colonizers or oppressors as co-​victims. In order to wield their unnatural power, oppressors denigrate their essential wholeness such that Nandy writes, “the victors are ultimately shown to be camouflaged victims, at an advanced stage of psychological decay” (Ibid., p. xvi). This perspective, rooted in compassionate social theory, seeks to unmask the dualities that support the lasting effects of colonialism. In contrast to Memmi’s critique of decolonized people’s attempt to rise to power, Nandy uncovers the oppressor’s weaknesses and revalidates a kind of interstitial innocence—​that is, an in-​between place that values both masculine and feminine, power and passivity, historical narrative and myth, modernity and tradition. Nandy draws from a particular Hindu analysis of the self–​world relationship, in which “greater self-​realization leads to greater understanding of the not-​self, including the material world” (Ibid., p. 62). Thus, his work focuses on the psycho-​spiritual aspects of colonialism as a 59

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foundational component of unmasking and healing its legacy. As stated, he maintains that the evils of colonialism perpetuate cycles of power and domination that negatively affect both the oppressed and the oppressor. Drawing on M.K. Gandhi, as he does throughout much of his work, he writes, “freedom is indivisible” (Ibid., p. 63), and “to [Gandhi] victimhood was indivisible and victor’s impunity was only notional” (Ibid., p. 119). A theory of social evolution, modernity, and progress underscored the tremendous psychological power of colonialism. Nandy observes that “at the high noon of colonialism, India with a population of 350,000  million never had more than 50,000 white” (Ibid., p. 118). The mindset of progress, which values the modern and powerful over and above tradition and vulnerability, is one of the great lasting effects of colonialism and one that impacts both colonizer and the colonized. In the second part of Intimate Enemy, Nandy discusses the “westernized Indian consciousness” that is split as either spiritual or materialistic. This dichotomy posits one or the other as false, as if to be spiritual one must be utterly non-​materialistic or vice-​versa. Nandy asserts that this division of self occurs as a rejection of intimate, and essential, parts of the self. Through an analysis of Rudyard Kipling, he considers how the refusal to acknowledge and accept parts of the self is a fundamental deficit that exacerbates the propensity for outward expressions of violence, intolerance, or racism. Nandy ultimately portrays Kipling as a victim, not only of unfortunate childhood circumstances, but also of a colonial mindset that limited his ability to experience compassion and joy. According to this analysis, the outward colonial violence he supported stemmed from a measure of internalized cultural violence. By contrast, Nandy looks at the Indian guru and activist Sri Aurobindo. As almost a mirror opposite to Kipling, he grew up in a primarily English setting and returned to India, much to his father’s disappointment, to support independence from Britain. As a nationalist and a proponent of an international school of spiritual teaching, Aurobindo was able to use his early experiences in England to expand his own nationalist ideals and teachings. As a postcolonial subject he was never forced to denounce the West. Instead, in his own interpretation of things, he found a way to supplement and build upon Western ideas with Hindu teachings. Thus, however critical one might be of both Kipling and Aurobindo (for different reasons), Nandy’s critique highlights the internal divide and self-​loathing instigated by Kipling’s pejorative view of India and, therefore, of his own earliest memories of his existence. Conversely, Aurobindo’s ability to accommodate the West within his own perspective of Hindu universalism allowed him to maintain an internal wholeness despite his intercultural existence. According to Nandy, it is the division of self, and subsequently of community, that is the source of postcolonial discord. He writes, This century has shown that in every situation of organized oppression the true antonyms are always the exclusive parts versus the inclusive whole—​not masculinity versus femininity but either of them versus androgyny, not the past versus the present but either of them versus the timelessness in which the past is the present and the present is the past, not the oppressor versus the oppressed but both of them versus the rationality which turns them into co-​victims. (Ibid., p. 99) Nandy cuts straight to the ways in which the self can be divided by cultural norms, such as how the valuing of masculine over feminine traits translates to a wider level of social discord. Because gender identity, for example, does not follow the artificial binary that this division sets up, individuals will always struggle to conform to an unrealistic norm. He then suggests that the Hindu ability to universalize, accommodate, and absorb variant perspectives and traditions presents 60

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a model for wholeness that, if nothing else, is efficient at surviving hostile takeovers. Going a step further, it might allow for an internal sense of wholeness that defies external attempts to divide the self. He terms this a “mythopoetic understanding” of the conqueror, in which the particulars of the other can be understood and accepted under a broader umbrella of cosmic truth, which remains consistent with one’s own worldview.Thus, rather than die for a dogmatic cause, according to Nandy, the Hindu could as well surrender and then slowly work to convert his or her opponents. He explains, “In order to accept oneself, one must learn to hold in trust ‘weaknesses’ to which a violent, culturally barren and politically bankrupt world someday may have to return” (Ibid., p. 112). In keeping with the other postcolonial thinkers discussed here, Nandy recognizes that “colonialism was produced and driven by persons and states of mind in addition to institutions” (Ibid., p. 116). Nandy’s position as a sociologist and psychologist offers a very practical approach. Thus, his focus on the antithesis of colonial values embodied in the androgynous, feminine, weak, and uneducated raises some important questions for the ongoing pursuit of postcolonial and post-​authoritarian ethics. Valuing the paradoxes and dichotomies within the self may lead to greater tolerance of others. Religious pluralism, as a descriptive term, is increasingly the norm. Interestingly, while postcolonial thinkers like Ashis Nandy recognize the benefits of a universalist Hindu worldview, theologians of religion have made a progressive move away from universal terms toward the particular and a more nuanced analysis of traditions and cultures. Universalism may offer a means toward greater acceptance of self and other, yet it also potentially limits a deeper curiosity and understanding of religious difference that some would argue is crucial for meaningful dialogue and peace. Theologians like Kwok Pui-​lan and others challenge the idea that the study of religion can be separated from other cultural and social dynamics. Kwok critically evaluates John Hick’s prescriptive form of pluralism that highlights religious similarities. In Hick’s view different religious traditions may celebrate the same God through different practices and the acceptance of a common religious goal can mark a transition “from self-​centeredness to Reality-​centeredness.” Hick’s idea that there are many paths up the same mountain attempts to grant an equal measure of respect to all religions and prioritize similarities rather than difference. Joining an illustrious group of critics, Kwok argues that we should, conversely, be talking about a “postcolonial theology of religious difference.” She writes, Given that religious traditions exist in such diverse forms, [Hick’s] glossing over the differences that distinguish one religion from another smacks of the patronizing tendency of white liberals. Moreover, it is far too presumptuous to say that the Reality worshipped or revered by all traditions is ultimately the same, albeit with different names and guises. (Kwok 2005, p. 199) What makes this criticism particularly relevant and interesting for our current project is the fact that Hick was largely influenced by Hindu, neo-​Vedantic, thinkers. Neo-​Vedanta refers to the non-​dual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta and the work of Shankaracarya (ninth century) interpreted through the particular lens of transnational modern guru figures like Swami Vivekananda (1863–​1902) and Sri Aurobindo (1872–​1950) and prominent leaders like former Indian president and education reformer, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–​1975).This perspective became the primary representation of Hinduism in the West. It promoted a universalist worldview, in which all other faith traditions could be absorbed and accepted under a broad 61

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umbrella of non-​dual Hinduism. (For more on this elevation of Advaita Vedanta see Nicholson’s chapter in this volume.) Kwok argues that although Hick avoids using the term “God,” “his approach seems to be based still too much on a Christian theistic framework” (Ibid., p. 199). According to Kwok, this is evident in the kinds of questions that Hick (and others) ask, which focus primarily on ultimate truth claims, addressing religiosity as if it is separate from cultural circumstances, and which, consequently, end up reinstating a hierarchical ordering of religious traditions. Since Hick’s proposal ignores many specifics of religious life, it runs contrary to most of Christian theology (though Christian medieval mysticism stands out as an exception here). For example, in not recognizing God as the creator or Jesus Christ as the son of God, Hick challenges the early statements of faith established by the Catholic Church in the Nicene Creed. Compare this to the prominent student of SwamiVivekananda, the internationally recognized yoga teacher, Swami Sivananda, who writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same.There is difference only in the non-​essentials” (Swami Sivananda 2019). Like Christian theologians who are willing to accept that other forms of worship might be acceptable to God (as Christ), the neo-​Vedantins similarly are willing to accept that Christ is an avatar of Vishnu, i.e., that other forms of worship can be interpreted and accepted as ultimately serving a Hindu God. Contrary to these approaches, Kwok’s “postcolonial theology of religious difference” emphasizes the link between culture and theology. She writes, A postcolonial theology of religious difference needs to examine how Christianity constructs difference in various historical epochs, taking into consideration the contestation of meaning, the shaping of the imagination, and the changing power relations. The issue before us is not religious diversity, but religious difference as it is constituted and produced in concrete situations, often with significant power differentials. (Kwok 2005, p. 205) The “postcolonial theology of religious difference” is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of religious difference that includes discordant voices from history, cultural studies, feminist theory, and other fields. Thus, while Kwok does not directly address Hindu–​Christian dialogue, she offers a corrective that is vital to expanding that dialogue beyond mainline traditions to include a wider spectrum of voices. Despite British colonial rule over India for almost a century, Christian missionaries were much less successful at converting Hindus than they had hoped they would be. The Christian practice of inculturation in India was initially an effort to make Christian faith communicable to people living in Indian culture (see Michael Amaladoss’s chapter in this volume for more on inculturation). Early Catholic missionaries such as Roberto de Nobili, SJ (1577–​1656) established a trend of adopting Indian habits of dress, language, and religious customs in order to befriend and gain the trust of Brahmin Hindu leaders for the express purpose of evangelization. This early effort largely failed to convert, and it also failed to consider the possibility that Hindu people would have anything of theological value to offer Christians. Some centuries later, the Bengali Catholic convert Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–​1907) identified a link between the Advaita Vedanta of Shankaracarya and the theology of Thomas Aquinas and thereby initiated an integration of Hindu contemplative philosophy into Catholic theology. This connection was then later taken up in a more systematic and comprehensive study by Pierre Johanns, SJ (1882–​1955). Following from this, in the early nineteenth century, several Catholic monks migrated to India and, rather than converting Hindus, found 62

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themselves profoundly changed by Indian ways of living, philosophizing, and practicing faith. Three Benedictine monks—​Jules Monchanin (1895–​1957), Henri Le Saux (later known as Swami Abhishiktananda) (1910–​1973), and later Bede Griffiths (1906–​1993)—​as well as others including Sister Sara Grant (1922–​2002) founded Christian ashrams that integrated aspects of the earlier interreligious discourse with contemplative practice. In India, ashrams are a traditional, communal setting for religious practice, typically centered on a guru or enlightened teacher. The Christian ashram movement copied this model, using charismatic religious leaders to found centers of Christian practice and learning. Additionally, Christian ashram communities adopted various “Indian” methods of practice, such as meditation, and they advocated study of Hindu scripture in conjunction with the Bible and Catholic mass.This movement had a significant impact on the larger community of Christians in India. For example, the 1968 “All-​India Seminar on the Church in India Today” spoke of the need to stimulate the contemplative side of the Catholic Church in the Indian context (Cornille 1991, p.  121). Additionally, a 1977 Bishops Synod maintained that while the Christian message is intended to transform culture, “the real incarnation of the faith through catechesis is not just a process of giving, but also that of receiving” (Ibid., p. 2). On the surface, the integration of Hindu practices and texts with Christian, Catholic liturgy might smack of gross cultural appropriation. And yet, for a period of several decades, the Christian ashram movement inspired Indian Christians as well as foreigners in a spiritual movement directed toward fostering interreligious peace and collaboration. Further, many Indian Christians after decolonization valued the incorporation of various cultural practices, from garlanding the pictures of saints with jasmine wreathes to using the word “Om” in place of “Amen.” A.J. Appasamy provocatively states, “I think we should recognize that there is a great deal in Indian culture which is quite unconnected with Hinduism and which the Indian Christian can use without any hesitation” (Appasamy 1970, p. 114). Christian ashrams and the inculturation movement have lost momentum in the past few decades, perhaps in part owing to the focus on a guru figure and the loss of community that ensues after the passing of a beloved leader. The convergence of Indian culture and Christian praxis in inculturation raises many questions, suspicions, and promises. C.I. David Joy is a scholar and preacher within the Indian church. Throughout his work, he acknowledges the “traitor image,” suffered by many native leaders of the Indian church during the colonial period. Hindus who left Hinduism during the colonial era have often been stigmatized for their decision. Although the earliest efforts of inculturation were directed at Brahmin Hindus, the majority of converts were from lower-​caste, village contexts.The act of conversion was sometimes also an act of resistance to the hierarchical organization of Hindu people according to caste.Whatever the driving force behind conversion, Indian Christian seminaries and leaders offer a challenging voice of faith in the Indian context. According to Joy, “It is a fact that the Bible and liturgical pieces equipped Indian Christians during the colonial period to explore the ways in which sociopolitical power groups interacted with one another” (Joy 2015, p. 112). Joy goes on to advocate for a deeper engagement with vernacular commentaries on the Bible and for more indigenous, historiographical studies of the colonial past in order to orient the mission of the Church in postcolonial India. In The Bible and the Third World, R.S. Sugirtharajah explores some of the possibilities for postcolonial biblical interpretation. Along with Marcella Althaus-​Reid, Sugirtharajah suggests that liberation theologies are wed to a particular dogmatic outcome that maintains the “binary notions of Christian and non-​Christian and sees religious pluralism as an exception rather than the norm” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 262). He recognizes that “liberation hermeneutics and postcolonialism share mutual agendas and goals,” yet he makes the important distinction that 63

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postcolonialism “represents the contemporary restlessness concerning religious pluralism, the validity of different confessional traditions, and the empowerment of repressed voices through visual, oral, and aural means” (Ibid., p. 265). He points in his conclusion to the interpretation of Ruth by the Cherokee scholar Laura Donaldson. In Jewish and Christian liturgy and in liberation theology, Ruth is celebrated for her loyalty and devotion when, after the death of her husband, she refuses to leave her mother-​in-​law, Naomi, thereby accepting the God of the Israelites as her own. Donaldson focuses instead upon Ruth’s sister, Orpah, who also lost her husband, but who instead returns to her family in Moab—​thus embracing her native culture and faith. Echoing the contrapuntal reading discussed previously in the work of Mahasweta Devi, postcolonial analysis of scripture unmoors the embedded privilege and patriarchal tendencies of many of the classics and sacred literature. Stemming from years of working to develop a postcolonial hermeneutic of biblical interpretation, Sugirtharajah offers a word of caution that is well worth noting. He writes, “Any theory or discourse that does not have within itself an inbuilt mechanism for its own deconstruction will become a potent tool for theological and ideological propaganda. This applies to postcolonial theory as to any other” (Ibid., p. 273). He grounds the value of this theoretical analysis in the concrete results that it can bring to bear upon the lived experience of people, including access to housing, food, healthcare, and justice.

Global spiritualities, cultural appropriation, and liberation India’s largest export may be yoga. Despite its esoteric and multivalent origins, yoga today is one of the most iconic elements of what might be termed “Global Spirituality.” In the West yoga is predominantly associated with a physical practice of movement, stretching, and breathing. It is now a multimillion-​dollar industry that promotes health, fitness, and fashion. Many trace the beginning of transnational yoga to interreligious organizations like the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky), which drew inspiration from the mystical teachings of multiple religious traditions and from the eclectic nature-​based spirituality of the Transcendentalists (early nineteenth century). Theosophy emphasized spiritual practices and theories drawn from various religious traditions, without the dogmatic or traditional context of religious belonging. Today, it is estimated that at least one in three US adults identify as “spiritual but not religious” (Pew Research Center 2017). Yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices are easily the most commonly shared practices for religious and non-​religious individuals, many of whom would identify yoga as “spiritual.” Yoga in the United States is rooted in a spiritual search for truth and meaning that expands beyond the traditional religious context. Similar to A.J. Appasamy’s suggestion that many elements of Indian culture were not explicitly Hindu and could pertain to the practice of Indian Christianity, proponents of yoga in the twentieth century largely promoted it as a philosophy and practice that could be taught separately from Hindu ideology. Swami Kuvalayananda (1883–​ 1966), Swami Vivekananda (1863–​1902), T.K.V. Krishnamacharya (1883–​1966), and other Indian leaders who taught yoga to Western students or traveled to the West emphasized the scientific and medical value of the practices. To this point, in 2015, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal upheld a prior decision to allow a secular form of yoga to be taught in Encinitas public elementary schools, stating that the program did not make any explicit references to Hinduism. While conservative Christians remain concerned over the implicit Hindu-​ness of yoga, some Hindus are equally concerned about the misrepresentation of yoga in the West. Aseem Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation states, “[Yoga is] a victim of overt intellectual property theft, absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu 64

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yogis, gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism” (quoted in Jain 2012, p. 2; for more on debates about the Western appropriation of yoga, see Christopher Miller’s chapter in this volume). In relation to these debates, Andrea Jain argues that yoga is fundamentally malleable in both meaning and function. She states, “Yoga has a long history whereby adherents of numerous religions, including Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, New Age, and Christian traditions, have deconstructed and reconstructed it anew” (Ibid., p. 6). The 2013 Smithsonian exhibit, “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” beautifully highlighted the many variations of yoga, from strict ascetic practice to its general popularity in the modern era. Even as the soteriology and practice of yoga has shifted radically over time, for those practitioners and curious scholars yearning for greater depth and authenticity, a return to premodern, largely Hindu texts seems inevitable. This is evidenced in the emerging field of Yoga Studies, now taking institutional shape in the form of Masters programs in Yoga Studies offered at select universities, all of which emphasize Hindu studies, Sanskrit language, and even travel to India. So, while yoga may not be strictly Hindu, it also cannot be fully appreciated apart from Hindu religious history. While modern, postural yoga may be a radical innovation when compared with early Indian ascetics, the idea that contemporary yoga is solely the result of cultural appropriation is equally complex and problematic. As cultures combine and cross-​pollinate, new forms of religious and spiritual practice emerge. The Hindu–​Christian postcolonial experience affects both traditions. Postcolonial scholarship highlights marginal voices and untold narratives. It also points toward the need for new forms of tradition to take shape that are structurally more inclusive and aware of power imbalances, both within the respective tradition and within an interreligious global landscape. Throughout this chapter I have focused upon particular strategies of postcolonial analysis that address the religious and social texts and contexts of Hindu and Christian discourse, including contrapuntal reading and the analysis of self and other that values a non-​binary perspective. It is, perhaps, in the critical self-​evaluation and mutual evolution of both traditions, alongside and with the ever-​g rowing faction of global spiritualities, that greater truth and liberative potential can be found.

Bibliography Ambedkar, B.R. 2016, 1936. Annihilation of Caste:  The Annotated Critical Edition. Anand, S. (ed.). New York: Verso. Appasamy, A.J. 1970. The Theology of Hindu Bhakti. Bangalore: The United Theological College. Cornille, C. 1991. The Guru in Indian Catholicism:  Ambiguity or Opportunity of Inculturation? Louvain: Peeters Press. Devi, M. 2005. After Kurukshetra. Katyal, A. (trans.). New Delhi: Seagull Books. Fanon, F. 1952. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Gandhi, L. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, S. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Rutherford, J. (ed.). Identity:  Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hick, J. 1995. A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Jain, A.R. 2012. “The Malleability of Yoga:  A Response to Christian and Hindu Opponents of the Popularization of Yoga.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 25(4), 3–​10. Joy, C.I.D. 2015. Overlooked Voices: A Postcolonial Indian Quest. Phoenixville, PA: Borderless Press. Kwok, P. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Memmi, A. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nandy, A. 2009, 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Stephanie Corigliano Pew Research Center. 2017. “More Americans Now Say They’re Spiritual but not Religious.” Fact Tank, September 7.  Available at www.pewresearch.org/​fact-​tank/​2017/​09/​06/​more-​americans-​now-​say-​ theyre-​spiritual-​but-​not-​religious/​. Accessed May 2, 2020. Prakash, G. 1995. “Introduction: After Colonialism.” In Prakash, G. (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–​20. Roy, A. 2017, 2016. The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste.The Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. —​—​—​. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Sivananda, S. 2017. “The Unity That Underlies All Religions.” The Divine Life Society. Available at www. dlshq.org/​religions/​unirel.htm. Accessed May 2, 2020. Spivak, G.C. 1979. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (eds.). Colonial Discourse and Post-​Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 66–​111. —​—​—​. 1985. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory 24(3): 247–​72. —​—​—​. 1992. “New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa.” Interview with Leon de Kock. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 23(3): 29–​47. —​—​—​. 1996. “Subaltern Talk:  Interview with the Editors.” In Landry, D. and Maclean, G. (eds.). The Spivak Reader. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 287–​308. Sugirtharajah, R.S. 2001. The Bible and the Third World:  Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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PART II

Historical interactions

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6 SYRIAN CHRISTIANS AND DOMINANT-​C ASTE  HINDUS Sonja Thomas

The Syrian Christians of Kerala capture the imagination of many interested in the history of Christianity in India. Considered “indigenous Christians,” the Syrian Christians are the longest established Christian community in India.They trace their conversion to the year 52 CE, when they believe St.Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus, came to Kerala and reportedly converted Brahmins to Christianity. They are not migrants from Syria. Rather, the term “Syrian” stems from the Syriac language, a western dialect of Aramaic used by the community in masses, prayers, and devotions. The first European missionaries to come to this area of India were the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Since the Portuguese Catholic Church’s language was Latin, a distinction was made between the “Syrian” Christians who practiced Eastern traditions and used the Syriac language, and the “Latin” converts who practiced in the Western traditions. In the South Indian state of Kerala, the Syrian Christians are also known as “St. Thomas Christians” and “Nazranis.” In this chapter, I use the term “dominant caste” to refer to the privileged caste status of the Syrian Christians. “Dalit Bahujan” is a term that refers to the shared experiences between Dalit peoples (meaning “broken” and used for the former untouchable castes) and Bahujan (meaning “majority” referring to non-​dominant Sudra-​casted peoples). “Adivasi” is a term that means “original inhabitant,” or tribal peoples of India. The dominant-​caste status and casteist practices of the Syrian Christians set them apart from Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi Christians—​a caste difference that is little discussed in scholarship on Indian Christianity.Throughout the centuries, the Syrian Christians have developed specific ties to dominant-​caste Hindus in the state and beyond. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the history of the Syrian Christians, their dominant-​ caste status, and their current socio-​economic and caste privilege that links the community to dominant-​caste Hindu interests more than to those of Christians in Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi communities. I particularly focus on the differences in access to a quality education—​the ease of access for dominant-​caste Hindus and Syrian Christians, and the barriers placed upon OBCs (Other Backward Castes), Dalits, and Adivasis in comparison. By centering my discussion on education, I show how brahmanical patriarchal power is consolidated not just within Hinduism, but between Hindus and Christians through shared dominant-​caste power/​interests.

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A history While Christians comprise only 2.3% of the population of India (“Religion” 2011), they constitute just over 18% of Kerala’s population (Zachariah 2016, p. 9). Just under half of the Christians in the state are Syrian Christians (Ibid., p. 10). The Syrian Christians themselves are divided into numerous denominations. Despite denominational divides, their dominant-​caste status and Eastern Christian traditions bring them together and distinguish them from other Christian minorities. There is a debate concerning St. Thomas’ visit to India and early Syrian Christian history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese inquisition in Goa destroyed many Syrian Christian historical documents, which raises questions about whether any of these documents may have substantiated the claim that St. Thomas visited India in 52 CE, as Syrian Christian tradition asserts. Additionally, the tradition contains a potential anachronism, since it asserts that the apostle converted Brahmins to Christianity. The problem is that there is much historical debate about whether Brahmins actually existed as a caste in South India at that time. According to most historians, Brahmin migration to the region only occurred somewhere around the seventh to tenth centuries (on the debate, see Gurukkal 2003, p. 109; Gangadharan 2003, p. 92; Menon 2000, p. 103; and Menachery 2000, p. 197). Can the claim, then, that St. Thomas converted Brahmins be substantiated? Whether it can or not, I  would argue that the truth of St. Thomas’ mission matters less than the way in which Syrian Christians understand their caste status through the lens of the St.Thomas conversion story, and the fact that because of this story, other castes in the region, and even the state of Kerala itself, have recognized their caste status. Members of the Syrian Christian faiths do not question the establishment of Christianity in India by St. Thomas. According to communal history, St. Thomas performed many miracles, including removing a heavy piece of driftwood from a beach at the request of a local king, bringing forth a freshwater spring at Malayattoor mountain, and suspending water droplets in the air, an act which impressed over a hundred Brahmins and led to their conversion. St. Thomas is said to have established eight churches (at Palayoor, Kodungaloor, Paravur, Kothamangalam, Niranam, Nilackal, Kollam, and Thiruvithamcode), while erecting crosses at other locations. The distinctive St. Thomas cross is still used in Syrian Christian churches and homes today, and a portrait of the saint often hangs in Syrian Christian churches throughout Kerala. Xavier Koodapuzha has argued that it is likely St. Thomas came to the area to preach to the small Jewish community known to be present in Kerala at this time (2000, pp. 48–​49). To this day, the Syrian Christians are the only Christians to celebrate their own version of a Seder meal—​the Pesaha meal—​which consists of unleavened steamed bread made from rice flour and is eaten with a banana mixture and bitter herbs. Rituals like Pesaha and the Syriac language give strength to Syrian Christian claims that St. Thomas traveled to India in the first century. However, it is not just the Syrian Christian community that expresses a belief in St. Thomas’ visit to India, and his conversion of Brahmins. Today, the Catholic Church recognizes as historical fact St. Thomas’ mission to India and his martyrdom outside the present-​day city of Chennai. Moreover, the state of Kerala recognizes the community as a “forward caste” (a technical term for a dominant caste), and most communities in Kerala—​Christian, Hindu, and Muslim—​view the Syrian Christians as a dominant-​caste community as well. As I will discuss below, Syrian Christians’ consolidation of social privileges and land ownership, as well as their ideological support for the caste system over the centuries, secured and maintained this external recognition of their dominant-​caste status.

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Though the actual date is a matter of scholarly debate (see Thomas 2018, pp. 24–​25; Zacharia 1994, p.  12; Zachariah 2006, p.  51; Swiderski 1988; and Philips 2004), at some point, likely around 345 CE, the Syrian Christian community was strengthened in numbers by the arrival of the Knanaya Christians. In this year, seventy Christian families led by a man named Thomas Cana traveled to Kerala from the Middle East. They interacted with and became part of the Syrian Christian community. The Knanaya Christians tied the Syrian Christians more securely to the Eastern churches. Prelates were sent from Babylon to India periodically over the centuries, with the Syrian Christian churches coming under the jurisdiction of the Chaldean Church (Mundadan 1970, p. 137). Somewhere around the seventh to tenth centuries, caste divisions started to become especially pronounced in the region. Religious society became oriented around temples, and castes became intimately tied to temple occupations and/​or to forced slavery. However, Kerala’s caste divisions did not conform neatly to the four-​caste system of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra known over much of the rest of peninsular India (Kurien 2002, p.  45). Among other differences, the Kshatriya and Vaisya castes are not present in Kerala. The Brahmins of Kerala, the Namboodiris, developed an intimate relationship to the Nayar caste, which is technically considered Sudra, but functions similarly to how Kshatriya castes function in other areas of India. Perhaps because of their knowledge of Syriac and ties to the Chaldean Church in the Middle East, Syrian Christians developed a presence in the region as merchants. For this reason, Vijayakumar speculates that they may have come to be perceived and accepted as a Vaisya caste (1981, p. 259). Dalits, on the other hand, were forced into agricultural slave labor and continued to be counted among the slave castes even after slavery was formally abolished in 1843 in northern Kerala (Malabar), and 1855 in southern Kerala (Travancore). In fact, manual agricultural labor is considered a Dalit Bahujan occupation to this day. Syrian Christians performed an intermediate function in the caste hierarchy, one that served to distance them from Dalit Bahujans and put them in closer proximity to the status of the dominant-​caste Hindu Nayars. As caste divisions became more and more pronounced, communities in the region started to practice not only untouchability, but distance pollution. The mere shadow of a Dalit falling on a Brahmin could result in the Dalit’s death. For Kerala’s dominant-​caste Hindus, “polluted” objects could be deemed “purified” with one touch from a Syrian Christian male. Many Syrian Christian families trace their histories to Brahmin priests/​ temples who granted the Christian families plots of land and privileges in return for their purifying touch (Thomas 2018, p. 83). In 849 CE, the King of Venadu granted Syrian Christians a number of privileges, which were memorialized by being hammered into a series of copper plates. Known as the Syrian Christian copper plates, they granted the Syrian Christians (among other things) the power to punish/​receive fines from (non-​Christian) families of Kerala, the power to buy and sell slaves from among the Dalit castes, freedom from certain taxes, and rights to their own system of justice “for the time that earth, moon, and sun exist” (Gundert 1844, pp. 132–​34; Narayanan 2002, p. 71). Thus, the Syrian Christian community practiced casteism themselves and participated in the slave-​caste system as slave-​and landowners, which allied them with dominant-​caste, landowning Hindus. As the Syrian Christians integrated themselves into the developing temple-​oriented society, dominant-​ caste traditions became Syrian Christian traditions. Syrian Christian women’s clothing practices were tied to Hindu dominant-​ caste clothing practices (Thomas 2018, pp. 35–​66). Syrian Christian communities, like Kerala’s Namboodiri Brahmins, were and continue to be patrilineal. Also similar to the state of affairs among Namboodiri Brahmins, Syrian Christians practiced and continue to practice dowry (Lindberg 2014, p. 30). Certain rituals of

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the community, especially those tied to marriage and childbirth (the literal reproduction of the community) remain distinctly Hindu and dominant caste in nature (Thomas 2016). Syrian Christians not only have their own churches (distinct from those of lower-​caste communities), they also have segregated cemeteries. Even in death, then, Syrian Christians enforce casteism. In 1498, the Portuguese colonizer, Vasco da Gama, sailed around the tip of South Africa and landed on the Kerala coast, paving the way for the arrival of Portuguese missionaries. The Portuguese missionary, St. Francis Xavier, converted thousands of Hindus and Muslims from the fisher-​castes (fishing is considered a low-​status occupation) to Latin Catholicism. In 1599, the Portuguese attempted to Latinize the Syrian Christians at the Synod of Diamper. The Synod consisted of a series of acts and decrees. Among them, the Syrian Christians were to pledge loyalty to the Pope and to renounce obedience to the Patriarch of Babylon, their priests were to give up marriage, and their sacraments were to be stripped of any so-​called heresies (Zacharia 1994, pp. 22–​59). In 1653, the majority of Syrian Christians rebelled against the Portuguese in an event known as the coonan kurisha. This event split the once united Syrian Christian community into two factions. The Syrian Christians who took part in the oath were called puthankutukar, or new Christians. Today, they are called Orthodox Syrian Christians or Yakoba Christians. The minority who did not take part in this rebellion were called the pazhaykuttukar, or old Christians. These old Christians remained loyal to the Pope in Rome, but Eastern in their ritual traditions. Today, the old Christians constitute the largest denomination within the Syrian Christian faiths, and they follow what is formally known as the Syro-​Malabar rite of Catholicism (Zachariah 2006, p. 145). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Orthodox/​Yakoba Christians split numerous times. A branch preaching reform splintered off and formed the Marthoma Church. A  difference in hierarchal structures led to yet another split—​the Methran and Bava factions of the Syrian Orthodox/​Yakoba Church. Another small group of Orthodox/​Yakoba Christians—​following the Syro-​Malankara rite of Catholicism—​ sought to unite with Rome. Because the Syrian Christians had established themselves as a dominant caste, the community did not (and does not) interact with the Portuguese-​converted Latin Christians, or the Protestant Christians converted by British (and other) missionaries in the early nineteenth century, or their descendants. This is because both Latin and Protestant Christians are differentiated from the Syrian Christians by way of marked caste practices. To this day, marriages are endogamous in the Syrian Christian community. Even within a denomination like Catholicism, marriages between (dominant-​caste) Syrian Catholics and (Bahujan) Latin Catholics are rare. This reality speaks not just to casteism within Christianity, but to what feminist scholars call “brahmanical patriarchy” (Chakravarti 1993, p. 580). Because endogamous marriages are integral to both engendering and maintaining caste and religious boundaries, the regulation of female sexuality is a key element in casteist/​religious discrimination. To fully understand the workings of caste divisions in Christianity, then, it is crucial to understand how casteism and patriarchy go hand-​in-​hand. For example, to this day, according to the Eastern Code of Canon, for dominant-​caste Syrian Catholics, marrying a (Dalit Bahujan) Protestant Christian requires a canonical form. But if a Syro-​Malabar Catholic marries a (dominant-​caste) Orthodox Syrian Christian, no special dispensation is needed (Payyappilly 2014, pp. 73, 188). This means that the Syro-​Malabar Church makes it easier to marry within the caste, and places restrictions on inter-​caste Christian marriages. Restrictions serve to “criminalize love” (Mody 2002, p. 247), and community and kin can ostracize and punish those with “oppositional agency” (Chowdhry 2007, p.  159). Caste, gender, and religion intersect in profound ways to uphold the “status” of kin and community and caste and religious differences are enforced through caste-​based violence. 72

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Over the centuries, the caste privileges and landed power of all the different Syrian Christian denominations have led to the relative socio-​economic privilege of the community. Today, the Syrian Christians lead all other religious communities in Kerala in land ownership (Zachariah 2006, p.  28). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many were in a position to take a gamble on cash crops including tea, coffee, and rubber tree cultivation. The Syrian Christians also became prominent in the banking industry and in the management of private schools. Each of these endeavors proved to be profitable for the community as a whole. Their socio-​economic and caste privilege thus unites them in profound ways with dominant-​caste Hindus. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how Christians are not a united group in India, and to interrogate the links between dominant-​caste Hindus and the Syrian Christians when we examine Hindu–​Christian relations.

Education: dominant-​caste politics One of the most visible manifestations of alliances between dominant-​caste Hindus and Syrian Christians can be found in the education sector. Kerala is the most educated state in India, well known for high literacy rates for both men and women. According to the latest census data, the literacy rate in the state is 96% for males and 92% for women—​far above the all-​India averages of 82% and 65% respectively (“State of Literacy” 2011). However, while literacy rates are celebrated by many, the casteist history of education in the state is less known. Kerala’s educational landscape was shaped by British missionaries. In the early nineteenth century, the area of Kerala had the highest density of Protestant missionaries in India (Jeffrey 1992, p.  97). These Protestant missionaries converted many from the Dalit Bahujan communities and established missionary schools for them. Especially because education offered the possibility of government jobs in the princely state of Travancore (south Kerala), which was under indirect British rule, Kerala’s dominant castes pressured the Travancore government for more government schools. They were successful in securing caste-​segregated government schools and, from this schooling, positions in the government. In 1895, the Travancore Maharaja attempted to rectify this discrimination against Dalit Bahujan children by establishing separate schools for Dalit Bahujan, Muslim, and Adivasi communities (Padmanabhan 2010, p. 105). Dominant-​caste Hindus opposed the creation of schools administered and run by Dalits. In 1905, a Dalit school was destroyed by dominant-​caste Hindus (Ibid., p. 106), and a 1907 government order to admit Dalit children into government schools was not enforced (Ibid., p. 107). The Syrian Christian community was likewise opposed to a Dalit education like that to which they had access. Syrian Christians blocked the admission of Dalit Christians into CMS (Church Missionary Society) College and advocated for Dalits to be trained instead in trades like carpentry or blacksmithing (Mohan 2015, p. 134). Syrian Christians became prominent in private school management starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing to this day. With grant-​in-​aids from the government, Syrian Christians began to surpass the British missionaries in establishing private Christian schools. These schools discriminated against Dalit Bahujan children in the region (Tharakan 1984, p. 1924).The right of minorities to establish and administer their own schools was later protected in 1950, under Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution. By exercising this right, and with the continued help of the state’s grant-​in-​aid system, Syrian Christians established and continue to establish many of the private schools in Kerala. In contrast, Dalit Christians were discriminated against when trying to exercise the same rights. As Padmanabhan explains, “in the context of heightened community politics, the Dalits could not match up to the power of organized 73

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powerful communities with greater resource endowments. Dalit community asset formation thus remained low, including schools” (2010, pp. 108–​109). Because of their long-​established prominence in private education, the rhetoric of “minority rights,” when used in Kerala, often refers specifically to the rights of Syrian Christians involved in educational sector management. Non-​Syrian Christian concerns—​such as that of the Latin Catholic fisherman affected by the Ockhi cyclone in 2017—​are rarely included in political and media discussions of “minority rights.” In many ways,“minority rights” almost paradoxically ties dominant-​caste Hindu and Syrian Christians together, while education itself is used as a tool to perpetuate casteism against Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi communities. A caste divide has also begun to arise between Dalit students and their upper-​caste teachers. While government schools operate on the reservation system, the number of Dalit teachers in private aided schools in post-​independence India has been “woefully minimal” (Ibid., p. 108). The largely dominant-​caste profile of teachers has not changed much since the mid-​twentieth century. In 2002, only 0.28% of teachers in the state were Dalits (Nampoothiri 2015, p. 260). In aided private colleges today (many of them run by the Syrian Christian community), Dalits constitute only 0.15% of the total number of teachers (Ameerudheen 2017). While Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi Christian children have struggled to gain admission into both public and private schools and have faced a caste divide/​casteism in the classroom, Syrian Christian and dominant-​caste Hindu children have not. Surveying the demographic data of Syrian Christians, K.C. Zachariah has found that they “have always been ahead of other communities with respect to education” (Zachariah 2006, p. 37). As mentioned, modern education has promised opportunities for employment in the government. Due to casteist discrimination in education, it has been the privileged communities of Kerala that have been able to obtain government jobs. Even today, the Nayar community (which is dominant-​caste Hindu) leads all communities in employment in government and semi-​government sectors, while the Syrian Christian community comes second (Ibid., pp. 27–​29). Further, over the decades there has arisen a large divide between government (vernacular) and private (English-​medium) schools. It has been and continues to be the landowning privileged classes that can afford private schools, English-​medium education, and tuition. Dalit students receive little guidance and lack the cultural capital that dominant-​caste Hindus and the Syrian Christians enjoy in education (Nampoothiri 2015, p. 266). Dalit children continue to contend with a glaring caste divide between themselves and their dominant-​caste teachers, they face discrimination in classrooms, receive poor entrance test coaching, continue to face a relative disadvantage in their English-​language skills, and face discrimination in stipend distribution (Ibid.; Kumar and George 2009). Thus, education in the state historically benefited and continues to benefit dominant-​caste Hindus and Syrian Christians. On a national level, it may surprise many to know that prominent priests and bishops in the Syrian Christian community have been friendly toward the Bharatiya Janata Party and its current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, despite the party’s proclivity for majoritarian politics and anti-​minority rhetoric, and despite its weak response to (or even support for) anti-​ Muslim and anti-​Christian violence. Syrian Christian leaders have met with Modi more than once and expressed approval of his secular stance and the nature of his religious tolerance. It is the Latin Catholic church in Kerala that has commented on the “anti-​minority stand of Modi” (Sanandakumar 2014; see also Kumar 2014; Ghosh 2015). The caste and class divides in Christianity reveal a Hindu–​Christian relationship that is casteist/​classist in nature, and suggest that at least for the Syrian Christians, caste solidarity is stronger than that related to religion.This complicated but largely positive and strong Hindu–​Christian relationship should give pause

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to scholars of Indian Christianity (who tend to focus on Hindu–​Christian tension), and it begs deeper analysis into how brahmanical patriarchal power functions across religions.

Conclusion On May 25, 2018, Kevin P.  Joseph and Neenu Chacko registered their marriage despite the fact that Neenu’s parents objected to their marriage because Kevin Joseph was a Dalit Christian. The very next day, Kevin and his cousin Aneesh were kidnapped by a gang of men. Aneesh was assaulted during the kidnapping, but was abandoned by the gang and survived. However, Kevin’s body was found days later drowned in a canal. Although the state of Kerala is seen as “progressive,” Kevin Joseph’s murder has brought issues of casteism within Christianity and brahmanical patriarchal marriage norms into relief. Ten men associated with and allegedly hired by Neenu’s family members were convicted of the crime in August of 2019, after a trial during which Neenu testified against her brother and father, who were accused in the case. A retired judge of the Kerala High Court, Justice B. Kemal Pasha, stated that the so-​called “honor killing” exposed the social attitude that someone belonging to a “dominant” caste—​which they consider as dominant—​can’t marry someone who doesn’t belong to a non-​ dominant caste. Even within the Christian community, Dalits are not considered as “real Christians” by the others. A Dalit Christian marrying a Christian from another denomination is not welcomed. (quoted in Balan 2019) Kevin Joseph’s murder is not the only recent case concerning issues of sexism and casteism in Indian Christianity. The Syrian Christian community is currently undergoing what one could call a reckoning. In July 2018, a woman from the Malankara Orthodox Church, an Orthodox sect of Syrian Christianity, came forward claiming that after she sought absolution from the “sin” of being sexually abused, the priest hearing the confession blackmailed and sexually exploited her. The survivor named four Orthodox priests in the blackmail/​sexual exploitation ring (Unnithan 2018). In August 2018, after the devastating floods in Kerala, a case was lodged against 28 Syrian Christian families who allegedly refused to share a relief camp and food with Dalits similarly affected by the floods (Semmalar 2018; Dalit Camera 2018). In September 2018, Syro-​Malabar Bishop Franco Mulakkal was arrested for the alleged rape of a nun. The authorities were slow to question Bishop Mulakkal, and only after protests from nuns across Kerala and international media attention was the Bishop arrested (Jacob 2018). Counter-​protests and smear campaigns against the alleged victim nun also occurred. A  few months later, on January 10, 2019, the Church re-​issued a reminder to the four nuns standing in support of the alleged victim to return to their home convents. The move was seen by Sister Anupama Kelamangalathuveliyil as an “attempt to split and destabilize” the protesting nuns (Express Web Desk 2019). Syrian Christians continue to show strong support for their dominant-​caste Hindu neighbors, as well. From December 2018 to January 2019, the state was rocked by protests against women’s entry into the Sabarimala temple (which had historically excluded women of reproductive age). In response, an estimated 3.5 million to 5 million women from Kerala gathered throughout the state to stand shoulder-​to-​shoulder against gender discrimination (Thiagarajan 2019). Positioning themselves against these women, and in alliance with the dominant-​caste Nair Service Society and the Brahmin organization, the Yogakshema

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Sabha, the Kerala Catholic Bishop’s Council voiced its opposition to the women’s wall, arguing it would “divide society” (Express News Service 2018). In each of these globally reported stories, the brahmanical patriarchal instincts of the Syrian Christian community rise to the surface. More must be said not just about how casteism is part of Christianity in India, but also about how alliances between dominant-​caste Hindus and the Syrian Christians serve to support and maintain caste/​class divides and patriarchal power there. Casteism/​classism within Christianity is directly related to the historical social, economic, and political interests shared by dominant-​caste Hindus and Syrian Christians at the expense of, and in domination over, Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi Christians. For this reason, it is particularly troubling when the Syrian Christian community is portrayed—​as it often is—​as proof of Christianity’s indigenous roots in India. While the Syrian Christian community does have a long and established history in India, it is a history that is inextricably tied to brahmanical patriarchal power. Discussions about Hindu–​Christian relations must therefore take on the nuanced caste, class, and gendered dynamics of “Christian minorities” in the state of Kerala and beyond.

Bibliography Ameerudheen, T.A. 2017. “‘Systematic Exclusion’: Why Kerala’s Schools and Colleges Have Few Dalit Teachers.” Scroll.in. November 22. Available at https://​scroll.in/​article/​858606/​systematic-​exclusion-​ why-​keralas-​schools-​and-​colleges-​have-​few-​dalit-​teachers. Accessed January 16, 2019. Balan, S. 2019. “Why the Kevin Murder Trial Is a Landmark in the Battle against Casteism in Kerala.” The News Minute. June 21. Available at www.thenewsminute.com/​article/​why-​kevin-​murder-​trial-​ landmark-​battle-​against-​casteism-​kerala-​104038. Accessed July 1, 2019. Chakravarti, U. 1993. “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State.” Economic and Political Weekly 28(14): 579–​85. Chowdhry, P. 2007. Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dalit Camera:  Through Un-​ Touchable Eyes. 2018. “Kerala Flood Relief & Syrian Christian Caste Arrogance.” Round Table India. September 20. Available at http://​roundtableindia.co.in/​~roundta3/​ index.php?option=com_​content&view=article&id=9464:kerala-​flood-​relief-​syrian-​christian-​caste-​ arrogance&catid=119&Itemid=132. Accessed January 2, 2019. Express News Service. 2018. “Women’s Wall Will Cause Division in Society:  KCBC.” The New Indian Express. December 18. Available atwww.newindianexpress.com/​states/​kerala/​2018/​dec/​18/​womens-​ wall-​will-​cause-​division-​in-​society-​kcbc-​1912965.html. Accessed December 24, 2018. Express Web Desk. 2019. “Kerala Rape Case: Nuns Respond to Transfer Order, Say ‘Attempt to Split us Emotionally’.” The Indian Express. January 17. Available at https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​india/​ kerala-​rape-​case-​nun-​transfer-​order-​bishop-​franco-​mulakkal-​5543271/​. Accessed January 17, 2019. Gangadharan, T.K. 2003. Evolution of Kerala History and Culture. Calicut: Calicut University Central. Ghosh, A. 2015. “PM Narendra Modi Breaks His Silence, Says Govt Will Ensure Undeniable Right to Retain, Adopt Religion of Choice.” The Indian Express. February 18. Available at https://​indianexpress. com/​article/​india/​india-​others/​pm-​modi-​breaks-​silence-​on-​church-​attacks-​says-​govt-​committed-​ to-​religious-​freedom/​. Accessed January 15, 2019. Gundert, H. 1844. “Translation and Analysis of the Ancient Documents Engraved on Copper in Possession of the Syrian Christians and Jews of Malabar.” The Madras Journal of Literature and Science 13(1): 115–​46. Gurukkal, R. 2003. “St. Thomas Christians and Nambudiri Brahmins: A Note.” In Purther, B. (ed.). St. Thomas Christians and Nambudiris, Jews, and Sangam Literature:  A Historical Appraisal. Cochin:  LRC Publications, pp. 108–​16. Jacob, J. 2018. “Bishop Franco Mulakkal Arrested in Kerala Nun Rape Case.” India Today. September 21. Available at www.indiatoday.in/​india/​story/​bishop-​franco-​mulakkal-​arrested-​in-​kerala-​nun-​rape-​ case-​1345584-​2018-​09-​21. Accessed December 20, 2018. Jeffrey, R. 1992. Politics, Women and Well-​ Being:  How Kerala Became “A Model”. New Delhi:  Oxford University Press. Koodapuzha, X. 2000. “Response.” In Purther, B. (ed.). The Life and Nature of the St. Thomas Christian Church in the Pre-​Diamper Period. Cochin: LRC Publications, 188–​203.

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Syrian Christians, dominant-caste Hindus Kumar, A. and George, K.K. 2009. “Kerala’s Educational System: From Inclusion to Exclusion?” Economic and Political Weekly 44(41/​42): 55–​61. Kumar, G. 2014.“The Parrikar Model: Why Modi Is Reaching Out to Kerala’s Syrian Christians.” Firstpost. February 10. Available at www.firstpost.com/​politics/​the-​parrikar-​model-​why-​modi-​is-​reaching-​out-​ to-​keralas-​syrian-​christians-​1382099.html. Accessed January 18, 2019. Kurien, P. 2002. Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lindberg, A. 2014. “The Historical Roots of Dowries in Contemporary Kerala.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37(1): 22–​42. Menachery, G. 2000. “Social Life and Customs of the St. Thomas Christians in the Pre-​Diamper Period.” In Purther, B. (ed.). The Life and Nature of the St. Thomas Christian Church in the Pre-​Diamper Period. Cochin: LRC Publications, pp. 188–​204. Menon, S. 2000. A Survey of Kerala History. Madras: S.Viswanathan (Printers & Publishers) Pvt, Ltd. Mody, P. 2002. “Love and the Law: Love-​Marriage in Delhi.” Modern Asia Studies 35(1): 223–​56. Mohan, S.P. 2015. Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mundadan, M. 1970. Sixteenth Century Traditions of St. Thomas Christians. Bangalore:  Dharmaram College. Nampoothiri, D.D. 2015. “Confronting Social Exclusion: A Critical Review of the CREST Experience.” In Deshpande, S and Zacharias, U (eds.). Beyond Inclusion: The Practice of Equal Access in Indian Higher Education. New Delhi: Routledge, pp. 252–​88. Narayanan, M.G.S. 2002. “Further Studies in the Jewish Copper Plates of Cochin.” Indian Historical Review 29(1–​2): 66–​76. Padmanabhan, R. 2010. “Learning to Learn: Dalit Education in Kerala.” In Raman, K. (ed.). Development, Democracy and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development. New York: Routledge, pp. 102–​17. Payyappilly, S. 2014. Mixed Marriage: In the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches and the Particular Law of the Syro-​Malabar Church. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications. Philips, A. 2004. “Gendering Colour:  Identity, Femininity and Marriage in Kerala.” Anthropologica 46(2): 253–​72. “Religion.” 2011. Census India. Available at http://​censusindia.gov.in/​Census_​And_​You/​religion.aspx. Accessed June 24, 2015. Sanandakumar, S. 2014. “Rich Kerala Christians Praise Narendra Modi as He Gets Orthodox Seminary Support.” The Economic Times. January 3.  Available at https://​economictimes.indiatimes.com/​news/​ politics-​and-​nation/​r ich-​kerala-​christians-​praise-​narendra-​modi-​as-​he-​gets-​orthodox-​seminary-​ support/​articleshow/​28306980.. Accessed January 18, 2019. Semmalar, G.I. 2018. “How Caste Discrimination during and after Kerala Floods Has Affected Dalits, Adivasis.” The News Minute. October 30. Available atwww.thenewsminute.com/​article/​how-​caste-​ discrimination-​during-​and-​after-​kerala-​floods-​has-​affected-​dalits-​adivasis-​90804. Accessed December 20, 2018. “State of Literacy.” 2011. Census India. Available at http://​censusindia.gov.in/​2011-​prov-​results/​data_​ files/​india/​Final%20PPT%202011_​chapter6.pdf. Accessed June 4, 2012. Swiderski, R. 1988. “Northists and Southists:  A Folklore of Kerala Christians.” Asian Folklore Studies 47(1): 73–​92. Tharakan, P.K.M. 1984. “Socio-​Economic Factors in Educational Development Case of Nineteenth Century Travancore.” Economic and Political Weekly 19(45): 1913–​28. Thiagarajan, K. 2019. “Millions of Women in India Join Hands to Form a 385-​Mile Wall of Protest.” NPR. January 4.  Available at www.npr.org/​sections/​goatsandsoda/​2019/​01/​04/​681988452/​millions-​of-​ women-​in-​india-​join-​hands-​to-​form-​a-​385-​mile-​wall-​of-​protest. Accessed January 18, 2019. Thomas, S. 2016. “The Tying of the Ceremonial Wedding Thread:  A Feminist Analysis of ‘Ritual’ and ‘Tradition’ among Syro-​Malabar Catholics in India.” Journal of Global Catholicism 1(1): 104–​16. —​—​—​. 2018. Privileged Minorities:  Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Unnithan, P.S.G. 2018. “Kerala Priests Sex Scandal: 1 Surrenders, 3 Still on the Run.” India Today. July 12. Available at www.indiatoday.in/​india/​story/​kerala-​priests-​sex-​scandal-​1-​surrenders-​3-​still-​on-​the-​ run-​1284217-​2018-​07-​12. Accessed January 15, 2019. Vijayakumar, K. 1981. “The Influence of Caste in Kerala Politics: A Historical Perspective.” Journal of Kerala Studies Parts 1–​4, pp. 259–​75.

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7 HINDU–​J ESUIT ENCOUNTERS Francis X. Clooney, SJ

The Catholic–​Hindu relation—​to be understood in the context of other Christian ways of relating to Hindu traditions, which Thomas (regarding Syriac traditions) and Jones (regarding Protestant) have described—​has played out in many ways involving various forms of Hindu and Catholic presence, and certainly, on the Catholic side, through the agency of many women and men in various religious orders and among the laity. (See Clooney [forthcoming] for distinctive features of Hindu–​Catholic relations, the rich interactions made possible by features unique to each, and features shared in common.) Within the wider Catholic framework, this brief essay focuses on the Hindu–​Jesuit relation as a characteristic and distinctive form of the Hindu–​ Catholic relation, itself an important instance of the Hindu–​Christian relationship.Throughout, I use the general terms “Hinduism” and “Catholicism,” “Hindu” and “Catholic,” and “Jesuit” as a shorthand, but I do not concede that any of these is utterly simple or possessed of an easily identifiable essence. I write as a Jesuit too, mindful of the intersections between the overall Jesuit encounter with Hinduism and my personal experiences of Hinduism as studied and as a lived reality.1 I focus on the intellectual Hindu–​Jesuit encounter visible in the notable works of some extraordinary Jesuits, even if every one of them is really only part of a much larger network with complex social and political ties and various forms of apologetics, as amply illustrated in this Handbook, and particularly in the essays by Fernandes, Young, and Boopalan. Any such encounter can be studied in terms of the outer features of it—​political, economic, etc.—​but also, as it were, on the inside, in terms of the religious dimensions that give the encounters a significance not merely of incidental importance. Spiritual and theological intentions are as pertinent as historical data. While this essay focuses on intellectual encounters and theological exchanges, from the start we must keep in mind that most of the positive and fruitful contacts of Jesuits and Hindus in India have occurred in educational contexts, in the many Jesuit high schools and colleges across the subcontinent. As early as 1543, immediately after the arrival of Francis Xavier, Jesuits started teaching at St. Paul’s in Goa, and since then it is in the schools that the most sustained interaction of Jesuits and Hindus has taken place. Since the Jesuit schools have been highly esteemed over the centuries, we can say that these schools were highly successful sites for intellectual interaction. In such schools, the majority of students have always been Hindu. One can also extend this thread of ordinary contexts by reflection on Jesuit

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parishes and Jesuit mission stations in every region of India, where daily encounters extended over years. Some were tense, rendered difficult by religious tensions, but most testified rather to the possibility of living as neighbors in harmony—​even when your neighbor happens to be a foreigner, a Catholic priest, and a Jesuit. Likewise, while much of this essay has to do with famous foreigners—​rather than the ordinary disagreements, partial agreements, etc.—​we should not neglect the fact that over 4,000 Indian Jesuits live and work in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka today. Throughout, I speak mainly to the Jesuit side of all these encounters, but near the essay’s end I return briefly to the still more elusive question of Hindu views of Jesuits.

Francis Xavier and the beginnings of Hindu–​Jesuit encounter India was the first country in which Jesuits worked outside of Europe, a nearly 500-​year commitment that began at Francis Xavier’s arrival there in 1542. Jesuits have worked in India continuously since then, excepting during the era of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus, a period begun in 1773 by a papal decree that abolished the Order, confiscated properties, and expelled or imprisoned members. The decree was reversed only in 1814. After a long process of restoration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the number of Jesuits in India is in fact the largest in the world. So there is a great deal indeed that one might say on “Hindu–​Jesuit encounters.” (For overviews of the history of the Jesuits in India, see Correia-​Afonso 1997, Fernando 2016, de Mendonça 2007, and more specialized studies such as Xavier and Županov 2015, and Rubiés 2001.) We naturally begin a study of the relations of Jesuits and Hindus with Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit to reach India and to encounter Hindus (and see also Young on Xavier’s encounters with Hindu intellectuals). To understand this earliest encounter, we can look at a letter Xavier wrote from India in 1544 to Ignatius and his companions in Rome. Throughout the long letter, he combines utterly firm convictions, zealous ambitions, energetic labor, and moments of openness and innovation, all in a tightly defined project aimed at bringing Christ to Asia and Asians to conversion. Xavier shows himself to be confident and vigorous enough in his teaching and work of conversion that barriers of language and expectation do not hinder him. Translators helped him to teach the people, and to teach them basic Catholic prayers, to be memorized and repeated again and again. He was an educator who very much wanted those listening to him to learn a better way on the basis of good, clear instruction. But he was not against the destruction of “pagan” artifacts and places of worship, even at the cost of family dissension, as newly converted boys would, at least in some cases, rush to destroy their village temples, with Xavier’s approval (Francis Xavier 1992, p. 66) Xavier coupled his animosity toward Hindu worship with disregard for what he took to be the false pretenses of Brahmins, the leaders of Indian religious society. He was initially inclined not even to enter into conversation with Brahmins, convinced that such dialogue would lead nowhere. The story might have ended there, with a well-​intentioned preacher sorely lacking in respect for the religious practices and structures he encountered. There surely have been Jesuits with that attitude since Xavier’s time.Yet, as he reports in the same letter, Xavier also glimpsed a basis for a further conversation when he met a relatively learned Brahmin who began to tell Xavier what Brahmins really believe: They have some writings in which they preserve their commandments. The language used for teaching in their schools is like the Latin used in ours. He recited their commandments for me very well, giving a good explanation to each one of them. Those who are wise observe Sundays, something that is quite incredible. On Sundays 80

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they say no other prayer than the following, which they repeatedly recite, “Om Sri Narayanaya Namah,” which means, “I adore thee, God, with your grace and assistance for ever;” and they recite this prayer very gently and softly in order to keep the oath they have taken. He told me that the natural law keeps them from having many wives; and that in their writings it is stated that a time will come when all are to live under one law. This Brahmin further told me that many incarnations are taught in those schools. (Francis Xavier 1992, pp. 71–​72) In this first instance of a Jesuit’s dialogue with a Hindu, Xavier himself learned to see Indians and their beliefs and practices in a slightly more nuanced light. He believed he recognized knowledge of the one God, creator of heaven and earth (though a knowledge hidden lest the revenues of idolatry dry up); commandments; observance of the Sabbath and the recitation of Sabbath prayers; the natural law; and monogamy. All of this made sense, and suddenly India appeared a more interesting and complex religious world, and Xavier glimpsed dimensions of Indian life that could not be written off as idolatrous or demonic or worthy only of eradication—​even if, in his view, such insights were still mixed with superstition. Similarly, Xavier reported, other Brahmins he spoke with eventually acknowledged the truth of his own positions and admitted the truth of the Christian religion as most harmonious with the best in human nature. But even such Brahmins refused to convert—​due, Xavier thought, to the pressure of public opinion. Drawing on this same letter of Xavier, Young points us to an encounter in which Xavier had a brief but complex conversation with Brahmins, a tale partly of miscommunication and misunderstanding, and partly of real differences regarding what counts religiously in terms of truths and practices (Young 1989). We may conclude here too that the Jesuits came across as argumentative intellectuals who, however, did not understand how Hindu knowledge fit together; they picked and chose matters they grasped—​regarding idols, myths, etc.—​and sought to disprove them in order to undercut, they hoped, the entire edifice of Hinduism. This first encounter is in nuce paradigmatic for all that would follow:  equal parts of zeal, rationality, distrust, great insights and claims wide of the mark, and glimpses of something new that a Christian might learn, with more or less attention to what might be recognized as starkly different.

The golden age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Despite the Jesuit theological interests, adaptation was, even early on, a matter of language, the mundane but essential work of devising grammars and compiling dictionaries. For instance, Henrique Henriques (1520–​1600) composed a Tamil grammar and a catechism in Tamil. The Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stephens, SJ (1549–​1619) is a complete retelling of the life of Jesus, and an impressive effort to express the gospel in Konkani, the language of Goa. Recently, however, it has been read more acutely in light of the violence against Hindus in the same period—​as not simply a fresh telling of the Christian story in the narrative form of a purāṇa, but one that would do well to replace the Hindu purāṇas which, in the Christian India imagined by the missionaries, would fall out of favor and be forgotten (Henn 1994, pp. 65–​82). In the same vein of appreciation for language and literature, and all the more impressively was the work of Constantine Beschi, SJ (1680–​1747).This brilliant linguist, apologist, and theologian showed imaginative mastery in retelling the Christian story in his famed Tempāvaṇi (The Unfading Garland), which retells the Christian story in an elegant Tamil style, and with great originality, from the viewpoint of St. Joseph. Apologetics are present. In the twenty-​seventh 81

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chapter, for instance, Joseph is told by Jesus to instruct the Egyptians in virtue and, as necessary, to refute the errors of the pagan priests whose beliefs make virtue nearly impossible. But the overall approach focused on the beautiful, seeking a way of beauty by which to communicate with Hindus. Ignatius Hirudayam, SJ (1977) explored the linguistic, cultural, and religious sensitivities of Beschi who, though ever the missionary, went well beyond the dynamics of apologetics in his determination to present the gospel in an aesthetically pleasing manner that would win over listeners by the positive elements of the gospel rather than by relentless criticism of the Hindu traditions. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a golden age of Jesuit–​Hindu encounter of the theological genre. These centuries witnessed innovative work by missionaries who tried to minimize cultural differences as much as possible. The era was astonishing in terms of the learning that occurred, even if admittedly far removed from the conditions of twenty-​first-​ century interreligious learning. The Jesuits famously made efforts to adapt to the local cultures in language and dress and to accommodate as many customs as possible. Roberto de Nobili (1579–​1656) is well known as the Jesuit and Catholic leader in this regard, eager to recontextualize the gospel in Indian terms. His writings, as will be evident quickly to anyone who reads them, are marked by an extraordinary balancing act:  a robust defense of adaptation on the one hand, alongside sharp polemic against whatever in Indian culture he identified as pagan and contrary to the gospel. We must be impressed with de Nobili’s careful and intelligent appropriation of Indian culture, but also notice how deliberately and systematically he identified a small set of beliefs and practices which could not be assimilated into a Christian worldview and which had to be rejected as superstition and idolatry in theory and practice. He was as stubborn in refusing to comprehend such features as he was steadfast in his generally broad understanding. What seemed essentially religious was judged to be superstitious and had to be eradicated whenever possible. Hindu deities had to be labeled false insofar as they indicated anything more than reasonable inklings of God. De Nobili’s texts indicate his belief that the error of idolatry can be traced in theory (e.g., in the Inquiry into the Meaning of “God”) to wrong understandings of the very meaning of God that then played out in erroneous worship (e.g., in the Refutation of Calumnies). Such mistakes in theory and in practice were harmful overlays that spoiled generally sound social structures (such as were defended in the Report). (For a translation of the Report and the Inquiry, see de Nobili 2000. That translation of the Report is a revision of that done by Pujo in de Nobili 1972.) De Nobili’s rejection of elements one might consider basic to Indian culture is all the more notable because when he wanted to understand and accommodate, he was perfectly capable of going out of his way to improvise new categories in order to foster appreciation of aspects of Indian culture that seemed very foreign to most Europeans—​for example, certain ways of dressing, a strict vegetarian diet, and even caste relationships (see Boopalan’s essay in this volume). But the balancing of much acceptance with some rejection was a correlative and necessary feature of this project of understanding, since total sympathy and understanding would not have served well the missionary project. Whatever he might have learned, the logic of his missionary scholarship would still not allow him to embrace wholeheartedly the traditions he found in South India, nor even to understand and explain their imperfections as he would the imperfections others found in his own Catholicism. Generous approval on most fronts required some point or points at which condemnation could proceed. The realm of the unintelligible and the unacceptable had to exist, had to be discovered, conceptualized, and critiqued, were the work of conversion to remain clear and urgent even among missionaries inclined to scholarly work. 82

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The Dispelling of Ignorance, probably from late in de Nobili’s life in India (Clooney 2009a), explores various perfections of God, each topic marking both a positive theology and also a polemical exclusion of other gods. It displays more knowledge of the local religions than did the earlier Inquiry, and also stresses the value of empirical observation, but now even by introducing scientific learning regarding the size and make-​up of the universe. Arguments about the perfections of God are tested with reference to impressions of lived religion, and by way of more empirical verification of reasoned truths about God. Operative is a new dynamic in the emerging European view of religion, a shift in opinion toward the empirical and the verifiable: a religion that cannot verify its claims does not merit being taken seriously. Hindu beliefs, already scrutinized regarding their logic and assessed regarding differences from Christian belief, are now also measured with respect to their adequacy to the new scientific account of the world. Most indigenous learning is ruled out as unscientific, even regarding the natural world. (Of course, this trend is not entirely to the benefit of the Jesuits, since soon enough Christianity too will be subjected to scrutiny over evidence for its claims and the coherence of its beliefs and practices.) The Dispelling of Ignorance also opens the way to a distinctive Jesuit mix of ethnography, anthropology, and science—​that is to say, a shift from conversation with Hindus to a discourse about India and about Hinduism, giving priority to the search for superior knowledge rather than the earlier apologetic aims. For examples of this shift in intellectual disposition, we note briefly two later Jesuit scholars, Jean Venance Bouchet (1655–​1732) and Gaston-​Laurent Coeurdoux (1691–​1779). In their works, the missionary agenda is muted, even if Hinduism is inevitably still read through Western and Christian lenses. Jean Venance Bouchet, SJ, was a Jesuit missionary in South India for over forty years, largely in the first decades of the eighteenth century. His extant writings are mainly in French, long letters for the audience back home. From these letters, we learn that he led a spartan existence, his eating and drinking marked by an austerity owing both to a paucity of resources and to a determination to live as an ascetic. He was a prominent member of the group of Jesuits known as “pandarasamis,” who, in Rajamanickam’s words, were sufficiently respected and at the same time could deal with all the castes, even with the Brahmins, though they could not be their teachers. They did not need to be Sanskrit scholars nor strict vegetarians nor were they obliged to fast every day. They could look after the low castes more easily. (Rajamanickam 1972, p. 49) What had been de Nobili’ s personal adaptive practice had become a standard form of missionary acculturation. Bouchet studied Indian culture and religion deeply and in breadth. He wrote nine substantial letters back to Europe which exemplify the progress he had made in understanding India. He showed interest in historical explanations, and in tracing Indian religion back to the biblical and Greek pagan worlds. His letter on reincarnation (1714) shows his staunch missionary attitude, and also his growing interest simply in the details of Indian religion. This typical letter covers several main topics: the Indians and the errors of the ancients; transmigration, attacked even by Francis Xavier; and the similarities of the Greek and Indian beliefs regarding reincarnation, considered in detail and with reference to Indian and Greek sources. He then describes how he could then use his knowledge of reincarnation in refuting Hindu beliefs, relying on the rigorous logical thinking found in European philosophical argumentation. Learning and polemic are in tension in the letter; it is only later on, I suggest, that a greater and greater mass of learning would dampen the enthusiasm for polemic and dull the edge of its argumentation. 83

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The strengths and obvious shortcomings of this version of the Christian study of Hinduism are manifest: careful learning, enthusiastic participation in European arguments, some engagement with some willing Indian intellectuals, expectations regarding rational discourse—​but without an expectation that his Hindu interlocutors might have ideas and arguments not anticipated earlier on in the West. Resources for the Christian study of Hinduism were accumulating, with considerable spiritual energy driving that study, but without satisfactory evidence of the mutuality required for the Hindu–​Christian studies to which we aspire today. We see a further step, and a final one for the eighteenth-​century Jesuits, in the ascendancy of Jesuit Indology in Coeurdoux’s Manners and Customs of the Indians (Moeurs et Coutumes des Indiens).This work shows, by my reading, a deeper rebalancing in the intellectual work, with the sheer work of understanding taking precedence over missionary zeal and polemic. The Manners offers a meticulous description of the life, practices, and beliefs of the Brahmin. If de Nobili’s Dispelling of Ignorance argues according to the robust logic and disciplined argumentation of scholasticism with a measure of scientific precision added in, the Manners more fully embraces the empirical and scientific frame of mind. Science takes the place of religious argumentation, and exactitude in insight and conclusion matter more than any practical missionary payoff. In this light, the Manners is an early instance of a post-​missionary study of Hinduism that was largely an intellectual enterprise without any explicit evangelical agenda. No matter how positive many of these efforts are, such encounters were for many Hindus rather bitter. The first experience of Christianity, even as presented by the most spiritual of Jesuits, was tainted by colonial power and colonial intrusion, be it Portuguese, Dutch, French, or most notably, that domination imposed by the British empire. However the Jesuits sought to distinguish themselves as honest interpreters, their Christianity was in fact the religion of foreign powers that had exercised and would exercise brutal force when the colonizers deemed it necessary. (For more on such reactions, see Fernandes and Bauman in this volume.)

Cautious new beginnings It seems fair to observe that the Society of Jesus, upon its return to India (1834) after the disruption of the Suppression era, was a more cautious presence working in the more settled and even predictable world of the emerging British India. The new Jesuit missionaries arriving in India seemed interested primarily in institutional developments such as the founding of schools and colleges. They did not make any notable contribution to the explicit emerging field of comparative theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Knowledge was accumulating and theology needed to take the fact and meaning of religions into account, but Jesuits did not show leadership in the new learning. Scholar-​administrators such as Joseph Bertrand, SJ, proceeded most cautiously in defending the new Jesuit mission and the memory of the pre-​Suppression Jesuits, and kept innovation and bold learning at a distance (Clooney 2009b). More typical were the polemical works of scholar/​practitioners such as Leo Meurin, SJ (1825–​1895) in Bombay. His essay “God and Brahm” (1891) is an exercise in Christian apologetics which, though replete with reference to Hindu texts, yields no hint of openness to possible truth in those texts or to further dialogue with Hindu intellectuals. (On the general issue of Catholic interest in Asian religions in the nineteenth century and up to 1950, see van Wiele 2008.) In the early twentieth century, some Jesuits in Calcutta demonstrated a new openness to interreligious learning by developing a Catholic study of Hinduism that was academic and theologically informed: Aquinas meets India, so to say.William Wallace, a convert to Catholicism from the Anglican tradition who then too became a Jesuit, was a leader in an era of Catholic and Jesuit study of Hinduism. William Wallace (1863–​1922) rethought his Christian identity rather 84

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dramatically through his encounter with Hinduism, and, as a result, became a Catholic and then a Jesuit (Clooney 2018). Even as Wallace was becoming a staunch Catholic, he became a vigorous defender of Hinduism against its detractors and insisted that the next generation of Jesuits had to study Hinduism deeply, with the necessary linguistic tools in place. As a result of Wallace’s efforts, in the early twentieth century an informal school of Jesuit Indology flourished in Calcutta, energized at the start by Pierre Johanns (1882–​1955) and Georges Dandoy (1882–​1962). (See also Nicholson, Corigliano, and Amaladoss in this volume.) Johanns and Dandoy cooperated in the famous “To Christ through the Vedānta” essays (see Johanns 1996), published serially in The Light of the East (see Doyle 2006; Beltramini 2016; and Ganeri 2007). Here too, we see formidable learning, harnessed for the sake of understanding positively major streams of Hindu intellectual thought, now by the measure of the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.Their commitment to Aquinas provided a coherent frame as well as confidence that progress in an interreligious theological understanding could be achieved. Perhaps they would have been more open-​minded without reference to Aquinas and the tight hold of Thomistic thinking, but without such grounding they most likely would not have studied Vedānta at all. Though a highly intellectual genre of comparative theology, proceeding by ideas and concepts carefully compared and contrasted, it was not mere intellectualism, but a strategic way of bringing together the Hindu and the Catholic in a positive fashion. Robert Antoine (1914–​1981), Pierre Fallon (1912–​1985), and Richard De Smet (1916–​1997) were worthy successors to Johanns and Dandoy. They continued the sustained study of Vedānta and related fields. Particularly through his famed doctoral dissertation (Gregorian University, 1953) on the “theological method of Śaṅkara” (see De Smet 2013), De Smet adapted this “Jesuit Vedānta” to the changing world of the academic study of Hinduism. De Smet’s near contemporary Jacques Dupuis (1923–​2004), who taught in India for decades and then in Rome, was not a Vedānta scholar, but in his theology of religions he engaged the possibility of deep learning from Hinduism as spiritually and intellectually viable and profound. (On the twentieth-​century Jesuit view of Hinduism, see also Clooney’s afterword to this volume.)

The Society of Jesus as an Indian society I have for the most part in the preceding pages referred to foreign Jesuits, from the West. It is necessary now to attend to the dawning era of Indian Jesuit social and intellectual leadership. In the years after Indian independence, and as the age of the foreign missionary engagement in India waned, Jesuit interest in Hindu traditions remained vital, now as a matter of native, Indian Jesuits engaging their own culture and often their own family heritages. The scholarly tradition of learning has continued. Some Jesuits have been Indologists standing in close continuity with the heritage of the European Jesuits, Indian Jesuits such as John Vattanky, Ignatius Puthiadam, Francis D’Sa, and Ishanand Vempeny. Yet they and other Jesuit scholars, including Noel Sheth (1943–​2017), Michael Amaladoss, and Anand Amaladass, have extended the reach of learning more directly into issues of dialogue, culture, arts, and music. A few Jesuits, most notably Ignatius Hirudayam (1910–​1995) and, in the next generation, Sebastian Painadath, have combined Jesuit intellectual commitments with the contemplative virtues and practices of the ashram movement, thus bridging the gap between the Jesuit and the Hindu, by a more concerted combination of inquiry and spiritual practice. In recent decades new concerns and energies have come to the fore in Catholic India, most notably with the rise of liberation theology and in Dalit theology’s thirst for justice. Some Jesuits, scholars included, have championed distance from caste Hinduism, so as to focus the Society’s energies on the interests of Dalits and tribal peoples. Some, such as New Testament scholar 85

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Georges Soares-​Prabhu (1929–​1995), have also criticized the Christian ashram movement and other movements of accommodation as marginal to the needs of the modern Church, which has to be committed to the poor (see Soares-​Prabhu 1991). On the whole it would seem that the Jesuits of India, the largest number in the world, have not yet settled on a unified approach to mission, nor on how to respond to and work with the vast majority of Indians who are Hindu. The schools and colleges still flourish as primary sites for the encounter of Jesuits and Hindus, but what the next stage in the relation of Jesuits and Hinduism will be, on the intellectual level, is not yet clear.

Other venues for Hindu–​Jesuit relations This essay has focused almost entirely on the more scholarly encounter of Hindus and Jesuits, in part because of available materials, and in larger part due to the interests and limitations of this author. But it would be remiss to neglect entirely the many other venues in which, from the time of Francis Xavier on, Jesuits and Hindus met. Jesuit churches and mission stations were everywhere in India, and figures such as Constant Lievens, SJ, championed the cause of the tribal peoples, bringing large numbers into the Church (see Aril 2001). We must remember too the schools and colleges founded by the Society of Jesus in India, where, from the time of St. Paul’s College in Goa in the sixteenth century to the great institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—​St. Xavier’s in Bombay and Calcutta, St. Joseph’s in Trichy, Loyola in Madras, St. Xavier’s in Kathmandu—​Jesuits have taught many generations of Hindu (and Muslim and Buddhist) boys, rarely converting them but, by all accounts, having a profound effect on their lives (see Namboodiry 1995).

Hindu views of Jesuits As was stated at the start of this essay, this has been largely a report on the Jesuit side of the matter. It cannot be denied that most accounts of Hindus and Jesuits have to do with what Jesuits thought of the encounters, since much less frequently do we hear the Hindu side of the matter. But such an admission must be followed up on by a determination to trace Hindu reactions to Jesuits. A few clues are already in place. There has always been controversy about the legacy of the Portuguese invasion and conquest of Goa. Half a century ago, A.K. Priolkar (1966) wrote on the violence and destruction endemic to the Portuguese establishment of Catholicism in Goa. Jesuits cannot be exonerated from a role in that imposition of empire in Goa. We have already noted Francis Xavier’s complicated engagement with Hinduism, though what is really needed is a Hindu letter about meeting Xavier; here we appreciate Young’s efforts, noted earlier, to tease out the Hindu side of that very early encounter, and his essay in this Handbook offers crucial context. We are indeed more widely indebted to Young, for his meticulous reconstruction of Hindu–​Christian conversations and debates in books such as Resistant Hinduism (1981) and, with Daniel Jeyaraj (2013), Hindu-​Christian Epistolary Self-​Disclosures, but these books do not pertain to the Jesuits. Many contemporary responses by Hindus to Christians, sometimes rather fiercely critical, do not bother to differentiate among Christians, and do not respond directly to Jesuits.Yet this lack of differentiation among kinds of Christians and kinds of missionaries tells us something about how Christians are perceived. Roberto de Nobili (1972, 2000) appends to his Indian Customs a summary of his arguments on caste and culture, and he supports it with the attestation of 108 Brahmins that his characterization of Indian customs is true. Margherita Trento (2018) has recently researched the case 86

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of the important but largely unknown Śivadharma who aided de Nobili in his experiments in adaptation, and as a convert was named Bonifacio. During the Christian debates about adaptation, Trento shows, Śivadharma/​Bonifacio skillfully persuaded Brahmins to be witnesses to the veracity of the Jesuit understanding of the distinctions of cultural and religious artifacts and practices, with the implication that one could be a Christian and a Brahmin at the same time. Ananya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles (2018) details the complex interactions of Jesuits and Hindus, and she too highlights the ways that both sides were negotiating not only religious but also political and economic factors in relation to one another. Other Jesuits echo the early reports of Xavier, de Nobili, and others, regarding how Brahmins argued with them, but were very rarely inclined to convert. In the modern academic theological context, there was been some theological response from Hindus to Jesuits, such as Trichur S. Rukmani’s polite but strong rejoinder to Richard De Smet’s theological reading of Śaṅkara (Rukmani 2003), and Chakravarthi Ram-​Prasad’s lengthy review of my 2010 Comparative Theology (Ram-​Prasad 2012). Ultimately, the relationship has to be reviewed and reconsidered in the current moment, with candor about aspirations and goals, but also with regret and repentance regarding what has gone wrong in the past. It is undeniable that Jesuit–​Hindu encounters have often taken place in contexts of unequal power, shadowed by colonial governments and occurring in settings and in Western languages instinctively informed by Christian norms.Western Jesuits need to reflect on this history in light of the legacy of colonialism, while Indian Jesuits can take a different course, pondering the substance and manner of the Christianity brought to India over the centuries, and the opportunities and challenges facing those who rightly insist on being fully Indian, fully Christian, and Jesuit precisely on those terms.

The global scene But in the end, we must opt for a still wider lens, to see the much wider global scene where Jesuits and Hindus are meeting one another. Immigration as a global phenomenon, particularly in the postcolonial era, has created many opportunities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas for encounter. Spirituality has created many fluid opportunities for exchange. Tony de Mello, SJ (1931–​1987) influenced many Western Christians’ perceptions of India, Hinduism, and their own Christianity. Yoga and other practices closely connected with Hinduism have flourished greatly in the United States, as teachers have brought various forms of Hindu spirituality and practice to life in a vast sweep of American life. Jesuits, too, have been directly or indirectly influenced by the arrival of Eastern spirituality; there is even a very lively and innovative initiative known as “Ignatian Yoga” (Ignatian Yoga n.d.). Worth noting too is that Jesuit high schools, colleges, and universities have often been welcome destinations for Hindu students. Here in the United States, for example, some Jesuit institutions are even at this writing breaking new ground. Georgetown University in the United States is the first Catholic university to hire a Hindu scholar and spiritual practitioner as a full member of its campus ministry.The current chair of the Theology Department at the University of San Francisco is a Hindu, the first to hold such a position at a Catholic university in the United States, perhaps anywhere. Even now there is much to be said for the creative common ground shared by Hindus and Jesuits, along with other Catholics and Christians, in facing today the common challenges of war and peace, human rights and justice, the ecological crisis, shared by all living being in the twenty-​first century. If it is now all the more important for religious intellectuals in all traditions to be in regular communication with one another, and to learn each other’s traditions more deeply and communicate that knowledge to their communities, then Jesuits and their Hindu 87

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counterparts will surely continue to play a leading role in the uncharted territory before us, particularly if the relationship grows beyond its long missionary history. In every age, the Hindu–​Jesuit relationship is with increasing precision and competence read by historians and scholars of colonialism in India (see, for example, Županov 2016). This reading is perhaps necessarily a reading “from the outside,” focused on the social and political and cultural conditions that enable and constrain authentic encounter and intellectual exchange. For a fully balanced assessment of the Hindu–​Jesuit relationship in the future, a renewal of the study “on the inside” will still be desirable, as both Jesuits and Hindus reflect, individually and together, on the meaning for their faith traditions of their long, evolving, and now global encounter.

Note 1 See Clooney (2006) on the parallels of my encounter with Hinduism and the Jesuit discovery of Hinduism. This essay, admittedly something of a Derridean twist, tells in parallel columns the general Jesuit story, in more detail than can be done here, alongside my own distinctively twentieth to twenty-​first-​century  story.

Bibliography Aril, J. 2001. The Missionary Approach of Fr. Lievens. Ranchi: D-​R Publication. Beltramini, E. 2016. “Hinduism in the Roman Catholic Imagination between the Two World Wars.” Asia 70(2): 333–​45. Chakravarti, A. 2018. The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodation, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Clooney, F.X. 2002. “A Charism for Dialogue: Advice from the Early Jesuit Missionaries in Our World of Religious Pluralism.” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 34(2): 4–​39. —​—​—​. (ed). 2006. “Francis Xavier, and the World/​s We (Don’t Quite) Share.” In Clooney, F.X. (ed.). Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 157–​80. —​—​—​. 2009a. “From Apologetics to Indology: A Case Study in the Scholarship of Roberto de Nobili, SJ.” Toronto Journal of Theology 25(1): 41–​56. Also in Clooney 2020. —​—​—​. 2009b. “Some Reflections on Caste according to Fr. J. Bertrand, SJ, 19th Century French Jesuit.” Indian Church History Review 43(2): 148–​57. Also in Clooney 2020. —​—​—​. 2018. “Alienation, Xenophilia, and Coming Home:  William Wallace, SJ’s From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East.” Common Knowledge 24(2): 280–​90. —​—​—​. 2020. Western Jesuit Scholars in India: Tracing Their Paths, Reassessing Their Goals. Leiden: Brill. —​—​—​. Forthcoming. “The Hindu-​Catholic Encounter.” In Valkenberg, W.G.B.M. (ed.). Brill Companion to Comparative Theology. Leiden: Brill. Correia-​Afonso, J. 1997. The Jesuits in India: 1542–​1773. Anand, Gujarat: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash. De Smet, R. 2013. Understanding Śaṅkara:  Essays by Richard De Smet. Coelho, I. (ed.). Delhi:  Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Doyle, S. 2006. Synthesizing the Vedānta: The Theology of Pierre Johanns, SJ. New York: Peter Lang. Fernando, L. 2016. “Jesuits and India.” Oxford Handbooks Online. Available at www.oxfordhandbooks.com/​ view/​10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780199935420.001.0001/​oxfordhb-​9780199935420-​e-​59. Accessed May 7, 2020. Ganeri, M. 2007. “Catholic Encounter with Hindus in the Twentieth Century: In Search of an Indian Christianity.” New Blackfriars 88(1016): 410–​32. Henn, A. 1994. Hindu-​Catholic Encounters in Goa:  Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Hirudayam, I. 1977. Christianity and Tamil Cultures. Madras: Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Institute for Advanced Study in Philosophy, University of Madras. Ignatian Yoga. n.d. Igantianyoga.com.www.ignatianyoga.com. Accessed May 7, 2020. Jeyaraj, D. and Young, R.F. 2013. Hindu-​Christian Epistolary Self-​Disclosures:  “Malabarian Correspondence” between German Pietist Missionaries and South Indian Hindus (1712–​1714).Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

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Hindu–Jesuit encounters Johanns, P. 1996. To Christ through the Vedānta. Greeff, T.D. (ed.). 2 vols. Bangalore:  United Theological College. Lockman, J. (publisher of the English edition). 1743. The Travels of the Jesuits into the Various Parts of the World Extracted from Their Letters to the Jesuits of France. 2 vols. Mendonça, D.d. (ed.). 2007. Jesuits in India: History and Culture. Anand, Gujarat: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash. Meurin, L. 1891.“God and Brahm.” in Select Writings of the Most Reverend Dr. Leo Meurin, SJ. Bombay: Printed at the Examiner Press, at the Fort. Murr, S. 1987. L’Inde Philosophique entre Bousset et Voltaire. 2 vols.Vol. 1. Mœurs et coutumes des Indiens (1777). Vol. 2. L’indologie du Père Cœurdoux. Paris: École française d’Extrême Orient. Namboodiry, U. 1995. St. Xavier’s: The Making of a Calcutta Institution. New Delhi: Viking. Nobili, R.d. 1972. Report on Indian Customs. Rajamanickam, S. (ed.). Pujo, J. (trans.). Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute. —​—​—​. 2000. Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Roberto de Nobili in Dialogue with the Learned Hindus of South India. Amaladass, A. and Clooney, F.X. (trans.). St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources. Indian edition, Chennai: Satya Nilayam Publication, 2005. Priolkar, A.K. 1966, “Truth Has to Be Told.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay 41: 254–​67. Rajamanickam, S. 1972. The First Oriental Scholar.Vienna: De Nobili Research Institute. Ram-​ Prasad, C. 2012. “Finding God with—​ and through—​ the Other.” Harvard Theological Review 105(2): 247–​55. Rubiés, J.P. 2001. “The Jesuit Discovery of Hinduism:  Antonio Rubino’s Account of the History and Religion of Vijayanagara (1608).” Archiv der Religionsgeschichte 3: 210–​56. Rukmani, T.S. 2003. “Dr.  Richard De Smet and Sankara’s Advaita.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 16(6): 12–​21. Soares-​Prabhu, G. 1991.“From Alienation to Inculturation: Some Reflections on Doing Theology in India Today.” In John,T.K. (ed.). Bread and Breath: Essays in Honor of Samuel Rayan, SJ. Anand, Gujarat: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, pp. 55–​99. Thébaud, A. 1878. The Church and the Gentile World at the First Promulgation of the Gospel. Considerations on the Catholicity of the Church Soon After Her Birth. 2 vols. New York: Peter F. Collier. —​—​—​. 1876. Gentilism: Religion Previous to Christianity. New York: D. & J. Sadlier. Trento, M. 2018. “Sivadharma or Bonifacio? Behind the Scenes of the Madurai Mission Controversy (1608–​1619).” In Županov, I.G. and Fabre, P.A. (eds.). The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World. Leiden: Brill. Wiele, J.v. 2008. “Ex oriente lux? The Representation of Asiatic Religions and Cultures in Catholic Education from 1870 until 1950.” Missionalia 36(1): 60–​85. Xavier, Â.B. and Županov, I.G. 2015. Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–​18th Centuries). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Xavier, F. 1992. “To His Companions Living in Rome (Cochin, January 15, 1544).” In Costelloe, M.J. (trans.). The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, pp. 63–​74. Young, R.F. 1981. Resistant Hinduism:  Sanskrit Sources on Anti-​Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-​ Century India.Vienna: Indological Institute, University of Vienna. —​—​—​. 1989. “Francis Xavier in the Perspective of the Śaivite Brahmins of Tiruchendur Temple.” In Coward, H. (ed.). Hindu-​ Christian Dialogue:  Perspectives and Encounters. New  York:  Orbis Books, pp. 64–​79. Županov, I.G. 2016, “The Historiography of the Jesuit Missions in India (1500–​1800).” Jesuit Historiography Online. Brill Online Reference Works. Available at https://​referenceworks.brillonline.com/​entries/​ jesuit-​historiography-​online/​the-​historiography-​of-​the-​jesuit-​missions-​in-​india-​15001800-​COM_​ 192579?s.num=0&s.f.s2_​parent=s.f.book.jesuit-​historiography-​online&s.q=the+historiography+of+j esuit+missions+in+india+%281500–​1800%29. Accessed May 7, 2020.

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8 STATE POWER IN THE RELATIONS BETWEEN CATHOLICS AND HINDUS Jason Keith Fernandes

Effectively appreciating the encounters between Hindus and Catholics requires that one locate Hinduism not only as an invention from the nineteenth century, but as the ideology of the Indian state, and, as such, an ideology actively sustained by the same. To talk about Hindu–​ Catholic encounters, therefore, is to necessarily talk about the relationship between Catholics and the Indian state, and to recognize Hindus as the subjects of this political formation. Toward this end, the chapter will progress in four stages.The first will elaborate the argument that Hinduism is sustained by the Indian state and propose eschewing the usual route of taking the term “Hindu” as a given. The chapter offers this proposal as a way to get out of the trap in which scholars usually find themselves when discussing religious encounters in India. The second points out that while Hinduism emerged, via Orientalist and nationalist interventions, beginning in the nineteenth century, Catholicism has been integral to the processes by which Hinduism and Indian nationalism were constituted from as early as the sixteenth century, with the institutional arrival of Catholicism via the patronage of the Portuguese crown. Developing the argument chronologically, the third section will discuss the Indian national movement and its linkage with Hindu nationalism, pointing out how even Indian secularism is in fact concerned with producing the Hindu subject. The fourth and final section will look at the manner in which Catholic elites in India, whether in the clergy, or the laity, by collaborating with the Indian nationalist project, have established a self-​defeating relationship with it. The articulation of Catholicisms compliant with nationalism has involved the privileging of dominant caste identities that are fundamentally at odds with the vision of human dignity and universalism preached by Christianity. Similarly, the desire to avoid governmental harassment on the issue of conversion has effectively turned the Catholic Church into a service provider for the Indian state, while simultaneously converting its transcendental message into an ideology that is compatible with secular liberalism.

There is no Hinduism, but the Indian state is its prophet The question of whether Hinduism is a nineteenth-​century construction or not is one that has attracted the attention of a number of scholars and has been admirably attended to in this volume by San Chirico. Rather than rehearse this argument all over again, I will merely highlight that my argument does not rest on denying the presence of organized faith practices 90

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in the subcontinent, nor on denying the presence of sophisticated ideologies embodied and perpetuated by complex institutions. I  concur with San Chirico’s argument in this volume that there was also some amount of conversation and borrowing among these ideologies, both in theory and practice. There is, therefore, no argument to be made that there was absolutely nothing that united various groups in the subcontinent. There are, however, good reasons not to rush to label these complexes as Hinduism. The first of these reasons is that doing so would require overlooking the reality of caste and the way it structures the subcontinent, and, more importantly, has structured nationalist politics in this space. Secondly, Hinduism, as it exists today, is more appropriately understood as an identity forged in the nineteenth century from pre-​existing resources selectively collated by those associated with the various forms of nationalism initiated by dominant caste groups in the subcontinent. To assert the existence of Hinduism prior to its formation under these nationalisms, as many scholars (including some in this volume) do as a matter of conviction or convenience, would therefore be to ignore the way caste operates, and to privilege dominant-​caste narratives while actively silencing narratives from subaltern castes and especially Dalit groups, consequently perpetuating and participating in a gross historical and continuing injustice. The propensity to read Hinduism back into an historical era when it did not yet exist is the result of a deep-​seated and often unconscious methodological nationalism which presumes that pre-​colonial polities were national societies, i.e., integrated, unified, and relatively homogenous entities. This was definitely not the case with South Asia, which was marked by the practice of caste. As much as concepts and even practices may have been shared across caste groups, it needs to be recognized that these practices were largely enclosed within the confines of individual castes that did not see each other as equal. Furthermore, the nature of hierarchical ranking in the subcontinent ensured that those at the bottom of the hierarchy were seen as progressively degraded to the extent that those at the very bottom were seen as sub-​human. Critiquing the assumption that something like today’s Hindu society existed more than several centuries ago, Soumyabrata Choudhury (2016) points to the work of the lower-​caste rights activist B.R. Ambedkar (1891–​1956), who specifically denied the existence of a Hindu society, likening caste polity instead to a collection of gangs (Ibid.). While there can be no doubt about the pre-​existence of Brahminical traditions in the subcontinent, what needs to be taken seriously is the body of arguments mounted by various scholars pointing to the manner in which Hinduism as we know it today was constructed as a result of Orientalist scholarship crafting a single religion out of the variety of practices that existed there (Inden 1992; King 1999; Thapar 1985; see also the discussion by San Chirico in this volume). This Orientalist tendency was actively supported by the upper-​caste and often Brahmin native informants of these Orientalists.These informants then independently affirmed the Orientalist vision through reform movements led by dominant-​caste groups in British domains. These movements, like the Ramakrishna movement initiated by Swami Vivekananda (discussed further in this volume by Rinehart, as well as by Sharma 2013), and the Arya Samaj movement initiated by Dayananda Saraswati, were not simply movements of religious reform; rather, in them, tendencies toward religious reform fused with what has come to be called the anti-​colonial Indian nationalist movement, as I explain further below. Rather than being a movement that took onboard the concerns of a diverse segment of the subcontinent’s population, the Indian nationalist movement was in fact a movement of the dominant castes clamoring for a share of political power. Shubnam Tejani (2007) suggests that while led by Brahmin and upper-​caste groups, incipient Hindu nationalism was sustained through the support of Jain, Baniya, and other Vaishya castes seeking upward mobility. Hindu reform movements and Indian nationalism, therefore, were merely two sides of the same coin. 91

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While the casteist element of Indian nationalism has been largely ignored by contemporary scholars, it was not lost on members of marginalized communities in British India, who looked upon the Indian national movement with suspicion (Omvedt 2011). After independence, the project of securing upper-​caste hegemony and unifying the country through allegiance to Hinduism continued. As such, the Indian state has not merely been a powerful representative of Hinduism, but has in fact sustained and continued to produce it. Among other ways it does this is by policing and expanding the definition of “Hinduism.” As in the Hindu Marriage Act (1952), for example, “Hindu” includes Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs while excluding anyone who is Muslim, Christian, a Parsee, or a Jew. This definition not only effects the exclusion of those seen as belonging to foreign faiths, but also prevents Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs from asserting an identity that is non-​Hindu. Another way in which the Indian state ensures Hindu hegemony is by denying access to the constitutionally mandated reservations (in Indian legislatures, academic institutions, the civil service, etc.) to Christians and Muslims from the historically marginalized castes. This denial not only sets ostensibly “indigenous” Indian faiths against “foreign” religions, as in the Hindu Marriage Act, but also discourages (by design) the conversion of members of marginalized castes to Christianity or Islam, while encouraging those who have converted to conceal their conversion for fear of losing access to affirmative action (see Ashok and Robinson 2010, as well as the example of the Banaras devotees of Jesus in San Chirico’s contribution to this volume). A third route through which the Indian state has ensured Hindu hegemony is through the series of oddly named “Freedom of Religion” laws enacted by various states since the 1950s to prohibit conversion by “force, fraud, and inducement.” The laws were challenged in court, both because of the way they could be used to harass all converts and evangelists and also due to the intrusive requirements (included in some of these legislations) that potential converts and those conducting conversion ceremonies indicate their intention ahead of time to law enforcement authorities in their district. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of these laws (see Heredia 2007, pp. 81–​82; for more on these laws, see Richards’s chapter in this volume). The Supreme Court has intervened in other ways to produce the Hindu subject, such as in its 2014 decision in the case of K.P. Manu, Malabar Cements Ltd vs. Chairman, Scrutiny Committee for Verification of Community Certificate, in which it affirmed that Christian members of Scheduled Caste communities who “reconverted” to Hinduism could claim access to the reservations available to members of the Scheduled Castes. In addition to clearly advancing the exclusion of non-​ “Hindu” members of marginalized castes from positive affirmation, what should also be noted is that in its use of the term reconversion the Supreme Court implicitly suggests that Hinduism is the primordial identity of those on the subcontinent. A further effect of laws and rulings such as these, as Nathaniel Roberts points out, is to confirm the view that Dalits are Hindus, a view that neither Dalits nor others held prior to the twentieth century (Roberts 2016, p. 125). This legal confirmation has had some limited effect, since, at least in urban settings, Dalits now accept themselves as Hindus, especially because this definition is backed by the force of law. These examples demonstrate the manner in which the Indian state actively produces the Hindu as a national subject.This statal effort is required not merely due to the recent emergence of “Hindu” identity, but also because there could well be no such identity at all were there no state violence backing the project of creating it. Rather, the grand fabric of Indian and Hindu identity would revert back to the myriad regional, caste, and other associational identities that marked the subcontinent prior to the creation of Hindu and British-​Indian identity under the sovereignty of the British Raj.

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The Catholic formation of Hinduism Given that it is the Indian state that has produced and continues to produce “Hindus,” any narrative that speaks of Hindu–​Catholic encounters must therefore speak of encounters between Catholics and various forms of Hindu/​Indian nationalism. This position prohibits one from portraying the encounter between Catholic missionaries and the various caste groups in the subcontinent from the sixteenth century onwards as a meeting between Catholics and Hindus. It does, however, have the advantage of allowing us to recognize that it was the encounter of Catholic missionaries with these diverse caste groups in the subcontinent that laid the foundations for how India would be represented in the future, as well as for the construction of the diverse practices and traditions within the subcontinent into a single form called Hinduism. The predominant scholarly narration of the production of Hinduism credits High Orientalism under the auspices of the British East India Company (BEIC) from the late eighteenth century onwards with the consolidation of diverse subcontinental traditions into a unified religious system called “Hinduism” (see, e.g., Inden 1992; Dirks 2001). However, in Catholic Orientalism (2015), Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov argue that what is often lost in these narratives is that the Orientalists were in fact building upon practices of classification that had been established since the extension of the Portuguese Padroado (or patronage, i.e., the obligation of the Portuguese crown to support the Catholic faith) to the subcontinent. If High Orientalism in the subcontinent was necessitated by the BEIC’s need to know, classify, and administer populations and territories, classificatory schemes were similarly required by the Portuguese crown’s assertion of sovereignty along the western seaboard of the peninsula, beginning at the very end of the fifteenth century. Take, for example the Foral of 1526, compiled by the Vedor da Fazenda (Comptroller of the Portuguese Crown), Afonso Mexia, which enumerated villages and the laws and customs of the territories of the Portuguese crown (Ibid., chapt. 2). This process of establishing an administrative apparatus not only relied on appreciating the context of the local populations, but was also critically reliant (as were Orientalist scholars subsequently) on the cooperation with the local elites, who were not always perfectly forthcoming. Works like Mexia’s, then, contributed to the creation of an archive that would later be used by other European powers in their own attempts to understand the peoples over whom they asserted sovereignty and with whom they had to negotiate. More importantly, however, the efforts of Catholic missionaries to bring local populations into the fold of Christianity contributed not only to the idea that all places had somewhat unified societies, as in Europe, but also to the notion that the various religious practices they found in what they assumed was a unified society were aspects of a single religion. One of the first such efforts at constructing a coherent system of the varied local practices and doctrines that were understood as religious was Das opiniões, ritos e cerimonias, de todos os gentios da India (“Of Opinions, Rites and Ceremonies of All Gentiles in India”), an account from 1603 attributed to the Augustinian monk Agostinho de Azevedo. Xavier and Županov (2015) identify the Malabar Rites controversy as critical to the production not only of Brahminism, but also the distinction between the religious and the secular, as well as the presumption that a single, unified society existed on the subcontinent.The rites controversy was a clash over the missionary methods employed by Jesuits in the Madurai, Mysore, and Carnatic missions during the first half of the eighteenth century. While the controversy would eventually be debated in Rome itself, it emerged from a conflict between two Jesuit companions in the Madurai mission who espoused two radically different notions of what it meant to be Catholic and disagreed, accordingly, on how to go about Christianizing the native

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populations (for a detailed discussion of this clash, see Županov 2001, as well as Boopalan’s chapter in this volume). For Gonçalo Fernandes, a former soldier turned Jesuit, to be Christian or Catholic was equivalent to being Portuguese. As was the case for the natives under the sovereignty of the Portuguese crown, Fernandes advocated that formal conversion to Christianity should be followed by a process of Christianization whereby the converts were encouraged to adopt Portuguese forms of dress and social behavior (Xavier 2008). Fernandes’s companion, Roberto de Nobili, a Roman noble and Jesuit, recognized that in the Tamil region where they were both missionaries (a space that was outside of the sphere of direct Portuguese control), the very Portuguese social practices that converts were encouraged to adopt were seen as marks of the low-​status foreigners known as Paranguis (also Parangis, or Franks). Intent on gathering upper-​caste converts to Christianity, Nobili realized that insisting on adopting Portuguese mores and mien would serve only to alienate upper-​caste groups in the region. To avoid this, Nobili sought to distance the Catholicism he conveyed from Portuguese-​ness. He did so, inter alia, by representing himself as a Brahmin from Rome and adopting sartorial markers of local Brahmins. It was this adoption of markers of the dominant castes in the practice of Catholicism outside of the sphere of the Portuguese crown that irked Fernandes and led to the conflict that eventually escalated all the way to Rome (Aranha 2015). It also had the effect of helping produce a single unified Indian religion, Brahminism, and identified Brahmins as this religion’s natural leaders, an idea that remains influential even today, though one that is now hotly contested. Nobili’s strategy, and indeed his later defense, rested on a distinction between the civil (which included customs, habits, and rituals) and the religious (comprising essentially of belief). The distinction was an innovation, given that in the early sixteenth century, culture was considered inseparable from religious beliefs (Xavier and Županov 2015, p. 153).The distinction was necessary, however, if the Jesuits were to secure conversions from among the dominant groups in the elaborate polities they encountered in Asia. Their practice of accommodation sought to indulge local social structures while displacing pagan religious belief. Xavier and Županov point out that by introducing this distinction between culture and religion, thereby contracting the realm of the religious, Jesuits effectively “invented societies, such as Confucian Chinese Empire and Brahmanical India” that to their mind “functioned perfectly, or almost, without religion” (Ibid., p. 155). Interestingly, when the dispute first arose, both Nobili and Fernandes acknowledged that the polity they were encountering in Madurai was divided into castes and sects. While Fernandes seems to have acknowledged this diversity, Nobili reconstituted it as a single society by ignoring the social divisions he observed and working with a simplistic binary of high and low. In sum, it was Catholic interventions that actually created the idea of an Indian society and a religion that they called Brahminism and would come to be known as “Hinduism.” Catholic interventions not only produced the idea of an Indian society, and religion, but also created the possibilities for the construction of a common public sphere. In his chapter in this volume Clooney points to the constitution of grammars of subcontinental languages by Jesuit scholars. The immense value of these texts cannot be underestimated precisely because they laid the foundation for the creation of a commonality among the diverse castes in regions and consequently the possibility for the linguistic public sphere that would emerge in the latter colonial period and undergird the nationalist movement in British India. To appreciate this argument, it is necessary to recognize that even today, given that each caste speaks distinctively, language constitutes the manner in which castes are both identified and perpetuated. The missionary constitution of grammars therefore allowed for the various caste forms of Indian languages to be recognized as part of a unified language. The constitution of these grammars also allowed castes that had been forced to be non-​literate to access literacy, as was the case 94

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among the Konkani speaking Catholics. Indeed, the Konkani language that Clooney identifies is the very result of this process, constituted as a separate language from a proto-​Marathi, through missionary constitution, and becoming a regional language precisely because it was used by all Catholics and then used by linguistic activists hoping to have it recognized as the language of Goa (Fernandes 2013).

The Indian national movement and Catholicism The continuity between Indian nationalism and the Indian state, in terms of the creation and perpetuation of “Hinduism,” is often obscured by the scholarly tendency to distinguish Indian from Hindu nationalism (the latter being associated with the Sangh Parivar and the political parties it has supported).The problematic nature of this distinction is clear, however, if one keeps in mind that many anti-​minority and anti-​Christian projects (e.g., the Niyogi Committee, as described by Richards in this volume) have been sponsored by the putatively more secularist Congress Party. Nehruvian secularism, in fact, could be more accurately described as Hindu contextualism, that is, the celebration of multi-​religiosity and secularism within a context that was Hindu (Srivastava 1998, p.  112). Perhaps no one better embodies the slippage between Indian and Hindu nationalism than Gandhi, who was elevated by Indian nationalists under Nehru as the Father of the Nation and a model of Indian secularism, but whose anti-​colonial and state-​building nationalism was also tinctured by a palpable ambivalence about Christianity, and an explicit distaste for Christian proselytization (as described more fully in this volume in the chapters by Bauman and Clough). Gandhi’s criticism of Christian evangelism is a testament not only to the continuities between his thought and that of Hindu nationalists, but also to the fact that Gandhi’s response to conversion and Christianity was critical in the formation of contemporary Indian attitudes to Christianity. More importantly, the arguments that Gandhi was the first to develop and promote have come to structure both popular discourse and contemporary state laws restricting religious conversion (Roberts 2016, p. 138). Among these arguments were the following: “that conversion is disruptive of local communities, that it attacks the converts’ innermost identity and sense of self, and that there is something especially objectionable about conversions undertaken for hope of worldly gain” (Ibid., p. 134). Further, Gandhi portrayed the conversion of Dalits to Christianity or Islam not only as a threat to Hinduism, but as a threat, also, to India and the Indian nationalist cause (Ibid.). Gandhi’s assertion that Dalit conversions to Islam and Christianity were frequently marred by the pursuit of earthly gain, dangled in front of them by Christian missionaries, led him to urge Christian missionaries to engage in social service alone, without the ulterior motive of converting those they served. As I  describe below, the Catholic Church in India has largely internalized Gandhi’s critique, which has effectively reduced the Church to a service provider for the state. What needs to be affirmed for now, however, is the fact that Gandhi opposed conversion largely because he was, beginning in the 1930s, engaged in an effort to consolidate a Hindu majority in the nascent Indian state. That project informed his resistance to the Communal Award in 1932 (as described more fully in Clough’s chapter), since the Award would have carved off a separate electorate for Dalits, and would thereby weaken the broader “Hindu” bloc. Gandhi’s nationalism drew upon Orientalist understandings of India, which in turn were profoundly impacted by Romantic notions of the volk and the superiority, for any particular group of people, of the culture that sprang from their soil. From this volkist perspective, it was obvious that Hinduism was natural to India, and that Christianity and Islam were not. Gandhi’s 95

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ideas were also informed by a taxonomic distinction developed by nineteenth-​century comparative religion scholars such as Max Müller and C.P. Tiele (Roberts 2016, p.  132). As per this taxonomy, religions could be divided into those that converted, and those that did not (the former being prone to conflict insofar as they believed in their universal relevance and articulated “totalist” truth claims). Gandhi was therefore aided and influenced in his desire to forge a unified Hindu nation by both Orientalists and comparativists. Sara Claerhout is typical of the dominant tradition of Gandhian studies in trying to reconcile the apparent paradox of Gandhi’s simultaneous opposition to conversion and apparent tolerance for diversity by referencing Gandhi’s espousal of the taxonomy described above (Claerhout 2014). Claerhout argues that for Gandhi and many contemporary Hindus, religion is “the tradition or set of ancestral practices that constitute a community” (Ibid., p.  78) and it is for this reason that proselytizing is “inevitably…experienced as an unwelcome and disruptive intrusion into the communal life of such traditions” (Ibid.). While it may well be that many in the subcontinent see religion as an ancestral tradition, what Claerhout does not seem to recognize is that the perception of religion she attributes to Gandhi is in fact rooted in the predominant understanding of caste practices. Once we are cognizant of this issue, it becomes clearer that Gandhi’s rejection of proselytism was a manifestation of dominant-​caste anxiety that dominant-​caste hegemony might be threatened by Dalit conversion rather than a manifestation of a long-​standing “Hindu” conception of religions as ethnic and non-​proselytizing. In other words, Gandhi’s attempt to forge Hinduism and an India under Hindu hegemony was clearly caste-​marked.

Catholic elites and the Indian national project While Catholics in India certainly had relationships with diverse caste groups prior to the emergence of the Romantic movement and Orientalist-​inspired nationalism (Mosse 2012), with the increasing growth of Indian nationalism these relationships effectively came to be seen as relationships with Hindus (defined according to ostensibly homogenous Brahmin ideals). This shift in what we can now properly call “Hindu–​Catholic” relations has had a number of significant effects. First among these is that it has led many Catholics, particularly the highly Westernized Indo-​ Portuguese along the west coast, to conceive of themselves as insufficiently Indian. Given the manner in which Orientalism and Hindu nationalism celebrated Brahmins and Brahminism, Brahmins were understood to provide an appropriate model for Indo-​Portuguese Catholics who had adopted European manners to emulate. Following Romantic ideals, it was assumed that these Catholics, having become hybrid, were culturally sterile. For upper-​caste Catholics, the solution was to emulate Brahmins as far as possible. This privileging of the Brahmin resulted in the attribution of an inordinate importance to Puranic and Brahminical mythology in the public sphere. Once again, Gandhi was important in this regard. Gandhi openly advocated that Indians should consider Ram Rajya, the governance of the Vaishnavite deity-​king Ram, the ideal model for a postcolonial nation. One effect of this privileging of mythology was to obscure the role of Catholic Indians in subcontinental politics, and in fact to actively exclude them from nationalist historiography by associating them negatively with colonialism. Victor Ferrao, a Catholic theologian and priest, argues that “[t]his rooting of history into a [Hindu] mythology textually produces the illegitimate citizenry of the Goan Christian” and, again, the Christian in India (Ferrao 2011, p. 43). Mythologizing the Indian past as essentially “Hindu,” nationalists such as Gandhi have also interpreted colonialism through a Brahminical lens, through which, Ferrao argues, the colonial period is perceived to 96

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have polluted the body politic, effectively rendering the Christian in India an outsider in their own home, as is the case for the Dalit citizen (Ibid.). That this exclusion from the body politic is keenly perceived is evident from a speech given by Cardinal Oswald Gracias to a conference of Latin Rite bishops held in Bangalore in February 2018. The Cardinal, it was reported, suggested that the conference would call upon Indian Catholics to “become better Indian Christians…to be fully Indian fully Christian” (UCAN 2018). The call to “be fully Indian fully Christian” implies, of course—​following a Hindu nationalist script—​that Christians in India are not seen (and do not even view themselves) as fully Indian. Catholic elites have dealt with this challenge in a variety of ways. Even while members of the hierarchy, such as the late Cardinal Valerian Gracias (1900–​1978), affirmed that “Christianity is not a denationalizing influence” (cited in Pimenta 2002, p.  210), Catholics have used the reforming spirit of Vatican Council II to justify the approximation of Indian (read:  Hindu) nationalism in Catholic liturgy and theology. Take, for example the suggestion by a prominent Catholic theologian that he sought to become a “Hindu-​Christian,” a desire that mimics Hindu nationalist demands that both implicitly and explicitly posit Hinduism (understood exclusively in its upper-​caste Brahminical forms) as the foundational culture of India. Further, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has often utilized severely Brahminical versions of vernacular languages. Language, as observed above, is a significant marker of caste, and as Bauman and Young point out, for Dalit Christians the very language of church hymns composed by dominant-​caste Vellala Christians serves as a painful reminder that in the pre-​Christian past Dalits did not and could not participate in temple-​based bhakti traditions with the same privileges that their Vellala co-​religionists enjoyed (Bauman and Young 2014, p.  xviii). In locations such as Goa, where contemporary Catholics are five centuries removed from the dominance of Sanskrit, the Church’s use of Sanskritized language means that Catholics in the region are forced to give up words firmly rooted in local culture because they are now deemed unacceptably Western by the Church hierarchy (Fernandes 2015). Other elite Catholics have attempted to align themselves with upper-​caste Hindu-​oriented Indian identity by describing the conversion of their ancestors as an “accident of history.” This strategic move was obvious in an op-​ed authored by Julio Ribeiro and published by The Indian Express on March 17, 2015. The piece was written to express his anguish at the spate of attacks on churches and Christians in the country at that time, and Ribeiro deploys this cliché to suggest that his ancestors would still be Hindu if they had not been forcibly converted. Ribeiro implies a Brahminical heritage for his ancestors, linking himself to Manohar Parrikar, the late Saraswat Brahmin, who was at the time defense minister of India. In keeping with this strategy, many Catholics from dominant-​caste backgrounds have chosen names and surnames that are viewed as more properly “Indian” than those more regularly chosen by Christians in India. Not coincidentally, the names chosen are often Sanskritic, feudal, and upper-​caste, signaling a desire to affirm a caste-​based solidarity with the Hindu castes that define local Hindu-​ness. As a Catholic priest from Mangalore pointed out to me some decades ago, “Have you noticed how it is only people from upper-​caste backgrounds who change their surnames?” In very many ways, calls for liturgical vernacularization and interreligious dialogue have in fact allowed elite members of the Catholic Church to align themselves more fully with Indian nationalism.Take, for example, the fact that in a book dedicated to Paul Jackson, a Jesuit priest who spent his life in dialogue with Muslims, the majority of the contributors wrote of dialogue with Hindus. The sole contributor who discussed dialogue with Muslims was a priest from outside of India (Fernandes 2009). Ignoring or neglecting dialogue with Muslims is not coincidental; rather, it corresponds to a larger trend within India, where especially 97

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elite Catholic communities signal their solidarity with Indian nationalism by adopting Indian nationalist Islamophobia. In the op-​ed discussed above, for example, Ribeiro (2015a) asserts that Christians are a “peaceful people,” and then contrasts Christian peacefulness with Muslim belligerence, suggesting that if Hindu extremists had attacked Muslims rather than Christians, the Muslim response would have been far more violent. Similarly, when a church in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj neighborhood was attacked on February 2, 2015, a Catholic priest suggested that “We [Christians] are peace-​loving people. If it had been another community, Muslims, khoon kharaba ho jaata’ (blood would have been shed)” (Kaushik 2015). Nidhin Shobhana’s experiences in this regard mirror my own: Over the years, in several Christian gatherings, across caste groups, I have been a mute listener to thick accounts of the enemy. I know of Christians who refer to Muslims as “Anti-​Christ.” For me, the single most important feature of these descriptions is their startling similarities to Caste Hindu descriptions of Muslims. It is as if they share a common word bank of epithets to describe Muslims.The image of the bearded enemy, walking down the street after his evening prayers is programmed in one’s mind. The scale of hatred may vary from indifference, antagonism to explicit acts of hostility. However, the image is fixed, unchanging. (Shobhana 2014) Shobhana further argues that Christian Islamophobia is not an inheritance from Western colonial or Christian missionary prejudices. Rather, he argues, the Islamophobia that Christians share with dominant-​caste Hindus is due to the fact that the Christian elite communities that most regularly express it had historically been part of the Brahminical ruling classes: [O]‌ne can only understand [the] emergence and growth [of higher-​caste Christian public life] in tandem with the [higher-​caste] Hindu public life which shaped nationalism in India. [The two groups] were traveling together on major issues, responding to each other and finding an audience amongst themselves or in the “West.” They were neighbours and friends, studying in common schools and colleges, speaking a common language. (Shobhana 2016) Another attempt by Catholic elites, including members of the priesthood, to articulate themselves within the context of Indian nationalism, has been to distance themselves from proselytization. Ribeiro captured a sentiment common among some Catholics in India when he suggested, in an interview with the Economic Times in March 2015, that “some fringe Christian groups convert people in large numbers, but the government should find out who they are and take action against them. Mass conversions should be opposed as they create problems in society, but it is a thing of the past” (Ribeiro 2015b). Ribeiro’s opposition to mass conversions, and not to individual conversions, is reflective of the Indian nationalist fear that mass conversions by lower-​caste groups would destabilize Hindu hegemony in India, and it is for this reason that he identifies fringe Christian groups as being responsible for these conversions, rather than the mainline churches in India. This opinion has also been articulated by Lancy Lobo, a Jesuit priest and developmental activist in Gujarat. He argues that while early Protestant missionaries and then Catholic missionaries fought against superstition and engaged in issues of social justice, “modern evangelical

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Protestant sects have little to do with either development, or social justice,” engaging instead “in a kind of mumbo-​jumbo which resonates with the tribals” (Lobo 2003, p. 322). The alternative that these members of the Catholic elite proffer is one that Gandhi himself had suggested even before Indian independence: that missionaries do not proselytize, but instead limit themselves to becoming providers of aid, health services, and education to both marginalized and dominant communities, and by extension to the state itself (John 2018, p. 196). According to Lobo, The church in India…covers 25 percent of the entire voluntary sector operations in India though Christians are a mere 2.3 percent of the total population. The church is the single most important NGO in India that has activities in education and health, rural and urban development, caring for widows and orphans, aged and handicapped, leprosy patients, and doing relief, reconstruction and development work in times of floods, famines, droughts, cyclones and hurricanes. (Cited in Rowe 2018, p. 273) Like Ribeiro, Lobo too suggests that Catholics in India are not focused on mass conversions, but that “Conversions if any were a matter of slow process after due reflection and deliberation by the Adivasi.” Moreover, while there may have been conversions, “one cannot speak of mass conversions” (Lobo 2010, p. 216). The language of conversion, he suggests, “changed to that of development” (Ibid.). Despite the differences among Christians, however, Lobo complains that “Hindutvavadis fail to distinguish Catholic from Protestant missionaries and from among the Protestant missionaries the earlier mainline churches and the latest, the evangelical sects. They lump them into one. They display their ire on all hues of missionaries” (Ibid). In statements such as these, Lobo and others implicitly suggest that violence against evangelistic Christians is justified. Lobo is also aware, however, that there is a casteist aspect to the critique of conversion: while dominant-​ caste Hindus often rail against Catholic interventions on behalf of tribal peoples, those same dominant-​caste Hindus, along with the urban middle classes, seek to monopolize access to posh Catholic schools in urban areas (Lobo 2003, pp. 321–​22). One gets the sense that the Catholic elites believe that strategies like those described here are enabling a shift “from colonial Christianity to indigenous modes” (Lobo 2010, p. 219). Colonial Christianity, as Clooney points out in his chapter in this volume, is seen as a violent imposition. This perspective, however, is one that is shared by Hindu and Catholic dominant castes, since Catholics from subaltern castes rarely articulate this logic, and perhaps with good reason; for many subaltern castes, conversion to Catholicism, even when under the violence of colonialism, was a relief from the daily violence of Brahminical oppression. For this reason, it appears that when dominant-​caste Catholics attempt to construct “indigenous” modes of Catholicism they are effectively supporting Indian nationalism’s version of “Hinduism” while obfuscating the violence inherent in this nationalist ideology. For example, when responding to the spate of attacks on churches in 2015, Cardinal Oswald Gracias suggested that those “those attacking Christians are not real Hindus” (Gupta 2015). In this way, the Cardinal not only demonstrates acceptance of Gandhi’s portrayal of Hinduism as an eminently peaceful religion, but also overlooks the fact that it is precisely in the context of the growing strength of nationalism that Christians and Muslims have been minoritized in the Indian polity and made victims of violent attacks. Further, in taking positions such as those demonstrated by Lobo in his writings, Catholic elites effectively compromise the transcendental message of Christ, and instead settle for an activity that is satisfied with primarily producing good, safe, and respectable citizens (Lobo 2003, p. 324).

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Conclusion Catholic encounters with the Indian state have not been, however, solely restricted to acquiescing to the state’s hegemonic projects. On the contrary, the Catholic Church, whether through the clergy and religious or through the laity, have been at the forefront of asserting the rights of marginalized populations throughout the country, whether tribal groups or Dalits. Further, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India has been consistently demanding that the Indian state extend the benefits of reservations to Christians and Muslims of Dalit origin. Given that this exclusion is foundational to the Indian state, it is unlikely that the state will accede to this persistent demand. If, however, it does, this may mean that Catholics will continue to be drawn into the secular liberal frameworks of the effectively Hindu state, drawing dominant-​caste Catholics into ever closer association with dominant-​caste Hindus who protest affirmative action. While this should not be read as an argument against the support for equal access to reservations, it should nevertheless be recognized as the conundrum facing Catholics in India. One way out of this could be for the Catholic Church in India to consciously opt out of the nation-​building agenda in which it has participated, affirming a commitment to a larger universal ideal, and working outside the secular liberal imaginaries that seem to frame its operation.That this seems increasingly impossible in the face of the growing intolerance and violence in the Indian polity is just another conundrum that Catholics in India must face in their encounters with Hindus.

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State power, Catholics, and Hindus India: Conversion, Community Development, and Religious Freedom. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, pp. 179–​97. Kaushik, K. 2015. “Pre-​Poll Communal Violence in Delhi, Part II: Why the Multiple Attacks on Delhi Churches Are a Cause for Concern.” The Caravan. February 5. Available at https://​caravanmagazine.in/​ vantage/​pre-​poll-​communal-​violence-​delhi-​partii-​multiple-​attacks-​delhi-​churches-​concern. Accessed January 1, 2020. King, R. 1999. “Orientalism and the Modern Myth of ‘Hinduism’.” Numen 46(2): 146–​85. Lobo, L. 2003. “Tribals and Christianity in Gujarat.” The Eastern Anthropologist 56(2–​4): 311–​25. —​—​—​. 2010. “Christianization, Hinduization and Indigenous Revivalism among the Tribals of Gujarat.” In Robinson, R. and Kujur, J.M. (eds.). Margins of Faith:  Dalit and Tribal Christianity in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 211–​34. Mosse, D. 2012. The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India. The Anthropology of Christianity 14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Omvedt, G. 2011. Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-​Brahman Movement in Western India. New Delhi: Manohar. Pimenta, S.C. 2002. Cardinal Valerian Gracias: His Life and Ministry. Bombay: St. Pauls. Ribeiro, J. 2015a. “As a Christian, Suddenly I Am a Stranger in My Own Country, Writes Julio Ribeiro.” The Indian Express. March 17. Available at https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​opinion/​columns/​i-​feel-​ i-​am-​on-​a-​hit-​list/​. Accessed September 20, 2020. Ribeiro, J. 2015b. “Attempts to Make India Saffron Pakistan Won’t Work:  Former IPS Julio Ribeiro.” The Economic Times. March 17. English edition. Available at https://​economictimes.indiatimes.com/​ opinion/​interviews/​attempts-​to-​make-​india-​saffron-​pakistan-​wont-​work-​former-​ips-​julio-​r ibeiro/​ articleshow/​46589810.cms. Accessed September 20, 2020. Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversions and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. New Delhi: Navayana. Rowe, P.S. 2018. “The Burned Church: Christians and Pluralism in India.” In Shah, R.S. and Carpenter, J. (eds.). Christianity in India: Conversion, Community Development, and Religious Freedom. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, pp. 256–​80. Sharma, J. 2013. A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shobhana, N. 2014. “The Image of the Enemy.” Round Table India. June 8.  Available at http://​ roundtableindia.co.in/​index.php?option=com_​content&view=article&id=7540:the-​image-​of-​the-​ enemy&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132. Accessed March 4, 2019. —​—​—​. 2016. “Savarna Christian Contributions to ‘Hindu’ Nationalism:  The Example of Srambickal Kuruvilla George.” Round Table India. October 22. Available at https://​roundtableindia.co.in/​index. php?option=com_​ c ontent&view=article&id=8839:savarna-​ c hristian-​ c ontributions-​ t o-​ h indu-​ nationalism-​the-​example-​of-​srambickal-​kuruvilla-​george&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132. Accessed January 1, 2020. Srivastava, S. 1998. Constructing Post-​ Colonial India:  National Character and the Doon School. London: Routledge. Tejani, S. 2007. Indian Secularism:  A Social and Intellectual History 1890–​1950. Ranikhet, Uttarakhand: Permanent Black. Thapar, R. 1985. “Syndicated Moksha?” Seminar 313:14–​22. UCAN. 2018. “Catholics Urged to Become Better Christians, Indians” UCAN India. Available at http://​ india.ucanews.com/​news/​catholics-​urged-​to-​become-​better-​christians-​indians/​36536/​daily. Accessed March 5, 2019. Xavier, Â.B. 2008. A invenção de Goa:  poder imperial e conversões culturais nos séculos XVI e XVII. ICS. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Xavier, Â.B. and Županov, I.G. 2015. Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–​18th Centuries). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Županov, I.G. 2001. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-​century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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9 HINDU–​PROTESTANT ENCOUNTERS Arun W. Jones

While Hindus and Christians are found all across the world, this essay will restrict its scope to Hindu–​Protestant religious encounters in India. Protestants and Hindus first met in India due to business rather than religious ventures.The British and Dutch East India Companies established trading centers in India in the seventeenth century, so that Company chaplains and other religiously inclined Europeans interacted with local people, sometimes having rich discussions on religious topics. The earliest Protestant chaplains in India were British. Edward Terry arrived in Surat in 1616 and described the land and its people in two treatises, which included observations on Hindu and Muslim customs. On the Dutch side, the chaplain, Abraham Rogerius, lived in Pulicat, Tamil Nadu from 1632 to 1642, where he fortuitously became good friends with the Brahmin Padmanābhan, who with his friends provided Rogerius with quite detailed information about their religion, which Rogerius published in a book (Neill 1984, p. 379). His counterpart in Sri Lanka, Philip Baldaeus, published similar literature in 1672 about Tamil Hindus in Jaffna. Nine decades after the first Protestant traders landed in Surat, the first two Protestant missionaries arrived in India. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau disembarked at the Danish colony of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in Tamil Nadu on July 9, 1706. The missionaries came from the University of Halle in Germany, the center of Pietism, a movement that emphasized affective religious experience over ecclesial doctrines and differentiation. Of the two, it was Ziegenbalg who made the more intense study of Hinduism, desirous as he was to convert Hindus to Christianity. In order to express the Christian faith in Tamil terms, Ziegenbalg set out to study Tamil as quickly and thoroughly as possible, collecting hundreds of Tamil books and carrying on an extensive correspondence with learned Hindus in order to do so. His study changed Ziegenbalg’s view of Hinduism; within a year he had concluded that the Indians were a highly civilized people, and while their religion was idolatrous, it was also rich in morality and profound intellectual insights (Frykenberg 2008, p.  151). In 1711 he published Malabarian Heathenism, followed in 1713 by Genealogy of the Malabarian Gods, both rich descriptions of the religious thought and practice of Tamil Hindus among whom he lived. Local interlocutors, teachers, and informants, both Hindu and Christian, were critical collaborators in the efforts of Ziegenbalg and his successors to learn about Hinduism, and these interlocutors deeply influenced the ways that missionaries understood Indian religious beliefs and practices. 102

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While Ziegenbalg believed that Hindus were wrong in their beliefs, he also endeavored to represent them fairly. For example, he compiled several volumes on Tamil bhakti piety. Ziegenbalg sent his work to Halle to be published so that Europeans could come to know and understand Tamils better. His German mentor famously wrote, “Missionaries were sent out to extirpate heathenism, and not to spread heathenish nonsense in Europe” (Ibid.). Ziegenbalg died and was buried in Tranquebar in 1719, disappointed by the lack of support and the criticism from Germany. From Tranquebar, the Pietist movement in India spread to other parts of South India throughout the eighteenth century, resulting in increasing interaction between Indians and Europeans of various religious backgrounds. The German missionary Benjamin Schultze founded the Lutheran church in Madras in 1726, while the Indian military officer Rajanayankan founded the first Lutheran church in Thanjavur in 1727. In contrast to later Protestants, the eighteenth-​century Pietists (both Indian and European) generally engaged Hinduism irenically, for example deciding with various degrees of reluctance that caste was endemic to Indian society, and therefore necessary to accommodate within Indian Christianity. Perhaps the most famous eighteenth-​century Lutheran missionary interlocutor with Hindus was Christian Friedrich Schwartz (1726–​1798), who was born in Prussia and educated at Halle where he learned Tamil from Benjamin Schultze. He was a gifted linguist; in India he became fluent in Telugu, Sanskrit, Marathi, Urdu, Persian, and Portuguese, adding these to the classical and modern European languages he already knew. He arrived in South India in 1750 when the region was gripped with war among several competing Indian and foreign political and military forces. The hostilities created huge humanitarian crises in which Schwartz assiduously intervened, caring and advocating for the casualties of the conflicts with such vigor and to such positive effect that he gained the trust and confidence of all the belligerent parties. He quickly became famous for his diplomatic and administrative skills, acting as a go-​between between various opposing parties, and as a civil servant in a number of different territories and kingdoms. For the last ten years of his life he took on the role of teacher and guardian of the very young Rajah of Thanjavur, Serfoji, whose education and development he personally directed. As a Christian missionary, Schwartz was a highly successful evangelist, teacher, and trainer of indigenous workers who started and ran schools and churches throughout South India. Many of these Indian workers engaged Hindu traditions in creative ways. One such pioneer was a Brahmin widow named Kohila who became the mistress of an English officer, Henry Littleton, and lived with him from 1765 onwards. (The life of Kohila [Clarinda] has many interesting similarities to that of the Begum of Samru, a Roman Catholic convert in Meerut who lived from 1753 to 1836.) Littleton taught Kohila the basics of the Christian faith, and she in turn sought baptism from Schwartz, who denied her request because she was not legally married. After Littleton died, at her insistence, Schwartz baptized her in 1778 and she took the name Clarinda (Kent 2004, p. 32). Clarinda became the head of a Christian congregation in Palayamkottai, which in two years had forty members from at least thirteen different castes. Clarinda led and supported the growing Christian community in a variety of ways. She encouraged conversion among groups of villagers living on lands she controlled; she visited Christians in times of hardship and supported them in their need; she employed school teachers for the community; with considerable difficulty she personally secured from the Lutheran mission a suitable catechist, Gnanaprakasam, whose salary she paid; she sponsored the construction of a stone church (which still stands) in Palayamkottai for both Europeans and Indians. All this she did in the face of European missionary (and perhaps some Indian) disapproval of her conduct. In the end, Schwartz supported her despite his personal misgivings. It is not clear exactly what it was about Clarinda’s life that European missionaries found unsettling. Perhaps they perceived she enjoyed 103

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too much the “sartorial finery that signified power in the Tamil socioreligious universe of signs” (Ibid., p. 36) or had intimate relationships with certain men, or confidently exercised power and authority over the Christian community. As Eliza Kent notes, what seems clear is that in many of her projects Clarinda sought to transfer her economic capital into social capital in a manner that was consistent with the Indian relationship between material and religious power…[She] was behaving in a Tamil manner, endowing a religious institution with the fruit of her wealth with the frank expectation that she would receive back the honors that centers of religious power alone could provide. (Ibid., pp. 36–​37) This brief exploration of Clarinda’s leadership demonstrates how a narrow focus on written or spoken words in the study of Hindu–​Protestant encounters misses out on the highly diverse and complex ways in which these encounters have occurred. The world of speech is part of a much larger universe of signs and symbols that people use in interreligious interactions. Aesthetics have been important in encounters between Hindus and Christians, as well. Among the Tamil Christian leaders who were trained and nurtured by Christian Friedrich Schwartz, none excelled the artistic fame and stature of Vedanayagam Sastriar (1774–​1864). Vedanayagam was born into a high-​caste Roman Catholic family, and his father embraced the Lutheran tradition when the boy was 11 years old. That year, Schwartz, impressed by the lad’s mental acuity, took him to Thanjavur where he was educated in a Lutheran school for two years, and then sent to Tranquebar to study theology. After some work as a rural evangelist and elementary school teacher, at the age of 20 Vedanayagam started teaching at the Lutheran seminary in Thanjavur, continuing in that position for the next 25 years. He eventually became the poet-​ laureate of the Maharajah of Thanjavur, his childhood fellow student, Serfoji. Over the course of his life,Vedanayagam created a prodigious number of Tamil works of religious poetry, hymns, drama, and dance (as well as scientific works), producing “masterful works in classical Tamil poetry and equally creative contributions to modern Tamil prose” (Frykenberg 2008, p. 161). He became renowned for his use of the kuruvanchi genre of drama, which is a play about a wandering woman fortuneteller; his Bethlehem Kuruvanchi presented the gospel story in verse. His hymns are still popular today. Vedanayagam Sastriar is one of many artists who have, over the last two millennia, employed Hindu art forms for Christian purposes. Such aesthetic interreligious encounters continue with beauty and power today, as evidenced by the work of P. Solomon Raj and Frank Wesley. The artistic traffic has not been one-​way: George Harrison’s 1970 song “My Sweet Lord” was written and performed in praise of Krishna. For most of the eighteenth century the Protestant presence in India was represented by followers of German Pietism in South India. As the nineteenth century approached, a new variant of Protestantism, namely British and British American evangelicalism, entered India. (It is important to note that not all British missions and Christians in India in the nineteenth century were evangelical; so-​called “high church” and Scottish Protestants were also living and working on the subcontinent.) European Pietism had laid the foundations and been the inspiration for evangelicalism, but whereas the former was primarily interested in a change of heart, the latter was also interested in a reformation of Christian society. Thus around 1800, British and North American evangelical Protestant missionaries started to come to India.They brought a different attitude toward Hinduism.Very generally speaking, Europeans in India in the eighteenth century had viewed Indian cultures and religions as mostly helpful resources to be used for their purposes in the subcontinent, whether those were commercial gain or Christian 104

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conversion. The evangelicals of the eighteenth century tended to view Indian cultures and religions as needing to be thoroughly reformed (in the case of cultures) or replaced (in the case of religion). The Hindu tradition, which was now conceived of as a massive integrated system of thought and practice rather than a collection of various local beliefs and customs, was often condemned outright. The British Baptist William Carey exemplifies the transition from the eighteenth-​to the nineteenth-​century Protestant missionary presence. Carey was born in 1761 into a lower-​class Anglican family in England, at a time when evangelical preachers were exerting a powerful influence on British Protestantism. From his childhood he was an inveterate reader and a plant and animal collector, a boy with a great thirst for knowledge. At age 14 he became a cobbler, and at 20 married Dorothy Plackett. Two years later, Carey joined the Baptists and became deeply involved in the nascent Baptist missionary movement, serving as its apologist, publicist, and then its first missionary. In 1793, he arrived with his family in Bengal where he would spend the rest of his life, dying in 1834. Because of the British East India Company’s opposition to missionary activity, Carey began full-​time religious work in the Danish colony of Serampore, just north of Calcutta, in 1795. He studied Indian and other Asian languages in order to translate the message of Christianity. In 1799, the Careys were joined by missionaries Joshua Marshman and William Ward and their families. This “Serampore Trio” established a printing press, a church, a school, and eventually a college, and engaged Hinduism through study and publishing. Carey wrote Sanskrit, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, and Telugu grammars, and he translated the Ramayana into English (for which he was criticized by friends of the mission). He taught Sanskrit at Fort William College in Calcutta, and as biologist he studied and recorded thousands of plant and animal specimens. The missionaries also tried to establish as quickly as possible an indigenous church. In many ways, then, the British evangelicals continued the kinds of engagement with Hinduism that had been pioneered by Lutheran Pietists in the South.Yet there was a significant difference: the evangelicals were also intent on reforming Indian society according to their own Christian and European Enlightenment ideals. So, unlike the Lutherans, they decided not to condone the observation of caste lines within the Christian community. In the public realm, they became famous as part of the group of reformers who spearheaded the drive to abolish sati, or widow immolation, in British-​ruled India. In 1811 William Ward published a highly influential and popular description and analysis of Hinduism in which he described Hinduism as a coherent religious system that was immoral, superstitious, evil, and desperately needing to be displaced by evangelical Christianity (Jones 2017, pp. 112–​13). Such negative views of Hinduism would lead important Protestant missionaries (but certainly not all of them) to call for a complete disengagement from dialogue with Hindu traditions. The Scottish missionary, Alexander Duff, over the course of the 1830s, developed a mission strategy of establishing English-​medium (rather than vernacular) education that taught evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment science as “the preparing of a mine, and the setting of a train which shall one day explode and tear up the whole [of Hinduism] from its lowest depths” (Smith 1881, p. 68). Thus, a number of different ways of engaging—​and confronting—​Hinduism were operating simultaneously in the small Protestant community in India in the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, these ways could easily overlap, and Indian Christians could selectively appropriate missionary theories and practices as they interpreted the faith for themselves in conversation with local (and, in the case of converts, their former) religious traditions. The writings of a Brahmin, Anandarao Kaundinya, who converted to Christianity in 1844 in the Basel Mission in Mangalore, shed some light on how Indian Christians could engage and confront various Hindu and Christian traditions. Anandarao traced the beginning of his spiritual 105

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journey not to a meeting with any Christian ideas, but to his father’s teachings about the divine when Anandarao was just a boy of 4 years old (Sebastian 2004, p. 81). At the age of 9, Anandarao lost his father and was enrolled in a school run by the Basel Mission. He later wrote that it was not Western education but the morality propounded by the Bible that he read in school, coupled with the personal commitment of the missionaries to their task and their students, that impressed him most deeply. A crisis created by a grave illness precipitated his conversion to Christianity. Anandarao’s spiritual journey demonstrates how the rather straightforward theories of Protestant missionaries regarding preaching, teaching, and translation were interpreted and appropriated in highly complex ways by Protestant Indians with a Hindu heritage. In North India, the responses of Hindus to evangelical Christianity were varied and diverse. Prevalent throughout North India were groups of Hindus who practiced various forms of bhakti, which is devotionalism focused on a particular deity, originally propounded by a particular poet-​saint and carried on by his or her disciples. Bhakti is well known for its religious songs and poetry, and for its tendency to ignore, if not disparage, the hierarchical caste and gender norms of Brahminical Hinduism in order to form communities grounded in religious devotion and worship. Some Hindus influenced by bhakti engaged Protestant evangelicals in discussion, due to certain theological and practical similarities between these very different traditions. A  few of these joined the evangelicals. Conversely, many Indian Protestants used bhakti theological and ritual themes to express their faith (Jones 2017, pp. xv–​xxi). Other Hindus responded to the nineteenth-​century evangelical movement by rethinking and reformulating their own religious traditions. One of the most famous reformers was Rajah Rammohun Roy (1772–​1833). Dermot Killingley’s chapter in this volume describes Rammohun’s multilingual education, his interaction with Christians and Christian missionaries, his campaigns for social and religious reform, his translation of the New Testament in Bengali, his rejection of “idolatry,” his theological reformulations of Hinduism, his distinctive interpretation of the person of Jesus (and the debates with Baptists it provoked), his attraction to and disagreements with Unitarians, and his forming of the Brahmo Samaj. Extraordinary though he was in many ways, Rajah Rammohun Roy shows how the Protestant–​Hindu encounter in India has always occurred in a context where a variety of other religious and ideological movements, forces, and institutions have been active and have impinged on each other. These have included Islam, Jainism, and even Buddhism, as well as the European Enlightenment. Rammohun also demonstrates how the religious and ideological boundaries between traditions have been permeable, allowing for traffic in ideas and practices in multiple directions. This permeability has not been fixed, however; boundaries have been strengthened and weakened over time and in different contexts, and as traffic between traditions has been allowed or resisted, the boundaries themselves have shifted and been relocated. Finally, Rammohun also manifests the intense creativity that could be generated by Protestant and Hindu encounters. His creativity is well known since he wrote and published prolifically. However, he was arguably more exemplary than unique; unseen by most, and unrecorded for posterity, have been great numbers of women and men who have creatively engaged different religious traditions in order to forge new beliefs, ideas, and practices that made sense to them. The year 1857 marks a watershed in the life of modern India. A widespread rebellion of Indian soldiers—​known as sepoys—​in the British army set off a massive military and social revolt against British rule that consumed most of North India for over a year. The ensuing British victory had a marked effect on Protestantism in India. Since Christianity was closely connected to European civilization in the minds of most Protestant missionaries, many of them believed it would only be a matter of time before Indians would see the truth of Christianity and accept the faith for themselves. However, the imposition of British (Protestant) rule in 1858 106

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(replacing that of the British East India Company, which had a complicated relationship with Christianity—​on which, see Penelope Carson’s chapter in this volume) also slowly spawned counter movements, both religious and political. The religious reaction came first, appearing in the second half of the nineteenth century as the Arya Samaj. The founder of the Arya Samaj was Dayananda Saraswati, who was born in 1824 in what today is Gujarat. His father was a devout follower of Shiva. At the age of 14 he experienced a crisis of faith, probably triggered by a sect of Jains, as he questioned the efficacy of Hindu worship and its focus on images or, in his words, “idols” (Farquhar 1967 [1913], p. 104). The death of his sister four years later devastated him, and around the age of 21 he ran away from home to avoid marriage and a householder’s life. For years he wandered around North India as an ascetic, looking for and studying under various religious teachers and mentors. He was given the name Dayananda from a teacher in the Saraswati order of Shankara’s Dandis. He also spent time conversing with members of the Brahmo Samaj and other Hindu reform groups, as well as Christian missionaries. In 1875, he founded the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. As with leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, he condemned worship involving images and animal sacrifice; he claimed that the Vedas were the source of true religion, and also of all knowledge (including secular and scientific knowledge); he promoted the use of Western science and technology; he promoted the education of women and the remarriage of virgin widows and widowers; and he condemned child marriage. Unlike the Brahmo Samaj, which exhibited some sympathy toward Protestant Christianity, Dayananda’s Arya Samaj severely criticized Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, and called for the expulsion of Muslims and Christians from India. It was he who first propounded the term, “swaraj,” picked up later by Mahatma Gandhi, referring to self-​rule of India by Indians. On the other hand, he borrowed freely from Protestantism when it suited his purposes. Some of his key theological and social reforms had been championed by Protestant missions. And, like them, he set up schools in order to propagate his teachings. One missionary who attended an Arya Samaj Sunday morning service in Lahore in 1912 noted that it “was just like a Protestant service, and totally unlike any Vedic observance” (Ibid., p. 123). Perhaps the Christian counterpart to Dayananda Saraswati was the Marathi scholar and social activist Pandita Ramabai (1858–​1922; for a biographical sketch of Ramabai’s life, see Frykenberg’s biographical introduction to Ramabai 2003, pp.  1–​54). Born near Mangalore into a highly orthodox and learned Brahmin family, Ramabai was educated by her father and became famous as a scholar of Hindu texts. At the age of 20 she was proclaimed “Pandita” and “Saraswati” (the goddess of learning) in Calcutta. Soon, however, due to a spiritual and intellectual crisis precipitated by a famine, Ramabai rejected orthodox Hinduism, which she believed was inherently misogynistic, and joined the Brahmo Samaj. In 1883, she left for England to study medicine, and after four months there was baptized amidst much controversy. Her Christianity was anything but orthodox, leaning much more toward the rationalistic and Unitarian understandings typical of the Brahmo Samaj. In 1886, she sailed for the United States, and while there she published The High-​Caste Hindu Woman (1887), a searing indictment of the institution (as she saw it) of caste, and of Hindu views and treatment of girls and women, especially child widows in Brahmin and other high-​caste Indian families (Ramabai Sarasvati 1887). Upon her return to India in 1889, she established a home for Brahmin child widows where they could live without breaking caste, which garnered much support among the reforming Hindu educated elite. This support collapsed when conversions to Christianity started to occur in the home. Ramabai was never again an influential public figure. She herself became increasingly absorbed in evangelical and then Pentecostal Christianity. She published several articles and tracts on Hinduism and Hindu scriptures, subjecting them to trenchant criticism. Late in life she undertook the task of personally translating the Bible into Marathi, because she became 107

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dissatisfied with the extant translations which she considered overly Sanskritized and therefore influenced by Hindu thought. While the educated elite exchanged ideas and invectives in print, many Hindu–​Protestant encounters took place outside the limelight of publicity, among ordinary peasants and other poor people in the course of Christian evangelism. A glimpse of one such interaction comes from the report of Susannah Haqq, a North Indian Methodist evangelist. One November morning in 1869, she reports: I took my [female] companions and went into the village of Hatain, and called at the house of the head man of the village. About thirty women came together, and I read and explained a few pages to them, and then we sang for them. The women listened to us with much pleasure, and said to us, “We never heard such words before. Till this present hour we have always considered Ram as God, and Nanak as our Saviour, but now it would appear that Ram was only a king, and Nanak a fakeer, and that there is another Saviour. So please continue to teach us these words, and we will not hate you anymore.” One of the women wept violently. It is the custom of these people to despise Christians, and not to give them a seat, but God softened these women’s hearts, so that they brought a cot for me, and spread blankets on the ground for the girls, and showed much love towards us. (Haqq 1870, p. 83) This account of a Hindu–​Protestant encounter, which was published in an American women’s missionary magazine, contains a number of Protestant tropes which are easily identifiable.These include resistance to the Christian message followed by its acceptance; the portrayal of Hindu belief as false and Christian belief as true; a highly emotional moment of “conversion” when a person weeps bitterly at her past “sin”; and a conviction that God is working for and with the Christians. After accounting for the source and genre of this report, certain features of village Hindu–​ Protestant encounters can be discerned. First, as among the upper classes and castes, Protestant evangelism could elicit a number of different and strong reactions from village Hindus. In Haqq’s account there are reports of both hostility and hospitality. Second, by the latter half of the nineteenth century Hindu–​Protestant encounters were usually not isolated incidents but occurred as part of a longer history of such encounters. For that reason, exchanges between people of different religious backgrounds, such as the one reported above, were deeply influenced by these histories. Past encounters—​whether negative, positive, mixed, or indifferent—​affected the ways in which people of different religious traditions and commitments approached and interacted with each other. Even when Protestants and Hindus of various stripes met each other for the first time, news, stories, and reports of other encounters would color their exchange. Third, as in the case of Rajah Rammohun Roy, interactions between Protestants and Hindus even in villages were often part of a larger constellation of interreligious interchange, which is indicated by the mention of Nanak in Haqq’s report. The ways in which the religiously pluralistic context of India affected Hindu–​Protestant encounters is a rather understudied subject. Fourth, the interpretations of Protestants and Hindus of each other’s traditions could be quite varied. It is striking that in an era when Western evangelicals tended to be highly critical of Hindu beliefs and practices, the Indian female evangelist chose to portray Ram as a king and Nanak as a religious man to her American Protestant audience. Finally, Hindu–​Protestant interactions were shaped not only by the personal attitudes and temperaments of the interlocutors, but also by

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their social characteristics and locations. Race, nationality, gender, class, and caste, for example, played important roles in Hindu–​Protestant and other interreligious interactions. Besides providing a Protestant account of village evangelism and religious exchanges, Haqq’s report indicates how Protestant–​Hindu encounters often occurred in gender-​specific spaces. One of these spaces was the zenana, which was the women’s quarters in upper-​class Muslim and Hindu homes, especially in North India. Early in the nineteenth century, Protestant women missionaries initiated zenana missions, where female missionaries and their Indian companions would meet with upper-​class Hindu and Muslim women whose social status prevented them free access to the world beyond their domestic confines. Through conversations, storytelling, songs, and scripture readings, these women engaged in various kinds and levels of religious interaction. Beginning in South India in the 1870s and reaching a crescendo throughout India in the first three decades of the twentieth century, large numbers of low-​caste and outcaste Indians, or Dalits, converted to Christianity in what has been termed a “mass movement.” According to census numbers, the Christians in India grew from about 1.2 million in 1872 to over 6 million in 1930 (Pachuau 2014, pp. 158). One of the key characteristics of these movements is that Indians became Christians not individually (as had been the norm previously), but in groups or communally. Like the Indian Rebellion of 1857–​1858, and the Indian independence movements of the twentieth century, the mass movements profoundly shaped and influenced the interactions and exchanges between Protestants and Hindus. On the one hand, large numbers of Hindu Dalits responded positively to the Christian message and joined any one of the many active Protestant and Roman Catholic mission agencies and churches. On the other hand, over time there arose severe criticism of the mass movement from a number of quarters, most notably by Mahatma Gandhi, as the scope of the movement and the numbers of converts became known. Of interest here are the religious and social exchanges that took place in the process of conversion. While one might assume that the choice between Christianity and the inherited tradition of Hinduism was a clear one, with Dalits choosing Christianity in order to combat and escape their great oppression, in fact this was often not the case. Indians tended to move back and forth between different religious and social identities (the two being closely and inseparably intertwined) as well as creatively blend the new and old ways, as Christian and Hindu leaders and lay people hammered out understandings of their respective religious traditions. The Methodist missionary, Edwin Parker, described a difficult situation he faced regarding marriage customs among villagers in Rohilkhand in 1876. The people there, some of whom had joined the Methodist mission, had traditionally practiced child marriage, where children were married (betrothed) at a young age and then took up joint residence some time after puberty. Such child marriage was technically forbidden to the Methodists. The case involved a family where the Methodist parents (only the father is named) had married their daughter in childhood to a boy, accepting the usual bride price from the boy’s family. The father was later removed from the Christian community. However, the girl had been educated at a Methodist boarding school, and when it came time for her to live with the boy to whom she had been married as a child, she refused to move in with him, and instead announced that she would marry a Christian boy. Another girl from this community joined her in the same act of defiance. As Parker put it, “[t]‌hese marriages divided the people into two hostile parties,” with one group insisting on honoring the pledges made in childhood, and another (which included church officials and other leaders) declaring that the child marriage was invalid. Methodists were found on both sides of the divide. Communal discussions and arguments on this topic stretched from

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early morning to late evening on the day that the people had gathered for the “Christian” wedding to be conducted by the Methodist leaders. No resolution was found to the disagreement, and Parker reported that “our little classes scattered throughout the villages are sadly broken and divided” (Messmore 1903, pp. 159–​60). Communal decisions to join the Christian religion and Protestant communities during the period of the “mass movements” created vigorous conversation, discussion, disagreement, and consensus between Protestants and Hindus. One of the most vocal and influential critics of the mass movements, and of conversion to Christianity in general, was Mahatma Gandhi (1869–​1948). Over his lifetime, Gandhi exhibited an ambivalent and fluctuating relationship to Christians and Christianity. At one point, as a young man, he was deeply sympathetic to the faith and even considered becoming a Christian himself. Moreover, throughout his life he was appreciative of certain aspects of the Christian tradition; he had a fondness for the Sermon on the Mount and considered Jesus one of the world’s great religious teachers.Yet from about 1920 onwards he was highly critical of Christian missions, and on this matter he set himself against even his closest and most trusted Christian friends, such as the Anglican missionary, C.F. Andrews. Gandhi had three objections to Christianity (and most of his interlocutors were Protestants) from about 1920 onwards. First, he decried what he perceived to be the supercilious missionary attitude to India. Second, he criticized the Europeanization of Indian converts to Christianity. Third, he saw no need for conversion from one religion to another, stating that all religions had their strengths and weaknesses. While these have been accepted as self-​evident truths by many people, in fact Gandhi’s positions have recently been seriously challenged, especially by Dalits whom he, throughout his life, considered to be intellectually deficient. In any case, Gandhi’s objections to Christianity became even more vociferous and strident after 1932, when scholarship about the mass movements to Christianity was published, and serious negotiations regarding the political future of India were occurring (Pachuau 2014, p.  167). His views of Christians and Christian missions were deeply tied to his political and nationalist views of India. (For more on Gandhi’s interactions with Christians, see chapters by Bauman and Clough in this volume.) While Gandhi was attacking Christian leaders—​both Western and Indian—​for their supposedly anti-​nationalistic stance, leading Christian intellectuals and ecclesial authorities in the second quarter of the twentieth century increasingly came out publicly in favor of nationalism. This also entailed a much more appreciative understanding of Hinduism, even when Christians disagreed with certain aspects of the tradition. In fact, a new Protestant appreciation of at least certain traditions within Hinduism was evident from the beginning of the twentieth century and was manifest in Christian publications and promotion of Hindu literature. A  harbinger of this appreciation was the work of the “high church” missionary and Tamil scholar George Uglow Pope (1820–​1908), who in 1886 published a vast study and translation of the Tirukkural, a classic Tamil text of poetry dealing with ethics, morality, society, and human love (Pope 1886). In 1900 he published an explicitly religious text, a critical edition and translation of the highly popular and revered Tiruvasagam by the bhakti poet and saint Manikkavasagar (Pope 1900). Another early missionary pioneer of a serious scholarly engagement with Hindu thought was the Scottish educator, Alfred George Hogg (1875–​1954), who in 1909 published a comparative study of Hindu and Christian ethics and soteriology entitled Karma and Redemption: An Essay toward the Interpretation of Hinduism and the Re-​statement of Christianity. This work had its origins in conversations that Hogg had with his Hindu students at the Madras Christian College, and in particular was a response to an article in the college magazine in August of 1904, which was written by S.  Subrahmanya Sastri and defended the idea of karma (See Eric J.  Sharpe’s introduction to Hogg 1970, p. x). Sastri and Hogg exemplified a newer, thoughtful approach 110

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to the comparative study of Hinduism and Christianity that avoided the polemics so characteristic of many Christian and Hindu apologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the Indian side, prominent Christian leaders such as Bishop V.S. Azariah (1874–​1945) and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (1889–​1964) were fervent nationalists, while theologians such as Vengal Chakkarai (1880–​1958), Pandipeddi Chenchiah (1886–​1959) and Bishop Aiyadurai Jesudasen Appasamy (1891–​1975) reinterpreted Christian thought using Hindu theology and philosophy. Appasamy’s dissertation at Oxford University interpreted the biblical Gospel of John through the lens of the great Hindu philosopher, Ramanuja. Such Protestant leaders were in the decided minority in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, but by the 1930s the tide of opinion at least among the Christian elite had turned. The push toward respectful interreligious dialogue between Hindus and Christians was championed, paradoxically, by perhaps the most famous Christian evangelist of the first half of the twentieth century, the American Methodist missionary, E. Stanley Jones (1884–​1973). Jones strove to present the Christian message in culturally relevant ways, but also initiated the Christian ashram movement, where followers of different religious traditions could come together in a hospitable space to engage in heartfelt and respectful dialogue without any hint of proselytization. After Indian Independence in 1947, several interrelated factors helped shape the course of Hindu–​Protestant encounter. The first was that the Indian Christian community had reached a critical mass in the Indian population, giving it confidence in its interactions with other religious communities. Second, the great majority of foreign missionaries both voluntarily and involuntarily left India, and Christian leadership became thoroughly Indian. Third, the ruling Congress Party had committed the nation to socio-​economic development and a decidedly secular approach to nation-​building. Fourth, and in contrast to the Congress Party’s secularism, important political leaders picked up on Gandhi’s aversion to conversion and proselytization, and pursued avenues in state governments to criminalize conversion, since the national Constitution guaranteed every citizen the “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.” For example, the state of Madhya Pradesh commissioned an inquiry into Christian missionary activities in the mid-​1950s, and the report issued by the commission advanced several proposals meant to curtail or even prohibit religious conversion (on which, see Richards’s chapter in this volume). The fifth factor was the inclination of Indian Protestant leaders toward interfaith or interreligious dialogue. Prominent Protestant theologians of the post-​independence era, such as Paul David Devanandan (1901–​1962) and Madathiparampil Mammen (M.M.) Thomas (1916–​1996) led the way in developing Indian Christian theologies that were suited to the modern secular state, and that used interfaith dialogue as the mode of engaging Hinduism. Protestant Christians, at both the elite and the popular level, thus chose to carve out a space for peaceful coexistence with other religious communities in India, and to engage in irenic dialogue—​both in daily life and in various academic and religious institutions—​with their Hindu neighbors. This kind of cooperative engagement began to change in the late 1980s for two reasons, one on the side of Hindu traditions, and the other on the side of Protestant Christianity. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started to gain political power in India, eventually coming to rule in 1998 as leader of a coalition of parties. Since then it has functioned either as the party in power or as the most potent opposition party. The BJP has historically been sympathetic to Hindu nationalist ideologies which view India as the homeland of Hindus (and not Muslims and Christians). Its rise to power has given permission and arguably even encouraged the activities of militant Hindu nationalists, who do not eschew violence and persecution in order to advance their vision of India as a Hindu nation. Many thoughtful observers of the Indian social and 111

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religious scene believe that friction between the Hindu majority and minority religious groups such as Christians is due to the rise of the popularity and political power of Hindu nationalism. On the Protestant Christian side, since the 1980s the growing strength of the tradition has been in Pentecostal movements. Pentecostal thought and practice are manifest in a great variety of ways, both liturgically and sociologically, in India (Jones 2009, pp. 504–​509). However, a small though vocal segment of Pentecostals believes it is their calling to condemn Hinduism not only privately but also publicly. Moreover, Pentecostals tend to be very active in evangelism and conversion activities. What Pentecostalism has revealed is that the critical evangelical approach to Hinduism was not eradicated but rather submerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The aggressive stance of some Pentecostals has created trouble for Christians generally in India, the majority of whom do not subscribe to the highly critical views of Pentecostals. Thus the dangerous mix of a hostile Hindu nationalism and a belligerent Pentecostalism has significantly raised tensions between Protestants and Hindus in India today (for a thorough analysis, see Bauman 2015). To be fair, Pentecostals are not the only contemporary Christians condemning Hinduism in India. The rise, since the 1980s, of Dalit and Tribal Liberation theologies which condemn Brahminical Hinduism and are embraced by certain Protestants and Roman Catholics, has also added to the friction between various Christian and Hindu intellectuals, activists, and populations. While millions of Hindus and Protestants in India today live together in peace, the tensions that have increased over the past quarter century have reduced the opportunities for meaningful and productive religious encounters, where participants can engage each other frankly and respectfully, openly discussing and living out difference as well as commonality in their interactions with each other. In conclusion, encounters between Hindus and Protestants in India over the past four centuries have been highly diverse, as different people with different kinds of investment in these encounters have engaged each other and their traditions across religious and social boundaries. Yet such engagements have brought new life and vigor to various strands within both these religious traditions, and to the lives of the people who at some point or another have claimed some aspect of these traditions for themselves.

Bibliography Bauman, C.M. 2015. Pentecostals, Proselytization and Anti-​Christian Violence in Contemporary India. New York: Oxford University Press. Farquhar, J.N. 1967, 1913. Modern Religious Movements in India. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Frykenberg, R.E. 2008. Christianity in India:  From Beginnings to the Present. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Haqq, S. 1870. “Itinerating Notes by a Native Preacher’s Wife in India.” Heathen Woman’s Friend 1(11): 83. Hogg, A.G. 1970. Karma and Redemption. Madras: The Christian Literature Society. Jones, A.W. 2009. “Faces of Pentecostalism in India Today.” Society 46(6): 504–​09. —​—​—​. 2017. Missionary Christianity and Local Religion: American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836–​1870. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Kent, E.F. 2004. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New York: Oxford University Press. Messmore, J.H. 1903. The Life of Edwin Wallace Parker, D.D. New York: Eaton and Mains. Neill, S. 1984. A History of Christianity in India:  The Beginnings to AD 1707. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Pachuau, L. 2014. “A Clash of ‘Mass Movements’? Christian Missions and the Gandhian Nationalist Movement.” Transformation 31(3): 157–​74. Pope, G.U. 1886. The “Sacred” Kurraḷ of Tiruvaḷḷa-​Nâyanâr. With Introduction, Grammar, Translation, Notes (in which are reprinted Fr. C.J. Beschi’s and F.W. Ellis’ versions), Lexicon, and Concordance. London: W.H. Allen & Co.

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Hindu–Protestant encounters —​—​—​. 1900. The Tiruvāçagam or “Sacred Utterances” of the Tamil Poet, Saint, and Sage Māṇikka-​Vāçagar. The Tamil Text of the Fifty-​One Poems with English Translation, Introductions, and Notes to Which Is Prefixed a Summary of the Life and Legends of the Sage, with Appendices Illustrating the Great South-​Indian System of Philosophy and Religion Called the Çaiva Siddhāntam with Tamil Lexicon and Concordance. Oxford:  The Clarendon Press. Ramabai, P. 2003. Pandita Ramabai’s America. Frykenberg, R.E. (ed.)., Gomes, K. (trans.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Ramabai Sarasvati, P. 1887. The High-​Caste Hindu Woman. Philadelphia, PA: Jas. B. Rodgers Printing Co. Sebastian, M. 2004. “Mission without History? Some Ideas for Decolonizing Mission.” International Review of Mission 93(368): 75–​96. Smith, G. 1881. The Life of Alexander Duff, D.D., L.L.D. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

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10 THE EAST INDIA COMPANY, CHRISTIANITY, AND HINDUISM Penelope Carson1

A Godless company? In 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to 218 London merchants giving them exclusive trading rights to the East Indies.Theirs was a joint-​stock company, and its aim was to make large profits for its investors. Apart from the stipulations of its charter, the Company was autonomous and answerable only to the shareholders. It started trading on the Indian subcontinent at Surat in 1608. The Company was to remain in India for the next 250 years, founding three main centers of trade (called presidencies) at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. For most of this time trade, not conquest, was the Company’s focus.The merchants needed goodwill and cooperation if they were to trade successfully and most of the merchants arrived without wives. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the merchants intermingling with the Indian population, taking Indian mistresses and even wives and adopting Indian ways and customs. There was a degree of mutual respect. Job Charnock, founder of the Calcutta factory, for instance, wore a lungi and married a Hindu widow he had allegedly saved from the funeral pyre of her first husband. He sacrificed a cock on her tomb when she died and was believed to be more Hindu than Christian. What part did Christianity play in this company of merchants? England was now a Protestant state and Elizabeth undoubtedly regarded the Company as a bulwark against Catholic Spain and Portugal. The Company did not, however, regard spreading the Christian gospel abroad as foremost among its obligations. Morning prayers were said at its factories (trading posts) and the terms of its charter stipulated that chaplains should be provided for voyages (and, later, for the main factories) in order to ensure good behavior and to provide essential religious services. There were no churches before 1680 when St. Mary’s was constructed in Madras. The merchants and even the chaplains had little interest in propagating the Christian religion to the local populace. The Company did, however, consider it prudent to allow its mixed-​race Indo-​Portuguese employees, whose knowledge of Indian customs and languages was useful, the services of Roman Catholic priests. Roman Catholic priests were also required to look after the needs of the Company’s many Roman Catholic soldiers. These priests required licenses from the Company and had to take oaths of loyalty and behave in a “fit” manner. In 1661 on the cession of Bombay to England, the Company came under a legal obligation to look after the interests of Bombay’s Roman Catholic population. It also set up Christian asylums and charity 114

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schools for the many orphaned or abandoned Anglo-​Indian children. The Company therefore provided a basic amount of Christianity for its employees. At the end of the seventeenth century, changes in Britain had a dramatic effect on how the Company operated. The Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 placed Parliament, rather than the monarch, firmly in control. The Company’s wings began to be clipped. There were the first evidences of a revival of religious and moral fervor that developed into what became known as the “Evangelical Revival.” Evangelicals took to heart Christ’s command to “Go ye therefore and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19), and in 1698 the Anglican Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was formed, followed in 1701 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).The Company’s 1698 charter stipulated that chaplains should learn Indian languages in order to be able to preach Christianity to Indians. The Company’s Court of Directors was not happy with this clause, and in 1712 sent a dispatch restricting Christian instruction to employees or slaves of the Company. Ironically, just at this very same time, the SPCK approached the Court of Directors asking it to protect and encourage the Lutheran missionaries of the Royal Danish mission in Tranquebar (which the SPCK had been supporting financially since 1709) to start charity schools in Madras. This resulted in a volte-​face in which the Court reminded its officials in Madras of the 1698 charter and instructed them to give the missionaries the countenance and protection they desired so that the missionaries could be strengthened in their work. The Court of Directors was mindful of the fact that the SPCK was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London and had many powerful patrons. The Company necessarily had to be responsive to political and economic feeling at home. The Court, accordingly, was generous, granting the missionaries free passages, giving them land and buildings, a free mail service and allowances for providing religious services for Europeans and for running its asylums and charity schools. By 1740, replacement of deceased or retired missionaries had become routine and by mid-​century a Court dispatch urged Madras to give additional allowances to aid the propagation of the Protestant religion. This gives the lie to the myth that the East India Company forbade missionaries from working in its territories, although it has to be said that Parliament and the Company were more interested in converting Roman Catholics to Protestantism than in converting Hindus or Muslims to their faith. The Lutheran missionaries had approached the Company partly because of hostility they encountered from both Danish merchants and the local population. Little is known about the details of Indian hostility to both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries, but both felt it necessary to petition the Company for protection fairly regularly.

Pressure intensifies Just as these first stirrings of interest in the propagation of Christianity were being felt in Britain and India, the Indian situation was also beginning to change in dramatic ways. The Mughal Empire was weakening and the French took advantage of the Empire’s decline to consolidate their own position. In the face of French rivalry on the subcontinent, the Company began to assume control over more and more territory, determined as it was to ensure the security of its trading interests. The need for larger fighting forces led to a great increase in the numbers of sepoys (Indian soldiers). Up to this point, the Company had reacted to events in an ad-​hoc manner and on the whole had a laissez-​faire attitude toward religious matters. However, as the Company took over more and more territory, officials began to believe that they should operate a policy of religious neutrality or toleration. As has been mentioned, there were already signs that Indians were hostile toward attempts to convert them. In 1662, the Court ordered that there were to be no compulsory conversions and no interference with Indian religious “prejudices,” 115

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and the killing of cows was forbidden in Hindu areas. The belief that British officers needed to respect the customs and religious prejudices of the sepoys in order to hold on to India became a mantra. The Company decided to follow the Mughal example of endeavoring to legitimate its rule in Indian eyes by taking on some of the traditional roles of an Indian ruler. One of the important functions of Hindu kingship was the endowment and protection of religious institutions.The Company therefore attempted to cement local loyalties by confirming the tax-​ exempt status of such endowments, collecting pilgrim taxes for the maintenance of shrines and their priests, giving police support, and showing marks of respect such as the firing of salutes at major festivals. Company officers learned Indian languages and started to attend major Hindu and Muslim festivals. This Company eventually codified this policy in Section 12 of Bengal Regulation III of 1793, which became known as the Company’s “compact” with the Indian people. Thus, just as Britain was becoming a sovereign power in India, it began to operate more as a Hindu than a Christian “Raj.” Evangelical Christians argued, with some justice, that this went much further than toleration and signified positive support of “idolatrous” Hinduism. At the same time, countervailing influences emerged in Britain. By the eighteenth century, the Company was in dire financial straits and had to ask for a one-​million-​pound loan from the government. There was also increasing concern over corruption by Company servants. This led to parliamentary oversight of the Company’s operations. A  governor-​general was appointed in 1773 (Warren Hastings). By 1784, a system of dual control had been set up with a Board of Control given supervision and ultimate authority over the Company’s affairs. This meant that the Company had to become more responsive to political realities in Britain. The moral character of imperial authority and the ethics of British conduct became subjects of public debate. Some argued that Britain had a duty to look after the “happiness” of the Indian people in return for the great wealth it was drawing from the subcontinent. Most Company officials who had served in India believed that ensuring the happiness of the Indian people required that Indian institutions and religions should be left alone as far as possible. They took the view that British rule should be “Indianized” if the population was to be reconciled to it. The growing numbers of evangelical Christians in England, in contrast, argued that Indians would only achieve happiness only if their immortal souls were saved by being brought to Christianity. The question was emotionally charged, with evangelicals and “old India hands” taking up entrenched positions against each other. The rapid growth of evangelicalism in Britain had a significant impact on official attitudes toward the new evangelical missionary societies wishing to work in India by the end of the eighteenth century. With one exception, the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), these missionary societies were founded by Dissenters. No longer content with mere toleration, Dissenters were demanding equal religious and civil liberties, which they regarded as “natural rights.” Prejudices that evangelical activity was fanatical and subversive of the established order would naturally have implications for those who wished to evangelize in India.

Soldiers of Christ The Company refused the first proposal for an English mission, which came from two Anglican senior servants of the Company: Charles Grant, member of the Board of Trade at Calcutta, and David Brown, senior presidency chaplain. Grant was not a person to give up, however, and once home in England, he pursued his missionary plans with vigor, attempting to have what became known as the “Pious Clause,” asserting Britain’s duty to provide for the religious and moral improvement of India, inserted in the Company’s 1793 charter. 116

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There is insufficient space here to go into the details of his efforts. Suffice it to say that the Company vigorously opposed the proposal. Stephen Lushington, the chairman, forecast the end of British rule if missionaries proved to be successful.While the debates over the “Pious Clause” were taking place in Britain, Lord Cornwallis, Hastings’s successor, and his Council passed the aforementioned Company “compact” (Bengal Regulation III of 1793), which promised to “preserve to [Indians] the laws of the Shasters and Koran in matters to which they have been invariably applied, and to protect them in the free exercise of their religions” (Carson 2012, p.  41) In 1803, after the Company’s conquest of Orissa (now Odisha), the Brahmins of the Jagannath temple at Puri asked to be taken under British protection. The Company agreed, assuming the management of the temple and the collection of pilgrim taxes in order to maintain public welfare. Evangelicals were appalled.They argued that it was improper for a Christian government to take upon itself any regulation of “heathen” worship. They felt this was tantamount to operating the Company as a Hindu Raj. Grant insisted that while the Company was bound to consider the welfare of its subjects, for the definition of welfare it must look to the moral sanctions of the rulers, not of the ruled. This question was to haunt the Company for the rest of its rule. Grant had failed in his bid to achieve a statutory requirement for the Company to support missionaries but was successful in obtaining an increased number of Company chaplains. British Dissenting missionaries began to arrive in India in the 1790s. They were advised not to apply for licenses and entered India clandestinely. Interestingly, once in India the Company permitted them to go about their missionary duties. It is clear that the authorities knew precisely who they were, though the missionaries initially portrayed themselves as indigo planters. Lord Wellesley, governor-​general 1798–​1805, initially expressed some concern that the lower-​class Dissenting missionaries (some of whom had shown radical tendencies at home) might link up with French Jacobins (republicans) to overthrow English rule on the subcontinent. The French and English were long-​term rivals on the Indian subcontinent. Wellesley also was concerned that the Baptist missionaries were operating out of the Danish enclave of Serampore and the London Missionary Society (LMS) from the Dutch colony of Chinsurah. However, Brown and Buchanan, the evangelical presidency chaplains, managed to reassure Wellesley that the missionaries were not revolutionary.The evangelical chaplains regarded missionary work as part of their duty and, indeed, argued that, far from exciting alarm, their official role as Company chaplains would enable them to promote Christianity effectively and unostentatiously. The support of Lord Wellesley and the presidency chaplains was crucial to the safety and well-​being of the missionaries. A modus vivendi was achieved whereby missionaries were permitted to live and work in British territory, provided they did so unofficially and refrained from causing difficulties. The Baptist press was useful to the government and Lord Wellesley took full advantage of the missionaries’ translation skills and appointed the much-​loved Baptist former cobbler,William Carey, to teach Bengali at his Fort William College. In 1805, the Asiatic Society allowed the Baptists a stipend to translate and publish Sanskrit writings. All this helped the Baptists to finance their mission stations. While Wellesley held that the justification for British rule was to provide for the “happiness” of the people, he also felt that missionary work “unsanctioned by Government” was consistent with this policy. He publicly expressed his goodwill toward the Baptists and gave liberal subscriptions to their non-​religious publications. He also allowed Christian scriptures to be translated into Indian languages, maintaining, “A Christian Governor could do no less, a British Governor could do no more” (Ibid., p. 60). Nevertheless, while Wellesley asserted that he would not tolerate government involvement or give encouragement to the conversion of Indians to the Christian religion, he was prepared to 117

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intervene in inhumane Hindu practices. He asked Carey to investigate the custom of throwing newly born children into the Ganges at Saugar Island. As a result of Carey’s report he prohibited the practice by Regulation VI of 1802. Carey also investigated the custom of sati (the burning of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands). Wellesley was, however, advised that this was a religious practice and should not therefore be prohibited. He also declined to forbid the Hindu practice of leaving the sick and old to die on the riverbanks.

Indian hostility As had happened in Tranquebar at the beginning of the century, there were immediate signs of Indian hostility to the arrival of these new missionaries. Perceived transgressions by the missionaries were readily reported to the Bengal government. In 1800, after the first Baptist baptism, over 2,000 Indians assembled to protest and to vilify the new converts. In their writings from the time, the Baptists often described the mocking and insults they had to endure while they were itinerating, and early on decided to use native catechists to do much of the preaching. There is no doubt that Baptist tracts and sermons condemned Hinduism and Islam, and Indians often exhibited signs of irritation in response. One of the biggest problems for the missionaries was the persecution of converts. Between 1799 and 1806 there was widespread hostility to thousands of conversions in the Tinnevelly district. False rumors spread among the Indian populace that the Christian converts were conspirators in league with the British. Such was the hostility that the SPCK felt it was once again necessary to petition the Company for special protection for its converts. When the directors eventually responded in 1805, the dispatch simply pointed out that all religions should enjoy similar protection and enjoined the missionaries to conduct themselves in “a prudent and upright manner” (Ibid., p.  65) It is significant that the Court of Directors specifically mentioned missionaries in the dispatch, thus confirming that they knew of their presence and had no objection.The missionary societies’ policy of stressing non-​involvement in politics, their generally good conduct, together with their utility in in providing essential religious and charitable services for Christians was paying off. Company officials connived at the presence of the unlicensed missionaries and the Court of Directors did not try to force them to do otherwise, probably because it did not wish to arouse unnecessary antagonism from the religious public at home. Its confirmation of allowances granted by presidency governments for performing divine service gave implicit sanction to the missionaries. In 1806, a crisis occurred with the murder or wounding of nearly 200 Europeans at Vellore, in the Madras presidency, where members of Tipu Sultan’s family were being held. Shortly afterwards, the unrest spread to other stations. News of the disturbances deeply shocked Britain. Opponents of missionary activity seized the opportunity to try to have the missionaries expelled. William Bentinck, governor at the time, attributed the unrest to the introduction of new dress regulations for the sepoys, which forbade the use of caste marks and earrings with uniform, ordered the trimming of beards, and included a new style of headdress that included a leather cockade. In contrast, the commander-​in-​chief, unsurprisingly, stated that the crucial factor was intrigue by the Mysore princes imprisoned at Vellore. Whatever the precise reasons, it is clear that some Indians believed that there was a plan to convert them to Christianity. Missionaries found themselves put under restrictions in the wake of the rebellion. Sir George Barlow, acting governor-​general, told the president of the Board of Control that he feared “preaching Methodists and wild Visionaries disturbing the religious ceremonies of the Natives will alienate the affections of our Native troops and lead to the loss of India” (Ibid., p. 73). Lord Minto, who succeeded Barlow as governor-​general, agreed 118

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and demanded that the Baptist press be moved to Calcutta for greater oversight. Similarly, he demanded that the Rev. Claudius Buchanan submit his sermons for inspection. He also ordered missionaries not to itinerate in unsettled border areas. Minto rightly perceived the radical implications of Christian demands, especially their demands for the abolition of caste. Grant and Parry, chairman and vice-​chairman of the Court, had to use all their skill and influence to prevent missionaries from being ordered home. They warned Robert Dundas, chairman of the Board of Control, that they would call on the religious public to insist that the Company allow missionaries in India. Letters from Dundas demonstrate that this warning hit home and he was wary of alienating large numbers of the “respectable” British public. Both sides made copious use of the word “toleration.” Evangelicals argued that they wanted “toleration” for Christianity, by which they meant no restrictions on its peaceful propagation and protection for their converts. They regarded the measures instituted by the Bengal government in the wake of Vellore as persecution, not merely intolerance of Christianity. Their opponents, on the other hand, believed that preaching, itinerating, and distributing tracts was intolerant of Indian religions. Parry pointed out to Dundas that it was unthinkable that the Company should refuse to assist Christian missions on the grounds that it meant interference in religious matters, while at the same time the Company was involved in managing one of the chief Hindu shrines. Long-​serving Company officials, like Warren Hastings, argued, on the contrary, that Britain’s Indian government was not Christian but in effect Hindu and Muslim, administered by Christians for their benefit. By 1808, few Britons were prepared to argue against the principle of propagating Christianity in India; the debate hinged on how this should best be achieved. While most felt that the circulation of the scriptures was acceptable, it was difficult for Company servants and politicians, faced with responsibility for India’s security, unequivocally to sanction other forms of missionary activity. Without exception, the governors-​general maintained that Company servants could not support missionary activity in their official capacities, although they were prepared to protect missionaries from persecution and to give them non-​missionary employment as Company chaplains, heads of charitable institutions, or translators.They also recognized the value of missionary educational work. However, evangelicals were no longer happy with the Company’s informal arrangements with them and were determined to persuade the legislature to force the Company to put missionary activity on a formal footing.

1813 renewal of the Company’s charter: the Pious Clause By 1812, the Company was feeling increasingly under siege as negotiations began for the periodic renewal of its charter. It was fighting for its very existence, not to mention trying also to preserve its trading monopoly. Member of Parliament William Wilberforce was the public face of the campaign to open the door to missionary activity. He made much of the “Hindu” practices of sati, infanticide, polygamy, as well as of what he perceived to be the poor condition of Hindu women and Hindus’ idolatrous ceremonies, arguing that “their religious system is one grand abomination.” Hastings and other old India hands could not agree, maintaining that the moral character of the Hindu was a great deal better than the moral character of Britons in general, and that Britain would gain by the “import cargo” (Ibid., p. 143). In other words, Britons could learn more about moral character from their involvement with Indian Hindus than Hindus would learn from Britons. The religious public was well organized and presented 908 petitions trying to force the Company to do more for Christianity (a number that significantly overshadows the 123 petitions presented in favor of preserving the East India Company’s monopoly). In the end, two 119

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religious clauses were included in the Company’s new charter. Resolution 12 provided for a bishop, three archdeacons, and three Presbyterian chaplains. Resolution 13 stated that Britain had a bounden duty to provide for the religious and moral improvement of the people of India and was therefore to provide facilities for people dedicated to this task to go there (i.e., missionaries). Nevertheless, the Court of Directors held on to the right to grant licenses and to determine where and how missionaries should proceed. Apart from the possibility for an appeal to the Board of Control, the legal position of missionaries wishing to reside in India remained unchanged. The real sting in the tail, for the missionaries, was the enshrinement in the charter, for the first time, of the Company’s “compact” with the people of India, which reiterated the principle that Britain must allow Indians the free exercise of their religion. There is no doubt that a major re-​adjustment had occurred in Britain’s political and economic priorities, which demonstrated the power of the new commercial interests and the extraordinary strength and vitality of the religious public. How far would this make East India Company rule Christian?

Center versus periphery: the power of “the man on the spot” The first signs were not encouraging for evangelicals. Despite Resolution 13, the Court of Directors had to be forced to grant licenses to missionaries by appeal to the Board of Control. Until at least the mid-​1820s, the Court raised queries and objections to applications from evangelical missionary societies. This does not appear to have been the case for missionaries associated with the High Anglican SPCK and SPG, who were routinely granted licenses. Both the Company at home and its officials in India demonstrated a determination to control missionaries and, indeed, all ecclesiastical officers. As communications still took six months to travel between England and India, the initiative was very much with local officials, who were determined to lead rather than react to events. Military commanders were paranoid about sepoy conversions because of the excitement they aroused among the troops and the local populace.There are numerous examples of missionaries being forbidden to go near the troops, native and European. In 1814, the Bengal government issued an instruction prohibiting the circulation of the scriptures in military stations. In Madras, Christians were not permitted to join the army and converts were dismissed. Missionaries in the south found that the previous easy-​going attitude of Company officials largely evaporated with the arrival of Hugh Elliot as governor (1814–​1820). Elliot insisted on controlling the movements of missionaries and ordered them to keep away from frontier areas. In 1816 and 1817, he passed two laws that caused evangelicals considerable alarm. One regulation strictly forbade the employment of any except Hindus and Muslims in the native courts as agents or conductors of suits.This amounted to a complete bar to the employment of Christians in public office. In 1817, he codified the Company’s involvement in Hindu religious festivals, giving responsibility to the Madras Board of Revenue to manage and maintain Hindu temples and endowments. Evangelicals were outraged, believing that this made it appear as if the Company officially sanctioned “heathenism” and practices such as temple prostitution. The Company found itself enforcing local demands for labor to pull the temple carts.This was a particular bone of contention because in certain areas many of the laborers were Christian. The attendance of Company officials at Hindu festivals was also formalized. Elliot also put the missionary press under strict censorship and interfered in decisions over where to situate churches. Sir Thomas Munro, Elliot’s successor, followed the same line, as did Mountstuart Elphinstone and John Malcolm in Bombay. Missionaries in the south were without doubt in a worse situation than they had been prior to 1813. At the same time, despite this official support for Hinduism, Indian

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hostility was increasing. Many Indians began to believe that, in the face of British power, their gods could no longer help them and they would end up becoming Christian.

Implications of the new ecclesiastical establishment The new charter provided for a formal ecclesiastical establishment for India, headed by a bishop based in Calcutta. Without exception, governors-​general felt that they, rather than the bishop, should control the movements of Company chaplains and intervene if necessary for security reasons. Lord Moira, governor-​general 1813–​1823, refused the new bishop’s request for an ordinance forbidding the employment of native artificers on Sundays. He felt that such a law would do violence to the religious habits of Muslims and Hindus and would be connected in Indian eyes with the recent appointment of the bishop (as indeed it was). Thomas Thomason, the senior presidency chaplain, did all he could to promote missionary work. Reverends Corrie (who became first bishop of Madras) and Thomason were on the Bengal Corresponding Committee of the CMS and founded a CMS auxiliary in Calcutta. Likewise, Marmaduke Thompson, senior chaplain in Madras, became the first secretary of the CMS Corresponding Committee, which supervised the activities of the CMS missionaries. The ties between the chaplains and missionaries could not have been closer. In 1823, the Bishop of Calcutta formally became responsible for the superintendence of Anglican missionaries under the India Bishops and Courts Act, which had far-​reaching implications. As bishops became more involved with missionaries and their work, it became increasingly difficult to separate the government from attempts to propagate the gospel in the eyes of Indians. Lord William Bentinck, governor of Madras at the time of the Vellore Mutiny and governor-​general 1828–​1835, did not approve of Bishop Wilson’s connections with missionary societies, nor did he approve of Wilson’s attempts to force Hindus and Muslims to work on their holy days or his ruling that caste prejudice was unacceptable within Christian communities. The actions of a number of evangelical officials who went well beyond what was generally considered acceptable for government officials aroused even greater hostility. One such official established a Christian village in Mysore, and another prohibited the custom of forcing Christians to perform services at Hindu temples, despite receiving death threats intending to discourage him from doing so. This particular official also set up Christian schools in his garden and supported many converts. Another used his official position to distribute tracts and otherwise further Christianity (he was dismissed by the governor for his pains). The most extreme case of favoritism toward Christians occurred in Travancore (which came under British control in 1801), where two ardently evangelical Residents in succession did all they could to promote Christianity. Colin Macaulay, the first, invited missionaries to work in Travancore in 1806. He later persuaded the new Rani, who needed British support, to exempt Christians from performing forced labor on Sundays. Colonel John Munro, Macaulay’s successor, went even further and persuaded the Rani to grant Syrian Christians privileges, hoping to make them a client community of the British. A considerable number were given public appointments and a law was passed putting a Christian judge in every district court.The Rani also granted Christian converts tax concessions, inheritance rights, and full exemption from all duties associated with temples, and gave generous gifts of money, land, and building materials to the missionaries. Munro’s actions were widely regarded as a breach of the Company’s policy of religious neutrality and Munro’s successor rescinded the concessions. In the early 1820s, Hindus and Christians began to clash violently over the issue of temple honors, the organization of festivals, and the allocation of temple shares. One of the more

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emotive disputes, which outraged Western notions of decency, was the “breast-​cloth” controversy, in which low-​caste women took to wearing an upper cloth over their bosoms in the manner of high-​caste women. For their audaciousness, such women were insulted and attacked, and military aid had to be called in to restore order. Both Morison, the Resident, and the Madras government declined to intervene in favor of low-​caste Christian women who were wearing the breast cloth, regarding the issue as one of local caste usage. Eventually a compromise was reached. Christians were exempted from Sunday labor but not from general government labor. Permission was still required before places of worship could be erected. The Court of Directors approved of this line of action. This pattern of opposition to missionary work and the periodic persecution of converts by their fellow Indians repeated itself throughout the subcontinent. Despite the care that both missionaries and most Company officials took to ensure that no connection could be made between them, missionaries were often asked if they were paid by government to convert Indians. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Christian converts suffered greatly because of their adherence to Christianity. For example, as punishment for breaking caste, they were often refused essential services such as that of barbers, midwives, and washers. Indian landowners increasingly refused to renew leases to Christians, particularly in areas where missionaries were making progress. Opponents destroyed Christian houses, pillaged their gardens, and plundered their granaries. Periodically, children attending missionary schools were attacked and their schools had to be abandoned. Missionaries themselves were threatened.This persecution led to even more tension, as missionaries expected Company officials to take the side of the Christian converts.

The Company and Christian education Education was a high priority for missionaries, who considered it a way of improving Indian morals and character and undermining the Hindu scriptures. Missionaries perceived the Indian desire for education as an opportunity to sow the seeds of Christian values. The government also saw education as a useful way to educate Indians and to inculcate Western values that, the government hoped, would bind rulers and ruled. Soon, an educational partnership between the Bengal Government and the LMS began. The Court of Directors sanctioned a subsidy of 600 rupees per month, which it increased to 800 in 1816, provided that Christian scriptures would not be used in the schools. This enabled the Company to say that it had honored its promise not to promote conversions. Lord Moira, the governor-​general, contributed 1,000 rupees to a Baptist appeal for support for its schools. Within fifteen months, they had established 103 primary schools with 6,703 pupils. In 1818, Lord Moira, now Lord Hastings, asked the Baptists to send a missionary to Ajmer in Rajputana to start elementary schools, contributing 3,000 rupees out of his own purse to match the same amount provided by the Nawab (ruler) of Oudh. Hastings agreed to become the first patron of Serampore College for the Instruction of Asiatic, Christian, and other Youth in Eastern Literature and European Science. Government officials examined these government-​aided schools. In addition, there were a number of charities, whose secular aims hid the close involvement of evangelical officials and missionaries. The Baptists also had thirteen presses operating and claimed to have published 71,000 books by 1828. The CMS similarly operated presses. Increasing numbers of officials were evangelical and actively supported missions. The missionaries were thus in close alliance with the Bengal government for educational and other purposes, a fact that did not escape the notice of Hindus and Muslims, many of whom suspected a political agenda in the alliance. By the 1820s, missionaries began to be more confident in using Christian scriptures in their schools, despite the Company’s injunctions to refrain 122

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from doing so. Indian opposition increased in response, and was so great at times that schools had to be moved or even abandoned. Missionaries were even accused of planning to kidnap school children and take them abroad. At the same time, scarcely a month passed without a request for another school. Indians wanted the education but not the Christianity. The Bengal government tried to be even-​handed by giving subsidies to Hindu and Muslim institutions of higher education and encouraging Indians to take part on the managing committees of secular educational societies. Lord Amherst, Hasting’s successor as governor-​ general, was less sympathetic toward anything that looked like missionary activity. In 1825, he overruled his Council and refused to give a grant to a female education society on the grounds that it promoted Christian education. The Court supported his stance. A General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI) was formed to supervise and make recommendations for education within the Presidency. The GCPI decided to continue the grants to some of the missionary schools, as well as to the Calcutta madrasa (a Muslim institution of higher education, founded by Warren Hastings in 1781)  and the Hindu Vidyala, a Sanskrit College founded in Benares eleven years later. The GCPI also established new Sanskrit colleges in Calcutta, Agra, and Delhi. The appointment of Horace Hayman Wilson, a Sanskrit scholar, as secretary to the committee, heralded a shift in government support toward Indian rather than missionary educational institutions. This led to fierce debate between “Anglicists” and “Orientalists” over how the small amount of public money available for education should be spent.

Lord Bentinck and Hinduism, 1828–​1835 Evangelicals had great hopes when fellow evangelical, Lord Bentinck, arrived in India determined to abolish sati. Evangelical campaigning in Britain against sati reached fever pitch in the 1820s, with publications such as James Peggs’s India’s Cries to British Humanity (1826). Human sacrifice abolition societies were formed. Bentinck believed that he would be guilty of murder if he hesitated to abolish the practice and, with his encouragement, it was formally abolished in Bengal by Regulation XVII of December 1829. Prohibitions followed in Bombay and Madras in 1830. To petition against the legislation, Hindus founded the Dharma Sabha. (For more on the sati controversies, see chapters by Killingley and Jones in this volume.) Bentinck’s abolition of sati and other similar reforms were a radical departure from the declared policy of the Company. Bentinck was prepared to address missionary concerns over the loss of inheritance rights for converts, which he regarded as unjust. Bengal Regulation III of 1832 banned the operation of the Hindu law by which a convert became an outcast, losing claim to a share of any heritable property. He also prohibited discrimination against any individual on the grounds of race, caste, or religion. While he had been encouraged to do this by the directors for financial reasons, the regulation finally made Christians in Bengal eligible for public posts. Bentinck was prepared to employ missionaries as chaplains but refused to give grants to missionary schools. He stood up against evangelical attempts to abolish the pilgrim tax and declined to abolish slavery. Despite fierce lobbying by evangelicals, the Company’s 1833 charter made abolition of the pilgrim tax discretionary.This gave leeway to the Court to decline to send out specific instructions that Christians were not to be involved in Hindu festivals, and the Court did not think it expedient to stop the collection of pilgrim taxes where the taxes had already been collected for some time. Bentinck also reluctantly agreed to an increase in the number of bishops. Bentinck’s Bengal Regulation about public employment was included in the new charter.The charter ended the Company’s monopoly on trade and with it the requirement for licenses to go to India. 123

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The introduction of the steamship greatly cut the delay in receiving instructions from England and the governor-​general was given more power over the subordinate presidencies. All this meant that the powerful evangelical lobby in Britain would be able to exert its influence more effectively. Indians continued to be suspicious of the motives behind government educational projects. They formed defensive associations in response to perceived threats to their religions. Despite Bentinck’s efforts to be even-​handed in his treatment of both Indians and Christians, neither were happy.

Hinduism under siege By the 1830s, an arrogance was beginning to pervade official thinking. By this time, there was little doubt in most British minds that Western civilization and Christianity needed to be brought to the British Empire. Even those who did not approve of proselytism conceded that missionaries brought much-​needed help to Indians through their educational and social work. Britain’s power in India now seemed secure enough to make changes. Nevertheless, India’s governors-​general remained unconvinced. Lord Auckland continued Bentinck’s cautious line and Lord Ellenborough, his successor, had no time for missionaries. Lord Hardinge, soldier statesman and next governor-​general, held fast to the traditional military view that Britain’s power rested on the fidelity of the native army. An 1833 dispatch ordering the cessation of the government’s involvement in Hindu institutions was largely ignored in India. Auckland was particularly recalcitrant.The extent of his frustration was shown when he suggested that evangelicals should be disqualified from serving in India because they could not refrain from acting as missionaries in addition to carrying out their official duties. Maitland, the evangelical commander-​in-​chief at Madras, resigned over the issue and was regarded a martyr by evangelicals in Britain. Eventually Auckland had to accept the inevitable, though the last connections with Hindu temples did not cease until 1863. The severing of that connection caused Hindu disquiet and resentment. As many had forecast, temples were neglected, mismanaged, and abandoned, and there was widespread corruption. The Company also lost an important source of information, and with it, its feeling for the popular mood. Antagonism and violence increased against Christian converts as they more regularly demanded rights they had not previously possessed. Opposition reached fever pitch in response to high-​caste conversions, such as a conversion in Nagpur in 1848, which resulted in the arrival of a deputation of 15,000 to 20,000 Hindus demanding the convert’s return to his community. In 1845, there was an explosion of violence after more than 7,000 converted in Tinnevelly. A mob of several thousand attacked houses and prayer halls, destroying and looting hundreds of buildings, while beating men and raping women. Troops had to be used to bring the situation under control. By the late 1840s, anti-​Christian meetings were taking place in both Calcutta and Madras. The Sacred Ash Society and the Four Vedas Society were set up to counteract what were considered the pernicious effects of Christianity on Hinduism. The strength of evangelicalism in Britain was demonstrated by the increasing numbers of officials prepared to do all they could to spread Christianity, such as the governors Robert Grant (son of Charles) in Bombay and Lord Tweeddale in Madras. Tweeddale’s educational measures favoring Christianity caused particular concern, manifest in a petition of 12,000 signatures protesting against the violation of Hindu rights and privileges. Tweeddale was recalled and the Court of Directors reiterated its stance that officials were to abstain from all interference with Indian religions. As far as education was concerned, the government could not cope with the scale of the challenge. By 1837, missionary schools were providing most of the English education in Bengal, despite their use of Christian scriptures. In 1841, a dispatch, drafted by J.S. Mill, 124

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was sent to Bengal effectively reversing the English Education Act of 1835 (which required the Company to spend its education funds on English education and had been encouraged by Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education), directing that it be phased out over four years in order to conciliate Hindu and Muslim feelings. Sir Charles Wood, the new president of the Board of Control, decided that it was the government’s duty to educate the mass of its subjects. This education was to be secular but his dispatch intentionally aided mission schools by stipulating that grants-​in-​aid could be given to all schools, secular or religious, without reference to caste or creed. Wood’s dispatch also removed the restrictions against Bibles being held in government school libraries and permitted teachers to explain Christian references to pupils outside of class. By the 1860s, missionary schools accounted for nearly half of all educational institutions, despite Indians setting up their own schools. In 1848, a governor-​general of a different stamp arrived in Bengal:  James Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie. Young and energetic, he had little patience with the gradualist policies of his predecessors. He deemed it “both his Christian duty and wise policy to show India we were not ashamed of being Christian, nor afraid to protect them” (Ibid., p. 223). He had the continuing practice of infanticide publicly notified as murder, and he swept aside all objections to giving Christian instruction to the children of native Christians in the Company’s troops, while encouraging his provincial governors to aid missionary education liberally. He also asserted the importance of female education, which caused considerable fears among Hindus and Muslims, who did not want to see their daughters unveiled or educated in the same schools as boys. Critics of these policies also noted that Christian scriptures were increasingly appearing as classroom textbooks. Hindus expressed by far the most opposition, however, to Dalhousie’s Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850, which extended provisions giving converts the right to inherit ancestral property. The Act ignored the fact that the Hindu family is a religious as well as a social entity and important sacred duties are connected with the inheritance of property. It also undermined caste regulations and overrode the authority of caste councils. Opponents organized petitions, including one from 14,000 Hindus against what they regarded as a breach of faith. Before leaving India, Dalhousie drafted the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, which stated that any children resulting from the remarriage of widows should be accorded—​contrary to traditional upper-​caste Hindu practice—​all the privileges of family and inheritance. Finally, the General Service Enlistment Act, passed in 1856, stipulated that sepoys had to be available for service overseas. Many Hindus (particularly upper-​ caste Hindus) believed that such travel would pollute them and lead to the loss of caste, and therefore regarded the Act as a cynical move aimed at encouraging them to become Christian (since Hindus who had been outcasted might be more likely to convert). There was a general feeling, then, that the Company was tampering with Hinduism, and growing suspicion that the Government intended to force Christianity on non-​Christians under their control. Brahmins in particular sensed a threat to their traditional status from British ideas of progress. Bentinck had started the process, but Dalhousie’s governor-​ generalship appeared finally to break the Company’s “compact” with its Indian subjects. In fewer than ten years of rule, Dalhousie had swept away any remaining goodwill between rulers and ruled. Arrogance and contempt seemed to have replaced the previous symbiotic relationship between Britons and Indians. The stage was set for the Great Uprising of 1857/​58.

Conclusion: a Hindu or a Christian Raj? In truth, the East India Company was a hybrid operation as far as Hindu–​Christian relations are concerned. It had a duty to provide for its Christian employees at the same time as trying to 125

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maintain the acquiescence of millions of non-​Christian Indians to British suzerainty. From the mid-​eighteenth century to about 1840, the Company could, with some justice, be described as a Hindu Raj, as it bent over backwards to ensure Indians were free to practice their religions. This “compact” was even enshrined in the 1813 and subsequent charters. The Company was very hesitant to help Christian converts or to be seen as promoting Christianity. By trying to be all things to all people, the Company ended up pleasing none. Bentinck’s abolition of sati in 1829, however, demonstrated that Britain would no longer allow the practice of what it considered inhumane religious customs. By the 1840s, the Company’s confidence in its ability to hold India and the extraordinary strength of evangelicalism in Britain led it to shift from its stated position of neutrality to one of more positive support for Christianity. Dalhousie decisively ended the charade of neutrality and it was not long before Indians in the north rose up against the British in what has become known as the Great Uprising. This is not the place to discuss how far religious disaffection was a factor in the Great Uprising. The south remained calm despite the fact that there had been considerable religious unrest there because of mass conversions, Tweeddale’s Bible Minute, and the breast-​cloth controversy in Travancore and Tinnevelly. The south’s placidity therefore seems to indicate that the Uprising was not entirely due to religious factors. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that there were genuine fears that Britain intended to convert India to Christianity and was interfering with Hindu and Muslim religious traditions. In order to reassure Indians that this was not the case, Queen Victoria’s proclamation to the Indian people, after the Uprising was brutally put down, was essentially a repetition of the Company’s “compact” with the Indian people. However, all British involvement with Hindu shrines ceased in 1863 and this was undoubtedly an evangelical victory. The Uprising did not end the debate over how far it was possible to introduce Christianity without causing upset, nor were Indians convinced by Victoria’s proclamation. The mistrust that had grown up between rulers and ruled became more, rather than less, entrenched in ensuing years. The connection of Christianity in Indian minds with imperial rule has had tragic consequences for many Indian Christians.

Note 1 This chapter is a distillation of several sections from the author’s book, The East India Company and Religion 1698–​1858 (2012).

Bibliography Carson, P. 2012. The East India Company and Religion, 1698–​1858. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.

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11 HINDU–​C HRISTIAN DEBATES IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES Richard Fox Young

For this discussion to get off the ground, a daunting conceptual obstacle has first of all to be removed. A fitting subtitle of this essay would be: “Defending the Dharma.” While this is not the place to overview, philologically, the complex permutations of the protean term dharma/​ Dharma, it may help to know that to speak of “the Dharma” is to presuppose an acculturating process (outlined magisterially by Nongbri 2015) that I will denominate “religionization,” viz. the construction (some might say “invention”) of “Hinduism” as a species of the genus “religion,” to place it on a par, for purposes of contrast and comparison, with Christianity. Emptied of its intrinsic diversity (as, in fact, “Christianity” had also been), the semi-​fictional entity thus created increasingly conformed to the expectations imposed upon it, though actually a loose agglomerate of largely disparate phenomena. Even though, of necessity (for reasons of space), I intend to focus on Hinduisms that I denominate śāstric (in being grounded on one revealed authority source or another, e.g.,Veda, Āgama, etc.), readers should be very clear that it was only the relentless rigor of the religionization process that imbued these Hinduisms with an aura of unity having to do with, say, a core of indispensable and invariable cognitive (almost creed-​like) affirmations transcending regional, sectarian, and other identities. (For more on these processes, see San Chirico’s chapter in this volume.) Having (I hope) clarified what my approach presupposes, I want to underscore the need for an essay of this kind, it being a residual impression among Hinduism Studies scholars that Christianity elicited only negligible interest from Hindus grounded in India’s śāstric traditions. To that end, I provide an overview of eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century texts in Sanskrit and selected vernaculars (Tamil and Hindi, primarily). In these texts, one finds Christianity critiqued from a normative standpoint (Vedanta or Śaiva Siddhānta, particularly). Toward the end, I take note of the virtual eclipse of śāstric responses to Christianity by the emergence of new and more Anglocentric forms of Hindu eclecticism exemplified by Keshub Chandra Sen and the Brahmo Samaj. Before starting, some historiographical observations also seem apropos. First of all, the earlier the era, the more dependent we are on European sources for indications of how Christianity was perceived and received in the encounters Hindus had with it. Usually, such encounters were missionary-​initiated and indigenous interlocutors had to be coaxed into having them. Of Syro-​Malabar Christianity—​India’s most ancient Christianity—​no textual evidence offering

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clues to the way it figured in the minds of literate and learned Hindus appears to have survived. Only with the arrival of exogenous Christians of the Catholic orders or Protestant missionary societies more than a millennium later do data of this kind become available. Naturally, such material, being adapted for piety and biased by “devout partiality,” has to be used with care. A prime example would be the report sent to Rome from the Fishery Coast (Southeast India) by the Jesuit Francis Xavier (1506–​1552) about an unusual coloquio he had had in 1543 at Tiruchendur Temple (in today’s Tirunelveli District, Tamil Nadu) with individuals identified only as “Brahmins.” My reading of this report (Young 1989) suggests that the interlocutors who probed Xavier at length were Ādiśaiva ritual-​specialists well versed in Śaiva Siddhānta. Being a stranger whose intrusion into their precincts might well pose a threat to the purity of this renowned cultic center, Xavier recalls in minute detail the questions he was asked but clearly failed to grasp, notwithstanding that in the end he writes that his responses earned him a round of hearty applause (“Y me dieron grandes abrazos”). In the era of Christian missions Xavier inaugurated, similar European source material abounds, reprocessed for home consumption, the subjectivity of indigenous interlocutors barely audible, and usable historically only if read with a healthy dose of hermeneutical suspicion. A change, however, begins to occur in the early eighteenth century when a corpus of Indic-​language literature gradually emerges, first in the South and then in the North, making the retrieval of Hindu subjectivity a real possibility. It may seem counterintuitive, but śāstric Hinduism’s discovery of Christianity begins here, despite the invidious asymmetries that constrained interactions between India and Europe in the colonial era.

I. In the eighteenth century, the closest we come to raw, unmetabolized Hindu source material emerges in the decade beginning in 1706, when Tamil Hindus began interacting with an atypical European—​atypical, that is, on the Southeast coast, because he was neither a mercenary nor a merchant but a German missionary—​by the name of Ziegenbalg, whose years in India predate the better-​known era of British missions by nearly a century. A Lutheran Pietist close to August Herman Francke of Halle, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1692–​1719), locally known as Cīkaṉpālku, had been sent out to the Danish trading enclave in Tanjore called Tranquebar, with a royal commission from Friedrich IV to proclaim the gospel and convert the “Heathen.” While Heide, the cognate term in German, carried none of the derogatory connotations associated with the word in English, Ziegenbalg went out to India convinced that Tamil Heidentum (Heathenism) was classifiably “polytheistic,” unlike the monotheistic religions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, whose sacred books purported to be divinely revealed. Educated in the milieu of the German Evangelical Enlightenment and gifted with a quick mind, Ziegenbalg became fluent in Tamil, and in that process found himself converted, in particular by the nīti (ethics) texts he translated, to a radically different—​almost gushingly positive—​appraisal of Tamil culture and society. Of his first interlocutor, a lively septuagenarian Śaivite who tutored him in Tamil, Ziegenbalg wrote, Our School-​Master argueth daily with us, and requireth good Reasons and Arguments for everything. We hope to bring him over to Christian knowledge but he is confident as yet that at one time or another, we shall all turn Malabarians [“Malabar” being the name in European usage for the region], and in this Hope he takes all the Pains imaginable, to render things as plain and easie to us as possible. (Jeyaraj and Young 2013, p. 48) 128

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While Ziegenbalg offers no clue as to the kind of questions his tutor asked, we know that the son who succeeded him, Kaṇapati (1685–​1740), a scholar renowned locally for his expertise in Tamil belletristic literature, compiled a long list of questions about Christianity—​648 in all!—​ that Ziegenbalg sent in translation (with the Tamil originals, which survive) to Copenhagen to be answered by Europe’s great-​souled (mahātmat) theologians. Of these, one of the first was, “Is Caruvēcuraṉ [the ‘Sovereign Lord’] constrained by the laws of karma?” (Young and Jeyaraj 2006, p. 971). From the above, it will be evident that interreligious exchanges of the kind that transpired in Tranquebar did not entail eschewing a perspective of one’s own. Nor was the intention behind them to trivialize the apparent incongruities and contradictions that interaction appeared to expose. Realizing how little he knew about Tamil religion and to learn more about it, Ziegenbalg initiated a two-​year correspondence (1712–​1714) with a number of knowledgeable, mainly Śaivite Brahmin and Veḷḷāḷa Hindus (some had honorific titles such as śāstrī), from as far south as Nākapaṭṭiṇam and as far north as Tiruvoṟṟiyūr (near today’s Chennai). While colonial asymmetries may explain why a few brushed him off with anodyne assurances of appreciation for being consulted, many were frankly and plainly outspoken, especially when asked for their impressions of Christianity. All in all, 99 letters in translation have survived (for which, see Jeyaraj and Young 2013). Though deferential to the Christian holy book (Veda/​ Vētam), some of Ziegenbalg’s correspondents could barely disguise their contempt for Christians (Europeans, presumably): like goblins (īrātcatar), said one, they behave as though they have no dharma. Here, the term for “Christians” is Akkiyāṉikaḷ (literally, “those who are ignorant”), the same term that Ziegenbalg had coined in Tamil to correspond to Heide in German for “Heathens.” A worse mismatch can hardly be imagined, considering the derogatory connotations of the Tamil (its antonym would be “those who are enlightened”).With this deft rejoinder, the author turned the tables on Ziegenbalg, who had unwittingly offended his Hindu correspondents up and down the coast by including with his out-​going letters of invitation copies of a newly printed tract (1713), gloomily entitled “Abominable Heathenism.” Declaring that Akkiyāṉam (Heathenism) flourished among the Tamils because, in the translated words of Romans (1:21), “Knowing the one God [i.e., Caruvēcuraṉ], they [viz. the Tamils] did not praise him as such,” Ziegenbalg elicited from another correspondent a measured and subtle critique of this locus classicus of Pauline theology on human depravity (thus making it, arguably, the earliest on record from the Indic world). With surprising candor, the author, a Śaivite (Civapaktikārar), admits that Akkiyāṉam (Heathenism) did indeed flourish among the Tamils, especially in the village cults of vernacular religion devoted to demons (pēy and picācu among others). Still, the author argued, Ziegenbalg’s generalizations about the Tamils were gratuitous, given that such cults were no less abhorrent to proper Śaivites than to Christians. Instead, they worshipped one Supreme God, who had laid upon them the obligation of also worshipping lesser gods (in conformity, presumably, with the Āgamas). In short, Ziegenbalg was being told that Tamil religion was, in technical nomenclature, monolatric, Śiva being at the apex of a divine hierarchy—​a critical corrective that should have set him straight on the European canard that all who were not Jews, Christians, or Muslims were classifiable as polytheists. Not yet finished, Ziegenbalg’s correspondent then doubled down on the Pauline-​derived notion of human depravity: You cannot consider a person a heathen who is able to discern true virtues, right worship, and good conduct, who recognizes the Supreme Being as the one Lord, and as the Creator of all, who lives blamelessly as commanded in his Vētam [Veda], is free of craving and worldly lusts, lives in faith and love [i.e., practices pakti (bhakti)], commits 129

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neither evil nor sin, serves the wise and the learned by obeying them unfailingly, and who pleases God by the way he lives. Such a person can be called a child of God, and is not a heathen. (Jeyaraj and Young 2013, p. 274) While the faith of Lutheran Pietists back in Europe was unlikely to have been shaken by such a critique, Ziegenbalg appears to have been not only keen on learning more about Tamil religion but also open to learning from it. Be that as it may, his zeal for interreligious encounter and exchange helped open a window onto the Dharma, its deeper meanings, and its defense more than a century before the first unmediated, Indic-​language resources become available.

II. Before I explore those Indic language resources on śāstric Hindu responses to Christianity, it should be recognized that the missionary endeavor, especially in metropolitan India, had already by the mid-​nineteenth century provoked the emergence of countervailing forces. The triggers could be various. An offensive tract, a controversial conversion, or the admission of an avarṇa (marginal caste) student into a mission school were just a few of the factors that could catalyze the organization of a dharmasabhā (society for the defense of Dharma) or create opportunities for activists and agitators alike to take to the streets in protest. While the causes of confrontation were usually local and multiple (for a classic analysis of one such incident, see Frykenberg 1976), it is clear that anti-​Hindu polemics engendered anti-​Christian pushback, something Arun Shourie has provocatively called, not without warrant, the “wages of calumny” (Shourie 1994). In Bombay (now officially Mumbai) in the first half of the 1800s, a Scottish Presbyterian, John Wilson (1804–​1875, on whom see Numark 2011), stirred up fierce opposition, just as his better-​known counterpart in Calcutta (now officially Kolkata), Alexander Duff, had. (Both founded prestigious colleges.) Though an inveterate controversialist who relished the hullabaloo of debate, Wilson had a surrogate, a recent convert named Rāmacandra, make the case for Christianity in a public forum held in 1830, the first of its kind but not the last. An English transcript of the Marathi exists, of which the following is a snippet:

Fir st Brahmin:  Jesus Christ was some Philosopher (Sadhoo) [sādhu] among you, I perceive:  we have a thousand Philosophers and Saints like Jesus Christ (Dyanoba and Tookaba, etc.). Christian:  Pray did any one of these give his life for you? Fir st Brahmin: Why should they give their lives when they could save us many other ways? (Young 1981, p. 26) A year later, Wilson himself squared off with an opponent named Morabhaṭṭa Dāndekara, the publisher of a vernacular periodical, Upadeśa Candrikā, who had refused to debate Rāmacandra, saying that a convert was like a man who suspected his own mother of adultery. That was the only kind of person who would give up his natal religion for another (here, Morabhaṭṭa used a relatively new expression, hindudharma). The year after that, Wilson got an earful from one Nārāyaṇa Rāo, a teacher in one of Bombay’s new English-​medium schools. Rāo argued, inter alia, that Englishmen who believe in gravity cannot also believe that Jesus ascended into heaven. And so it went, not exactly year by year but episodically, until a virtuoso performance by a relative unknown, Kṛṣṇa Śāstrī Sāthe, a Maratha pandit who had graduated from the Poona 130

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(now officially Pune) Sanskrit College; he held forth for weeks on end during the cool season of 1852–​1853, lecturing publicly on Christianity, either on Chowpatty Beach or in the Thākurdvār Temple, a short distance from John Wilson’s college. Although these were private affairs for Hindus (no missionaries [“mlecchas”] or converts [“apostates”] allowed), a verbatim record in English translation was published, week by week, by an undercover Indian correspondent for the popular Christian periodical Dnyanodaya (Jñānodaya), published by the American Mission Press. Kṛṣṇa Śāstrī was quite the orator; he was garrulous, witty, and adept at repartee with the Christian hecklers who managed to get admitted. Given the colonial milieu of Bombay, it somehow seems natural that the missionary trope of Christianity as a driver of “progress” came under scrutiny, except that Kṛṣṇa Śāstrī bought into it more than might be expected: The British are very industrious and energetic. Not so the Hindus. On account of the enervating influence of the climate we possess very little physical strength. We cannot well get through breakfast before 12 o’clock, and then we must sleep till 3 o’clock at least before we are capable of any mental exertion. For the next two or three hours of the day our minds are in working order. But the English can easily endure ten or twelve hours of daily toil. (Young 2002, p. 44) Etiologically, an Englishman’s energy (“frenzy” might be the better term) was both a wonder—​ “While we are adjusting our turbans, an Englishman will make himself master of a new language”—​and a worry because of Christianity’s associations with bad religion: They accuse us of being lazy, and of doing nothing but studying the Vedas. But this is not true. We believe the soul to be an emanation from the deity; and to establish and confirm this belief we study the Vedas. The English require nothing of this kind. Such an amount of righteousness has been accumulated by the death of Christ that they can get along without any of their own. (Ibid., p. 45) By “bad” religion, I mean that Christianity evoked for Kṛṣṇa Śāstrī associations with the Kali Yuga, the age of dharmic atrophy. Surely the English, who would not rest until they ruled the whole world from Calcutta, were descended from daityas (demons); the missionaries, too, were demon-​born, as was Jesus himself; the pursuit of wealth (artha) was all they lived for, and each missionary owned a wardrobe of “seven jackets” at a minimum; once they gathered an audience, the mouths of the missionaries moved faster than “chariot wheels,” and no one could get a word in edgewise; Jesus was neither a savior nor a sage but a magician, and not a very good one, either, who needed the help of “demons and fairies”; Rām saved Ayodhya, but Jesus could not even save himself. And to cap off this brief inventory of the kind of fare that regaled his audiences at mid-​century, there is this, a polemical trope as old as Celsus in the Mediterranean world of the second century: “The Hindu Religion, being without beginning [sanātana], must be true” (Ibid.). In the śāstric texts to which we now turn, some of these same arguments will reappear, only in the language of the original authors.

III. Insofar as śāstric texts on Christianity are concerned, by which, to reiterate, I  mean texts grounded on one revealed authority source or another (Veda, Āgama, etc.), missionaries were 131

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inclined to blame the relative absence of pushback on the presumed introversion of India’s cohorts of traditionally learned Hindus. About that, they were flat wrong, according to Viṭṭhal Śāstrī, a renowned Maratha pandit at the Benares Sanskrit College, who explained that the missionaries “mistake our silence” and that the usual response from pandits like himself to the bunkum being purveyed was to “retire silently and civilly from useless discussions” (Ballantyne 1860, p. xli). That, however, was about to change; indeed, it was already changing, and by mid-​century, a critical mass of śāstric texts had begun to form. The provocation (as it seemed) that so alarmed the learned, because of both its cogency and its sophistication was the Mataparīkṣā (Examination of Religions), a treatise in Sanskrit by Scotsman John Muir (1810–​1882), a mission-​friendly East India Company civil servant, and later a renowned Indologist. Sanskrit had had by his time a longish history as a medium for belletristic Christian discourse (Amaladass and Young 1995), and, true to that tradition, Muir, a Glasgow Anglican educated in the late Scottish Enlightenment, made sure that his ślokas (metered verses) were impeccably correct. He did not berate or browbeat, saying that he wanted to put each religion “to the test of reason,” impartially, which of course his interlocutors saw right through. Adopting a guru–​śiṣya (teacher–​student) dialogue format, the Mataparīkṣā’s opening verses echo the lofty Enlightenment ideal of reason validating religion:

Stude nt: There are many religions, each contradicting the others. One doubts whether they can all be true. Teache r : Truth is hard to find, but error is everywhere. People are blind about religion, even those who reflect on it carefully. Intelligent people ought to test religions, accept the true one [saddharma] and reject the false [anṛta-​]  ones. As I have elsewhere (Young 1981) inventoried the contents of the Mataparīkṣā, here I only highlight Muir’s insistence on rational “proof ” (pramāṇatva) and the un-​missionary absence of an appeal to faith (śraddhā). Naturally, there were lapses, and Muir was at his most dogmatic when invoking Scottish Common Sense Philosophy in a put down on Vedanta (Young 2006): “The world [saṃsāra] is not māyā but real [vāstava]. Our perception [pratyakṣa] of the world as real is undeniable.” As such, it was Muir’s subordination of faith to reason that evoked for two of his three primary interlocutors their gravest concerns, much more than the concerns provoked by the “evidence” he adduced for or against the two religions he claimed to gaze upon with studied objectivity. Of the three śāstric interlocutors I  overview, the first compiled his rebuttal when Muir’s Mataparīkṣā (Examination of Religions, printed in Calcutta) was fresh off the press. The author, Somanātha Vyāsa (1807–​1885) a Nāgar Brahmin from Gwalior, taught grammar and belles lettres at the Śihūra Saṃskṛta Pāṭhaśāla in Sehore, outside Bhopal in Central India. A traditional academy of Sanskritic learning where the exact sciences of Indian antiquity were studied (a rarity at the time), the Sehore school enjoyed the patronage of a colleague of Muir’s, Lancelot Wilkinson (1804–​1841), the Company’s local political officer. Reading jyotiḥśāstra (astronomy) together, Wilkinson and the Sehore pandits found openings for updating the ancient texts (siddhāntas), which entailed demythologization and a hiving off of religion and science into different epistemological domains. Given that astronomy was a vedāṅga, a branch of Vedic studies, the paradigm change that occurred (from geocentricity to heliocentricity; on which, see Young 2003) was naturally controversial. Though a littérateur and not a specialist in the field, Somanātha became an advocate for the new paradigm and open to Wilkinson’s project without 132

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being overawed by Europe. When, however, Wilkinson gave him a copy of Muir’s book, a more differentiated view found expression in a critique called the Mataparīkṣāśikṣā (A Lesson for the Mataparīkṣā). Considering himself learned in scientific truths (jñātavijñānatattva) and granting that Yavana (European) technology was highly advanced and that their steamships and flying machines (ākāśayāṇayantra; a reference to hot-​air balloons) were evidence of ingenuity (cāturya), Somanātha fulsomely praised the foreign scholars who investigated natural objects (padārtha). For Somanātha, however, empirical (sāṃsārika-​) or practical knowledge (vyavahārikavidyā) was one thing—​Europeans had an abundance of it—​but soteriological knowledge (pāramārthikavidyā) quite another, and in that they were deficient. While beef-​eating and other abhorrent practices were excoriated and blamed on karmic misdeeds from earlier lives, Somanātha’s overall attitude toward “otherness” in things religious, which he attributed to differences of time and place (deśakālabheda), was unusually latitudinarian. What irked him most about the Mataparīkṣā was the (Christian) guru’s insistence that one and only one religion can ever be the true religion (saddharma). This was a claim that elicited a full-​throated affirmation of unity in plurality (mataikya): He who is the Ātman in all things, the true Lord, who is honored as the Buddha in Buddhism, the Jina in Jainism, Christ in Christianity, Allah in Islam; he who is honored as Arka, Prathameśa, Śakti, Girīśa, Śrīśa and the other gods in the Vedas,Tantras, Purāṇas, and other scriptures—​He is the One who is to be worshipped. (Young 2003, p. 214) Here, the One in the Many left unnamed by Somanātha in his litany of divinities was the one true God, Lord Rāma, who for him was the highest manifestation of the non-​dual transpersonal Brahman, the knowledge of whom was soteriologically liberative. Due, however, to karmically conditioned differences of aptitude and eligibility (adhikārabheda), beatitude in Rāma could be attained in a variety of ways by means of different sacred texts (pṛthakśāstra) adapted to different races (vaṃśa). The plurality of religions was therefore meaningful, and the unity Somanātha envisioned not of content but of function, a discordant concord (as it were). One should be very clear, I hasten to add, that Somanātha would have been averse to the premise behind the (Christian) guru’s admonition in Muir’s Mataparīkṣā that one can—​indeed, should—​convert from false religions to the true religion, once it was validated by the test of reason: “In the Kali Age, anyone, Brahmin or otherwise, who abandons his own respective sacred text (svasvaśāstra) commits a sin. Our well-​being is always best served by our own religion (svadharma)” (Young 1981, p. 144). On the surface, Muir’s second interlocutor, Haracandra Tarkapañcānana, could not have differed more from Somanātha. A  little-​known Bengali Brahmin, Haracandra reveals helpful details about himself in his critique of Muir’s Mataparīkṣā, The Mataparīkṣā Answered (Mataparīkṣottara). In a Sanskrit oozing sarcasm, Haracandra adduced a mishmash of incendiary accusations, some (but hardly all) culled from Voltaire (Valṭāya), Hume (Hiyuma), and the American Thomas Paine (Pena). A brief inventory should suffice to convey the tone: the Christians’ Jesus was really the bastard offspring of Mary fathered by a temple priest; a deluded king named Constantine (kānaṣṭān) converted to Christianity, which thereafter propagated itself by bribery (dhanadāna), craftiness (kauśalya), and force (bala); Calcutta was being overrun by hordes of evangelists (pravarttaka)—​Catholics (kethālika), Protestants (prateṣṭāṇṭa), Presbyterians (presbyṭerīyān), and Dissenters (ḍiseṣṭara)—​all of them shouting “convert to our religion [asmākaṃ dharmam ālambya] and be blessed eternally.”Vowing that he himself would convert if convinced 133

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of Christianity, Haracandra predicted a different outcome: Christians would become Hindus, provided certain conditions were fulfilled. How can the eternal [sanātana] Vedic religion [vedadharma] be practiced by Europeans and others [yavana] who have fallen from it because of their wicked conduct? If they observe the common [sādhāraṇa] dharma [here, ten virtues are listed] throughout their lives, they will acquire an aptitude and eligibility [adhikāra] for the Vedic religion, having become Hindus [hindutvaṃ prāpya] in subsequent births. (Ibid., p. 150) Embedded here is a nexus of assumptions about non-​Hindus, their depravity (bhraṣṭa[tā]), and the possibility, albeit remote, of eventually being reborn in the karmabhumi of India (bhāratavarṣa, the realm of soteriologically efficacious action). As Somanātha also had but with a difference, Haracandra invoked the śāstric notion of adhikāra (karmically conditioned degrees of aptitude and eligibility for Vedic knowledge).That difference is revealed in a concluding exhortation: “If you have to have faith (viśvāsa) in a book (grantha), let it be in the Veda, which has existed from the time of creation.” Here, Haracandra appears to invoke vedabāhyatva, a notion of Vedic exclusivity belonging to the same nexus, which German Indologist Paul Deussen artfully rendered into Latin as extra Vedos nulla salus (cited in Ibid., p. 152). Muir’s third and most orthodox interlocutor, Nīlakaṇṭha Goreh (1825–​ 1895), hailed from a lineage of Citpāvan Brahmins that settled in Benares (now officially Varanasi) in the Maratha enclave at Assī Ghāṭ on the Ganges. Nīlakaṇṭha pursued his śāstric studies at the Annapūrṇachātrālaya, managed by his uncle, on the river’s edge in nearby Śivāla. As in Calcutta so in Benares, missionaries seemed to be everywhere, especially on the ghats. Later, Nīlakaṇṭha would mock them for haranguing the pilgrims who flocked there, clamoring that “faith (viśvāsa) in Christ the avatar (avatāra) of God” was the only way of salvation. Bold enough to answer back, Nīlakaṇṭha got to know an English Anglican, William Smith (1806–​1875), who gave him Muir’s Mataparīkṣā, thinking that a text in Sanskrit could not be brushed aside. Smith was right. In 1844, a year later, Nīlakaṇṭha, barely nineteen, returned with a sophisticated rebuttal, the Śāstratattvavinirṇaya (A Verdict on the Truth of the Śāstras). Although irked at the missionaries’ incessant appeal to faith (viśvāsa), Nīlakaṇṭha was troubled even more by Muir’s cavalier certainty about reason’s power of validation over revelation. Turning the tables on him, he upheld the self-​authenticating authority (svataḥprāmāṇyatva) of the śāstras and the primacy of faith (here and elsewhere śraddhā, in the sense of a willed assent of the intellect). Not only were the śāstras the Divine Eye that sees what humans cannot—​karma (adṛṣṭa, lit., the unseen) and the merit accrued by ritual action are mentioned—​without them one could never autonomously arrive at a knowledge of the transempirical (apratyakṣa) Brahman (a rebuttal aimed at Muir’s Scottish Common Sense Christianity). Although Christians like Muir were intoxicated with a godless (anīśvara) kind of rationality (tarka), when rightly used, reason and revelation would be found to be in fundamental rapport. Ironically, Nīlakaṇṭha’s defense of revelation concluded on a defiant note—​“the more you Christians criticize the śāstras, the more faith I  have in them” (Ibid., p. 106)—​not unlike what a missionary like William Smith might have said in response to the absurdities his young interlocutor thought he had found in the Bible and wrote about elsewhere in the Śāstratattvavinirṇaya. Having made a case for faith, Nīlakaṇṭha’s concluding words were a prayer for more of it (Ibid., p. 101): “Glory be to you, O Bhagavān Viṣṇu, powerful beyond reason [tarka]! I beseech you for faith in the holy Vedic religion [pavitre vaidike dharme].” And so, after all, the Hindu religion was, as the guru in Muir’s prologue said, only one among many vying for the title of the 134

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one true religion (saddharma). For Nīlakaṇṭha, however, there really was no question at all about which of them deserved to be crowned primus inter pares. Like his peers, he conceptualized the diversity of religions as a graded hierarchy, each religion’s soteriological efficacy corresponding to its adherents’ adhikāra (their karmically conditioned aptitude and eligibility). At the apex stood the “holy Vedic dharma,” which alone was directly efficacious (sākṣāt phalaprada) for the fortunate few blessed with a śuddha (fully developed) adhikāra. Lower down came Christianity, whose followers could, in principle, ascend into the higher echelons of the hierarchy to the very pinnacle (although Nīlakaṇṭha eschewed terms such as Hindutva to convey the idea of a privileged religious status). Ultimately, however, the Śāstratattvavinirṇaya leaves us with an unresolved ambiguity about other religions and their raison d’être. On the one hand, even though Europe had no Brahmins, God (īśvara) had, somehow or other, made it possible for its inhabitants to worship him indirectly, out of regard for their well-​being (nṛhitārthāya), with the meager adhikāra they had accrued. On the other hand, in another set of passages echoing the Law Code of Manu (12: 94–​96; Olivelle 2004, p. 217), which speaks of false scriptures (smṛti) “founded on Darkness” (tamas) that “bear no fruit,” Nīlakaṇṭha makes Haracandra’s harsh tone seem mild in comparison: “All those despicable scriptures that the orthodox (vaidika) ought to reject, God created because sinners have to be punished…Again and again, God flings those filthy-​minded rogues into a foul hell [aśaucanaraka].” And in a paroxysm of indignation, Nīlakaṇṭha repeated these hard sayings several times over, making it difficult to know on which side he would come down: is Christianity’s cosmic role punitive or remedial? Were we to dig deeper, a larger nexus of tropes could be exposed, not only about the Bible but also about Jesus as a false avatar, but for that I segue to the next section.

IV. As a printed work, Muir’s Mataparīkṣā had become widely available, attracting the attention of śāstric scholars from metropolitan India and even the hinterlands. While Haracandra managed to have his rebuttal printed, the two by Somanātha and Nīlakaṇṭha circulated locally, reproduced by scribes. Already in the mid-​1830s this was about to change, as restrictions on Indian-​owned presses were lifted and missionaries lost their (near) monopoly. Turning from the North to the South, the same years saw a critical mass of mass-​produced writing on Christianity emerge, especially in Madras (Chennai). There, missionary activity had catalyzed the formation of countervailing Hindu organizations. Some, like the Vipūti Caṅkam (Sacred Ashes Society), led by Śaivites, were narrowly sectarian and explicitly anti-​Christian. Others were more ecumenical although predominantly Śaivite, of which the most prominent was the Catur Vēta Cittānta Capai (Association for the Philosophy [sic] of the Four Vedas), presided over by a Veḷḷāḷa popularizer of Śaiva Siddhānta, Umāpati Muṭaliyār, who had acquired a press of his own. While having a press did not guarantee the quality of the texts churned out, a synopsis of one by Umāpati, The Padris’ Secrets Disclosed, returns us to the trope alluded to above, of Jesus as a false avatar. In short, during the preceding yugas, such an excess of merit had accrued to the inhabitants of Madras from wearing the emblems of Śiva (vipūti) and Viṣṇu (nāmam) and chanting their names that the Kailāsa and Vaikuṇṭha heavens had filled up, emptying hell of its usual population. In the present yuga, the Kali, the overlord of hell,Yama, therefore had nothing at all to do. Appealing for a rectification of cosmic balance,Yama was advised by Śiva and Viṣṇu that he should have the Virgin Mary conceive a minion of his who would be called Jesus Christ, a troublemaker who, in spite of being crucified, would be hailed as God by “those base men who call themselves Church Mission, Wesleyans, London Mission, and American Mission.” To make matters worse, the missionaries would tell the good people of Madras not to wear the 135

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sacred emblems or chant the divine names, entailing obvious soteriological repercussions for the witless and hapless who believed them. A variant of the Tamil myth of the “Overcrowded Heaven,” The Padris’ Secrets Disclosed only needed a contemporaneous twist to become a theodicy explaining not only how exogenous forces had subverted the Dharma but also the reasons why (Umāpati Muṭaliyār 1844;Young and Jebanesan 1995, pp. 83–​87). On the opposite side of the Palk Straits from the Tamil mainland, similar countervailing forces were contemporaneously emerging in the Jaffna peninsula of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Although predominantly Śaivite, Jaffna at the time was already in its third century of colonial occupation. Under the British, the draconian system of constraints on temple worship enforced by the Portuguese and the Dutch was suspended. Missionary activity, however, quickened its pace, especially in the field of education, contributing to Jaffna’s high rate of literacy. Since the Bible figured prominently in school curricula, one did not need to be a Christian to acquire a familiarity with it. As Jaffna at mid-​century was also the epicenter of a Śaivite revival movement led by graduates of these schools, it became a place where the Bible was a much-​contested site. A Tamil revivalist once summed up this contentious era in a memorable verse about three figures: one was Muttukkumarak Kavirāyar, who made the Bible “tremble”; another was Āṟumuka Nāvalar, who “knocked it unconscious”; and lastly C.W. Tāmōtaram Piḷḷai, who hit it so hard that it “fell down dead.” Since each of these individuals has already been discussed (Young and Jebanesan 1995), one who has received relatively less attention, Caṅkara Paṇṭitar (1829–​1870), a Veḷḷāḷa scholar, brings us full circle to topics that Xavier and the Brahmins of Tiruchendur had discussed two centuries earlier. Progress had indeed been made during the interval. Like his revivalist peers, Caṅkara had attended a mission school, and several early translations of Śaiva Siddhānta texts had been made by Jaffna missionaries. While parts of Caṅkara’s oeuvre on Christianity were archly polemical, his major work, kristumatakaṇṭaṉam (Christianity Refuted), included an introductory outline that might well have received a pass at the Methodist school he attended as a youth. This was followed by a chapter-​by-​chapter critique under the rubric of pati (lord), paśu (soul, lit. “beast”) and pāśa (karma, “bond”), the three-​pronged cardinal categories of Śaiva Siddhānta. Having formally acknowledged that Christianity should be understood on its own terms, Caṅkara proceeded to take it apart on his. While his critique was more systematic than the snippet that follows might suggest, all three prongs are found in it. If Jehovah created human beings to worship him as Lord (pati), was there a time when Jehovah thought, “Ah, I  am alone!”? And afterwards, did he think, “Ah, now I  am Lord (pati)!”? Given Jehovah’s bondage (pāśa) to āṇava, the source of individuation and egotism, surely the reason why Śiva had Jehovah become incarnate as Jesus was that Jehovah needed to polish his soul (paśu) of karmic encrustations. Clearly, whatever enduring value Caṅkara’s critique had for other Śaivites, it shows that the “test of reason” could also be applied by Hindus, and that conflicts like Jaffna’s both contributed to the “religionization” process discussed in the introduction and were themselves a product of it.

V. Although dwarfed by the sizable corpus of śāstric texts passed down from antiquity that critically engaged indigenous communities of belief and practice deemed extra-​Vedic or extra-​Āgamic and therefore heterodox or heteroprax (Cārvākas [Materialists], Jains, and Buddhists, to name but a few), a body of śāstric critiques of Christianity and other (originally) exogenous adversaries rather belatedly coalesced. Texts appeared in Sanskrit transregionally as well as regionally

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in a variety of vernaculars besides the Hindi and Tamil surveyed above, across large swaths of India, North and South. Much, undoubtedly, was lost, or remains to be discovered. Almost as soon, however, as this new corpus of śāstric texts attained critical mass, atrophy set in, especially in Sanskrit, its dwindling impetus ironically provided by the occasional Christian author composing belletristic literature, such as P.C. Devassia, author of the Kristubhāgavatam (1977). While different reasons could be adduced to account for the decline of this once-​vigorous genre, the one that I will single out for special attention in the paragraph below has more to do with the emergence of a heightened receptivity in the second half of the 1800s to the possibility of extra-​Vedic revelation than with the perils of modernity or the (much-​debated) “Death of Sanskrit.” Before I zoom in, let me zoom out to draw attention one last time to my definition of śāstric Hinduism as a Hinduism grounded on one revealed authority source or another (Veda, Āgama, etc.). While idioms vary, svataḥprāmāṇyatva and similar terms would typically appear in Vedantic contexts to assert the self-​validating primacy of revelation over reason. The authors surveyed above accordingly espoused exclusivisms that differed in degree but not in kind, as in the case of Somanātha, whose relatively irenic view of Christianity probably stemmed from the commensurate value he attached to love of God (bhakti). Underlying these exclusivisms were assumptions having to do with soteriological privilege and qualification clustering around adhikāra (Lubin 2010), a term connoting a range of gendered and caste-​based restrictions on access to the sources of dharma and/​or revelation. While these could vary, it was axiomatic that the adherents of non-​Vedic religions subsisted outside the pale altogether. By the mid-​1800s, however, that axiom had begun to erode in the cosmopolitan milieu emerging in metropolitan India where the adherents—​and advocates—​of non-​Vedic religions were mainly to be found, along with their imposing institutions. 1848, for instance, saw the high-​water mark of śāstric literary output on Christianity set in Sanskrit by Nīlakaṇṭha Goreh of Benares, who argued that the Brahman cannot be revealed apart from the Veda; it happened also to be the year that Debendranath Tagore (1817–​1905) proclaimed to followers of the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj that he could no longer take the Veda’s authority for granted (De Michelis 2004, p.  59). This was a dramatic departure, given the revelatory status attributed to the Veda (the Upanishads especially) by Rammohun Roy (1772–​1833), proponent of the demythologized and detheologized “rational” theism that was symptomatic of the Samaj in its earliest phase (for more on Rammohun, see Killingley’s chapter in this volume). Although I can only allude to the lively debates that subsequently resulted in the fracturing of the Brahmos into a plethora of competing factions, a notable development would be the “universalism” espoused by the radical—​and, by virtue of education, more Anglocentric—​wing headed by Keshub Chandra Sen (1838–​1884). At the Brahmo Mandir, the temple of Keshub’s Naba Vidhan (New Dispensation Church) constructed in North Calcutta in 1881, the Torah, gospel, and Qur’an found pride of place on the altar alongside the Veda, their respective truths universalized, Keshub believed, in a new supercessionistic “dispensation” (Stevens 2018, pp. 173–​74). In time, however, Keshub would go on to downgrade “book revelation” in favor of “intuition” and “inspiration,” especially of himself as the prophet/​r ishi of the Naba Vidhan (De Michelis 2004, pp. 82–​85). While here it would ordinarily be observed that after Keshub’s premature death Ramakrishna (1836–​ 1886) and especially Vivekananda (1863–​1902, on whom, see Rinehart’s chapter in this volume) became the primary popularizers of his universalism, domestically and globally, it should also be noted that none of this could have transpired but for the triumph of religionization mentioned at the outset of this essay. Soon enough, a democratization of adhikāra ensued, reconceptualized generically instead of particularistically (Young 1981, pp. 164–​65), subverting śāstric Hinduism by making it appear—​r ightly or wrongly—​archaic and archly restrictivistic.

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Bibliography Amaladass, A. and Young, R.F. 1995. The Indian Christiad: A Concise Anthology of Didactic and Devotional Literature in Early Church Sanskrit. Anand, Gujarat: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash. Ballantyne, J.R. 1860. The Bible for Pandits. Benares: Medical Hall Press. De Michelis, E. 2004. A History of Modern Yoga:  Patañjali and Western Esotericism. London and New York: Continuum. Devassia, P.C. 1977. The Kristubhāgavatam, A  Mahakavya in Sanskrit Based on the Life of Jesus Christ. Trivandrum: Jayabharatam. Frykenberg, R.E. 1976. “Questions Concerning Hindu-​Christian Encounters, with Special Reference to Tinnevelly.” In Philips, C.H. and Wainwright, M.D. (eds.). Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization, c. 1830–​1850. London: SOAS, pp. 187–​243. Jeyaraj, D. and Young, R.F. 2013. Hindu-​Christian Epistolary Self-​Disclosures:  “Malabarian Correspondence” between German Pietist Missionaries and South Indian Hindus (1712–​1714). Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz Verlag. Lubin, T. 2010. “Adhikāra.” In Jacobsen K.A. (ed.). Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism.Vol. 2. Texts, Rituals, Arts, Concepts. Leiden: Brill, pp. 671–​74. Muṭaliyār, U. 1844. “The Padris’ Secrets Disclosed.” Madras Christian Institution and Missionary Record 2:131–​34. Nongbri, B. 2015. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Numark, M. 2011. “Translating Dharma: Scottish Missionary-​Orientalists and the Politics of Religious Understanding in Nineteenth-​Century Bombay.” Journal of Asian Studies 70(2): 471–​500. Olivelle, P. (ed. and trans.). 2004. The Law Code of Manu. New York: Oxford University Press. Shourie, A. 1994. Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. New Delhi: ASA Publications. Stevens, J.A. 2018. Keshab: Bengal’s Forgotten Prophet. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, R.F. 1981. Resistant Hinduism:  Sanskrit Sources on Anti-​Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-​ Century India.Vienna: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien. —​—​—​. 1989. “Francis Xavier in the Perspective of the Śaivite Brahmins of Tiruchendur Temple.” In Coward, H. (ed.) Hindu-​Christian Dialogue: Perspectives and Encounters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp.  64–​79. —​—​—​. 2002. “Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century.” In Brown, J. and Frykenberg, R.E. (eds.). Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 37–​60. —​—​—​. 2003. “Receding from Antiquity: Hindu Responses to Science and Christianity on the Margins of Empire, 1800–​1850.” In Frykenberg, R.E. (ed.). Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-​Cultural Communication since 1500. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 183–​222. —​—​—​. 2005. “Enabling Encounters:  The Case of Nilakanth-​Nehemiah Goreh, Brahmin Convert.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 29(1): 14–​20. —​ —​ —​ . 2006. “The ‘Scotch Metaphysics’ in 19th Century Benares.” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 4(2): 139–​57. —​—​—​. 2013. “Loss and Gain:  An ‘Intellectualist’ Conversion and Its Socio-​Cognitive Calculus in the Hindu-​Christian Life of Nehemiah Goreh.” In Seitz, J.A. and Young, R.F. (eds.). Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, 1600s to the Present. Leiden: Brill, pp. 213–​39. Young, R.F. and Jebanesan, S. 1995. The Bible Trembled:  The Hindu-​Christian Controversies of Nineteenth-​ Century Ceylon.Vienna: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien. Young, R.F. and Jeyaraj, D. 2006. “Singer of the Sovereign Lord: Hindu Pietism and Christian Bhakti in the Conversions of Kanapati Vattiyar, a Tamil ‘Poet’.” In Gross, A. et al. (eds.). Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India.Vol. 2. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, pp. 951–​72.

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12 CRITIQUES OF CHRISTIANITY FROM SAVARKAR TO MALHOTRA Chad M. Bauman

In the chapter that precedes this one, Richard Fox Young discusses Hindu–​Christian polemical texts appearing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The end of his chapter details the decline of Sanskrit as the prime language of such polemics, and the rise of an Anglocentric Indian intelligentsia that in many ways typified the late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Hindu encounter with Christianity. This chapter picks up where that one leaves off, though it does elide several important transitional figures who are covered elsewhere in this volume (like Vivekananda, for example, who is discussed by Rinehart). Featured in this chapter are a number of prominent Indian critics of evangelism and conversion to Christianity over roughly the last hundred years. After briefly covering early twentieth-​century figures like Savarkar, Hedgewar, and Golwalkar, the chapter focuses primarily on postcolonial leaders of the last few decades, especially Mohandas Gandhi (who survived just barely into the “postcolonial” era), Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel,Arun Shourie,Ashok Chowgule, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, and Radha Rajan. Finally, at the end, to demonstrate the multinational scope of these critiques, I briefly discuss the views of the Hindu American Foundation and Rajiv Malhotra. It is important to note that the critical focus of this chapter’s critics differs somewhat from those featured in the previous chapter. The eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century polemicists described in the previous chapter tended to focus on perceived religious differences of an ethical, theological, soteriological, or epistemological nature. While such differences remain of concern to the figures featured in this chapter, they tend to focus more on the sociological or political ramifications of those differences, and therefore on the sociological and political manifestations of Christianity in India. The intent of the chapter is to provide a straightforward account of the views these figures espouse. These views range from the mild and relatively uncontroversial to the rather extreme and tendentious. Much more could be said about the misunderstandings and prejudices that fuel the most extreme, or about how they are made possible through the intentional misuse of historical evidence, or about how even the most moderate critiques of Christianity in India have been used by violent anti-​Christian activists to justify their actions. However, the necessary brevity of the chapter prevents any significant critique or contextual analysis of the views it describes. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that there is a good deal of coherence to the arguments these authors articulate. There is in their rhetoric plenty of bluster, bombast, and sarcasm, but there is not only that.

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Similarly, it is important to note that many Hindus in contemporary India—​probably even a significant majority—​find Christian attempts to convert others to their faith mystifying at best. They would agree with much of what the authors highlighted in this chapter have to say on the matter, though nearly all of them would reject violence as a response to grievances against Christianity, and would demand that the debate about conversion and the religious rights of minorities proceed through civil and democratic means. The views expressed by the authors in this chapter therefore represent, on many (but not all) points, the views of a majority of contemporary Hindus.

Predecessors: V.D. Savarkar (1883–​1966), Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–​1940), and M.S. Golwalkar (1906–​73) While there were Indian critics of Christianity long before the twentieth century, as discussed by Young in the preceding chapter, the broad outlines of the contemporary Hindu nationalist critique of Christianity emerged in the 1920s, particularly with V.D. Savarkar’s 1923 publication, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Savarkar’s seminal text argued that the genius of Indian civilization derived from its “Hindutva,” or Hindu-​ness. Hindutva for Savarkar designated a broad, cultural kind of Hindu-​ness; nevertheless, Savarkar himself defined a Hindu as one who declared India both fatherland (pitribhumi) and holy land (punyabhumi). No Christian or Muslim, of course, could do the latter. According to Savarkar, That is why Christian and Muslim communities, [who] might have a common Fatherland, and an almost pure Hindu blood and parentage with us, cannot be recognized as Hindus; as since their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu civilization…as a whole. (Savarkar 1989 [1923], pp. 100–​101) In 1937, Savarkar became president of the Hindu Mahasabha, which was at that time a lobby within the Indian National Congress. His ideas had a far greater impact, however, through his disciple, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–​1940), who founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. As an institution, the RSS perpetuates the ideology of Hindutva while using drills and physical activity to strengthen and embolden young Hindu men to work in its defense. Often referred to in short as “the Sangh,” the RSS became the first of many Hindutva-​ oriented organizations associated with the Sangh Parivar (that is, the “family of the Sangh”). The Sangh Parivar also includes prominent social, religious, and political parties, such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled the central government as this volume went to press. The writings of Hedgewar’s successor, M.S. Golwalkar (1906–​1973), including We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966), borrowed much from Savarkar and Hedgewar, and established many of the anti-​Christian critiques we will encounter in this chapter. For example, Golwalkar argued that Hinduism was a non-​proselytizing religion, but Christianity was an inherently expansionist religion bent on the destruction of Hinduism and political domination of India. Similarly, Indian Christians had foreign loyalties, and were therefore anti-​national and incapable of being loyal citizens (Golwalkar 2000 [1966], pp. 188–​94).

Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–​1948) In the postcolonial era, Gandhi represents an early figure, of course, having been assassinated just after independence. But his work as a leader in the independence movement makes him 140

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an important figure with regard to the topic of this chapter, as does the fact that his influence is unparalleled in the debate about conversion in contemporary India. Nearly every figure featured in this chapter quotes Gandhi approvingly, even if they go on to criticize him for not going far enough. Many of their publications quote him extensively. Gandhi was eminently gentle in dealing with his interlocutors, and he scrupulously avoided the rhetorical embellishment, snide vituperation, and hyperbole that characterizes the argumentation of many of the other figures featured in this chapter. Moreover, no one could accuse Gandhi of inciting violence or of espousing an ultra-​chauvinistic kind of nationalism. He therefore helps us begin the work of decoupling criticism of Christian conversion efforts from the violence against Christians it is sometimes accused of provoking. If the two can be kept distinct in our minds, then it becomes easier to discern that there is a certain logic to the critique of Christian evangelism and conversion that warrants scholarly engagement. Gandhi was not so much opposed to conversion as to conversion from one faith to another. “I believe that there is no such thing as conversion from one faith to another in the accepted sense of the term,” he wrote. “It is a highly personal matter for the individual and his God” (Ellsberg 1991, p. 48). India had need only for “Conversion in the sense of self-​purification, self-​ realization” (Ibid., p. 45). Conversion for Gandhi, therefore, was self-​transformation, something one did, or could do, within any religious tradition. Gandhi’s conception of conversion follows logically from his understanding of religion. Gandhi conceived of religion not in terms of a body of doctrinal assertions, but rather as a repository of spiritual practices that could be utilized for the purposes of moral development. Moral development was possible in all religious traditions, and was the standard by which a religious person, and religious traditions, should be judged. In fact, Gandhi’s primary objection to mass Christian conversions, and missionary attempts to provoke them, was not so much that they would entail Hindu demographic decline, but rather that in his estimation such conversions failed to (and could not possibly) produce moral transformation. Religions, it followed, were not true or false based on their doctrinal assertions, but rather on whether or not they could facilitate moral development. And since it was beyond debate that saints had been produced by all religions, all religions were equally true (and, of course, according to Gandhi’s conception of truth, equally false). If all religions were equally true, then there was no justification for converting from one religion to another, let alone seeking to provoke the conversion of another. If one found impediments to personal transformation within one’s tradition, then one had an obligation to reform one’s own tradition, to improve it. It is important to highlight this point: because no religion was fully true in the absolute sense, the discovery of defects in one’s religious tradition did not constitute sufficient grounds for apostasy. Religion, for Gandhi, was a journey toward truth, and he rejected the claim, made by many Christians, that a faith could be revealed from God in fully formed, static, universally valid, propositional truths. Gandhi’s rejection of the claims to universality made by religions like Christianity stemmed in part from his conception of particular religions as representing the cumulative spiritual wisdom of a particular people, and tailored to/​appropriate for that people’s idiosyncratic ways of thinking and behaving. Religious traditions, for Gandhi, were ethnic, not universal. The great faiths of Indian origin were sufficient for Indians, just as other religions were sufficient for other peoples. Because of this, attempts to convert others were unnecessary, disrespectful, and intrusive. For Gandhi, religion was not, and should not be about public or formal affiliation, particularly the exclusive kinds of affiliation demanded by most Christian denominations. So while conversion as an interior process of spiritual transformation was something to be desired, 141

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conversion as a change in religious affiliation was not, particularly if that change in affiliation required that one cut oneself off from one’s ancestral traditions. Throughout his career, Gandhi was a critic not only of the missionary impulse to convert others, but also of the association of Christian evangelism with educational or medical service. For Gandhi, so long as there remained the ulterior motive of conversion, the value of the service was undermined, not only in terms of the good it did for those who received it, but also—​and here, we might remember the Bhagavad Gita’s exhortation to do one’s duty without attachment to results—​in terms of what it did to those who provided it. Ulterior motives in service provoked insincere conversions from one faith to another, he argued. “If a person, through fear, compulsion, starvation or for material gain or consideration, goes over to another faith, it is a misnomer to call it conversion” (Ibid., p. 71).

Ram Swarup (1920–​1998) Gandhi can be credited with having established and/​or popularized many of the basic arguments against conversion to Christianity, but it was Ram Swarup who brought those arguments back to life at the end of the twentieth century. In 1982, Swarup established a publishing house, Voice of India, which has since then published a significant amount of literature in defense of Hinduism, including many of the texts referenced in this chapter. One of the stated goals of Voice of India, according to Swarup, was to “show to its own people that Hinduism is not that bad and other religions not so wonderful as they are painted by their theologians and televangelists” (Goel 2009 [1988], p. 176).With Voice of India’s publication of his own Hinduism vis-​à-​vis Christianity and Islam, Swarup (1992 [1982]) inspired a new generation of anti-​Christian critics, as we will see in the next section on Sita Ram Goel.Though many of his arguments may have been Gandhi’s originally, the assertive, orotund, and confrontational style was distinctly Swarup’s, and the influence of that style can be felt in the writings of nearly all the other authors profiled in this chapter. For Swarup, as for Gandhi, religion was and should be an interior thing, guided by experience. In the “predominantly mystical approach” that in his view characterized Hinduism, God is the innermost truth of one’s own being; ethical action is its natural expression; higher truth is revealed to one who sincerely invokes it. In this approach, therefore, God is the inner controller, ethical life is natural and spontaneous, truth is experiential, and revelation is open to all. (Ibid., p. 10) (In her chapter for this volume,Voss Roberts helpfully interrogates the orientalist assertion that Indian religions were uniquely typified by “mysticism,” an assertion that seems to have been accepted by figures such as Swarup, but that is nonetheless problematic, among other reasons, because of the way it obscures mystical strands within religions like Christianity.) Because religion is an interior thing, Swarup argues, following Gandhi, no tradition is necessarily better or more soteriologically effective than another is. Moreover, each religious tradition is particularly adapted to meet the spiritual needs of the community from which it emerged. “This attitude means that different peoples and different races have their own presiding genius, their own talents and their own svadharma [personal dharma],” he argues. “They worship the best when they worship through their svadharma” (Ibid., p. 6). Religious people, therefore, should be tolerant of the beliefs of others and encourage them to develop themselves within their own spiritual traditions. 142

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In contrast to this conception of religion, in traditions like Christianity (and Islam) where the growth of mysticism had been stunted or suppressed, God is conceived externally; ethics are commandments and injunctions from an external authority; moral laws are matters of exhortation and warnings. Here one’s obligations do not extend beyond one’s brothers in faith. In this approach, truth is creedal, revelation exclusive, and salvation belongs only to the elect… (Ibid., p. 10) Notice here how what appears at first blush to be a comparative statement morphs not only into an argument about what religion is and by implication should be, but also into a charge leveled against Christians and Muslims: they are, due to the inherent nature of their religion, loyal only to their coreligionists, and are therefore a threat to national cohesion. The proprietary nature of truth in Christianity leads inexorably to intolerance for other doctrines and other gods, and to the hypercritical language deployed in Christian anti-​Hindu polemics: The fact is that intolerance is inbuilt into the basic Semitic approach and cursing comes naturally to it. The Bible is full of curses invoked on rival-​gods, prophets, apostles, doctrines. For example, Paul told his Galatian followers that “should anyone preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed.” (Ibid., p. 32) No amount of Christian theological development could ever eradicate this basic intolerance, Swarup asserts. Times may change, necessitating gentler language and strategic adjustment, but the intolerance remains (Ibid., p. 15).

Sita Ram Goel (1921–​2003) Trained as an historian at the University of Delhi, Sita Ram Goel had an active career as a social activist, fighting for various causes throughout his career. As he describes it, a narrow escape from a murderous Muslim mob in 1946 appears to have moved him in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to his views on Islam. After 1982, he became involved, with Swarup, in establishing Voice of India. Goel’s central claim is that Christianity is a sly, minatory, and colonizing pseudo-​religion from which Hindus need legal protection. In a line he reproduces in several of his writings, he proclaims, “Christianity has never been a religion; it has always been a predatory imperialism par excellence” (Goel 2010 [1986], p. 5). His History of Hindu-​Christian Encounters is more or less a chronicle of that “predatory imperialism,” as he frames it, from the time of Constantine and the squelching of paganism in Europe, through the Inquisition’s manifestation in Portuguese Goa, right down to recent Christian evangelistic campaigns. Like Swarup, Goel argues that the imperialistic nature of Christianity emerged naturally from its historical and theological foundations. The Israelite God, Jehovah, was a jealous God who facilitated His putatively chosen people’s underhanded acquisition of other people’s lands and possessions (Goel 2009 [1988], p. 12). Hindus therefore need to be wary of wily Christian expansionism. Soft-​spoken, gracious, and feeble critique is insufficient. While praising Gandhi for his critique of proselytization, Goel found his irenic personality a liability. According to Goel, Gandhi had inadvertently weakened the position of Hindus by overemphasizing “the concept 143

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of sarva-​dharma-​samabhava (equal regard for all religions),” which missionaries had parroted to counteract criticism of conversion activities (Goel 2010 [1986], p. 235). Moreover, Gandhi had been too generous, and had unnecessarily spoken approvingly of Christianity. Gandhi “upheld an unedifying character like Jesus as a great teacher of mankind, and glorified [to] no end the sentimental nonsense that is the Sermon on the Mount” (Ibid., p. 235). This is one of the points at which Goel, iconoclast that he is, differentiates himself from other critics of Christian missions in India. Many of them go to great lengths to distinguish Christians and Christian missions (which they criticize) from Jesus (whom they admire). Goel refuses even to admire Jesus’ teachings and ministry, as is more than clear from the title of one of the chapters in his History: “Plea for Rejecting Jesus as Junk.” Goel also rejected what he considered the purely cynical and sinister Christian project to “indigenize” or “inculturate” Indian Christianity by utilizing as much as possible from Indian and Hindu culture in the development of Christian ritual, worship, and theology (for more on inculturation, see the chapter by Amaladoss in this volume).Whereas many Christian theologians view “inculturation” as a positive solution to the troubling tendency of Christianization to provoke Westernization, Goel (like Rajiv Malhotra and others featured in this chapter), conceives of the indigenizing project as little more than a change in tactics necessitated by the failure of more direct methods of evangelism. “The mission’s new-​found love for Hindu culture is a sham,” Goel contends. “It is neither spontaneous nor sincere at any point” (Goel 2009 [1988], p. 26). Goel’s Catholic Ashrams:  Sannyasins or Swindlers? is an extended critique of the Christian ashram movement, an important manifestation of Christian indigenization efforts. In both this text and in his History, Goel traces the development of the indigenizing impulse from Roberto de Nobili (1577–​1656) right up to the present day, providing critical biographies of key figures in the indigenizing movement, like the Indian “Hindu-​Christian” Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–​1907) and European Christian “sannyasins” like Jules Monchanin (1895–​1957), Henri Le Saux (aka Swami Abhishiktananda, 1910–​1973), and Bede Griffiths (1906–​1993), for whom Goel reserves his most potent venom. Goel criticizes these Christian indigenizing figures for engaging in trickery, and calls upon scholarly evidence that at least a few of their disciples had been confused about their gurus’ religious origins. The long, detailed debates Christians have had about exactly what can be acceptably utilized from the Hindu tradition in the effort to indigenize Christianity strike Goel not as the “deliberations of the divines” but as cynical and calculating, akin to communist strategizing or the desperate marketing of a multinational corporation peddling a tired product (Ibid., p. 7). Imagine if the roles were reversed, Goel suggests, and Muslims came to a poor ghetto of San Francisco, using petrol dollars to build a Muslim “cathedral,” adopting Christian orphans and raising them Muslim, preaching only from parts of the Bible that accorded with the Qur’an, wearing priestly vestments, and suggesting that Islam was little more than a more perfected form of Christianity (Ibid., pp. vii, 87–​88). Would American Christians not be justifiably incensed?

Arun Shourie (1941–​) Among contemporary Indian critics of Christianity, Arun Shourie is the most widely known. Trained as an economist, Shourie has edited two reputable Indian newspapers: the Indian Express and the Times of India. Shourie was also a member of the Rajya Sabha and a high-​ranking minister in the BJP government from 1998 to 2004. He remains a prominent public intellectual who writes and speaks frequently on a range of topics. In 1994, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) met in Pune for a consultation and invited Shourie to attend and give a Hindu perspective on Christian missionaries. 144

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Shourie was critical, yet the interactions remained courteous, and Shourie even complimented the bishops and others gathered for listening with “unwavering attention” to what he had to say. Shourie’s presentation at that meeting eventually grew into a book of nearly 300 pages:  Missionaries in India:  Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. Its publication appears to have strained the previously polite relations between Shourie and the CBCI. Among other issues, the CBCI was frustrated that Shourie had quoted liberally from reports that had been produced for the consultation, thereby making what was intended as internal discourse available to the public. But CBCI officials also complained repeatedly about the fact that Missionaries in India condemned Christian missionaries for harsh rhetoric and other strategies and practices that they argued had been largely abandoned, particularly by the Catholic Church. Shourie’s basic premise in the book is that the very survival of India is “in jeopardy” (Shourie 1994, p. 232), due to security threats both external and internal. In such a situation, internal unity and security are of utmost importance, yet they are threatened by the communal strife caused by conversion and attempts to convert. Moreover, the constitutional right to propagate religion is subject to considerations of security, law, and order. Therefore, Christian missionary activities can and should be regulated and curtailed. Shourie argues that missionary aims and methods exacerbate the problem. At one point, after surveying literature on mission that had been produced for the conference by the CBCI, Shourie declares that it “sounds more like the Planning Commission [that develops the Indian government’s five-​year plans], if not the Pentagon, than like Jesus” (Ibid., p. 15). The problem, Shourie suggests, lies in the shift from Christ to Christianity, or, as Max Weber might have put it, from charisma to routinization. The principal factors influencing Christians during this process, according to Shourie, were the objectives characteristic of most secular organisations—​numbers, market shares, the debates over one marketing strategy over another…even of which aspect of the doctrine is to be emphasised and which is to [be] underplayed in the light of what effect either is liable to have on the market share. The sacred secularised, from St. Francis of Assisi to a marketing agency. (Ibid., p. 19) Like Gandhi, Swarup, and Goel, Shourie is making a subtle argument about the “true” nature of religion here. It is interior and “purely” spiritual, not institutionalized and expansionist. Like Swarup and Goel, Shourie argues that Christianity’s predilection for criticizing other religions and its penchant for conversion grow naturally from the very nature of the faith. And with Gandhi, Goel, and others, Shourie contends that Christians have too often stooped to material inducements and vague, undeliverable promises of social improvement to attract Indians to their faith. Chief among the questionable methods utilized by Christian missionaries, according to Shourie, is (and has been) their targeting of lower-​caste and tribal communities, whose penury and lack of education makes them vulnerable targets. Essentially, Shourie sees as cynical and perversely calculating what many missionaries consider good stewardship of human and financial resources, that is, targeting the groups that are most likely to convert. In the end, Shourie maintains, along with Goel and Swarup, that the inclination of Christians to be critical of other faiths and to be obsessed with converting others is related to Christianity’s dogmatic absolutism; it is the “ineluctable position that every adherent of a revelatory, millenialist religion must take” (Ibid., p. 12). And even when Christians admit that there might be some truth in non-​Christian religions, as in fulfillment theologies, they do so with condescending pity, and without repudiating the aim of conversion (Ibid., p. 137). In fact, Shourie and many 145

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of his fellow critics are unable to understand why, after Vatican II, Catholics are still interested in conversion at all. And in their confusion, they are not alone. Shourie quotes extensively from CBCI documents he had been given to show that Catholics themselves were uncertain how to reconcile evangelism with Vatican II’s assertion that truth and salvation may be found in other religions. If this is the case, Shourie asks in a variety of ways, why not disavow conversion? The fact that Catholics have not given up trying to convert others is evidence, in Shourie’s view, for his assertions about the essentially absolutist nature of Christianity. The solution, in Shourie’s view, also comes from Gandhi, upon whom Shourie draws extensively, and “whose advice was always the same: stop conversions altogether as it is ‘the deadliest poison that ever sapped the fountain of truth’ ” (Ibid., p. 37).

Ashok Chowgule (1948–​) Ashok Chowgule was born into a wealthy industrialist family and was trained in economics in the UK and business in the US before getting involved in the family business, the Chowgule Group. Eventually, he began associating with the VHP in Maharashtra, becoming the organization’s state president there, and eventually its national vice president. As such, he represents what could be called the “Hindutva Perspective,” as the subtitle of his most comprehensive work, Christianity in India: The Hindutva Perspective, implies. Borrowing a line from Gandhi, Chowgule frames religion as something national and particularist, noting that each nation believes its religion to be as good as that of any other (Chowgule 1999, p. 36). The primary difference between Hinduism and Christianity is that the former has recognized this fact while the latter insists on arrogantly claiming special status for its own “truth.” Hinduism is for this reason tolerant, but only to a point. “Hindu philosophy has always been accommodative,” he writes,“[and it] will continue to be so, provided Christianity reciprocates the tolerant spirit of Hinduism” (Ibid., pp. 8–​9). (Evangelism, for Chowgule, is an act of intolerance, and therefore suggests that Christianity does not reciprocate the “tolerant spirit of Hinduism.”) More than any of the other authors profiled in this chapter (with the possible exception of Swami Dayananda Saraswati), Chowgule suggests that Hindus cannot and should not tolerate what he considers the intolerance of conversion. “A senior RSS leader was once asked by a Christian, ‘Since you believe in Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava, why are you against conversion?’ ” Chowgule reports, “The reply was, ‘Since you do not believe in Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava, I am against conversion’ ” (Ibid., p. 75). In addition, more explicitly than others, Chowgule asserts that any violence that Christians in India have experienced or might experience in the future has been a (implied: justifiable) reaction to their provocations: In a pluralistic Hinduism, religious minorities need not have any fear. At the same time, there has to be responsibility of these other religions to respect the Hindu civilisation, and not to provoke it. Hindus have resisted the attacks that have been mounted not only on the land, but also the culture. Hindu tolerance should not be confused with cowardice, lack of self-​confidence, or weakness of faith. (Ibid., p. 13) In his mildly menacing tone, then, Chowgule differs somewhat from the other critics profiled in this chapter and gets the closest to openly justifying violence against Christians. Many of his other assertions, however, should sound by this point quite familiar:  Christianity, in his view, is an imperialistic religion; Christians’ tendency toward exclusivism and demonization of others (here he references Pat Robertson) is an inevitable outgrowth of the doctrine of 146

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election and the Great Commission; inclusivist and liberal theologies are cynical and superficial whitewashing; conversions to Christianity are denationalizing and provoked only by false offers of social and economic improvement; etc. (Ibid., pp. 17–​19, 24, 38, 42–​43, 61–​62, 70, 137).

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–​2015) A native of Tamil Nadu, Swami Dayananda Saraswati worked as a journalist for several years before getting involved in the Chinmaya Mission of Swami Chinmayananda and eventually becoming a well-​known and well-​traveled teacher of Advaita Vedanta. After some time, he left the Chinmaya Mission and established his own centers for study from Rishikesh in India to Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in the US. In 2002, he founded the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha (HDAS), which brings together the leaders and heads of more than a hundred Hindu lineages in India to discuss matters of concern to Hindu society at large (including conversion and the growth of Christianity and Islam). He continued to act as convener for the HDAS until his death in 2015. He was a prolific writer and speaker, and he commanded great respect among certain sectors of the Hindu public, including many Hindu religious leaders. When he spoke, therefore, he spoke with some authority and could claim that he represented a significant portion of India’s Hindus, though the claim was contested (Radha Rajan, the next critic of Christian evangelism profiled, was among his critics). According to Swami Dayananda, religious assertions and “beliefs” are rationally “non-​ verifiable,” and for this reason no amount of rational disputation could logically lead one to abandon one body of doctrine for another, and there is therefore no justification for conversion (Dayananda 1999a). While religious traditions cannot be shown through rational disputation to be superior to one another, they remain (and should remain) intimately related to the cultures of the people from which they emerge. For this reason, [C]‌onversion implies destruction of…culture. The living religious traditions, intimately woven into the fabric of their respective cultures, have to be allowed to live and thrive. Religious conversion should stop—​the aggressive religions should realize that they are perpetrating violence when they convert. (Ibid.) Evangelism, in this view, is tantamount to ethnocide. Worse still is that conversion from Hinduism to Christianity involves an act of violence committed against people (Hindus) who because of the putatively non-​proselytizing nature of their religion are religiously “unarmed” (ashastrapaani) (Dayananda 1999b, pp. 19–​20). “Thus, conversion is not merely violence against people; it is violence against people who are committed to non-​violence,” he argues. “In converting, you are also converting the non-​violent to violence” (Dayananda 1999a). And here, then, is where Swami Dayananda’s explanation (or perhaps implicit justification) of reactionary violence against Christians parallels Chowgule’s: Religious sentiments are so central to human life, he says, that the “hurt caused by religion can turn to violence…When the hurt of the religious becomes acute, it explodes into violence. Conversion is violence. It generates violence. Conversion is, therefore, a rank, one-​sided aggression” (Ibid.).

Radha Rajan (1956–​) Radha Rajan is the editor, with Krishen Kak, of NGOs, Activists, and Foreign Funds: Anti-​nation Industry (2006) and Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle (2009), both of 147

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which touch upon the issue of conversion. Her views have become increasingly prominent in recent years, particularly in the context of Tamil affairs. Rajan is democratically critical, focusing her sharp analytical gaze both on those she agrees with and those she does not. She has, for example, criticized Swami Dayananda’s willingness to engage with Christians in interfaith dialogue (which she believes unnecessarily accommodates and legitimates their evangelical tendencies) and the Hindu American Foundation (see below), with which she would agree on many other issues, for sponsoring a report on caste in India that she considered overly critical. Rajan argues that India’s problems are not entirely unlike those of Europeans and Americans, who “are being compelled to re-​examine the importance of national identity, and the substance of their national identity and nationhood,” and will soon “begin to confront the thorny question of whether national identity can be defined ignoring the interests of the majority population” (Rajan 2007). In the face of foreign intrusion (through conversion, migration, and the like), she asks, can the culture of the majority survive if that culture includes and values accommodation and tolerance? The fact that this difficult question does now also confront Western countries she considers a “delicious irony” since those countries “until recently used these very issues to hector and lecture to countries where they have political and strategic interests” (Ibid.). Due perhaps to their more recent genesis, Rajan’s writings (like those of the similarly oriented Sandhya Jain, who could have been profiled in this chapter, and Rajiv Malhotra, who is profiled below) evince the influence of anti-​globalization rhetoric more than those of the earlier critics. Christian evangelism, in her view, is but one aspect of the larger neocolonial political and cultural project carried out by Western countries through military interventions, multinational organizations like the World Bank, and support for capitalist economies and free markets. For this reason, she uses the word “Church” to refer not only to historic Christian churches, but: also Christian NGOs, Christian funding agencies, White Christian governments and countries which legitimize and use evangelization and militant Christian missionary objectives as instruments of foreign policy in countries of Asia…[T]‌he generic Church also includes the United Nations with a charter that enforces Christian “liberal” political principles as the universal socio-​political ideal which will be enforced coercively by any one of the arms of the generic Church, including military intervention. (Rajan 2011) Here again, like Shourie before her (cf. Shourie 1994, pp. 132, 166), and like her contemporary Rajiv Malhotra, Rajan identifies a network of global forces that in her view conspire together to undermine India’s integrity. Also like others profiled in this chapter, Rajan understands Christian involvement in this project as a natural outgrowth of the Christian religion itself. All Abrahamic religions have inherited the basic genes from the parent; in this case, conquering the world for their jealous god who will not co-​exist with other gods…[A]‌ll Abrahamic ideologies, parent and heretic offspring alike, are about political power and control of territory[;] Abrahamic ideologies are always about numbers. (Rajan 2011) Because of this, Christians will use any means, fair or foul, to advance their political ambitions, and with Rajiv Malhotra she blames Christians for the particularly strong strain of anti-​Brahminism that informs Tamil politics and society. This “anti-​Brahmin ideology,” which South Indians themselves have now assimilated, was the result of the anti-​Brahmin preaching of 148

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Christian missionaries. The point, as Rajan sees it, was to pit lower-​caste Tamils against upper-​ caste Tamils in order to prepare the former for conversion. This, Rajan maintains, “is vintage Christian war strategy—​de-​link the target community from its parent, give it a sense of separateness resulting in alienation, render it defenseless, alone and vulnerable and then step in for the kill” (Ibid.). Because of this, and surreptitious evangelical methods (e.g., the Catholic ashram movement), Christianity represents a “cancerous cell that lodges itself quietly and unnoticed within the bloodstream of the body it intends to kill” (Ibid.).

The Hindu American Foundation Founded in 2003, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) is an organization that advocates in particular for Hindus living in America, but also on behalf of Hindu interests globally. On its original website (Hafsite.org, which has since been replaced by HinduAmerican.org) and elsewhere, the HAF described itself as a group that provides “a progressive Hindu American voice,” and on many issues it has done so. It has, for example, joined progressive causes on the environment, human rights, and LGBTQ issues. At the same time, because of its desire to defend Hinduism against attack and misportrayal, its agenda also, at times, overlaps with that of others profiled in this chapter. The group is very much in conversation with contemporary Hindu leaders in India. For example, after conversation with Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Radha Rajan, and other critics of a report on caste they published in 2011, HAF revised the document. I include a discussion of HAF’s views on conversion in this chapter both because of the group’s interactions with prominent intellectuals in India and because HAF staff and volunteers have played an increasingly public role in the American debate about conversion and Hindu–​ Christian conflict, publishing opinion pieces in prominent media outlets such as Huffington Post and The Washington  Post. One of HAF’s primary concerns is with what it calls “predatory proselytization,” a phrase coined by HAF itself to designate evangelical attempts that take undue advantage of some weakness or vulnerability of those targeted for conversion. “Conversion, when born from genuine faith, belief, study, or religious experience, can be beautiful,” a HAF position paper that appears to be no longer available online stated, “But, conversion begot by aggressive or predatory proselytization is a form of violence” (Hindu American Foundation, n.d.). Predatory proselytization is proselytization that proceeds by means including “…the conditioning of humanitarian aid or economic, educational, medical, and social assistance on conversion; denigrating other religions to sell the ‘primacy’ of another religion; or knowingly and intentionally promoting religious hatred, bigotry, and even violence” (Ibid.). Like Ram Swarup and Swami Dayananda Saraswati, HAF criticized the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) for privileging Abrahamic conceptions of what counts as religious freedom. These conceptions of religious freedom, enshrined in respected national and international bodies and documents “will continue to foster global asymmetries in favor of non-​pluralist religions,” HAF declared, and will “promote various forms of inter-​religious tensions and violent conflict, religious imperialism and supremacy, terrorism, and ultimately, the annihilation of more pluralistic peoples, cultures, and traditions” (Ibid.).

Rajiv Malhotra (1950–​) Educated in India before moving to the United States, Rajiv Malhotra had a successful career in various technology and media industries before retiring and using his wealth to help establish the Infinity Foundation in the mid-​1990s. In its earliest years, the Foundation focused on 149

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funding academic programs and research on Indic studies, but over time, Malhotra began to educate himself about the history of India and Hinduism in order to counter what he and his supporters perceive to be the skewed and unfavorable treatment of India and Hinduism in Western academia. A prime target of Malhotra’s critique has been the University of Chicago’s famed Sanskritist, Wendy Doniger (and her students, “Wendy’s Children”), whom Malhotra has accused of focusing inordinate attention on the most exotic and erotic aspects of the Hindu tradition. Malhotra’s vigorous critique of Western academic portrayals of India distinguish him from other figures featured in this chapter. These problematic Western academic portrayals of India do not stand alone, however, according to Malhotra, but rather function as but one node in a network of global forces intent on “Breaking India” (the title of a book that Malhotra published with Aravindan Neelakandan in 2011). Along with Western academic institutions, other forces within the Breaking India network include Western governments, liberal NGOs, human rights and religious freedom organizations, lower-​caste and Dalit rights organizations, Western funding agencies, and—​pertinent to this volume—​transnational Christian evangelistic organizations and intellectuals. The Breaking India network controls the “socio-​political discourse on India” (Malhotra and Neelakandan 2011, p. 2) not only globally but also within India itself through its influence on and cooptation of Indian scholars, journalists, churches, and NGOs, which is made possible by the network’s “superior funding-​capacity [sic], its globally positioned nexuses, and its long-​term experience in strategic thinking—​all of which [India] lacks” (Ibid., p. 88). According to Malhotra, all of the nodes within the Breaking India network share certain core values and pursue complementary goals. Some approach India employing a Western secular and progressivist perspective while others approach India with a Christian faith and agenda, but all work together, both consciously and unconsciously, to undermine India’s integrity.They do this through the publication of “atrocity literature” (Ibid., p. 5) documenting human rights abuses against Dalits, Dravidians, women, and ethnic and religious minorities, and in this and other ways pitting Indians against one another while encouraging separatist formations that fracture India in order to prepare it “for the second coming of the western empire” (Ibid., p. 195). (For a quick overview of how these organizations reticulate, according to Malhotra and Neelakandan, see the charts, Ibid., pp. 174, 177, 188, 246, and 335). Malhotra is a polarizing figure both in the West and in India. His views on Christianity in India draw in significant ways upon that of other figures profiled in this chapter, while being at the same time more all-​encompassing and informed. Accused of harassing and encouraging the harassing of Western academics he does not like, and found (by Richard Fox Young, author of the previous chapter) to have failed to indicate several instances where he borrowed directly from the writing of other authors without using quotation marks or providing an immediate reference to the source material (as is standard practice in Western academia), Malhotra is something of a pariah among Western scholars, despite his impressive range of knowledge and his deep familiarity with at least some of their academic work. Similarly, while he is reviled by more secularist intellectuals and minority and Dalit rights activists in India and abroad, he has developed a large, international following through a strong social media presence, the regular posting of videos on his YouTube channel, and a listserv on which he encourages and occasionally browbeats supporters to be ever more active in the work of countering “Breaking India” forces. This influence and clout have gained him intimate access to leaders within the Sangh Parivar, such as Mohan Bhagwat, Sarsanghchalak (Chief) of the RSS, and Subramanian Swamy, a prominent Indian economist and BJP politician who could himself have been profiled in this chapter. 150

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Consensus and conclusion The authors profiled in this chapter refer frequently (and generally approvingly) to each other’s writings. In some cases, they reproduce them entirely (or nearly entirely) in their own work. It should come as no surprise, then, that they evince significant agreement, which I summarize by way of conclusion. These authors generally agree that the purpose of religion is moral and spiritual development, which is equally possible within all the great religious traditions. For this reason, no particular soteriological superiority or greater absolute truth inheres in one religious tradition over another, and conversion as a change in affiliation (particularly affiliation implying exclusivity) is never necessary. The attempt to convert another to one’s faith, therefore, represents either a misunderstanding of the purpose of religion or a crass and cynical attempt to increase the numbers and political power of one’s religious group. Unfortunately, however, the drive to expand and convert others is a built-​in feature of the Abrahamic religions, and poses a particular threat to Hinduism, given the religion’s generally non-​proselytizing nature and India’s brand of secularism, which does not explicitly forbid this kind of “predatory proselytization” (but should). As indicated in the introduction, both because of a desire to present the views of these authors as sympathetically as possible, and because the length of the chapter prohibits it, I have avoided directly evaluating their claims. Those interested in a critique of such positions need go no further than Fernandes’s chapter in this volume, which contests the putative naturalness of such a “Hindu” understanding of religion, and sees it, following Roberts (2016) and others, as a rhetorical move constructed for the sake of maintaining the political power of dominant-​caste Hindus (and their allies, among which can be counted many upper-​caste Indian Christians, as both Fernandes and Thomas indicate in their respective chapters in this volume). Similarly, I  myself (Bauman 2013) have called into question both the presumption that conversion in India proceeds primarily through material inducement, and the presumption that there are no material incentives for Hindus to remain Hindu. There is no doubt, then, that the arguments articulated by the authors featured in this chapter are contestable and—​even more than that—​biased in favor of preserving the privileges of certain religious communities and the social arrangements that advantage them. That is not to say, however, that alternative conceptions of religion are somehow neutral and unbiased. All definitions of religion (and definitions of related terms like tolerance and religious freedom) privilege certain kinds of religious people and certain kinds of political arrangements. Some such arrangements are clearly more desirable than others, though which deserve that honor cannot be presumed in an a priori fashion, but can only emerge, it should be clear from this chapter, from social discourse, debate, and contestation.

Bibliography Bauman, C.M. 2013. “Does the Divine Physician Have an Unfair Advantage? The Politics of Conversion in Twentieth-​Century India.” In Seitz, J. and Young, R.F. (eds.). Asia in the Making of Christianity: Agency, Conversion, and Indigeneity. Leiden: Brill, pp. 297–​331. Chowgule, A.V. 1999. Christianity in India: The Hindutva Perspective. Mumbai: Hindu Vivek Kendra. Dayananda, S. 1999a. “Conversion Is an Act of Violence.” Hinduism Today. November. Available at www. hinduismtoday.com/​modules/​smartsection/​item.php?itemid=4308. Accessed January 30, 2016. —​—​—​. 1999b. “Conversion Is Violence.” Scribd. Available at www.scribd.com/​document/​27378131/​ Conversion-​is-​Violence-​Swami-​Dayananda. Accessed January 30, 2019. Ellsberg, R. (ed.). 1991. Gandhi on Christianity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Goel, S.R. 2009, 1988. Catholic Ashrams: Sannyasins or Swindlers? New Delhi: Voice of India. —​—​—​. 2010, 1986. History of Hindu-​Christian Encounters AD 304 to 1996. New Delhi: Voice of India.

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Chad M. Bauman Golwalkar, M.S. 2000, 1966. Bunch of Thoughts. Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana. Hindu American Foundation. n.d.“Hindu American Foundation Policy Brief: Predatory Proselytization and Pluralism.” Hafsite.org. Available atwww.hafsite.org/​sites/​default/​files/​HAF_​PolicyBrief_​Predatory_ Proselytization.pdf. Accessed October 10, 2011 (the source is no longer available online). Malhotra, R. and Neelakandan, A. 2011. Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines. New Delhi: Amaryllis. Rajan, R. 2007.“A Question of Identity.” VigilOnline.com. July 31. Available atwww.vigilonline.com/​index. php?option=com_​content&task=view&id=879&I. Accessed July 11, 2011 (the source is no longer available online). —​—​—​. 2011. “Tamil Nadu Politics: Cancerous Church Eats Into Dravidian Parties.” The Organiser, April 10. Available at www.organiser.org/​archives/​dynamic/​modules01eb.html?name=Content&pa=showp age&pid=392&page=16. Accessed May 7, 2020. Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. The Anthropology of Christianity 20. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Savarkar,V.D. 1989, 1923. Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? New Delhi: Bharatiya Sahitya Sadan. Shourie, A. 1994. Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. New Delhi: Rupa & Co. Swarup, R. 1992, 1982. Hinduism vis-​à-​vis Christianity and Islam. New Delhi: Voice of India.

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PART III

Contemporary exchanges Conversion, caste, and the diaspora

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13 ANTI-​C ONVERSION LAWS IN POST-​ INDEPENDENCE INDIA Ian Richards

In the second half of 1998, a number of attacks on Christians by Hindus affiliated with various organizations of the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar were reported in the remote tribal areas of the Indian state of Gujarat. Incidents such as these became common in other states during this period, particularly Odisha (though much more sporadically than in Gujarat) and the unrest received moderate coverage in the English-​language Indian media. In this coverage, one Sangh organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) played an important rhetorical role in justifying the violence.The VHP All-​India Secretary, B.L. Sharma, suggested that the unrest was caused by “the anger of patriotic youth against anti-​national forces,” and that “the Congress Party…may close its eyes to the black deeds of the missionaries, to their efforts to convert Hindus, but we in the VHP will not shut our eyes to the activities of these traitors” (Special Correspondent 1998). Then, beginning on Christmas Day, 1998, attacks on Christian churches and missionary schools began in earnest, particularly in the remote Dangs district of Gujarat. The VHP leadership continued to argue that the conversion of Hindus to Christianity was the primary motivation behind these attacks. For example,VHP Executive President Ashok Singhal told the press that there was a “foreign hand” behind the recent violence, and that he had “information that some Christian leaders had come into the country from other countries to fuel” it. The motive of the violence perpetrated by Christians, Singhal said, was to “bring unity among various sub-​sects of Christians to create conducive [sic] atmosphere for conversion and evangelisation programmes in the country” (Rediff News 1998). Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, whose ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was aligned with the Sangh, visited the Dangs region of Gujarat on January 11, 1999, to assess the situation. After talking to representatives of both the Christian community and the Sangh Parivar, as well as residents in the affected region, Vajpayee told the media the situation in Gujarat was not as serious as it seemed to be. Nevertheless, he still called for “a national debate on conversions.” Vajpayee said he “was concerned…that…religious conversion by…Christian missionaries was at the root of all the trouble in the district” (The Hindu 1999). Vajpayee made his call for a national debate in measured language, and in manner not nearly as provocative as Sharma’s and Singhal’s. Notwithstanding this measured language, his argument was more or less the same. Through his call for a national debate and immediate acceptance of conversion as the prime causative factor in the violence, Vajpayee had deftly turned the tables

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on Christians and implied that they were “ultimately responsible for their own woes” (Sarkar 1999, p. 1693), thereby putting the onus on them to prove that they were not a disloyal, anti-​ national minority community, and that their practices of proselytization and conversion were not a powerfully destabilizing activity. Vajpayee was following a time-​proven rhetorical strategy used by opponents of conversion throughout the history of independent India.This strategy is readily apparent in the Constituent Assembly Debates leading up to the drafting and establishment of the Indian Constitution, in the influential state-​level missionary enquiry reports published in the 1950s, and in the subsequent proposal and enactment of legislation curtailing conversion at various state and national levels. Elements of the strategy include asserting that conversion is socially destabilizing, implying that conversion is in almost all cases fraudulent, and using these prior arguments to justify the intervention of the government in matters of conversion in the name of “public health and morality.” This chapter provides an historical examination of the debate surrounding religious conversion since India’s independence in 1947, and the various ways that this debate has come to be been reflected in governmental policy. One of the most fascinating aspects of this history is how remarkably consistent the poles of the debate have remained in the seventy intervening years.

Defining conversion It may be useful, as a preface to the chapter’s historical analysis, to highlight the fact that debates about the desirability of conversion in India also involve competing understandings both of “conversion” and of what constitutes legitimate or valid forms of it. Opponents of conversion in India frequently argue that conversion can be valid—​ironically adopting a position historically associated more with Protestant Christians—​only if it involves an immediate and thorough transformation provoked by purely “spiritual” factors. Such conversions are rare, the opponents assert; in their view, the vast majority of conversions are the result of inducement on the part of nefarious external forces employing coercive or fraudulent practices. Consequently, conversion needs to be disciplined by the state, which is what all of the proposed and enacted anti-​ conversion legislation seeks to accomplish. Sociologically speaking, however, conversion is a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than presumed by opponents of conversion in India. Lewis Rambo has demonstrated, for example that religious conversion is an “ongoing complex” process and has proposed a multi-​tiered model for conversion involving multiple “phases of a process that takes place over time” (Rambo and Farhadian 1999, p.  23; Rambo, 1993). This model argues that conversion should never be understood as a single event, but is rather a life-​long process that develops “in a dynamic force field of people, events, ideologies, institutions, and expectations and experiences,” which, moreover, “cannot be extricated from the fabric of relationships, processes, and ideologies which provide the matrix for religious change” (Rambo and Farhadian 1999, p. 23). Similarly, Chad Bauman argues that religious conversion can be understood as a context-​ specific act with multiple, often disparate motivations. Deploying a Weberian analysis of social action that includes both material and ideal interests, Bauman suggests that among other motivating factors, conversion represents the pursuit of “primordial” interests that are a mixture of material and more elusive, often subconscious ideological and emotional interests that “have to do with basic and universal human needs such as security, health, and meaning” (Bauman 2018a, p. 17). Consequently, both material and more ideal interests have undoubtedly played important roles in conversion to Christianity in India, as elsewhere. 156

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Because of this, Bauman cautions that conversion to Christianity “cannot…be reduced to the result of economic and political concerns alone” (Ibid.). Among other issues, the transformation effected by religious change “will not become believable” to the convert unless the individual decision to convert is in some respect religiously informed, unless this “ ‘decision’ arises from the pre-​rational depths of his or her spirit with all the force and believability of an external revelation” (Bauman 2008b, pp. 74–​75). This idea of the primordial as fundamental and basic suggests that religious conversion is a means for some people to transition to a worldview more in keeping with their ultimate concerns, whether they are consciously aware of them or not. For the lower castes and tribal peoples of India, who are in general materially depressed, these concerns are often basic: security, health, dignity, and so on.That these desires are basic, and that they may also involve social and economic motivations, does not make them non-​religious, nor does it, I would argue, make them invalid. The Sangh Parivar’s opposition to conversion, as enshrined in its support for anti-​conversion legislation, emerges from the presumption of a fundamental dichotomy between “religious” and “material” motivations for conversion and the associated contention that socio-​economic and political motivations for conversion cannot be legitimately religious. Bauman’s contention that all social action is motivated by a complex mixture of ideal and material interests encourages us to cast a critical eye upon these Sangh claims.

The “foreignness” of religious conversion in the Indian context Even if religious conversion came to be appreciated by its Indian critics as a context-​specific act with multiple motivations, the putative “foreignness” of Christianity and Islam would remain a stumbling block. In addition to the fact that the origins of Christianity and Islam lie outside the subcontinent, there is also the fact of their historical association with colonialism and foreign domination. Because of this, conversion from Hinduism—​deemed a purely indigenous religion—​to either Christianity or Islam is doubly suspect.The putative foreignness of Islam and Christianity underpins much of India’s anti-​conversion rhetoric and legislation. A great deal of this rhetoric originates within the Sangh Parivar and follows the outline of arguments made by the by original Hindu nationalist ideologue, V.D. Savarkar (1833–​1966). Savarkar viewed India as a Hindu rashtra, or nation, united by a common Hindu culture, or “Hinduness” (Hindutva). Desirable citizens of this nation would accept this Hindu culture, and view India as both Fatherland and Holy Land. Savarkar knew well, however, that India’s Christians and Muslims would be alienated by this view of the nation. As Savarkar wrote, in addition to viewing geographic spaces outside of India as their Holy Land, “they belong, or feel they belong to a cultural unit that is altogether different from the Hindu one” (Savarkar 1989, p. 101). In fact, Savarkar argued, the only way in which Indian Christians or Muslims could become culturally Hindu was by giving up their religion and adopting Hinduism—​that is, it would seem, by converting. Consequently, as Chetan Bhatt has put it, these two communities (Muslims and Christians) have the perpetually unfinished burden of demonstrating their love and loyalty to the Hindu nation in a manner that could only reach completion, if at all, with the abandonment of their faiths and the adoption of an Hindutva ideology that considered them enemies. (Bhatt 2001, p. 98) From this view of the nation as Hindu rashtra emerged another one: that converting to an “alien” religious tradition like Islam and Christianity leads to denationalization, or, at best, to 157

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dual loyalties. The presumed denationalization of such converts leads to questions about how conversion ought to be handled by a nation that values its survival (as all nations do), on the one hand, and, on the other, its commitment to modern, secular values like freedom of religion.The debates surrounding conversion, and the laws that have been enacted to manage it, are key to understanding how this negotiation has unfolded, and how it continues to unfold to the present day in India. This political negotiation began almost as soon as India gained independence, becoming particularly visible in the Constituent Assembly Debates preceding the establishment of India’s Constitution in 1950.

The Constituent Assembly Debates Constituent Assembly discussions about conversion and the propagation of religion established the poles of the debate about conversion and foreshadowed how it would proceed over the next seven decades. Freedom of religion is enshrined as a Fundamental Right in Article 25(1) of the Constitution of India: “Subject to public order, morality, and health, and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice, and propagate religion.” This article, and particularly its inclusion of the right to propagate religion, was one of the most passionately debated articles during the constitutional drafting process. Two of the numerous proposed constitutional articles regarding propagation and conversion stand out for how clearly they stake out the poles of the conversion debate. In the first, K.M. Munshi, former Home Minister of Bombay, proposed 1)  that “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess and practice religion” must be “subject to public order, morality, or health”; 2)  that minors under the age of 18 should be forbidden from converting without parental consent; and 3) that conversions achieved through coercion, undue influence, or material inducement should be prohibited by law (Neufeldt 1993, p. 383). In the second, Dalit leader and chief constitutional architect, B.R. Ambedkar, argued in a memorandum to the Constituent Assembly (Ambedkar 1947) that “The State shall guarantee to every Citizen liberty of conscience and the free exercise of his religion including the right to profess, to preach, and to convert within limits compatible with public order and morality.” These proposals focus, respectively, on the individual’s right not to be converted (in Munshi’s proposal) and on citizens’ rights to profess or preach their own religion or to convert to another (in Ambedkar’s; Kim 2003, p. 43). The opposing and yet connected views of Munshi and Ambedkar alert us to a pattern of argumentation seen not only in the Constituent Assembly, but also in the language of subsequent anti-​conversion legislation and Supreme Court rulings on anti-​conversion laws. Munshi’s framing of the argument reflects common Hindu thinking about conversion, and certainly reflects the Sangh Parivar’s assertion that the attempt to convert others to one’s faith limits the potential converts’ right to continue adhering to their religion. In this view, conversion is something done by someone to someone else. Not surprisingly, then, Munshi’s language informs and even occasionally appears without revision in the language of subsequent legislation limiting freedom of evangelization and conversion (as discussed below). Contrarily, in Ambedkar’s view, conversion is something one does to oneself, and the freedom to do that thing must therefore be preserved. Ronald Neufeldt contends that the non-​Christian members of the Constituent Assembly were divided into two primary groups who saw the right of propagation, respectively, as either “superfluous” or “pernicious.” Advocates of superfluity argued that propagation was an issue of freedom of expression and had therefore already been dealt with in other sections of the 158

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Constitution. Meanwhile, those who saw propagation as pernicious considered the inclusion of the right to propagate divisive, arguing that the term “propagation” could allow for forced conversions, and that it was biased toward the traditionally proselytizing religions of Christianity and Islam (Neufeldt 1993, p. 384; Kim 2003, pp. 45–​46). The “pernicious” line of argumentation is key to understanding the language of the subsequent anti-​conversion laws, particularly the inclusion of language prohibiting conversion perpetuated by “force, fraud, or inducement.” In a proposed amendment to the Constitution’s language about religious freedom, K.M. Munshi was adamant that fraud be included in any reference to conversion or propagation: the idea behind this proposal is that very often, if there are conversions by fraud or undue influence or during minority, certain changes in the legal status take place, certain rights are lost. This [proposed change] will have only this effect that the rights will remain exactly the same as at the moment a person was converted by fraud or coercion or undue influence and in the case of a minor at the moment of conversion. (Constituent Assembly 1950) Unsurprisingly, several Christian members of the assembly argued against Munshi’s views, and particularly the proposal that conversion be forbidden to minors. In this case, they insisted upon the right of parents to raise their children as they saw fit, and that denying this right would be tantamount to placing an absolute embargo on all conversions, as “not a single adult who is a parent, however deeply he may feel, however deeply he may be convinced, will ever adopt Christianity, because, by this clause you will be cutting off that parent from his children” (Constituent Assembly 1950). Nevertheless, there was substantial support for Munshi’s amendment, with several members expressing concern about the pernicious nature of conversion and the effect that ensuring the right to propagate could have on the majority Hindu community. In so doing, these members implicitly portrayed those engaged in proselytization as agents attempting to undermine Hindu religion and culture. This portrayal mirrored and perhaps influenced that of the more militant vein of Hindutva that would develop in the years following independence. Eventually, religious propagation was enshrined as a fundamental right in the Constitution through political compromise. Opponents of propagation acceded to its inclusion after minority members agreed to forego separate electorates for religious minorities (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001, pp. 47–​49). This was a calculated political compromise on both sides of the debate. Still, the poles of the conversion debate had been clearly established, and antipathy toward propagation and conversion would remain, as would the standard understanding of these phenomena on both sides.

The state missionary enquiry reports Just six years after the Indian Constitution was established, the Indian government once again became an active participant in debates over conversion with the publication of two influential enquiry reports into missionary activity. These reports were commissioned in 1956 by two states, Madhya Pradesh and Madhya Bharat, and are more commonly known by the respective names of their lead commissioners, The Niyogi and Rege Reports (The Christian Missions Enquiry Report [Rege Report], 1956; The Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee [Niyogi Report], 1956). As influential as these reports have been, particularly the Niyogi Report, their recommendations were non-​binding. They were, however, informed by 159

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widespread ideological antipathy toward conversion, and expressed that antipathy in language similar to Munshi’s. The reports also contributed to the standardization of the argument against conversion from Hinduism to “non-​indigenous” religions in language that would be utilized in all subsequent anti-​conversion laws. The Rege Report repeatedly insisted that converts to Christianity were “denationalized,” and at risk of losing their national identity through association with the religion of the former colonial regime. This insistence emerged at least in part from what Chad Bauman has termed “postcolonial anxiety” (Bauman 2008b) about the survival of the Indian nation itself. These anxieties placed certain Hindus in a defensive posture, causing them to seek, as a bulwark against national disintegration, a primordial, unalterable, and unifying cultural essence. Given the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Indian nation, which prevented unity on ethnic or linguistic grounds, many identified “Hindu-​ness” (Hindutva) as that unifying essence…[T]‌o those who embraced such a definition of Hindu unity, converts to Christianity (or Islam) were by definition foreigners, to be treated with suspicion as potential traitors, and at the very least represented a threat to national unity. While resistance to conversion was expressed in the idiom of religion (that is, preserving Hinduism), therefore, it was provoked by political concerns. (Ibid., pp. 182–​83) As the Rege Report puts it, To the convert there is a feeling of elevation and of being superior to his erstwhile community whom he begins to despise and a serious rift is created in the National life…Such a person, it is observed, puts himself before his community and country. He is a Christian first and then an Indian. (Rege Report 1956, p. 20) In the Rege Report, then, the denationalization of converts appears to be of much greater concern than the issue of conversions induced by fraudulent means. Much the same could be said for the Niyogi Report, in which the main issue appears to be “postcolonial anxiety” manifest in opposition to religious conversion per se, due to the perceived repercussions such conversions would have within the Indian nation, and within “Hindu culture” more generally. The Niyogi Report identifies four major areas in which mission activity and conversion to Christianity threatened the fledgling Indian nation: in its ostensible extra-​ territoriality, its putatively anti-​national propaganda, its supposed denationalization of converts, and in its removal of untouchables and tribals from the Hindu fold. The Niyogi Report, at its most fundamental level, is a document advocating resistance to conversion to Christianity in order to preserve another religion (Hinduism). Questions of “faith” and “belief ” are secondary and almost inconsequential. Indeed, it is difficult to differentiate between religious and political concerns, and this is hardly surprising, in the modern era, given that [R]‌ eligious debates and conflicts are no longer primarily waged over…substantive issues of faith as they once were; it is instead religion as the basis of identity and identitarian cultural practices—​with co-​religionists constituting a community, a nation, or “civilization,” that comes to be the ground of difference and hence conflict. (Needham and Rajan 2007, p. 3) 160

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The government-​sanctioned assertion of an inherent equivalence of “Hindu” and “Indian” is therefore powerfully apparent in the Niyogi Report. It is not necessary to accept the premises informing the profoundly political conclusions of the Rege and Niyogi reports to understand that they were animated primarily by political fears over conversion. These fears were expressed in a religious idiom, but in such a way that what many consider a purely religious act came to be seen as a primarily political one. In an effort to manage the threat of denationalization through conversion, both reports recommended that conversion should be curtailed, and that it should be required that prior notice of all potential conversions be given to the state government. Inspired by these reports, several Indian states soon enacted anti-​conversion legislation, and several members of India’s national parliament even put forth similar anti-​conversion bills at the national level (though unsuccessfully).

The first wave of anti-​conversion legislation Anti-​conversion laws were enacted in the states of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh between the years 1967 and 1978. An analysis of this first tranche of anti-​conversion legislation shows that the arguments against conversion to Christianity in India remained consistent with the arguments formed in the Constituent Assembly and the enquiry reports. While the state acts and bills introduced at the federal level were proposed as remedies to fraudulent conversions, political concerns, namely the perceived threat of denationalization and indigeneity, loomed large in the language of the legislation, superseding concern over fraudulent conversions. In all of these contexts, however, those with power demonstrated greater concern about the actions of those seeking to convert others than about preserving the rights and agency of individuals wishing to convert themselves to other religions. The earliest enacted anti-​conversion law was established in the state of Odisha (formerly Orissa) in 1967 (The Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967). The stated intent of the state’s Freedom of Religion Act was to prevent forcible or fraudulent conversions. Punishments for contravening the Act—​which were to be applied to the person or individual performing the conversion and not the convert—​included fines and imprisonment for up to one year.The penalties, both financial and penal, were doubled in the case of the conversion of a woman, a minor, or a member of the Scheduled Castes and tribes, implying, of course, that these constituencies were particularly vulnerable to coercion and allurement (“Scheduled Castes,” henceforth SC, is the government’s official term for the lowest castes). The Act’s “Statement of Objects and Reasons” provides more information on legislators’ motives in passing the law. Here, the concern is not merely about conversion by fraudulent means. Rather, it appears that all conversion was of major concern to the authors of the Act, who wrote, “Conversion in its very process involves an act of undermining another’s faith” (Ibid., “Statement of Objects and Reasons”). The definitions of fraudulent conversion used in the Act were and are still today viewed by critics of the legislation as overly broad, and therefore open to the possibility of abuse by government administrators and investigators. Because of this, the Act essentially gave to government administrators final say in what constituted a real or true religious conversion, and a significant fear among Christians was that the political considerations of the religious majority could color bureaucratic decisions regarding what Christians considered a religious choice protected under the fundamental right to propagate religion contained in Article 25 of the Constitution. The State of Madhya Pradesh enacted its own Anti-​ conversion Act in 1968. Entitled the Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam (an approximate Hindi translation of “Freedom of Religion Act”), the Adhiniyam is extremely similar in nature and language to 161

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Odisha’s, and mandates identical penalties. The Adhiniyam goes beyond the Odisha Act, however, in its stipulation that conversions must be registered with the District Magistrate, who is required by the Act to submit a “register of conversions” to the state government every month. Failure to register a conversion with the District Magistrate carries additional penalties for the individual who performs the conversion, though not for the individual convert.The requirement of registration of conversions with the local District Magistrate, along with the emphasis on the identity of the person performing the conversion, is a feature of every subsequent piece of enacted anti-​conversion legislation. The Adhiniyam includes a very interesting introductory note, that is quite different from the note found in the Odisha Act, and that bears further consideration: It is observed that large scale conversions are taking place mostly among the Adiwasis [Adivasis, tribal peoples] and persons belonging to other backward classes in the State. The illiteracy and poverty of the people is exploited and promises of monetary, medical, and other aid are given to allure them to renounce their religion and adopt another religion. The Bill seeks to prohibit such conversions by use of force or by allurement or by any fraudulent means. (Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam, 1968) This introductory note makes clear that the major issue the Madhya Pradesh government hoped to address through the legislation was the supposed exploitation of the depressed classes by those seeking to convert them, and in this way—​that is, in its focus on those converting others rather than on the freedom to convert—​demonstrates the similarity of its ideological orientation to that of the Niyogi and Rege reports. Christians challenged the constitutionality of the Acts in court, and after the challenges in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh produced contradictory results in their respective state High Courts, the cases were brought to the Supreme Court of India for resolution in 1977. The language of the state High Court and Supreme Court judgments demonstrates an evolution in the government’s understanding of conversion, which resulted in the Supreme Court of India accepting arguments against conversion and proselytization made earlier in the Constituent Assembly Debates, and in the Niyogi and Rege reports. The Madhya Pradesh High Court ruling stated: What is penalized is conversion by force, fraud, or by allurement. The other element is that every person has the right to profess his own religion and act according to it. Any interference with that right by the other person by resorting to conversion by force, fraud, or allurement cannot, in our opinion, be said to contravene Article 25(1) of the Constitution of India, as the Article guarantees religious freedom subject to public health…On the other hand it [the Act] guarantees that religious freedom to one and all including those who might be amenable to conversion by fraud, force, and allurement. As such, the Act, in our opinion, guarantees equality of religious freedom to all, much less can it be said to encroach upon the religious freedom of any particular individual. (Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. AIR 1975 MP 163, paragraph 16) One particular aspect of this ruling is crucial:  Madhya Pradesh focused on the letter of the law, namely that the purpose of the Act was not to deter all conversions but only fraudulent 162

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conversions.The focus was on individuals—​or communities—​who “might be amenable to conversion by fraud, force, and allurement,” not those who sought to convert others. In comparison, the Odisha ruling focused on the rights of Christians to propagate their faith, and, by extension, convert others. The difference in interpretation came down to which group’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion was seen as being under threat: those seeking to convert others or those being converted. The Supreme Court examined both state Acts together and ruled on the two main legal issues at play: the constitutional validity of the Acts, and the competence of state legislatures to enact such laws. The Supreme Court judgment came out strongly in favor of the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s reading of the laws.The Supreme Court’s decision ruled that the two Acts were not in violation of Article 25(1) of the Constitution, upholding the validity of both the Odisha and Madhya Pradesh Acts. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled that state legislatures did indeed possess the legal competence to enact them. The Court stated that it found no justification for the view that it [Article 25 of the Constitution] grants a fundamental right to convert persons to one’s own religion. It has to be appreciated that the freedom of religion enshrined in the Article is not guaranteed in respect of one religion only, but covers all religions alike, and it can be properly enjoyed by a person if he exercises his right in a manner commensurate with the like freedom of persons following other religions. What is freedom for one is freedom for the other, in equal measure, and there can therefore be no such thing as a fundamental right to convert any person to one’s own religion. (Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. 1977 AIR 908, 1977 SCR [2]‌ 611) Article 25(1) of the Constitution, therefore, does not guarantee the right to convert another person, but merely to “propagate” one’s religion. The Supreme Court ruling also explained that propagate, properly defined, is “not the right to convert others but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets” (Ibid.). This definition mirrors the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s contention that propagation exists as a vehicle for edification and not, ultimately, for conversion. The Supreme Court wrote further: It has to be remembered that Article 25(1) guarantees freedom of conscience to every citizen, and not merely to the followers of one particular religion, and that, in turn, postulates that there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one’s own religion because if a person purposely undertakes the conversion of another person to his religion, as distinguished from his effort to transmit or spread the tenets of his religion, that would impinge on the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed to all citizens of the country alike. (Ibid.) In defining “propagate” as it does, the Supreme Court accepted the view of conversion articulated by Munshi in the context of the Constituent Assembly Debates. In this view, conversion is an act perpetrated upon an individual by another, not a decision of individual conscience (Kim 2003, pp. 54–​55). The Supreme Court’s definition of propagation as “spreading the tenets of one’s religion” or existing for the purposes of “edification” therefore falls squarely within a common “Hindu” understanding of propagation. In this sense, at least for the Indian Christian community, the legal interpretation of propagation employed by the Supreme Court can be 163

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seen to fall far short of what they fought for in the Constituent Assembly. Perhaps more importantly, the Supreme Court’s ruling paved the way for further anti-​conversion legislation. In 1978, a year after the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case, and in the wake of considerable anti-​Christian violence in India’s northeast (Bannerjee 1982, pp. 269–​70), a third state Freedom of Religion Act was enacted in the then Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh.While the Arunachal Pradesh Act contains similar language to the laws enacted in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh, it is most notable for its emphasis on “indigenous faiths.” “Conversion” is defined in the final language of the Act not as “renouncing one religion and adopting another,” as in the Madhya Pradesh and Odisha Acts, but as “renouncing an indigenous faith and adopting another faith or religion” (Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978). The prohibition of forcible conversion clause in the Arunachal Pradesh Act also refers only to conversion away from indigenous faiths, stating that “no person shall attempt to convert, either directly or indirectly any person from indigenous faith by use of force or by inducement or any fraudulent means nor shall any person abet such a conversion.” It makes no mention of whether “induced” conversions from non-​indigenous faiths back to the indigenous faiths listed in the Act are subject to the punishments outlined there (which are similar to those in the other existing Acts). Within this logic, indigenous faith and national identity become synonymous (Neufeldt 1993, p. 391). Moreover, the rationale of the Act, which presumes that conversion away from an indigenous faith disturbs public order while conversion in the other direction does not, implicitly declares Christianity an alien faith, and conversion to Christianity a subversive act against the interests of the state (Bannerjee 1982, p. 264). While conversion remained an issue in India over the twenty years following the enactment of Arunachal Pradesh’s Act, no new anti-​conversion legislation was put forward at any level of government in that period. Christians and other critics of the anti-​conversion laws considered their definitions of “fraud,” “allurement,” and “inducement” too broad, too vague, and therefore open to the possibility of abuse. Of particular concern was the way in which the legislation empowered politicians, bureaucrats, and even the police to judge the legitimacy of citizens’ conversion. Nevertheless, the first wave of legislation demonstrates both the greater political power of those critical of conversion to Christianity, as well the fact that their criticisms have remained uniform and consistent since the time of the Constituent Assembly Debates and the two state missionary enquiry reports. While the legislation exists, ostensibly, to prevent fraudulent conversions, the political issues of denationalization, extra-​territoriality and foreign influence remain as primary drivers of opposition to religious conversion. The first wave of legislation also demonstrates increasing recourse to the rhetoric of indigeneity, with conversion (or re-​conversion) to indigenous Indian religions viewed as an apolitical act while conversion to Christianity or Islam is not.

The second wave of anti-​conversion legislation The second wave of anti-​conversion legislation developed in a different historical and political context than did the first wave, a context that involved increasing anti-​Christian violence at the turn of the twenty-​first century, the highly publicized murder of Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two young sons, combined with the increasing political influence of the Sangh Parivar at both the state and federal levels. In this context, six more Indian states—​Tamil Nadu (2002), Gujarat (2003), Chhattisgarh (2006), Himachal Pradesh (2006), Madhya Pradesh (2006), and Rajasthan (2008)—​enacted legislation restricting and regulating conversion. Discursively, the second set of state laws follows the first quite closely, although with accretions that have greatly strengthened them relative to their predecessors. As with the initial 164

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legislation, the second wave of laws state explicitly that the prevention of fraudulent conversion is what necessitates their enactment. However, an analysis of the language utilized in these new laws exposes a recognizable shift in the focus of their opposition from fraudulent conversions (the prime concern of the first round of state laws) to conversion itself. Given this shift, the anti-​ conversion laws in the second wave are significantly more stringent in their management of conversion, with the various state governments granting themselves the sole authority to determine not only the right of an individual to convert but also the validity of specific conversions. The strengthening of these laws is exemplified by four key developments: 1) the inclusion of “threat of divine displeasure” among named and prohibited inducements to conversion; 2) an emphasis on the “ancestral religion” of the potential convert; 3)  increased bureaucratization of conversion through registration requirements including the filling out of various forms, a waiting period, pre-​notification of intent to convert (oneself or another), and government investigations of potential converts; and 4) explicit assertions that conversion is a threat to religious and communal harmony. Other than adjustments to fines for inflation, the laws in this second round resemble those in the first in terms of the punishments they recommend. The inclusion of threats of “divine displeasure” or “social excommunication” among prohibited inducements in these laws creates a kind of conundrum for India’s Christians. As indicated above, the propagation of one’s religion is a right guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. Even under the Supreme Court’s narrower definition of the term, as discussed above, Christians should theoretically retain the right to inform potential converts about what their religion has to say about the soteriological disposition of non-​believers. Certain sects of Christianity and Islam, of course, assert that God will not look kindly upon non-​believers. However, according to laws passed in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, informing others about this belief would be illegal. This represents a significant infringement upon the full exercise of religious freedom not only for those engaged in proselytization, but also for those through this law denied the possibility of hearing about religions other than their own. Furthermore, the inclusion of threats of divine displeasure among prohibited inducements requires that government bureaucrats must now, according to Laura Dudley Jenkins, learn to “read minds.” “How can one determine whether converts have been forced, lured, or tricked,” she asks, without being able to see directly into another person’s mind? Indeed, these laws place government bureaucrats in the illegitimate, impossible, and unenviable position of needing to determine what constitutes “valid” conversion (Jenkins 2008, p. 120). While the forms those intending to convert must fill out are rather typical, as bureaucratic documents go, two issues do stand out: first, that potential converts must indicate whether they belong to a SC or tribe, and, second, that converts must disclose their occupation and monthly income. Both of these disclosures are reflective of the historical rationale for opposing conversion. In the first instance, soliciting information about a potential convert’s membership in a SC or tribal community reflects the paternalism inherent in both tranches of anti-​conversion legislation. Given that members of SC and tribal communities are the most likely to convert to Christianity, and that the legislation calls for more stringent penalties in the case of their illegal conversion, any investigation into the conversion of members of these communities is likely to be more stringent. Questions about a potential convert’s occupation and income also reflect prejudicial stereotypes about the motivation of converts to Christianity, that is, that they are lured by the possibility of material gain. The state bureaucracy’s desire for information regarding the potential convert’s occupation and income is, therefore, in keeping with an established criticism of conversion seen throughout the post-​Independence period, a criticism that suggests that conversion for material reasons is the expected causal factor behind any religious conversion. 165

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A similar level of the bureaucratization of conversion is seen in The Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006. In addition, however, the Himachal Pradesh Act includes a provision that people “likely to be prejudicially affected” by a planned conversion have the right to contest it and be involved in the investigative inquiry. What is unclear from this clause is who may qualify as a prejudicially affected person. Is it a religious authority from the convert’s former religion? Is it a member of the potential convert’s family who may be upset by the individual’s decision to convert? Could it be a member of the local government or a member of a group associated with the Sangh Parivar who is opposed to all religious conversion away from Hinduism? Could it even be someone who merely has a personal issue with the potential convert? Since a “prejudicially affected person” is not defined in the rules, what is clear from the language of the Bill is that any attempt to convert is further complicated by the fact that essentially anyone could protest a potential conversion, for any reason. Chhattisgarh’s Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act came into effect in 2006. Among the unique aspects of Chhattisgarh’s Act is its definition of conversion as “renouncing one’s religion and adopting another,” and its insistence that a person’s “return in ancestor’s original religion or his own original religion…shall not be construed as ‘conversion.’ ” The term “original religion” is also reminiscent of the language of Arunachal Pradesh’s Act (from 1978), wherein conversion is defined as “renouncing an indigenous faith and adopting another faith or religion.” The implications of this kind of language are clear: re-​conversions to Hinduism are acceptable, which means that the Sangh Parivar’s re-​conversion campaigns—​variously called paravartan (“return”), ghar wapasi (“homecoming”) and shuddhi (“purification”)—​would be legal. Conversion by a Christian or Muslim to Hinduism would not even be considered conversion. Taking this rationale further, a conversion to the “ancestral religion” of Hinduism would be outside the scope of the law even if the convert’s family had been Christian or Muslim for any number of generations. One is forced to conclude, then, that the intention of Chhattisgarh’s Act (and others like it) is simply to discourage conversion away from Hinduism, while encouraging conversion to the same. The foregoing analysis of this second tranche of anti-​conversion legislation demonstrates both the increasing politicization of conversion in India during the period under examination and the substantial strengthening of the state’s role in managing religious conversion. While almost all of the previously identified arguments against both fraudulent conversions and conversion per se are maintained in the second wave of legislation, this analysis has revealed several important accretions to the first tranche of laws, including greater powers of investigation into conversion by state authorities, the ability of prejudicially affected persons to involve themselves in a state’s investigation and management of religious conversion, and the full transition of the agency in the act of conversion from the individual to the state. Reference to ancestral religions is seen in almost all of the laws, with re-​conversion to an “ancestral” religion (generally Hinduism) not falling under the auspices of the Acts. This language gives concrete legislative expression to the belief that a convert to Christianity or Islam is denationalized by that very act.

Conclusion From the Constituent Assembly Debates through the missionary enquiry reports and both waves of conversion legislation, the poles of the debate about conversion in India have remained more or less unchanged. Opponents of conversion and propagation focus on the individual’s right not to be converted (or subjected to the proselytizing activities of others) while those in favor

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of propagation and conversion focus on the fundamental right to teach or propagate one’s religion, along with the right of individuals to convert themselves to another religion at will. While there are many Indians who find themselves located somewhere between these poles, the first pole predominates in India, and this of course favors the opponents of conversion. How one understands the nature of conversion, and the motivations of those who choose to convert, significantly impacts one’s views on the appropriate nature and extent of state involvement in regulating it. State involvement in conversion, in turn, risks undermining citizens’ freedom of religion. Such issues will never be resolved while disagreements remain about the nature and appropriateness of conversion itself. Nevertheless, resolving such disagreements is critical to the task of affirming and defining India’s secular identity.

Bibliography Ambedkar, B.R. and All India Scheduled Castes Federation. 1947. “Memorandum on the Safeguards for the Scheduled Castes.” Available atwww.ambedkar.org/​ambcd/​10A.%20Statesand%20Minorities%20 Preface.htm#inter. Accessed August 20, 2019. Bannerjee, B.N. 1982. Religious Conversions in India. New Delhi: Harnam Publications. Bauman, C. 2008a. Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–​ 1947. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. —​—​—​. 2008b. “Post-​Colonial Anxiety and Conversion Sentiment in the Niyogi Report.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 12(2): 181–​213. Bhatt, C. 2001. Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths. London: Berg. Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee. 1956. The Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee, Madhya Pradesh [The Niyogi Report]. Nagpur, Madhya Pradesh:  Government Printing. Christian Missions Enquiry Committee. 1956. The Christian Missions Enquiry Report [The Rege Report]. Indore, Madhya Bharat: Government Press. Constituent Assembly. 1950. Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly Debates, December 9, 1946 to January 24, 1950. Available at 164.100.47.194/​Loksabha/​Debates/​cadebatefiles/​C01051947.html. Accessed August 20, 2019. The Hindu. 1999. “PM Calls for National Debate on Conversions.” The Hindu. January 11. Available at https://​hindunet.org/​home/​interfaith_​relations/​sridhar/​re110199.htm. Accessed December 23, 2019. Jenkins, L.D. 2008. “Legal Limits on Religious Conversion in India.” Law and Contemporary Problems 1009(Spring): 109–​27. Kim, S.C.H. 2003. In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India. Delhi: Oxford University  Press. Needham, A.D. and Rajan, R.S. 2007. “Introduction.” In Needham, A.D. and Rajan, R.S. (eds.). The Crisis of Secularism in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–​44. Neufeldt, R.W. 1993. “To Convert or Not to Convert: Legal and Political Dimensions of Conversion in Independent India.” In Baird, R.D. (ed.). Religion and Law in Independent India. New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 381–​401. Rambo, L.R. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rambo, L.R. and Farhadian, C.E. 1999. “Converting: Stages of Religious Change.” In Lam, C. and Bryant, M.D. (eds.). Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies. London and New York: Cassell, pp.  23–​34. Rediff News. 1998. “Singhal Sees ‘Foreign Hand’ in Violence against Christians” Rediff News. December 29. Available at:www.rediff.com/​news/​1998/​dec/​29sing.htm. Accessed August 20, 2019. Rudolph, S.H. and Rudolph, L.I. 2001. “Living with Difference in India:  Legal Universalism in Historical Context.” In Larson, G.G. (ed.). Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 36–​65. Sarkar, S. 1999. “Conversions and the Politics of Hindu Right.” Economic and Political Weekly 34(26): 1691–​1700. Savarkar,V.D. 1989. Hindutva—​Who Is a Hindu? 6th ed. Bombay: S.S. Savarkar. Special Correspondent. 1998. “VHP Justifies Attacks on Hindus.” The Hindu. December 29. Available at http://​niltindia.asia/​appiusforum/​VHP.html. Accessed December 23, 2019.

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Laws, Acts, and Judgments Cited The Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967. 1967. Available at http://​lawodisha.gov.in/​files/​acts/​act_​ 884132771_​1437987451.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2019. Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam, 1968. 1968. Available atwww.kandhamal.net/​ DownloadMat/​Madhya_​Pradesh_​Freedom_​of_​Religion_​Act.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2019. Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. AIR 1975 MP 163. 1975. Available at http://​ indiankanoon.org/​doc/​429501/​. Accessed August 20, 2019. Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. 1977 AIR 908, 1977 SCR (2) 611. 1977. Available at https://​indiankanoon.org/​doc/​1308071/​. Accessed August 20, 2019. Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978. 1978.Available atwww.kandhamal.net/​DownloadMat/​ Arunachal_​Pradesh_​Freedom_​of_​Religion_​Act.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2019. Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006. 2006. Available atwww.kandhamal.net/​DownloadMat/​ Chhattisgarh_​Freedom_​of_​Religion_​Act_​amendment.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2019. The Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006. 2006. Available at: https://​indiacode.nic.in/​bitstream/​123456789/​5395/​1/​the_​himachal_​pradesh_​freedom_​of_​religion_​act%2C_​2006.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2019.

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14 HINDU–​C HRISTIAN RELATIONS THROUGH THE LENS OF CASTE Sunder John Boopalan

Using caste as a lens for analysis, this chapter traces the change in self-​understanding of Hindus and Christians in the colonial period and its impact on their postcolonial relations. Dominant agents in India, whether Hindu or Christian, have historically attempted to objectify othered subjects using caste (varna-​jati) as a marker. The chapter chooses Dalits as a case in point of such othered subjects. However, because subjects exercise agency and cannot be objectified and perfectly contained, any attempt to objectify subjects causes what I call “accidents.” By defining caste as a category of power used to establish hierarchy, status, and control through tactile and epistemological modes of operation, this chapter describes accidents in attempts to objectify othered subjects and their impact on Hindu–​Christian relations. The chapter has the following structure. First, it describes caste, rehearsing basic conceptual vocabulary and establishing the practice of caste as a tactile and epistemological mode of exercising power. Second, the chapter analyzes a set of Christian interlocutors to trace how self-​ understanding changes through the encounter with caste. Third, changes in self-​understanding through encounters with caste logic and practice are analyzed in a set of Hindu interlocutors. The limited dominant-​caste insight of these Christian and Hindu interlocutors, as the chapter shows, causes accidents in their efforts to objectify othered subjects, especially Dalits. “Dalit” (a word derived from a Marathi root meaning “oppressed,” or, more literally, “crushed,” “broken”) is the self-​description of members of communities who were historically called and treated as “untouchables” based on the inherently discriminatory system of caste. While mostly reserving the word for communities that suffered this particular historical disadvantage, the chapter, at times, extends its meaning to include other subaltern communities (such as the Paravars) that are made-​ to-​be-​low by caste dominance. Such accidents are the consequences not just of solipsistic changes in dominant subjects but, more importantly and fundamentally, of the inevitable agency exercised by Dalits that resists objectification and containment. Finally, the chapter concludes with pointers toward what such accidents mean for Hindu–​Christian relations in postcolonial India and beyond.

Caste: two preliminary considerations In this section, I demonstrate, first, that caste-​based antagonisms predate the arrival of colonialism, and second, that the practice of caste derives its power from collusion between epistemological and tactile worlds. 169

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Precolonial caste-​based antagonisms The phrase “divide and rule”—​in reference to the British colonial government—​is often used to imply “a prior unity” (Roberts 2016, p. 128) among those persons inhabiting the large mass of land that is called the Indian subcontinent. When the lens of caste is employed to assess such an implied unity, one not only finds such unity lacking but also gleans evidence that points to the opposite (Ibid.). With respect to Dalits, Nathaniel Roberts’s observation that “the colonizer and the [elite, upper-​caste] colonized were in fact allies” captures well the persistence of caste-​based antagonisms in precolonial India (Ibid., pp. 2, 53; Mosse 2012, pp. 34–​35; Kruijtzer 2009, pp. 1–​2). Understanding such precolonial caste-​based antagonisms has implications for colonial and postcolonial Hindu–​Christian relations. Caste often becomes the fulcrum—​despite its instability as an unchallenged social feature—​around which Hindu–​Christian relations spin.

Epistemological and tactile collusions Caste is not an ontological category that is self-​evident. Caste takes on meaning only in the ways in which it is performed in dispositions, habits, actions, and reactions (Boopalan 2017, p. 3). The word “caste” is widely understood to refer to the traditional division of society into four large groups (or varnas), and many sub-​groups (or jatis), a division which places Dalits outside of society, as such, altogether. It is important, however, to recognize that tactile worlds collude with epistemological and schematic worlds in the performance of caste. A plethora of concepts provide the epistemological grease that oils the machine of the system. A  brief explanation of these concepts is necessary to get a grasp of the logic and function of caste. Varna may be understood as a unit tied to vocation and order, preventing society’s fall into chaos. Within each varna are found the jatis—​that is, castes into which people are born, marry, and die. In this worldview, there are no accidents. One’s current station in life—​good or bad—​is a function of one’s former works and behavior. This theory of cause and effect informs the idea of karma. Dharma refers to caste-​based duty or cosmic order. Varna and jati find conceptual meaning in a framework called varnashramadharma, as part of which one’s spiritual duty (dharma) is determined to a great extent by one’s varna and stage in life (ashrama). In this dharma-​infused worldview, when one’s place in the caste-​based hierarchy is disturbed, cosmic order is also disturbed. Caste hierarchy—​in this dominant reading—​becomes a sacred order that is to be protected against disturbance (Ibid., p. 30). Tactile operations that inform the caste system are often either overlooked or underplayed. Recognition of the collusion between epistemological and tactile worlds in the operation of caste is helpful to demystify its seeming complexity. This collusion can be illustrated with reference to the names of Indian villages and to the namaste greeting. Oor (i.e., ūr, the Tamil word for village) has two meanings. A first meaning, somewhat benign, conveys that the village is a small municipality of a larger district or state. A second level of meaning—​one that often escapes the uncritical reader—​refers to that part of the village where dominant (so-​called upper) castes live. This second meaning, with tactile ramifications, alludes to a dominant-​caste understanding in which “the village proper” or the “main” village is that part of the village in which the dominant castes live. Dalit households are physically separated from the rest of the oor (the second meaning), often by large tracts of land. This Dalit side of every village is called the cheri—​a Tamil word that denotes the part of the village where Dalits live. The idea of “our side” and “their side,” by virtue of being part of the geography of the village, is also deeply inscribed into patterns of thinking (epistemological) and acting (tactile) that constantly assess self and other (Ibid., p. 33). 170

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A second example that helps us understand caste as a category of power used to establish hierarchy, status, and control through tactile and epistemological modes of operation is the namaste greeting. Many are familiar with this greeting. It is a theologically loaded Sanskrit salutation that means “the divine within me salutes the divine within you.” What many do not know well is that the common greeting is often a tactile ritual that can render a person inferior or superior by establishing a hierarchy of power based on caste status. When two Indians—​acquaintances, co-​ workers at the workplace, service providers at grocery stores, or clients at those stores—​encounter each other, it is common to exchange the ritualized namaste greeting. In popular expression, namaste is often merely a verbal greeting accompanied sometimes by the palm-​to-​palm hand gesture (anjali). In the context of an anticipated greeting, the hierarchically “lower” person would say “namaste” and bow the head downward a little. The hierarchically “higher” person would often not respond at all or merely tilt the head in non-​reciprocal acknowledgment. Sometimes, this acknowledgment is accompanied by a verbal “namaste,” but the tone would indicate an asymmetrical power relation. The simple namaste thus turns out, when seen through the lens of caste, to be a tactile ritual in which persons allow their bodily movements and voices to enact and establish discriminatory and non-​reciprocal social relations (Ibid., p. 33). These social relations are enacted in a variety of other tactile ways, as well, such as in prohibitions against dining with people outside one’s jati, or against taking water or leftover food from inferiors. Such seemingly banal operations of caste have extraordinary consequences, including sanctioning physically brutal caste-​based violence (Ibid., pp.  36–​51). The collusion between the epistemological and tactile worlds of caste impact othered individuals and communities. This becomes evident when seen in and through Hindu–​Christian encounters in colonial and postcolonial eras.

Colonial Christian self-​and other-​understandings When Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–​1656) arrived in India in the early seventeenth century, he encountered Gonçalo Fernandes (1541–​1619), a Portuguese Jesuit. Both Jesuits were missionaries who intended to win converts to Christianity. Fernandes worked with the Paravar community. The Paravars were a subaltern community primarily involved with fishing for livelihood. Many Paravars converted to Christianity in the early 1530s in exchange for protection from Muslim raiders and undue taxation and other oppressive practices by Portuguese officials. Paravar Christians—​who made up a majority of converts—​were looked down upon by dominant-​caste Hindus owing to their inferiorized caste status. In addition, dominant-​caste Hindu animosity toward Paravar Christians was informed by the fact that these converts mimicked the social practices of Portuguese Christians who were derogatorily referred to as “Parangis,” a term that conveyed meanings of being “polluted,” “uncultured,” and a “foreigner caste,” among other things (Neely 1995, p. 45; Nardini 2017, p. 228). Nobili understood these caste-​based entanglements that informed dominant-​caste Hindu understandings of Christianity and sought to change them.This led to a change in Nobili’s self-​ understanding and understanding of others—​both Christian and Hindu. All of these changes were based on perceptions of caste. Eventually, they decisively impacted his relations with Hindus. Nobili developed a model of self-​presentation that involved adopting as his own markers of the local dominant-​caste (particularly Brahmin) ethos and status. Nobili had two major reasons for doing so. First, he believed mistakenly in a top-​down evangelistic approach, convinced that if he were able to convert those perceived to be at the very top of the caste hierarchy, a 171

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trickle-​down effect would inevitably allow for conversions of all others, including those who were at the bottom. A second reason for his adoption of markers of dominant-​caste status and ethos was to convince his dominant-​caste Hindu interlocutors that Christianity was a noble religion, not to be associated with derogatory labels like “Parangi” and others, as mentioned above, that dominant-​caste Hindus were familiar with before his arrival. Fernandes’s work with the Paravar community, however, undermined Nobili’s goal. Dominant-​caste Hindus in the region considered Christian Paravars a low-​status community. Conversion to Christianity consequently would have meant, for such dominant-​caste Hindus, association with lowly persons. Such association would have entailed loss of their own dominant-​caste social status and power. Recognizing this precipitated in Nobili a change of self-​understanding that impacted his understanding of his role as a missionary and influenced his assessment of his personal self-​identity. This change in self-​perception effected a change in Nobili’s understanding of other Christians (both converts and foreign missionaries), as well as other Hindus. Reassessing his missionary strategy, Nobili actively disassociated himself from his Portuguese Jesuit colleague, Fernandes (a former low-​status soldier). Italian by birth, Nobili also distanced himself from the Portuguese more generally, whose locally assigned low social status—​viewed with the lens of caste—​he did not dispute. Fernandes was Portuguese, and in the land of his birth was not entangled by caste logic and practice. Nor was Nobili. For this reason, both Nobili and Fernandes could have emphasized their common racial identity, as Europeans, and their common differences from those with whom they worked. Nobili chose instead to emphasize the caste-​informed binary of high/​low and pure/​impure, and thereby to make an assessment of Fernandes’s social location as lowly and undesirable for interlocution. In this, one notices the ways in which notions of caste and race can inform each other. In contrast to the low social status of Fernandes, individually, and the Portuguese, collectively, Nobili invoked his “noble” Roman ancestry (Patil 2016, p. 55). Nobili’s noble prejudices (informed by racial constructs) allowed him to accept as justified the hierarchy as caste, and therefore opened the door for a theological justification of his dominant-​caste-​centered model. In his assessment of dominant-​caste Hindus, Nobili did not question the privileges that Brahmins possessed. He took their presumed nobility in a caste-​based society as a given and made epistemological connections with philosophical viewpoints rooted in Christian theology. In subscribing to the idea of Brahmin nobility and the privileges it entailed, Nobili cited Gregory of Nazianzus: “I consider that erudition (knowledge) among all human good ranks first” (Arokiasamy 1986, p. 35). Here, Nobili deploys the dominant understanding of Brahmins as an educated literary class to justify their position atop the caste hierarchy. Nobili’s strategy was consistent and thoroughgoing. He distanced himself from all associations that were deemed lowly, whether from the perspective of his own developing theological anthropology or from the perspective of dominant-​caste Hindu caste logic.The strategy entailed very concrete tactile choices. While Fernandes spoke the dialect of the subaltern Paravars, Nobili made great efforts to imitate the high-​sounding literary Tamil spoken by dominant-​ caste Brahmins (Županov 1993, p. 125). Nobili refused to mix with or touch Dalits (Bugge 1994, p. 44). He became vegetarian, would not wear leather shoes, and wore saffron robes and a version of the sacred thread worn by Brahmins. Other tactile strategies included moving out of the mission compound and into the self-​segregated area where Brahmins lived: the oor of the oor. Further, in characteristic imitation of Brahmin priests, Nobili shaved all of the hair on his head except for a cluster of hair at the back. Nobili also hired a Brahmin to do his cooking for him. He received only dominant-​caste persons into his home and created separate churches for Brahmins (Neely 1995, pp. 46–​48). Based on the collusion between such tactile 172

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and epistemological worlds, Nobili did not see a contradiction between the Christian theological affirmation that all persons are created equal in the image of God and the logic of caste that places persons in inherently discriminatory social hierarchies (Sherinian 2002, p. 239). In his view, upsetting the inherently unequal hierarchy of castes and its logic was undesirable and a violation of that which he believed to be divinely ordained (Ibid., pp. 46–​47). Not surprisingly, Fernandes and Nobili clashed theologically and politically over the question of caste. Fernandes privileged the agency of Dalit converts and considered Nobili’s efforts to disassociate himself from Dalits a betrayal not just of the emancipatory logic of Christianity but also of Dalit trust in missionary integrity (Ibid., pp. 48–​49). After fifteen years of debate over Nobili’s strategy for missions, Nobili got his way, in 1623, by pulling political strings in Rome where his larger aristocratic family had deep connections with the papacy (Nardini 2017, p. 228).

Which (and whether) Hindus? The difference between Nobili and Fernandes, despite their common Jesuit identity, reveals how encounters with caste and the assessment thereof provoke changes in self-​understanding and the understanding of others that impact Hindu–​Christian relations. Fernandes, retired-​Portuguese-​soldier-​turned-​priest and semi-​literate, inadvertently finds himself theologically aligned with Christianity’s emancipatory logic. Nobili, with Italian aristocratic connections and Roman ancestry, locates himself instead in alignment with a dominant-​ caste logic that inferiorizes othered subjects. Although beginning with much common cultural ground, Nobili and Fernandes end up engaging disparate sets of interlocutors.While Fernandes’s interlocutors are a people (Paravars) on the margins of caste, Nobili chooses a community (Brahmins) at the center of caste power. Ultimately, Nobili and Fernandes become “other” to each other even as they engage with othered native others (Županov 1993, p. 123). Fernandes’s epistemology is based on his interaction with diverse caste communities on the streets of Madurai, an important temple town in Tamil Nadu. In this sense, Fernandes’s epistemology might be said to derive from a realistic tactile worldview that recognized the social complexity of the environs in which he found himself. In contrast, Nobili’s physical retreat via self-​segregation into the dominant-​caste quarters, and the limited epistemology available therein, allowed him to see categories of “Christian” and “Hindu” as binaries, with the quintessential native “Hindu” being a Brahmin (Ibid., pp. 125–​26). The debates between Fernandes and Nobili reveal that the choices missionaries made about with whom to engage and why had significant political ramifications in terms of caste. They also reveal that missionaries could not avoid stumbling their way into debates about who is a Hindu. Dalits in the colonial period were considered “other” by both Europeans and dominant-​ caste Hindus (Oddie 2014, p. 23). B.R. Ambedkar, Dalit statesman and principal architect of India’s Constitution, argued that there was no distinct commonality shared by all those within the category of “Hindu” (Viswanath 2016, p. 257). Moreover, generally speaking, dominant-​ caste Hindus in precolonial and colonial times did not consider Dalits “Hindus.” The notion that Dalits along with all other caste Hindus constituted a unified category emerged only at a later point, in a different political and historical context (Oddie 2006). It is important to underscore this point for those invested in fully understanding Hindu–​Christian relations. While the fact that Dalits were not counted as Hindus before the twentieth century is somewhat well known, it is also important to note that Dalits did not regard themselves as Hindus at this point, either (Roberts 2016, p. 125). The only significant way in which Dalits were formally counted as “Hindus” was in the censuses colonial authorities undertook beginning in the 173

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last decades of the nineteenth century. In these censuses, however, “Hindus” were defined by default. If one was not Christian, not Buddhist, not Sikh, not Parsi, not Jew, not Muslim, and so on, one was deemed “Hindu.” While this definition of “Hindu” was imagined and artificial, the censuses did contribute to the ossification of the categories of “Hindu” and “Hinduism” (Ibid., pp. 125–​26).

Colonial Hindu self-​and other-​understandings In the years leading up to India’s independence, another related development accelerated the inclusion of Dalits within the category of “Hindu.” In 1932, the British colonial government introduced the so-​called Communal Award, which allowed for political representation of religious communities according to their numerical strength. In its first iteration, the Award distinguished and granted separate electorates to Dalits and caste Hindus. Fearing that the number of Hindus would thereby fall below that of other religious communities, a number of dominant-​caste Hindus undertook efforts to have Dalits officially counted as “Hindus” (Viswanath 2016, p. 264). Swami Shraddhanand (1857–​1926), a key proponent of integrating Dalits into dominant Hindu society, worried about Dalits emerging as an autonomous political force and therefore sought to Hinduize them. He warned M.K. Gandhi (1869–​1948) and the Congress Party that Dalits could weaken the Hindu majority if they emerged as an autonomous political entity (Roberts 2016, p. 138).The communication between Shraddhanand and Gandhi reveal changes in self-​and other-​understandings that had implications for their relationship with Christians. Here again, caste became the fulcrum on which these various changes in self-​understandings and -​dispositions pivoted. Shraddhanand recognized the social reality that Dalits were not considered Hindus, and therefore argued that Hindus should strategically remove the practice of untouchability that disenfranchised Dalits. This would, he believed, pave the way for Dalit “conversion” to “Hinduism” instead of to other religions like Christianity (Ibid., pp. 138–​39). Gandhi, too, was aware of the tactile reality of the caste world but approached the problem by trying to persuade his Hindu, Dalit, and Christian interlocutors that Dalits were, in fact, already Hindu (Ibid.). Gandhi warned Christian missionaries “not to try to wean these suppressed classes [the term, at the time, for what we now call Dalits] from Hinduism” (Ibid., p. 139). The language of weaning is significant. It is patronizing and infantilizing, and as such, engages in the objectification of othered subjects. Debasing Dalits and their sense of self and potential for agency, Gandhi described them as being “worse than cows” (Ibid., p. 146), further playing into the mistaken but ubiquitous dominant-​caste stereotype that Dalits lack their own agency. The assessment of othered subjects on the basis of caste and the desire for their inclusion was not without cause or consequence. Over time, the tide changed with respect to the question of whether Dalits were “Hindus” or not. Before the introduction of the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (also called the Morley-​Minto Reforms) which created space for Indians in the colonial government structure, no one sought to include Dalits in the category of “Hindu.” For instance, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Hindu missionary organizations such as the Arya Samaj competed with Muslims to convert Dalits into their respective folds so as to achieve greater representation in colonial legislatures. Despite such Hindu missionary efforts, Dalits were not deemed desirable in the general Hindu imagination, and efforts like those of the Arya Samaj to bring Dalits within the “Hindu” fold were sometimes met with violent resistance (Ibid., p. 127). Similarly, the attitudes that deemed Dalits as undesirable Hindus also informed Hindu reactions to British census undertakings that grouped Dalits together under the label “Hindu.” Despite official instructions to the contrary, dominant-​caste native workers engaged 174

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in census work frequently refused to mark Dalits as Hindus for census data (Ibid., p. 127; Lee 2015, p. 110; Mendelsohn and Vicziany 2013, pp. 27–​28; Juergensmeyer 1988, 72; Green and Searle-​Chatterjee 2008, p. 191). Nevertheless, with the introduction of the Indian Councils Act of 1909, and the growing importance of community numbers in matters of political representation, dominant-​caste Hindu attitudes toward Dalits as a constituency began to change dramatically. Arya Samaj efforts to convert Dalits to Hinduism received new impetus and support, so much so that competing Muslim organizations were now beginning to register complaints that Hindus were artificially expanding their numbers by fraudulent means. All the while, however, while dominant-​ caste objectifications of Dalits-​ as-​ Hindu were coming into vogue, Dalits themselves, exercising their own agency, sought to distinguish themselves as a separate and distinct political entity all over India (Roberts 2016, pp. 127–​28). Still, some Dalits exercised their political agency through conversion. During this period, it was predominantly Dalits who approached Christian missionaries for conversion, not the other way around. Similarly, some Dalits embraced conversion to Hinduism as an opportunity for social mobility. That said, by the 1920s, Dalits were disenchanted with the liberatory promises offered to them by Hindu conversion programs. Beginning in this period, then, they began, instead, to assert, exercise, and develop their own autonomy as a theological and political force (Ibid., p. 131). When Hindu–​ Christian relations are considered with this background in view, the differences between Shraddhanand and Gandhi reveal different approaches to and assessments of emerging realities. Shraddhanand’s approach presumed that Hindus and Christians were competing to convert the same group of othered people. For Gandhi, however, Dalits were never “other,” or so he argued. Christian missionaries, in trying to convert Dalits—​deemed Hindus by Gandhi—​were harming Hindus (“us” in Gandhi’s hegemonic imagination) in a deep way. In this way, historically othered subjects suddenly became part of the Hindu “us.” Describing Christian missionary work with Dalits, Gandhi famously said, “[They] do harm to us. They do harm to those amongst whom they work, and they do harm amongst whom they do not work, i.e. the harm is done to the whole of India” (Ibid., p. 142). Irony surrounds any inter-​communal relations with respect to the question of caste. For instance, in the violence leading up to the partition of British India, in which as many as a million lives were lost due to violence, Dalits “remained calm amid the violence around them” because “they knew no one would touch them” (Ibid., p.  124; Butalia 2000, p.  238). With changing politics of numbers and representation, untouchable bodies became, quite rapidly and remarkably, touchable, countable, and desirable. Emerging political realities changed to such a great extent that in the 2011 Census—​in an almost exact reversal from a century earlier—​ Brahmin census takers refused to record the self-​descriptions of Dalits who told them they were not Hindus and, instead, counted them “Hindus” (Roberts 2016, p. 127; Lee 2015, pp. 3–​10).

Dalit agency and anti-​conversion laws: a lens to understand Hindu–​Christian relations A rise in Hindu nationalism—​frequently violent—​that perceives conversion to Christianity as a threat to its imagined unity has fundamentally changed Hindu–​Christian relations today. While cooperation between Hindus and Christians continues to thrive in several local pockets, the national mood is often antagonistic. Given how caste has historically been a fulcrum around which Indians’ understandings of self and others have changed for both Hindus and Christians, it may prove useful to use contemporary Indian anti-​conversion laws as a lens through which to understand current Hindu–​Christian 175

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relations. Hindu nationalist attempts to rally support against Dalit conversions to Christianity in the south of India did not yield much success as long as “Christians”—​understood as people of a certain faith with no reference to caste—​were identified as the problem. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, even during periods of turbulent anti-​Christian violence elsewhere, local harassment of Christians was uncommon. However, when the Hindu nationalist narrative shifted from religious politics—​“conversion to Christianity is a problem”—​to caste politics—​“Dalits are stepping out of their place”—​anti-​conversion laws began to receive the support of locally dominant castes who now perceived Dalit social mobility as a threat to their caste-​based social and political power (Mosse 2012, p. 204;Viswanath 2016, p. 262; Narula 1999; for more on anti-​ conversion laws, see Richards’s chapter in this volume). Despite these developments, Dalit assertion and opposition to anti-​conversion laws has only mounted. Interestingly, church leaders were initially not at the forefront of this assertion and opposition. Instead, Dalit activists and politicians led the movement. Churches, finding themselves vulnerable with the increase in Hindutva aggression, now became dependent on political leadership offered by Dalits (Mosse 2012, p. 205). This dynamic was particularly tangible in the South. In northern states of India, such as in Gujarat, where Hindutva had more of a stronghold, churches’ response to Hindutva aggression has been to stress dialogue. In the South, however, the Tamil church has employed Dalit assertion in service of its survival, lifting up the church’s Dalit face and flaunting Dalit support. As one Dalit Catholic priest put it, “[Church leaders] are using the Dalit community as their savior” (Ibid., p. 205). Despite the complexity of these developments, one cannot help but note how the Catholic Church’s alignment with Dalit movements reverses Nobili’s historical alignment with dominant castes (Ibid., p. 206).

Accidents in objectifying subjects: after-​effects on Hindu–​Christian relations today The tactile and epistemological considerations discussed above directly affect the extent to which conversion is perceived as a disruption of caste order, which in turn directly affects Hindu–​Christian relations. In contemporary India, Dalit converts are perceived to disrupt the dominant-​caste Hindu body politic in two major ways: The first is informed by Gandhi’s argument that Dalits were always Hindus. In this view, Dalit converts to Christianity are perceived to cause a rift “within,” by breaking up the presumed unity among India’s Hindus. Consequently, Christianity, by virtue of receiving these transgressive converts, contributes to breaking India’s—​ read: Hindu—​unity. Gandhi’s argument on this particular point animates present-​day Hindutva aggression against Dalit Christians. Contradictions, nevertheless, abound, leading to unhappy accidents. The place of Dalits in the sociopolitical Hindu imagination, despite Gandhi’s claims to the contrary, is precarious. Five (Hindu) Dalit men in the North Indian state of Haryana were killed by a mob of dominant-​caste Hindus in October of 2002. The five men were skinning a dead cow for its hide. Such “caste duty” is imposed upon their community according to the casteist traditions of local villages. Given the anti-​Muslim rhetoric that characterizes “Hindu” India, however, participants of a mob enraged at the killing of the cow assumed that these Dalits were not Hindus. Instead, they mistakenly believed what they witnessed (or heard about) was an attempt by Muslim raiders intent on killing holy cows (Boopalan 2017, pp. 49–​51).When such incidents as these, which have increased in frequency since the beginning of Narendra Modi’s first term as Prime Minister in 2014, are viewed through the lens of caste, it becomes evident that Dalits remain unable to be authentically incorporated into a “Hindu” body politic, and therefore

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continue to confuse the imagination of dominant-​caste Hindus. Such tactile and epistemological contradictions inform both intra-​Hindu and Hindu–​Christian relations. Moving back in time, Nobili’s efforts in distancing himself from Dalits and subaltern castes who were perceived negatively could be understood as manifesting a desire to ameliorate Hindu–​Christian relations and as a means to win dominant-​caste converts to Christianity. Nobili even inscribed his body with “the right signs,” like saffron robes, sacred thread, a hut in the Brahmin quarter of the village, and so on. Nobili hoped that these tactile signs would give him the needed credentials to enter dominant-​caste worlds and hearts (Županov, cited in Mosse 2012, p. 33). Nevertheless, Nobili’s efforts to relate to and win Hindus in this way failed. Was Nobili mistaken merely in his ethnography, or was his theological political project fundamentally flawed because he sought to objectify subjects with inherent agency? On the one hand, it could be argued that Nobili overestimated the social dominance and trickle-​down influence of Brahmins in Madurai. On the other hand, however, and more importantly, Nobili’s efforts to reach Hindus may be characterized as an accident in objectifying subjects in more ways than one. It was an accident to downplay Paravar agency in their conversion to Christianity and trivialize their worldview as that which does not count in comparison to more dominant castes. Othering Paravars—​an act of objectification—​by subscribing to dominant-​caste logic prevented Nobili from recognizing the legitimacy of Paravar converts’ agency. Nobili’s tactile efforts to gain entry to and conquer the world of Brahmins also failed because Brahmins had no use for a religion (that is, Christianity) that unduly attracted those relegated to the bottom of society and further raised them up. A second perceived disruption in the dominant-​caste Hindu body politic, therefore, is that converts to Christianity are not only breaking up India’s presumed Hindu unity (a first disruption) but that they are simultaneously disrupting a divinely ordained caste-​based order of varnashramadharma by moving out of their traditional places of abjectness. Antagonistic Hindu–​Christian relations often draw their rhetorical power from their peculiar assessment of religious conversion. At the heart, however, they are caste-​based antagonisms. In the south of India, for example, Hindutva aggressors physically harassed Christians, alleging that they were proselytizing Hindus around a site—​Tirumala Hills—​most sacred to Hindus. Investigations falsified such allegations (Rajkumar 2014, pp. 248–​49). The reality that became apparent was that Dalits were moving out of place by exercising their agency. As described in other sections of this chapter, at the heart of such antagonism is a caste-​based resentment that Dalits, in converting to Christianity, are threatening dominant-​caste power. Moving out of place by Dalits is perceived not only by Hindus, but also by dominant-​caste Christians as negative in both epistemological and tactile terms. A  dominant-​caste Christian, for example, may tell the story of their family’s driver (presumably from a subaltern caste) who refused to give up his seat on the couch in the living room upon the arrival of a dominant-​ caste houseguest (Boopalan 2017, p. 55). Such tactile deference is expected and enforced all over India by both Christians and Hindus who continue to objectify othered subjects. The refusal of the driver to give up his seat is emblematic of accidents in objectifying subjects. The caste-​informed agency of the subaltern driver is resisted and rejected by his dominant-​ caste hosts. Another example of such accidents in dominant-​caste-​informed desire to objectify othered subjects is seen in the case of the dominant-​caste Christians in Tamil Nadu, who, in 2003, and in response to various Dalit Christian demands, either threatened that they would leave Christianity or trivialized the prevalence of caste-​based discrimination, as also happened in response to Jesuit Antony Raj’s sociological study of discrimination against Dalit Christians in Tamil Nadu, and in several instances recounted in the Catholic nun Bama’s autobiography. Both Raj’s study and Bama’s autobiography came out in 1992 (and are discussed in Mosse 2012,

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pp. 205, 209–​17). Thus, while, on the one hand, dominant-​caste Hindus are resentful that Dalit converts to Christianity may destabilize their traditional caste-​based power, some dominant-​ caste Christians, on the other hand, are unhappy with the way the social configuration of Christianity is changing in ways that privilege Dalit agency. Despite the epistemological and tactile baggage inherent in the dominant-​caste imagination, Dalits continue to assert their dignity and identity in postcolonial India. What this commentary sheds light on is this: when seen through the lens of caste, the viability of positive Hindu–​ Christian relations, in the final analysis, seems to depend on how much disruption Christianity is perceived to cause to the system of varnashramadharma. In other words, the more the perceived disruption of caste order, the more intra-​Hindu and intra-​Christian relations become unstable. Likewise, the more unstable intra-​Hindu and intra-​Christian relations become, the greater the tension in Hindu–​Christian relations.

Bibliography Arokiasamy, S. 1986. Dharma, Hindu and Christian According to Roberto de Nobili: Analysis of Its Meaning and Its Use in Hinduism and Christianity. Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana. Boopalan, S.J. 2017. Memory, Grief, and Agency: A Political Theological Account of Wrongs and Rites. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bugge, H. 1994. Mission and Tamil Society:  Social and Religious Change in South India (1840–​ 1900). Richmond: Curzon Press. Butalia, U. 2000. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Green, N. and Searle-​Chatterjee, M. 2008. “Attributing and Rejecting the Label ‘Hindu’ in North India.” In Green, N. and Searle-​Chatterjee, M. (eds.). Religion, Language and Power: Routledge Studies in Religion. New York: Routledge, pp. 186–​201. Juergensmeyer, M. 1998. Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kruijtzer, G. 2009. Xenophobia in Seventeenth-​Century India. Amsterdam: Leiden University Press. Lee, J. 2015. “Recognition and Its Shadows:  Dalits and the Politics of Religion in India.” PhD Thesis, Columbia University. Mendelsohn, O. and Vicziany, M. 2013, 2000, 1998. The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mosse, D. 2012. The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India. The Anthropology of Christianity 14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nardini, G. 2017. “Roberto Nobili’s Vivāha Dharma: A Case of Cultural Translation.” In Flüchter, A. and Wirbser, R. (eds.). Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World. Boston, MA: Brill, 223–​51. Narula, S. 1999. Broken People Caste Violence against India’s “Untouchables”. New  York:  Human Rights Watch. Neely, A. 1995. Christian Mission: A Case Study Approach. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Oddie, G.A. 2006. Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–​1900. New Delhi: Sage Publications. —​ —​ —​ . 2014. “Malas and Madigas:  Their Life and Livelihood (c.1860–​ 1932).” In Rajkumar, P., Asheervadham, I.P. and Dayam, J.P. (eds.). Mission at and from the Margins:  Patterns, Protagonists and Perspectives. Oxford: Regnum, 23–​44. Patil, P. 2016. “Jesus’s Two Great Commandments: Analysing Indian Theology through Caste and Gender.” Feminist Theology 25(1): 53–​61. Rajkumar, P.J.R. 2014. “Hunting Using Hoax:  Dalits, Caste and the Conversion Debate in India.” In Rajkumar, P.J.R., Asheervadham, I.P. and Dayam, J.P. (eds.). Mission at and from the Margins:  Patterns, Protagonists and Perspectives. Oxford: Regnum, pp. 248–​60. Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. The Anthropology of Christianity 20. Oakland: University of California Press.

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15 RACE, REPRESENTATION, AND HINDU–​C HRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICA Sailaja Krishnamurti Relations between Hindus and Christians in North America cannot be studied without attention to the hegemonies of race, colonialism, and economic class that have shaped their encounters. In the US and English-​speaking Canada, white Protestant Christian narratives of religious and racial acceptability shaped state policies and public attitudes regarding settlement and migration. (The case of Quebec includes another set of ideological framings around language, Catholicism, and sovereignty which I  do not have the space to address in this essay, but which are critical for a more full discussion of Hindu identity in Canada.) For contemporary Hindus across North America, these narratives continue to mediate relations with the state through contemporary discourses of pluralism and multiculturalism. For Christians, the encounter with Hinduism in North America has fostered neo-​orientalist thinking and unequal investments in narratives of tolerance and liberalism. In this chapter, I first offer a brief history of North American Hinduism as a religious formation produced by these complex dynamics. In the second half of the chapter, I then discuss some contemporary conflicts and issues that demonstrate the complexity of Hindu–​Christian relations, particularly with regard to the politics of representation.

Histories of migration and interconnection Any discussion about race and religion in North American history must recognize the colonial roots of the Canadian and US states, and the ongoing displacement and colonization of Indigenous people. Hindus and other South Asians have settled on Turtle Island, an Indigenous name for North America, since the late nineteenth century. (The term “Turtle Island” is used by many Indigenous groups, particularly among the Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Cree, and is now widely used by Indigenous people and allies throughout the continent.) Early Hindus arrived on Turtle Island through colonial circuits of labor and exchange, and with little access to privilege and power. Among the early migrants were many Punjabi men seeking farming, pulp mill, or railroad work in British Columbia and California (Nayar 2012, p. 12) These specific 180

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kinds of labor were necessary to build the infrastructure and economy of the new colonial states; they were also forms of labor that contributed to the geographical and economic displacement of Indigenous people. On the east coast, as well as in California, another sizable group of early arrivals were Bengalis: some were itinerant workers and peddlers, some arrived as students at institutions such as Columbia University. These first Hindus of South Asian descent settled in the US at a time when “Jim Crow” laws regulated racial segregation after the legal end of the enslavement of African descended people (Bald 2015 [2013], p. 223). In Canada too, anti-​ Black racism drove segregationist policies across the country. In this way, early North American Hindus were both racialized by and complicit in the establishment of the United States and Canada as white Christian settler states (Upadhyay 2016). At the turn of the century, Hindus and other South Asians in North America were categorized in different, “inconsistent and unpredictable” ways according to their proximity to constructions of whiteness and blackness (Bald 2015 [2013], p. 8).These categories were further entangled by the narratives of race circulating from colonial India and the British Caribbean. Many South Asian arrivals were called “Hindu” or “Hindoo” (Shah 2012, p. 14). These terms referred to a racialized identity category and also to an ambiguous religious difference that could include Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. A Hindu presence was clearly evident on both coasts by the early twentieth century. Swami Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society of Northern California was established by 1906. In Canada, early Hindu migrants in British Columbia gathered with Sikhs to pray (DeVries, 2010, p. 20). One of the mitigating factors in a clearer picture of this history, alongside aggregation of religious identities, is that many Hindu practices can take place inside the home and thus Hindu practices may have been less publicly visible. By early in the twentieth century, however, white Christians in the US and Canada were increasingly uneasy with the flow of migrants from Asia, particularly those from China and India. New regulations were introduced to stem this flow. In the US, immigration policies in 1917 and 1924 limited migration from Asian countries. In Canada, Asians were effectively barred through the implementation of Canada’s white supremacist Continuous Journey policy of 1908 (Hasan et al. 2019, p. 125). Hindus, Sikhs, and other South Asians strategized against these efforts in a number of ways. South Asians from British India, Ceylon, and the West Indies claimed a right to be in Canada as British subjects, but this argument was poorly received by the public and by government. As was made abundantly clear in the Komagata Maru case of 1914, South Asians were deemed too racially different from white Christians to be allowed to land in Canada (Ibid.). In the US, some South Asians argued that their racial identity was “Caucasian,” aligning them with European-​descended white Americans. This argument met a critical defeat in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh whose request to be recognized as a “white” citizen of the US was denied by the US Supreme Court in 1923. (A detailed discussion of this case is found in Lopez 2006 [1997].) Bhagat Singh Thind’s Supreme Court case is often discussed as a key moment in US immigration history. But Thind is also significant because of his work as a mystic and teacher. Having earned a PhD in Theology and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Thind traveled the US in the 1930s, teaching texts and concepts drawn from Hindu, Sikh, and Christian traditions. Thind was one of a number of religious teachers of South Asian descent who capitalized on American fascination with Eastern mysticism. Ideas about Hindu spirituality had moved through Canada and the US since the mid-​nineteenth century, driven largely by orientalist translations and interpretations of the Puranas and other sacred Sanskrit texts. The theosophical movement was a significant driver of this interest. Swami Vivekananda’s representation of Advaita Vedanta in Chicago in 1893 was also a significant generator of interest, while the Vedanta Society offered a version of Hinduism that was intelligible to 181

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Christian audiences. By the early twentieth century, itinerant spiritualists, yogis, and meditation gurus were making a living traveling through the US. Some of these were people of South Asian origin, like A.K. Mozumdar and Yogi Wassan, while others, like Pierre Bernard, “The Omnipotent Oom,” were white people adopting the aspect of “yogi” (Foxen 2017, p. 48; Jain 2014, p. 25). Their appeal among white Christian women in particular was powerful and laid the ground for the commercialized forms of Western yoga visible in North America today.

Hindu communities and Protestant narratives of nation-​building The flow of migration from Asia to Canada and the US was effectively stopped by 1924. Until the 1960s, there was little growth in the Hindu population, though a small number of Hindus arrived in both countries through temporary labor agreements with Caribbean countries. The Hindu population did not see growth until the 1960s, when new immigration policies in the US and Canada prioritized the entry of English-​speaking professionals. When paths to immigration opened in the 1960s, Hindu families from Asia, South and East Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, and Guyana came to North America. This new wave of immigrants was significantly different in terms of gender and class from those who had arrived around the turn of the century. Men in these families were educated professionals, doctors, engineers, and professors, and they often emigrated with wives who were themselves highly educated and worked professionally outside the home (Bauman and Saunders 2009, p. 118; Khandelwal 2002, p. 94). As these first families began to establish communities in the US, expressions of Hindu community religiosity first took shape through satsangs (worship or prayer groups) in family homes. Families gathered for puja, bhajan singing, or discussion, and to mark samskaras, or significant life events. As young families began to see a need to acculturate their children into Hindu religion, bal vihar or children’s classes were organized through community volunteers. As Prema Kurien points out, these kinds of community gatherings did not require a temple space; often, especially in areas where a small group of Hindus had settled, such gatherings occurred in private homes (Kurien 2007, p. 48). In larger communities, sub-​g roups might form along the lines of shared linguistic or regional heritage, and even further by caste or sectarian differences. Kurien also shows how as the first temples were built through the 1970s, across North America these smaller groupings of Hindus turned toward a more ecumenical style of organizing, fundraising to build temples that could accommodate Hindus across differences. This signifies a shift toward what Kurien calls a congregational style of worship, corresponding to the structure and rhythm of Protestant Christian church communities (Kurien 2007, p. 10). Since urban life in North America was already configured around Sunday as a day of worship and rest, Hindu families also gathered on Sundays to share services. These services were usually in Sanskrit rather than in regional languages, focused on major deities and traditions rather than regional ones, and were often led by a Brahmin who was a member of the community. The first community-​organized temples in North America were consecrated in the 1970s through fundraising and lobbying campaigns. Often, these groups purchased decommissioned church buildings or commercial buildings that were then renovated. In the US, the first significant temples of this kind were the Ganesh Temple in Queens and the Venkateshwara Temple in Pennsylvania, both of which were consecrated in 1977. In Canada, temples were established in 1974 in Vancouver, and in Brampton, Ontario, the Prarthana Samaj group purchased a church in 1967 (Younger 2012, p. 234). Satsang and bal vihar programs became a regular part of these temple structures. These first temples functioned in many ways as community centers for Hindus, becoming a gathering place even for those in the community who were not particularly religious but might see themselves as “culturally Hindu.” 182

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In this way, Hindus organizing themselves in Canada and the US were looking toward models drawn from Protestant Christian communities. But, in keeping with the early twentieth-​ century American fascination with the mystical East, white Americans and Canadians continued to be intrigued by Hindu spirituality in the 1960s. Lola Williamson points out that the opening of immigration in the 1960s coincided with the rise of popular interest in “hippie” and new age spiritualities. Interest in “Eastern” religions gave rise to what Williamson calls “Hindu-​ inspired meditation movements” such as Kriya Yoga and Transcendental Meditation (Williamson 2010, p. 27). Gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) presented a kind of new age spirituality that was disconcerting to conservative Christians. The Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement attracted a number of young white followers, many of whom were leaving Christian homes to join this new community built around a Krishna-​centered spiritual practice. The first ISKCON temple in Toronto was established in 1968 by white followers from the US, just as immigration was starting to open up to South Asian Hindus (Younger 2012, p. 233). Some Hindu families also made use of ISKCON spaces, finding some cultural familiarity in the representations of deities, bhajan and satsang practices, and vegetarian foodways. Similarly, Joshi notes that in the 1960s and 1970s, some South Asian Hindu families in Atlanta attended the local ISKCON temple for festivals and celebrations (Joshi 2013, p.  198; for more on ISKCON, see Robison’s chapter in this volume). While patterns of migration and processes of community building are somewhat parallel in the US and Canada during this period, they begin to diverge in some critical ways during this second wave of Hindu migration. In Canada, intensive international recruitment and swelling numbers of new settlers brought unease to the predominantly Protestant white citizens of English-​speaking Canada, and exacerbated the anxieties of Francophone Catholics in Quebec, among whom separatist tensions were rising. To address this, the government of Canada introduced a policy on multiculturalism in 1971. After the establishment of the Canadian Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the Multiculturalism Act was passed in 1988. The Act provides that it is the policy of the Government of Canada to “recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance, and share their cultural heritage” (Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988, 3.1 [a]‌). As Himani Bannerji points out, the Act formalizes multiculturalism through the establishment of structures and bureaus and thereby becomes part of official state discourse (Bannerji 2000, p. 16). State multiculturalism in Canada supported community initiatives, such as the building of temples, and made the notions of tolerance and acceptance a part of the national narrative. Lori Beaman has written about the Protestant undercurrent of American and Canadian legal structures governing ideas around “tolerance,” what she calls the “the constitutional privilege of Protestantism” (Beaman 2003, p. 311). Similarly, Wendy Brown has critiqued the discourse of religious tolerance in the US as “a conceit of neutrality that is actually thick with bourgeois Protestant norms” (Brown 2009, p. 7). The US has not established multiculturalism as policy, but it remains a buzzword that is invoked alongside the narrative of America as a “nation of immigrants,” a formulation that neatly erases Indigenous people while making a claim to cultural diversity. “Tolerance” in the American context tends to be shaped by a push toward assimilation, rather than cultural preservation as in the Canadian context. In both models, however, religious freedom and rights discourse is structured around a Protestant understanding of “religion” as a category. This has directly impacted how Hindus have defined themselves. 183

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Advocacy and the racialization of religion As the population of Hindus in both Canada and the US has grown exponentially in the last twenty years, experiences of racism and of hate crimes have been a real concern. Khyati Joshi and others have called attention to the racialization of religion, a process which occurs “when certain phenotypical features associated with a group and attached to race in popular discourse become associated with a particular religion or religions” (Joshi 2006b, p. 211). The vast majority of self-​identified Hindus in North America can trace their ancestry to South Asia; they are largely a visibly racialized group. But they are not racially distinguishable from South Asians of other religions. Particularly in the post 9/​11 era, a significant aspect of the racialization of religion has been the “mistaken identity” that results in some brown bodies being mistaken for others. Hindus have long been constructed in the discourse of world religions and philosophy as a “benign,” meditative, and essentially peaceful community, a contrast to the perception of violence and terrorism historically associated with South Asian Muslims and Sikhs. Racists are not terribly concerned with distinguishing South Asian religions from each other; as Jasbir Puar shows, racialized brown bodies are interchangeable to those ready to enact violence (Puar 2007, p. 178). Hindus’ religiosity is less visible than that of Sikhs or Muslims, whose practices include head coverings and specific styles of dress. But ethnicity still marks them out as foreign and unfamiliar, thus evoking suspicion. An example: In the early hours of September 15, 2001, the Hindu Samaj temple in Hamilton, Ontario, one of the oldest Hindu temples in Canada, was set ablaze by arsonists who caused Can$500,000 in damage. The police contacted officials at the local mosque to alert them; like the arsonists themselves, the police mistook the temple for a Muslim place of worship. More recently, the Kansas (US) man who pled guilty to shooting and killing IT specialist Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injuring his friend, Alok Madasani, both Hindu immigrants, reportedly bragged about “shooting two Iranians” (Mishra 2017). In addition, it is important to recognize that Hindus have also experienced racism and violence that directly targets their religion. One of the most famous examples of organized violence targeting Hindus came in 1987 when a series of attacks against Hindus were connected with a group calling themselves “Dotbusters” (Gutierrez 1996). While the victims of these attacks included men, it is notable that the “dot” is an explicit reference to women wearing the Hindu bindi/​pottu mark; this highlights the potential vulnerability of Hindu women in public space. Hindu children have reported feeling bullied or ostracized because of religious difference. In the data collected by Joshi in her study New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground (2006a), this often took place in terms that invoked race rather than religion directly, as children reported being called racial epithets directed at Black and brown people. Joshi’s participants mentioned popular culture, citing in particular the impact of the extremely popular film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) in which “Hindus” are depicted eating monkey brains and performing human sacrifice. While obviously fantastical, these images were among the only representations of Hinduism of any kind in American popular culture and encouraged very problematic perceptions of Hinduism as a mysterious, dangerous Eastern religion. These perceptions of Hinduism were no doubt enhanced by perceptions among evangelical Christians of Hinduism as a “demonic religion,” perceptions perpetuated by influential figures like televangelist Pat Robertson (Rajan 1995). They are reflected in violence and racism against Hindus as fear of their beliefs and practices persists. Attacks on Hindu temples have occurred since temples were established and they appear to be happening with more frequency since 2015, a timeline which corresponds to swelling numbers of immigrant IT workers from India, as well as the rise of the “Trump era.” A recent hate attack at a Swaminarayan Hindu temple in Louisville, Kentucky, left “Jesus is Lord” spray-​painted on the wall in bold black letters, 184

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accompanied by a crude cross. Trying to make sense of the attack, a temple spokesperson told a media crew, the Jesus is Lord message “is fine…we were okay with that.” But elsewhere in the building, graffiti reading “foreign bastards” was not okay; for the spokesperson, this message was “about a race or someone’s skin color” (Mills 2019). At work in these remarkable comments is a clear attempt to navigate between the need to name and challenge racism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the desire to remain in good relations with Christian neighbors and to not be perceived as criticizing the Christian faith. Many scholars in Asian American Studies have analyzed the “model minority” discourse that holds up East Asians, especially Christians, and non-​Muslim South Asians as good, manageable immigrants who are high achieving, high earning, and resist drawing attention to themselves. While some scholars have suggested that Asians are omitted from discussions about racism that frame it as a Black–​white problem, the model-​minority discourse demonstrates how white supremacy locates Asians as more acceptable “others.” This narrative locates Asianness as proximate to whiteness, or even as aspiring toward some forms of white normativity (Joshi 2006b). It also situates Asians in opposition to Blacks in North America, who are constructed as having low rates of education and high rates of criminality, and this is contiguous with anti-​Black racism that is prevalent in Asian communities. Among South Asian Hindus, anti-​Black racism is often mingled with Islamophobia, rooted as much in North American politics as it is in the casteist, shadeist culture of South Asia (Upadhyay 2016). Hindus are a religious and racial minority in Canada and the US but are by no means homogenous. It may seem logical to associate Hindus primarily with India: Hindus represent the majority of the Indian diaspora in North America, and among Hindus in Canada and the US, those with Indian ancestry remain the majority. The dominance of Indian Hindus in the diaspora is therefore often connected to an affinity for Hindu nationalist politics in India. But it is important to complicate this narrative by thinking about internal Hindu diversity. There are Hindus in North America whose migrations have brought them, sometimes over generations, from countries where Hindus were a minority, though in some cases a minority that still had privileges compared to other racialized groups (South Africa being just one significant example). Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, bulldozes these differences in favor of a religious nationalism that centers upper-​caste Indian Hinduism. Concern about the influence of Hindu nationalism in North America dates back to the political rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the late 1980s, when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and related organizations were strongly connected with diasporic Hindu groups (Mathew and Prashad 2000). Hindutva politics have redoubled in the contemporary era, particularly since 2014, under BJP Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, with the BJP receiving widespread support from Indians living overseas. They have also been magnified by Trump-​era anti-​Muslim rhetoric. Hindutva politics in India are intensely pro-​Hindu and anti-​Muslim, and this sentiment carries into the diaspora where it is replicated by some conservative Hindus. Here, the shift from majority religious group to racialized minority group intensifies the nationalist impulse. As Kurien points out, alongside the model-​minority discourse celebrating Hindu achievement in North America, another narrative is also at work: “Simultaneously, they also use an oppressed-​minority discourse, highlighting a history of victimization and the need for recompense and self-​determination. Although these two discourses seem contradictory, they are interlinked and are both rooted in the Hindutva ideology” (Kurien 2007, p. 144). Certainly, as Joshi cautions, it is important to recognize that Organized Hindutva does not represent the views of most Hindus, even though it is a loud voice among them. While Hindutva represents an ideological extreme, the desire for what Joshi calls “self-​asserting” forms of representation produces many kinds of Hindu-​centered advocacy (Joshi 2013, p. 207). But 185

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there are many Hindus who are critical of government in India and in the US; for Hindus from Sri Lanka or from the “old diaspora,” there are other global politics of concern. Many Tamil Hindus, for example, were involved in widespread community actions in Toronto in the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war (Amarasingam 2015). In this movement, the primary focus was Eelam Tamil identity, but it was also a space in which Hindu and Christian activists of Tamil descent were connected through collective trauma. Tamil community actions were heavily criticized by Canadians who felt that this kind of civil disobedience was not in keeping with “Canadian values.” In the US, Hindus have been an important part of interfaith social justice organizing, particularly as part of Asian American coalition politics through organizations like SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together). But again, this is activism that does not center Hindu identity, but rather ethnic or ethno-​racial identity. More recently, Sadhana, a coalition of progressive Hindus, has attempted to counter loud conservative and Hindutva-​oriented voices by engaging in faith-​based organizing with an explicit commitment to challenging Islamophobia and supporting the LGBTQ community. Despite these recent efforts, organizing at national level for political advocacy on the basis of religion continues to be a challenge for Hindus in the US and Canada.

Conflicts and controversies One area where self-​assertion and advocacy has been an ongoing source of debate is with regard to academic discourse on Hinduism, in the context of which Hindu organizations have challenged the dominance of white scholars in the field of Hindu Studies. This is a complex problem. On one hand, the matter involves legitimate concerns about self-​representation, self-​definition, and the public expression of resentment of some Hindus toward orientalist interventions in Hindu thought. On the other hand, as Hinduism has historically been a loosely structured, multivalent, cacophonous religion, Hindus who organize to claim the right to speak on behalf of others make great assumptions about the representativeness and correctness of their own views. In the introduction to her book A Seat at the Multicultural Table: The Development of a Multicultural Hinduism, Prema Kurien writes about how, as a South Indian Christian working in the American academy, she was treated with suspicion and resentment by Hindus who heard about her work. A widely circulated email message portrayed [her] as a sinister figure—​an Indian Christian who had made the journey from India to the United States to study about Hinduism, and who was being funded and groomed by “Christian” organizations in the United States to be one of their “next generation of intellectual samurais.” (Kurien 2007, p. xi) The allegation that, as a Christian, Kurien must be connected with shadowy anti-​Hindu organizations demonstrates a real anxiety about Christian (and white) control of academic discourse about Hinduism. It also marks out how a Hindu-​centered politics can easily slip from a desire for self-​representation to a resentment of internal minorities, particularly Muslims, Christians, and Dalits from South Asia whose views on religion and nationhood might contradict this dominant Hindu perspective. Concern about the representation of Hinduism in academia has been a particularly powerful issue in the US. Joshi provides a case study of events that took place in 2003, when Hindus in the local Atlanta community and online accused an Emory University Hindu Studies professor, 186

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Paul Courtright, of writings “besmirching” Hindu deities (Joshi 2013, p. 200). Their complaints were based on a book he had published nearly twenty years earlier. The opposition to him grew so fierce that threats of violence were posted online. An organized group of Atlanta Hindus met with the president of the university to advocate for Courtright’s termination and to insist on prioritizing the hire of “practicing Hindus.” These events reverberated among South Asian religions scholars across North America. As Joshi points out, this was a significant attempt by the community to address the perception of white Christian hegemony over the production and consumption of knowledge about Hinduism, a problem which of course is traced back to European colonialism and the orientalist acquisition of knowledge. The activists correctly recognized the degree to which Christianity in various denominations (in Emory’s case, Methodist) continued to be directly involved in the founding of North American universities and religious studies departments. They also recognized that while it is a longstanding reality that practicing Christians are themselves the producers of knowledge about Christianity in the academy, Hinduism is primarily the research object of non-​Hindus. Joshi thus reads the “Courtright situation” as a genuine attempt at grassroots community self-​assertion that should be distinguished from organized Hindutva activism. But even if they were not explicitly aligned with Hindutva politics, voices like these also tend to be broadly consistent with the ideology of Hindu nationalism, promoting a homogenous, authoritarian view of Hinduism rather than recognizing its multiplicities and contradictions. What underlies any attempt of this kind to control narrative and representation, beyond simply the desire for autonomy, is a claiming of authority that assumes that there is a “correct” or authentic view. The main organizers of this community action were well-​educated, upper middle-​class, and upper-​caste Hindu families well established in Atlanta, working in coalition with upper-​caste Hindus elsewhere. There is a presumption on the part of this community of activists that their perspectives on “Hinduism,” a famously porous and complex category, are correct, and that white Christian perspectives have obscured truth. The desire for control over the teaching and learning of Hinduism has grown along with the North American Hindu population, and is exacerbated by the growing transnational presence of Hindutva. Similar campaigns waged by well-​known critics like Rajiv Malhotra (on which, see Bauman’s chapter in this volume) have targeted white scholars of Hinduism including Wendy Doniger and her students, objecting to the use of “Western” theoretical framings like psychoanalysis to interpret Hindu myths and images. Malhotra’s group of activists has attacked Hindu Studies forums and email lists, even interrupting and intervening in academic conferences such as the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Sippy 2012).While these activists appear to want to shut down certain strands of academic inquiry, there are other attempts to reclaim Hindu Studies from its perceived white Christian bias. The Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM) network, for example, seeks to “identify strategies for, and undertake, the recovery, reclamation, and reconstitution of Dharma traditions for the contemporary global era…providing bridges between, and networks among, the practicing Dharma scholars and the Diaspora Dharma communities in North America” (DANAM n.d.). DANAM also hosts conferences, meeting at the same time and in the same venue as the American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) national meeting each year for the last decade, with the explicit aim of providing a space for Hindu scholars of Hindu Studies outside of the white-​dominated spaces of the AAR. It is worth noting that there are several white scholars actively involved in the administration of DANAM, who regularly present at their conferences. Some of these scholars are themselves converts to the Hindu religion. Recent Hindu attempts across North America at raising funds for endowed university chairs also speak to forms of Hindu advocacy that fit within the Protestant capitalist framework of academia.These efforts are raising concerns within 187

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institutions. In 2016, the University of California, Irvine, declined a community-​funded gift from the Dharma Civilization Foundation to establish two endowed chairs in Hindu Studies, citing concerns about the organization’s intent to influence hiring (Redden 2016). Hindu advocacy has not been limited to university academics.Another very well documented issue concerns material covering Indian history and Hinduism in California state textbooks for public school students. In 2006, a number of American Hindu groups including the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) and the Vedic Foundation (VF) made interventions in the state board review of sixth-​grade textbooks. These interventions reflected a desire to excise discussion of historical social concerns, along with passages presenting Hinduism in a manner that might seem to contradict normative Christian beliefs and modern social norms: Among the HEF’s and VF’s alterations are the ideas that speakers of Indo-​European languages (“Aryans”) should be represented as indigenous to India instead of migrating from elsewhere; the caste system should be explained in more benign terms as an institution based on a division of labor; the word “Dalits” (the name for groups formerly known as “untouchables”) should be excised from textbooks; Hinduism should be described as a monotheistic faith; and references to women’s oppression should be omitted. (Bose 2008, pp. 15–​16) The HEF and other intervenors argued that such changes were necessary to protect Hindu children from being bullied, and to prevent the spread of misinformation produced by the dominance of non-​Hindu researchers in academic knowledge production. They were opposed by members of a number of South Asian community groups, including other Hindu groups, who argued that the proposed edits were dangerously revisionist and omitted the discussion of important social realities, particularly with regard to caste and gender. The edits proposed by HEF and other interveners were largely rejected, but the issue reared its head again ten years later in the state’s next recertification process. In the 2016 case, the rhetoric used by Hindu groups was significantly more attuned to the language of racism and marginalization.They were also supported by a group of academics, including some of those associated with DANAM. Again, some of the proposed changes were accepted by the board, while others were rejected. Like Joshi, Bose argues that the California textbook case is an example of Hindu American self-​advocacy. But Bose makes a further important connection, observing that the interventions of groups like HEF and the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) resemble the kinds of advocacy engaged in by evangelical Christian Americans on issues like the teaching of evolution in schools: “I suggest, perversely perhaps, that Hindu immigrants are performing their assimilation into American society by asserting their distinct religious identity. Religion provides a major interpretive framework for most North Americans” (Ibid., p. 28). The HAF has emerged as a significant voice in Hindu American advocacy. Based in Washington DC, HAF has a full-​time professional staff. Since 2003, it has made interventions in the media and in politics and has led campaigns on a number of issues. The leadership of HAF mainly comprises second-​generation South Asians who are trained as professionals in various capacities, though none of the current board or staff have academic training in Hinduism. The HAF mission statement is: “Promoting dignity, mutual respect, and pluralism in order to ensure the well-​being of Hindus and for all people and the planet to thrive,” a commitment they profess to make “across all sampradayas (Hindu religious traditions) regardless of race, color, national origin, citizenship, caste, gender, sexual orientation, age, and/​or disability” (Hindu American Foundation n.d.b). The HAF has participated in various interfaith campaigns 188

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supporting religious freedoms and civil liberties in the US. It regularly releases press statements decrying “anti-​Hindu” perspectives in academia and sends members to the AAR each year to review panels featuring Hindu content. In addition to the California case, the HAF has also been active in textbook revision movements in Texas and Virginia. Despite claiming to have no affiliations with transnational Hindu groups like the VHP, however, the HAF has earned a reputation as a conservative group supporting a nationalist Hindu politics. At best, the version of Hinduism promoted by HAF is homogenous and simplistic, as Bauman and Saunders suggest (Bauman and Saunders 2009, p. 121). But quite often, as Kurien (2017) shows, the HAF has been in conflict with other South Asian American organizations, particularly those supporting Muslims and other minority groups. One of the HAF’s most visible media efforts has been the “Take Back Yoga” campaign, which began with a letter HAF Executive Director Suhag Shukla wrote to the Yoga Journal. Shukla objected to the magazine’s resistance to naming Hinduism in connection with yoga; the magazine claimed that it did so because the term “Hinduism” “carries baggage.” Subsequently, an ongoing media campaign encouraged yoga practitioners and educators to clearly identify yoga as a practice with Hindu origins. Responses to this campaign were varied; some Hindus felt that the Western practice of yoga was already too far removed from Hindu religiosity to be associated meaningfully with it. Intriguingly, as Andrea Jain shows in her book Selling Yoga (and as Miller describes in detail within his chapter in this volume), some “yogaphobic” Christians agreed with the Hindu origins argument put forward by the HAF. Citing Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Jain writes, The story of yoga in the United States is a “twisted tale” from Mohler’s perspective because he defines American culture as essentially Christian and yoga as essentially Hindu. But the popularization of yoga, according to Mohler, is just one symptom of how Hinduism threatens American culture. (Jain 2014, p. 141) The Christian yoga critique has fostered a number of interesting interventions centered on anxieties that an asana practice encourages participants to worship false deities, as for example with the sun salutation, and to empty their minds, leaving them open to spiritual attack. A number of Christian “yoga alternatives,” such as Praise Moves, have appeared in recent years to address this. Yet another position on the yoga debate, generated in particular by second generation Hindu Americans, aims to protect it from cultural appropriation and racism. Noting the dominance of white teachers and participants in commercial yoga spaces, Shreena Gandhi and Lilli Wolff argue that the modern day trend of cultural appropriation of yoga is a continuation of white supremacy and colonialism, maintaining the pattern of white people consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable, while ignoring the well-​being and liberation of Indian people. (Gandhi and Wolff 2017) Gandhi and Wolff ’s article was widely attacked in the media by white yoga practitioners outraged by the argument. Their reaction, however, failed to comprehend the complex politics of yoga, laid out in a short piece by Dalit Bahujan activist Prachi Patankar (2014), that in the context of South Asian community, the heavily Sanskritized practice of yoga even as it exists in North America is aligned not just with white supremacy, but with upper-​caste supremacy. 189

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(“Bahujan,” or “majority,” is a term used by some lower-​caste communities—​Dalit, Scheduled Caste, Other Backward Caste, and others—​and by anti-​caste activists. It signifies that non-​ upper-​caste Hindus are the practical majority in India.) Writing in the academic journal, Race and Yoga, Sheena Sood (2018) recounts her own experience as a Hindu American yoga practitioner who was initially drawn in by HAF-​style approaches to Hinduism, but later began examining the kinds of critiques raised by Patankar, Gandhi, and Wolff. As an Indigenous person in Canada, Candace Brunette-​Debassige offers a different and important insight to the issue of race, colonialism, tradition, and cultural appropriation: As a Cree yoga teacher from Turtle Island, I have struggled with teaching a practice that is rooted in a tradition from South Asia and is considered by some people to be an Indigenous knowledge that is outside of my cultural and ancestral background. At the same time, I recognize the diversity of modern yoga practices, and while yogic knowledge can be contextualized as originating within Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, it is, like my own culture’s Indigenous ways of knowing, dynamic and constantly evolving. (Brunette-​Debassige 2018, p. 209)

Diversifying Hindu voices In the current political climate, Hindus of all political perspectives are fighting to make themselves heard. Conservative Hindu voices are loud, indeed. Defenders of the Indian BJP state regime see Trump as an ally and supporter, even though as racialized people in the US, they too are facing an increased mobilization of white supremacy. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has courted Hindu voters, visited temples, and emphasized trade relations with India. In both countries, the South Asian population is expected to continue to grow over the next several years. Advocacy around immigration, particularly for family reunification, has been a significant issue among Hindus in both countries. Amidst all this, there are some interesting shifts in the landscape of Hindu representation in North America. Different Hindu groups are mobilizing on social and political issues, and a progressive voice among Hindus is growing. One emergent group of note is Sadhana, the Coalition of Progressive Hindus. Sadhana was founded in New York in 2011 with a social justice mandate. The Sadhana community is culturally diverse, inclusive of South Asian and Indo-​Caribbean Hindus, as well as of converts. The group is active in community issues, particularly with regard to refugees and undocumented migrants, and on LGBTQ issues. It has stood out in its responses to global issues by naming and challenging caste-​based and anti-​Muslim discrimination and violence. Sadhana now has a chapter in Chicago, and there is growing interest in this group as an alternative to the homogenizing, Advaita Vedanta–​oriented voice of the HAF on political issues. But even Sadhana has been challenged in its position on caste issues. Dalit groups in North America, led by young feminist activists like Thenmozhi Soundarajan and Maari Zwick-​ Maitreyi, have pushed for recognition of caste discrimination among Hindus in the diaspora. A recent report by Equality Labs, “Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste among South Asian Americans,” shared the first significant data on this issue in North America (Equality Labs 2018). Among the supporters of these efforts is Cornel West, the influential African American philosopher and theorist of Christian religious publics, who sees a critical connection between the American racial hierarchies and the ongoing practice of caste (Paul 2018). As momentum for the anti-​caste movement develops, it will bring a new layer of complexity to North American Hindu–​Christian relations. While many Dalits do not identify as Hindus, and indeed some are 190

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Christians, caste discrimination is perpetrated by upper-​caste Hindus. The Equality Labs report describes children being ostracized by upper-​caste Hindu classmates and adults being harassed and abused in the workplace on the basis of caste. These findings directly contradict the position of the HAF, which insists that caste discrimination is “not intrinsic to Hindu religion”; while it acknowledges that caste exists in India, it blames Christian missionaries and “aggressive conversion campaigns” for exacerbating the problem, and thus rejects calls for anti-​caste-​ discrimination legislation to be introduced in the US (Hindu American Foundation n.d.a).The issue of caste in the diaspora thus illuminates significant fault lines in Hindu self-​advocacy, but it also demonstrates opportunities for new forms of solidarity across racial and religious lines. These various positions are made possible because of the particular knot of racial and religious histories that entangle Hindus and Christians in the US and Canada.

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16 ISKCON–​C HRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS Claire C. Robison

ISKCON–​Christian encounters at first glance may seem like a niche concern, or peripheral to the larger conversations about Hindu–​Christian relations presented in this volume. ISKCON—​ the International Society for Krishna Consciousness—​is, after all, merely one transnational organization of Hindu origin among many, several others of which are considered in the chapters of this volume. However, as ISKCON is a prominent transnational religious organization with an institutional history in India and the United States, charting the history of ISKCON–​Christian encounters also enables one to trace broader social and political trends in the development of transnational Hinduism, particularly in relation to colonialism, globalization, and global migration. Through a focus on three historical strands, or “acts,” in the multifaceted and decentralized history of ISKCON–​Christian encounters, this chapter will highlight the long shadow of colonial knowledge politics in twentieth-​century India, representations of Hindu and Christian traditions in missionary discourses, immigration policy changes and the rise of globalized Hindu spirituality, and the complexity of the current landscape of Hindu and Christian communities in the US and India (in which, for example, interreligious dialogue can counterintuitively take place between Western Hindus and Indian Christians, while transnational Hindu organizations are popular fixtures in urban India). My analysis will center on an evolution—​in the writings of ISKCON’s founder, Bhaktivedanta Swami, and in later global ISKCON communities—​of self-​ representations in relation to Christianity. I will touch on these far-​reaching issues under three headings that indicate diverse “acts” or approaches: 1) common cause, 2) condescending comparison, and 3) shared devotional interlocution. Discrete moments in this history also help illuminate how colonial-​era relations shaped the development of transnational Hindu organizations and complicate the two-​dimensional associations of specific religions with specific regions and/​ or ethnicities that undergird contemporary forms of religio-​ethnic nationalism in both India and the US. ISKCON’s founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (1896–​1977) was born, as Abhay Charan De, into a religious Vaiṣṇava Hindu family in a mercantile-​based jāti group in late colonial Calcutta. Educated at Scottish Churches College (shortened to Scottish Church College in 1929) and inspired by the Gandhian movement, Bhaktivedanta exemplified the widespread anti-​colonial resistance among young Bengalis of the time by refusing his diploma upon graduation in 1920 in non-​violent protest of colonial rule and its attendant educational structures. He married 193

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and had children, starting his professional life as a pharmacist before electing to take the partial vow of renunciation known as vānaprastha in 1950. From that time onward, Bhaktivedanta undertook increasingly ambitious writing and translation projects, centered on communicating the principles and practices of his Bengali (Gauḍīya) Vaiṣṇavism to what he saw as increasingly secularized modern Indian audiences in Calcutta and later in Allahabad, Vrindavan, and Delhi. Eventually, this missionary drive extended to a desire to spread Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism—​ styled in his specific iteration as “Krishna consciousness”—​among English-​speaking audiences in the West. To this end, in 1965 he traveled by steamship to Boston and then New  York, where he founded his mission-​oriented organization, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, in 1966. ISKCON has been known largely for its early, predominantly Caucasian American and European followers, many of whom came from Christian and Jewish households. However, the organization’s theoretical foundations and ritual culture were extensively determined by Bhaktivedanta’s presentation of a standardizedVaiṣṇava worldview. His statements—​ranging from public interviews and official lectures to personal conversations and private correspondence—​ were meticulously archived by followers, preserving not only his translations and commentaries on Vaiṣṇava scriptures but also his perspectives on a number of contemporary concerns. This multimedia archive provides followers with a trove of information on how to perceive the world around them from a devout Vaiṣṇava perspective; it also gives the scholar of ISKCON an opportunity to identify religious perspectives and even casual opinions that became influential in determining ISKCON’s stance on a range of topics—​from feminism, to industrialized economies, to interfaith relations.

Common cause In self-​published volumes of what would later become ISKCON’s trademark magazine, Back to Godhead, printed in Calcutta and Delhi intermittently in the 1940s and 1950s, Bhaktivedanta introduced his style of verse translation and commentary that would shape his future English translations of key Vaiṣṇava scriptures. In this early stage, however, Bhaktivedanta pitched his English-​medium missionizing for elite Indian audiences in Delhi and other North Indian cities and took for granted his audiences’ de facto Hindu identity. While he mentioned historical South Asian conversions to Islam and Christianity in one 1956 issue, his missionary agenda toward his upper-​middle-​class audiences was not positioned in relation to non-​Hindu traditions but rather in response to no religious identity, to those “many educated gentlemen who profess practically no particular faith of religiosity” (Bhaktivedanta 1956a, p.  1). Accordingly, Bhaktivedanta’s agenda to increase religious devotion in modern Indians’ lives was situated in relation to what he saw as competing ideologies, including Nehruvian-​era secular nationalism and—​on occasion—​the teachings of gurus prominent among middle-​and upper-​class Hindus of the time. Early issues of Back to Godhead included explicit considerations of how the teachings of Meher Baba and the Theosophical Society related to Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava philosophy, developing siddhānta-​oriented distinguishing lines between his teachings and those of adjacent modern religious organizations. However, during these waning days of the British colonial presence in India, Bhaktivedanta also pitched his religious message in consonance with conversations taking place in the metropole. In his inaugural issue of Back to Godhead in 1944, self-​published in English for an audience of Anglophone Indians in Calcutta during the height of World War II, Bhaktivedanta framed his introductory religious message with selected quotes from prominent Christian leaders, alongside Bhaktivedanta’s own guru, Bhaktisiddhanta, and the philosopher (and later president of India) 194

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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. After profiles of immediate figures in his lineage of Gauḍīya gurus, he underscored the transnational relevance of his religious message by citing “the great and urgent need of a literature like this…keenly felt by the leaders of all countries,” foregrounding statements from former US President Herbert Hoover, supporters of Moral Re-​Armament (MRA, also known as the Oxford Group), and members of the British House of Commons whom, he proclaimed: “jointly affirmed that spiritual principles which are common heritage of all people, are more fundamental than any political or economic issue” (Bhaktivedanta 1944, p. 2). In this mélange of quotes from prominent Western and Indian political and intellectual figures, Bhaktivedanta highlighted an “urgent need to acknowledge the sovereign authority of God in home and nation to establish that liberty which rests on the Christian responsibility to all one’s fellowmen,” citing a recent London broadcast from the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the midst then of World War II, which he transcribed at length: In every quarter of earth, men long to be delivered from the curse of War and to find in a world which has regained its peace, respite from the harshness and bitterness of the world they have known till now. But so often they want the Kingdom of Heaven without its King. The kingdom of God without God…OUR RESOLVE MUST BE BACK TO GOD…All our plans will come to shipwreck on the rock of human selfishness unless we turn to God. BACK TO GOD, that is the chief need of England and of every nation. (Ibid.) In an India still under British colonial rule, Bhaktivedanta traced a common cause with religious and political leaders of Britain and the US, to promote an increased religious presence in the public sphere. Notably, he seized upon the language of the Archbishop of Canterbury (adding emphasis through selective italicization and capitalization) to parallel the name of his own publication, Back to Godhead. The Vaiṣṇava revivalist message of a man born in colonial India took on new dimensions when he became a revered teacher of Americans enamored with Indian religions. However, the assertion of a common cause guided the development of Bhaktivedanta’s teachings, grounded in an assertion of Vaiṣṇava universalism. Bhaktivedanta frequently avowed that his mission was not to convert Westerners from Christianity (or Judaism or Islam) to Hinduism, but rather to introduce a pervasive devotional framework to their lives. In January 1968, after the establishment of ISKCON in the US, Bhaktivedanta reiterated this position in a letter to a close disciple, Hayagriva: “From the very beginning I  have always preached that basically we have no difference between the Christians, the Mohammedans, the Hindus, or the Buddhists, the four principal religionists in the world” (Bhaktivedanta 1987, p. 282). These similarities he elaborated elsewhere, in lectures and private conversations, as the common possession of scriptures, conceptions of a divine name, and the practice of prayer. Due to those commonalities—​albeit following now outmoded norms of comparative religion—​he asserted that he sought not to compete with or convert Christians—​or others—​to Hindu traditions.This message was consistent throughout his travels in North America, Europe, and Africa, as in this lecture delivered in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1975: If one is learned paṇḍita, he does not see Hindu, Muslim, Christian. I went to America. I did not go there to turn the Christian to become Hindu. No, I never said that. Did I say, any, anyone, that “You are Christian. You become a Hindu”? No, never I said. That is not my business. (Bhaktivedanta 1975a)1 195

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Indeed, as Bhaktivedanta stated to Australian reporters in 1974, different angles of vision were permissible on the one Divine: You cannot say, “Christian religion, Hindu religion, Muslim religion.”…God is neither Hindu, Muslim, Christian. God is God. God is one…but we understand Him from different angles of vision, and that different angles of vision may be called as Christian angle vision, the Hindu angle vision, this Jew’s angle vision. But that is angle of vision. Now, just like the sun is there. (Bhaktivedanta 1974a) Nonetheless, such universalism bore clear signs of Indian Vaiṣṇava theology, as Bhaktivedanta insisted that the ultimate “sun,” the ultimate notion of God, was the realization of Kṛṣṇa. Alongside universalist statements, Bhaktivedanta often established his teachings of Krishna consciousness through juxtaposition to other religious traditions, including Hindu Śaiva and Śakta traditions but also notably Christianity, given its predominance in many countries in which ISKCON established early centers. Grounded in the Gauḍīya assertion of Kṛṣṇa as the supreme Brahman of the Vedantic system, this perspective also partook in late colonial Hindu discourses of sanātana dharma as transcendent to historical religious traditions.2 This dual position of both universalist and ardently Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava arose in similar statements, such as during a lecture delivered several months after the founding of ISKCON in New York: You keep yourself in your position.You remain as American.You remain as Christian. It doesn’t matter. But there is no harm in hearing Bhagavad-​gītā…You’ll get knowledge. You’ll become better Christian. You’ll become better American. You see? It is not the purpose, that we are trying to convert American into Indian, or Indian into American, or Christian into Hindu. That is not our mission. We are just preaching the science of Kṛṣṇa, or science of God, Kṛṣṇa consciousness. So everyone can learn this science. (Bhaktivedanta 1966) This implied assertion of the theological superiority of Vaiṣṇava Hinduism over other religious traditions, including Christianity, represents the next act in the unfolding discussion between ISKCON’s approach to Christianity: a trend of (condescending) comparison, that I will argue took shape fundamentally in relation to colonial-​era knowledge systems, and particularly in relation to Christian mission-​oriented scholarship of Hindu traditions and the colonial-​era field of comparative religion, broadly defined. Placing Bhaktivedanta’s statements about Christianity—​ and their normalization within ISKCON transnationally—​in this context, I  will trace how they reflect broader socio-​political shifts in both Indian and American society, centering on the development of this form of transnational Hinduism.

Condescending comparison The historical circumstances that led a range of Hindu gurus to spread their teachings to Anglophone, Christian-​majority countries did not arise in a vacuum, of course. The popularity of Indian religious teachers in 1960s and 1970s North America paralleled a widespread countercultural shift away from a previously normative Protestant, Caucasian American notion of American society to one that became increasingly inclusive of ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual diversity. In the American countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Indian 196

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spirituality came to occupy a central space as an alternative to the perceived inadequacy of conventional twentieth-​century American social aspirations. Although religious teachers from India were popular throughout the US for decades beforehand, their presence was facilitated by the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, the year that Bhaktivedanta arrived in the country. This lifted the restrictive quotas on migration of non-​Europeans and overturned the Immigration Act of 1924, which included the Asian Exclusion and National Origins Acts that strategically disabled immigration to the US by people of Asian descent. Bhaktivedanta, like many others including Swami Muktananda, Swami Satchidananda, and Yogi Bhajan, were able to travel between India, the US, and the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s and develop ardent communities of followers therein, partially due to this reform of American immigration law. In this context of middle-​class countercultural rebellion and the sudden opening of the US to greater immigration from Asia, Bhaktivedanta brought his own lifetime of experience as an Indian man who had lived in both colonial and independent India. He offered his Western followers a conceptualization of Christianity that was shaped by his experience of it as the religion of the colonial British Empire. Indian nationalist rejoinders to colonial-​era discourses of European cultural and intellectual superiority often inflected categories to argue for the superiority of Indian civilizational heritage. Criticism of Western civilization—​drawn from a Gandhian framework—​served as a recurring theme in Bhaktivedanta’s personal communications, flipping a colonial-​era essentialism of other peoples’ cultures to depict the colonial power itself as degraded and in need of spiritual reform. Echoing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, Bhaktivedanta grudgingly referred to the “so called civilized nations” and, in a tone of partial jest, would describe his missionizing as a rejoinder to Western imperialism in India (Bhaktivedanta 1956b, p. 1). Indeed, he played with the implications of this reversal of missionizing trends in a postcolonial India, noting in one personal letter: “So many Christian missionaries are working in this country.Why not Krishna Conscious missionaries?” (Bhaktivedanta 1971b). Developing persuasive models of a technologically advanced but spiritually bereft West, Hindu teachers from Vivekananda to Yogananda articulated their religious messages to Western audiences as a corrective to perceived cultural ills. For Bhaktivedanta, these Western cultural ills were tied—​among other things—​to what he saw as misinterpretations of Jesus’ teachings and a general decline of enthusiasm among young Westerners for the Christian church. Although many of Bhaktivedanta’s early Western followers and prominent ISKCON leaders today come from a range of religious and ethnic backgrounds, Christianity came to be a significant religious other in ISKCON’s vernacular comparative theology. In this context, Christianity was approached not with rigorous theological engagement but rather as a foil over against which to describe bhakti, the ethical cornerstone of Bhaktivedanta’s presentation of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. In Bhaktivedanta’s writings and public statements, these condescending juxtapositions tended to underscore several repeated messages:  the superiority of bhakti, a model of devotion, to religion as transactional exchange; the veracity of karma and a conjoined insistence on individual responsibility for ethical conduct; the ethical superiority of a vegetarian diet; and the religious superiority of Vaiṣṇava knowledge of the divine. In this mode, Bhaktivedanta sought to communicate the self-​sacrificing devotion of bhakti in the Gauḍīya tradition through the use of condescending comparison: In the Christian world also, they believe God gives bread to everyone, and they go to the church, “O God, give us our daily bread.” But higher philosophy is that we should not or we need not ask God for our bread. That is already there. We should approach God, how to love Him. (Bhaktivedanta 1975b) 197

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Bhaktivedanta also related the importance of vegetarianism to an ethical lifestyle through negative comparison to American Christian dietary norms. While some basic ethical teachings were conveyed as parallel—​Bhaktivedanta made frequent reference to the commandment “thou shall not kill”—​he set the tone, taken up widely in ISKCON, that these were not developed with as much sophistication as in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, wherein the prohibition against taking life also applied to a strict adherence to vegetarianism and avoidance from harming any other non-​human form of life to the greatest possible extent. Moreover, the veracity of karma and the transmigration of the ātman, key tenets of Hindu traditions broadly, and cornerstones of Gauḍīya ethics, were often conveyed to Bhaktivedanta’s Anglophone audiences through the counter example of “certain Christians” who go to church to confess their sins, thinking that confessing their sins before a priest and performing some penance will relieve them from the results of their weekly sins. As soon as Saturday is over and Sunday comes, they again begin their sinful activities, expecting to be forgiven the next Saturday. (Ibid., p. 3) This ethical error, according to Bhaktivedanta, was rooted in the assumption that “generally the Christians…are very much confident that all of our sinful actions…have been absorbed by Lord Jesus Christ so we can do anything” (Bhaktivedanta 1971b). These points were often made in comparison with a broader claim about the precedence of Vaiṣṇava Hindu traditions in general to other religious traditions: In no other system—​religious system you may call, or cultural system—​can give you so many books to read. There is no comparison. The Christians, they can present only one small Bible, and the Muslims they can present one little Koran. But here, the Vedic culture is so great that we can simply give you sixty volumes like this only for Śrīmad-​ Bhāgavatam [the Bhāgavata Purāṇa]. And Bhāgavata is the eighteenth Purāṇa…Beside that, there are one hundred and eight Upaniṣads. Then there is big Mahābhārata, the great history of India. Then Rāmāyaṇa… (Bhaktivedanta 1974b) Ultimately, all that literature bestowed what Bhaktivedanta—​ following the philosophical example of superordination employed by the formative Gauḍīyas in relation to their religious contemporaries—​argued to be an unparalleled vision of the divine: Most of the Western country, they are Christian. So the Christians believe in Lord Jesus Christ as son of God. But we are presenting the father, God Himself. So there is no contradiction. If there is son, there must be a father also. (Bhaktivedanta 1972) Christian theologians or devout practitioners would object to such claims, and it is clear that they do not arise from a rigorous theological engagement with Christian traditions. However, these critical assessments and the implicit connection of the Christian religion with Western nations paralleled audacious missionary designs, such as his attempts—​conveyed through a series of letters and the attempted employment of sympathetic British followers—​to persuade the Archbishop of Canterbury to provide a church for use by the growing British ISKCON community. In letters written in the summer of 1969, Bhaktivedanta spelled out his logic for this 198

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transfer of religious spaces to one close Caucasian American follower, Syamasundara, whom he sought to engage in the task: “We simply want their cooperation in this matter that they allow us to use their many vacant churches in the Western countries for rejuvenation of spiritual life in this part of the world” (Bhaktivedanta 1987, p. 1009). Condescending comparison as a strategy of missionizing is visible across a range of religious groups; indeed, these strategies may have been shaped by Bhaktivedanta’s own colonial-​era education in Christian institutions. Depicting Christianity as a religion with some similarities to Vaiṣṇavism but also as a religion with a less advanced understanding of the divine, periodic slights of Christianity—​often in combination with Islam or Buddhism—​appear throughout Bhaktivedanta’s writings, lectures, and personal conversations while he led ISKCON between 1966 and 1977. We may read these critical assessments of Christianity alongside those of other Hindu teachers from Vivekananda onwards, refracting a world divided by colonizer and colonized into two-​dimensional categories of an implicitly Christian yet materialistic West, and an industrializing but spiritual East. Bhaktivedanta’s critical assessment of Christianity, however, may have had another proximate contemporary source in missionary discourses common among Europeans in the Calcutta in which Bhaktivedanta was raised. In lectures delivered in London and Los Angeles in the mid-​1970s, Bhaktivedanta derived his didactic assessments of Christianity and its relation to Vaiṣṇavism from his intellectual encounters while an undergraduate student at Scottish Church College. In these lectures, he mentioned one Scottish missionary and Professor of Philosophy, Revered William Spence Urquhart (1877–​1964), repeatedly by name, and relayed excerpts of their class discussions as his core examples. (Bhaktivedanta did not mention in these instances that Urquhart was also a noted scholar of Vedanta, albeit within what we would now recognize as an Orientalist framework. For a detailed examination of Urquhart’s scholarship, see Bhushan and Garfield 2017, pp. 190–​92.) Urquhart went on to become principal of Scottish Churches College and Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta. Alongside his publication of monographs on both Vedantic and Western philosophy, Urquhart published reflections on his mission-​oriented scholarship over the course of his career in the theology-​oriented Scottish academic journal The Expository Times. In 1929, around a decade after Bhaktivedanta attended his classes, Urquhart published a reflection entitled “The Gospel for India,” which took as its starting point a type of condescending comparison: It may be said without hesitation that the Hindu conception of salvation [later described as “essentially mukti”] leans to the negative side, and is a preparation for Christianity just in so far as the latter also includes an element of negation, but is not so helpful in respect to the more positive aspects of the promise of the gospel. (Urquhart 1929, p. 466) Proceeding to thread this conception of Hindu metaphysics through the Katha Upaniṣad and the Bhagavad Gītā, Urquhart concludes, The negative character of this procedure is largely due to the emptiness of the metaphysical conception of God on which it is based…Deliverance is a first step. We must leave the city of destruction before we can reach the heavenly city…The place of discipline has been recognized historically in many phases of Christian thought. The defect of Hinduism in this relation is not that it contains a negative element, but that it does not lead us forth to positive affirmative endeavor. It thus remains subjective 199

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and self-​contained, and just because of this subjectivity there is no “lift” towards the higher life. (Ibid., p. 467) Urquhart compares this “negative” idea of “salvation” to the glory of Christianity, underscoring that the self-​discipline and virtues revered in Vedantic Hindu religion “should surely provide a secure foundation for the Christian law of love…[and] is surely a preparation for the acceptance of the Christian conception of inward purity of the heart” (Ibid., p. 468). He asserts that Hinduism contains the basis for a “friendship of God” but not its “actuality.” Rather, the actuality of this friendship with God “will come to India, as to the rest of the world, through the grace and truth that are in Jesus Christ” (Ibid., p. 469). Written while Urquhart was principal of Scottish Churches College and Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, “The Gospel for India” is pitched for a readership of sympathetic European theologians, describing Vedantic philosophy for the ultimate purpose of discussing how it might benefit Christian missions among Hindus in India. This style of condescension toward Hinduism was, of course, commonplace—​although not universal—​in colonial-​era scholarship. The unequal comparison starts from an a priori affirmation of one’s own theology as the basis for assessment of another religious or philosophical tradition. As David Chidester has discussed, the development of the study of comparative religions in the British Empire was interwoven with such mission-​oriented scholarship, as much as the field strove to depart from those agendas throughout the twentieth century. Tracing certain strands of imperial comparative religion far beyond the scope of development within an academic discipline, Chidester posits a certain discourse of comparative religion as a “science of knowledge and power” and “an aid to the containment and control of indigenous populations” in colonial-​era Anglophone scholarship, a discourse that developed alongside the crystallization of Victorian racial and cultural imperialism (Chidester 2014, p. ix). Urquhart, it must be said, did not position himself as a scholar of comparative religions, despite the comparative nature of his scholarship. In an Expository Times article he wrote as an Emeritus Professor in 1950, under the title “Comparative Religion and Evangelism,” Urquhart expressed skepticism about the aims of comparative religion as an enterprise. However, he nonetheless continued his earlier model of illustrating the superiority of Christianity by providing selective examples drawn from a meandering consideration of both Hindu and Christian philosophers—​quoting Krishna (from the Bhagavad Gītā) and Swami Vivekananda, on the one hand, and Rudolf Otto, on the other. Conceding that “in the case of the adherents of another religion taken collectively,” there is a resentment fanned by the feeling that “the most prominent of all the higher religions, namely Christianity, has been associated in the minds of those religiously outside of it, with imperial ambitions and control,” Urquhart nonetheless affirmed the singularity and importance of Christian evangelism, asserting that “Jesus Christ Himself is the only complete expression of the missionary spirit because He could say at one and the same time, ‘I can of mine own self do nothing,’ and ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ ” (Urquhart 1950, p. 18). While Urquhart’s consideration of Vedantic Hindu sources rendered his scholarship in conversation with Indian traditions, he framed his research in relation to an intellectual Christian evangelism. The symmetries between Urquhart’s Christian mission-​oriented reflections on Vedanta and Bhaktivedanta’s Vaiṣṇava mission-​oriented discussion of Christianity reflect a world in which religious perspectives of both Hindu and Christian theologians were shaped through an intertextuality of ideas that belie simple characterizations as “crosscultural,” given the presence of these multiple perspectives in cosmopolitan centers such as Calcutta. J.  Barton Scott argues 200

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that nineteenth-​century Hindu reform movements should be studied alongside other reform movements of their period, “situated synchronically, in relation to empire, and not just diachronically, in relation to precolonial tradition” (Scott 2016, p. 3). Scott calls for an expanded genealogy of ideas—​in his case, for the liberal idea of the self-​governing individual—​that takes into account the contributions of both Indian and European theorists, who did contribute to a shared Anglophone intellectual sphere. Similarly, one might trace Bhaktivedanta’s style of missionizing discourse to Christian missionaries in India as much to the mission-​oriented ethos of previous Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava teachers (on which, see Stewart 2010 and Sardella 2013). However, Bhaktivedanta’s presentation of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism was aimed largely at Western Christian and Jewish audiences. In that context, statements about Christianity drawn from educational encounters during his college years served as a tactic of condescending comparison, to strategically highlight the intellectual and religious superiority of Vaiṣṇava Hindu traditions for receptive audiences disillusioned with their familial traditions. Several of Bhaktivedanta’s condescending representations of Christianity became standard ISKCON talking points. The centrality of Bhaktivedanta’s vāṇī, a term meaning “speech” and relayed through the collected body of his written and spoken words, enshrined these particular attitudes toward Christianity as standard fare for ISKCON preachers and lecturers. Indeed, many ISKCON presentations engage in a performative mimesis of Bhaktivedanta’s speech—​a salient instance of what Srinivas Aravamudan refers to as Guru English, or linguistic registers developed by Anglophone proselytizers of South Asian religions among others (Aravamudan 2005, p.  6). On Easter Day, in April 2008, I  found myself sitting among an ethnically diverse ISKCON congregation in Western Europe, at the foot of the dais of that morning’s temple program. The assembled group of roughly forty women and men included Belgian, Dutch, German, Croatian, and British Europeans, with a minority of Surinamese and Indian descent. The lecturer that morning, a North Indian undergraduate student who was completing a bachelor’s degree in Europe, foregrounded Jesus in accord with the importance of the day in this Christian-​majority country. After a few perfunctory praises of Jesus’ ethical teachings, however, he centered his lecture on the superiority of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism in relation to Christianity, asserting that the former demanded both greater sacrifice (“Christ sacrificed for those who followed him, but Caitanya came to liberate all people”) and demanded more holistic devotion (“not only on Sundays or before confession”). Notwithstanding the fact that many Christians theologians would contest the speaker’s assertions, his judgments resonated with the condescending critiques of Christianity familiar to ISKCON members from Bhaktivedanta’s collected writings. While a critique of Western civilization and the religious heritage of the majority in Western countries reflected a particular trajectory of colonial and postcolonial discourse in Bhaktivedanta’s writings, this discourse has come to occupy a different space for Bhaktivedanta’s Western followers, many of whom were raised in Christian households—​some observant, others less so—​before joining his religious organization. As ISKCON has matured to become an established religious organization with second-​and third-​generation followers, condescending juxtapositions in relation to Christianity no longer reflect a mode of interreligious orientation that all members support. Particularly alongside ISKCON’s own struggles to be accepted within civil society across a number of Western, predominantly Christian countries, new models of interreligious interaction have developed, which brings us to another act in ISKCON–​ Christian relations, one provoked by a new approach to Christianity within ISKCON.This new approach has been promoted by a network of ISKCON devotees involved in the organization’s communications ministry, a prominent institutional component of the group that is often at the forefront of media engagement and relationship building with civic institutions. 201

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Shared devotional interlocution In 2012, the Journal of Vaishnava Studies published a special issue on Vaiṣṇava–​Christian dialogue that brought together scholars and practitioners who had been involved in the annual interfaith dialogues held in the Potomac suburb of Washington, DC. Begun by Shaunaka Rsi Das, the Irish-​born founder and managing director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and former European ISKCON Communications Director, the first dialogue took place in Wales in 1996. The dialogues then moved to Boston, before settling in the Washington area under the organization of Anuttama Dasa, who for several decades held the position of International Director of ISKCON Communications, and Rukmini Dasi, an early American disciple of Bhaktivedanta and prominent ISKCON leader. These dialogues have brought together interlocutors from Vaiṣṇava Hindu and Christian communities across the Mid-​Atlantic US. They developed particularly through the growth of relationships between monks and teachers in local Catholic institutions, scholars of Vaiṣṇava and Christian traditions, and members of Mid-​Atlantic ISKCON communities. Although these networks formed a core of the dialogue over the years, there has also been a notably emphatic lack of sectarian boundaries within the categories of “Christian” and “Vaiṣṇava.” During the two years I attended as participant and observer in the mid-​2000s, a number of fellow participants reveled in the ambiguity of “which side they were on,” revealing a nuance about their religious identities in practice that transcended easy categorizations. The format of the dialogues echoes the academic orientation of many participants, centering on the presentation of prepared papers, distributed in advance, on a common theme (evil, prayer, devotion), followed by organized group discussion. While this format allowed for aspects of the familiar, textually grounded orientation of a Christian sermon or ISKCON-​style philosophical lecture, an approach of shared, intellectually oriented exploration has also shaped these dialogues to be spaces not of missionizing but of shared devotional interlocution. The setting—​ for decades, a retreat center with non-​sectarian prayer spaces—​set a new tone for ISKCON–​ Christian interactions, one which provides our third act and also blurs some of the boundaries established in prior acts. In the Prologue to the Journal of Vaishnava Studies’ special issue on the dialogues, Francis X. Clooney, SJ, reflected on their history. As a Jesuit priest who has centered his academic career on the analysis of Sanskrit and Tamil Śrīvaiṣṇava theological texts and the pursuit of comparative theology, he represents the nuances of both religious identity and theological exploration that can underlie the tenor of the dialogue.This “act” is more properly a process in itself; as Clooney relates in his prologue, the collected essays of dialogue participants show how “many years of dedicated conversations have changed the ways in which these Vaishnavas and Christians view the other religion, its theology, practices, and distinct claims about life’s ultimate meaning and destiny” (Clooney 2012, p. 12). This, according to Princeton University Director of Hindu Life (and dialogue participant) Vineet Chander, has amounted to a “certain integration of intellect and devotion,” wherein “a casual observer might, at first glance, mistake the dialogue for a breakout session at the yearly American Academy of Religion convention” (Chander 2012, p. 223). Although interfaith dialogue may seem trite and superficial to many Americans today (“it’s fine to talk around a table, but what is that doing to stop global conflicts?”), the idea of interreligious dialogue for dialogue’s sake—​as devotional interlocutors of various religious traditions without an overt missionizing purpose—​is a quite recent phenomenon. Kenneth Cracknell—​another long-​term dialogue participant, who glossed his Methodist denomination as a Christian bhakti movement—​described those interactions through the words of Anglican scholar of religion, David Brockman, to suggest that “encounters with religious others may

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become potential truth events witnessing to and deepening our understanding of God,” leaving one “no longer the same” (Cracknell 2012, pp. 83–​85). In this interfaith dialogue format, a mixed group of Caucasian and Indian American ISKCON devotees have notably sought out spaces for interaction that are not premised on missionizing or condescending comparison, but rather an assertion of common cause that echoes Bhaktivedanta’s earlier writings. However, as largely Western members of a transnational Hindu organization, their engagement with Christian interlocutors differs markedly from Bhaktivedanta’s social context. These shifts in ethnic and national identity were nowhere clearer than in the most recent set of Vaiṣṇava–​Christian dialogues, which American ISKCON members have worked to expand to India since 2015. Convened by the ISKCON Communications Ministry in partnership with the ISKCON temple at Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh—​an historic center for the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition—​the inaugural January 2015 event was promoted as the first formal Vaiṣṇava–​Christian dialogue held in India and has continued with two further dialogues in subsequent years. Participants at these events have included Indian Śrīvaiṣṇava leaders, ISKCON sannyasis, and Western ISKCON members from the US and UK, alongside Indian Catholic clergy members and Indian Protestant scholars from local Christian seminaries. Inaugural papers included presentations by Anuttama Das, a Caucasian American ISKCON leader (mentioned above); Ravi Gupta, an Indian American professor and director of the Religious Studies Program at Utah State University; and George Philip, an Indian faculty member at Bethel Bible College in Andhra Pradesh with a specialization in New Testament Studies. This expansion of the Vaiṣṇava–​Christian dialogue format is now recast in new territory, as a largely Western (albeit multiethnic) group of ISKCON devotees travel to India to engage in interfaith dialogue with Indian Christians. This shifting of identities in relation to who represents “ISKCON” and “Christian” in these relations was heightened by further connections between dialogue participants. An ISKCON News article on the event described the serendipitous meeting between one convent schoolteacher and student from twenty years prior. Parijata Dasi, an Indian ISKCON member from Mumbai and Communications Director for ISKCON in West India, expressed her surprise: “When I saw the name Sister Theresa listed on the program, I was curious…When she walked into the room I was amazed to see the very same Sister Theresa who had been my teacher twenty years ago in Convent [Catholic] School in Mumbai.” ISKCON News reported that during the dialogue Parijata talked about her convent school experience: “I’m grateful for the education I received,” she said.“The teachers, who were Christian, respected our Hindu culture. During the religion class, the Christian kids were taught about their religion, while the Hindu kids were separately taught about values, morals, and such things. Those instructions reinforced what I learned at home and helped to ground me in my life-​long Vaishnava convictions.” (Smullen 2015) This exchange between a prominent ISKCON member born in post-​Independence India and her convent schoolteacher, an Indian Catholic nun from Mumbai, contrasts in significant ways with the relationship at the center of our earlier act, that between Bhaktivedanta and Urquhart. Not only do the ethnic and gender identities of both student and teacher in this relationship differ from those in Bhaktivedanta’s colonial-​era Calcutta Christian missionary education, but the social and political landscape around them has changed markedly, reflecting a new context for ISKCON–​Christian relations. Here, at least in the neat curation of ISKCON’s print media,

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the relationship between a Hindu student and a Christian teacher is described as one of mutual respect for one another’s religious identities.

Conclusion The three “acts” I  have detailed display several possible trajectories for ISKCON–​Christian relations. As ISKCON enters its sixth decade and shifts its global center of balance toward Indian membership, both in India and in many of its North American and European temple communities, the global discourse of India’s place “on the world stage” is also undergoing important changes. Anxieties about postcolonial forms of Western economic and political imperialism remain prominent in many Indians’ understandings of their nation’s development, and India is the site of an increasingly established Hindu nationalist political order, solidified by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s resounding victories in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. During Narendra Modi’s first term in office as prime minister, instances of aggression toward Christians in India increased both in the public sphere and through online networks. Arrests of Indian Christmas carolers have occurred alongside the strengthening of laws across Indian states that seek to circumscribe conversion to Christianity and Islam, depicting these acts as coerced and threatening to Hindu religious sentiments (US Department of State 2018; Schultz and Raj 2017). In this context, condescending assessments about lived Christianity take on new valences. The bold choice of twentieth-​century Hindu teachers to speak truth to power sought to issue a corrective against a network of Christian missionaries and colonial officials who often framed Hindu traditions as inferior. Now, many Indian Christians find themselves in a position of relative precariousness in an Indian state increasingly defined by Hindu identity. Meanwhile, after several decades of their own precarious acceptance among Hindu communities in India, ISKCON is now increasingly at the helm of elite urban Indian Hindu networks, building grand temple complexes throughout the country, many of which are patronized by local governmental authorities and prominent business leaders. As these power relations continue to shift, what will be the next act in the unfolding transnational story of ISKCON–​Christian relations?

Notes 1 The collected letters, lectures, and conversations of Bhaktivedanta do exist in complete printed volumes, but they are not widely available. The volumes consulted here are from my personal digital copy of the complete works, available through the Bhaktivedanta Archives as  The  Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. In the digital format, entries are organized by genre and date but do not have consistent pagination, so I have not provided page numbers here. More information about the Bhaktivedanta Archives collections can be found here: https://​www.prabhupada.com/​Collections/​ Collections.html (accessed May 3, 2020). 2 Bhaktivedanta would popularize the notion among his ISKCON followers that the organization was not properly understood as Hindu, an argument that similar Indian transnational organizations have put forward as well. While acknowledging the problematic nature of this nomenclature, I will refer to ISKCON as a transnational Hindu movement for the sake of clarity in defining religious origins as commonly understood.

Bibliography Aravamudan, S. 2005. Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bhaktivedanta, A.C. 1944. “Back to Godhead.” Back to Godhead 1(1): 1–​4. —​—​—​. 1956a. “Religion Pretentious and Religion Real.” Back to Godhead 3(7): 1–​3.

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ISKCON–Christian encounters —​—​—​. 1956b. “Where Is Godhead? Is It Possible to See Him?” Back to Godhead 3(8): 1–​2. —​—​—​. 1966. “Lecture on Bhagavad-​Gita 9.15.” New York, December 1. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1971a. “Letter to Gurudasa.” Bombay, April 27. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1971b. “Room Conversation.” Delhi, December 12, 1971. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1972. “Hare Krishna Festival Address at Balboa Park Bowl.” San Diego, July 1. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1974a. “Reporters’ Interview.” Melbourne, June 29. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1974b.“Lecture on Śrīmad Bhagavatam 1.16.19.” Hawaii, January 15. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1975a. “Lecture on Bhagavad-​Gita 7.1.” Nairobi, October 27. In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1975b. “Press Conference.” Chicago, July 9.  In Anon. 2003. The Complete Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Sandy Ridge, NC: Bhaktivedanta Archives. —​—​—​. 1975c. Nectar of Instruction. Los Angeles: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. —​—​—​. 1987. Letters from Śrīlā Prabhupāda,Vol. 1, 1947–​1969 & Vol. 2, 1969–​1970. Culver City, CA: The Vaisnava Institute. Bhushan, N. and Garfield, J.L. 2017. Minds without Fear: Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press. Chander,V. 2012 “The Quiet Revolution in Potomac.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 20(2): 221–​24. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of Religion:  Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Clooney, F.X., 2012. “Prologue: Reflections on Vaishnava-​Christian Dialogue.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 20(2): 7–​14. Cracknell, K. 2012. “Christian Theology and Interfaith Dialogue.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 20(2): 69–​90. Sardella, F. 2013. Modern Hindu Personalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Schultz, K. and Raj, S. 2017. “‘We Are Afraid of Christmas’: Tensions Dampen Holiday in India.” New York Times. December 24, p. A14. Scott, J.B. 2016. Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-​Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smullen, M. 2015. “ISKCON Hosts First Vaishnava-​Christian Dialogue in India.” ISKCON News, January 15. Available at https://​iskconnews.org/​iskcon-​hosts-​first-​vaishnava-​christian-​dialogue-​in-​india,4761/​ . Accessed June 22, 2019. Stewart, T.K. 2010. The Final Word:  The Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Urquhart, W.S. 1929. “The Gospel for India.” The Expository Times 40(10): 466–​69. —​—​—​. 1950. “Comparative Religion and Evangelism.” The Expository Times 62(1): 16–​19. US Department of State. 2018. Report on International Religious Freedom: India.Washington, DC: Department of State.

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17 HINDU–​C HRISTIAN RELATIONS IN AFRICA, THE CARIBBEAN, AND THE PACIFIC Pratap Kumar Penumala

Historical background Though this chapter makes occasional reference to other Indian diasporic contexts, it will focus primarily on the three countries: Trinidad, Fiji, and South Africa. Before continuing on to an investigation of Hindu–​Christian relations in these contexts, a clarification of the terms used in the chapter’s title is perhaps in order. First, by “Hindu” and “Christian” I refer primarily to diasporic Indian Hindus and Indian Christians. Second, by the phrase, “colonial Indian diaspora,” I am referring to both indentured workers and other migrants to the European colonies during British colonial rule of India. By implication, I exclude from the scope of this chapter post-​ independence Indian emigrants to the West (as well as to other destinations). However, I do also refer to non-​Indian Christians in some contexts, such as in Fiji and Trinidad. I do so because in both contexts Hindu–​Christian relations are affected by ethnic/​racial differences and prejudices. In the context of South Africa, however, I limit myself to Indian Christians and Indian Hindus, because in the relations between Indians/​Hindus and other race groups there, religion has not been a significant factor. Those seeking more historical context on indentured migration than can be offered in this short chapter are advised to consult some of the more detailed and significant works in the field (e.g., Gonzales 1986; Lai 2004; Desai and Vahed 2010; Lal 2012 [2000]). Here, I shall merely highlight several key aspects of the history of laborers indentured to the British, French, and Dutch colonies. Also, instead of offering a detailed history of indentured labor for each of the colonies, I shall touch only on key aspects of their histories in order to create an overall picture of the situation of indentured immigrants of the colonial period from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, or to be precise from 1834 to 1917, when indenture was officially ended throughout the colonies (although the practice continued here and there for a little longer). The colonial Indian diaspora dates back to the early nineteenth century, when Indians were transported to the various British colonies under the infamous system of what among the workers was known as girmit (indenture).The stories of indentured lives in the different colonies to which they were transported are similar in that the indentured suffered in common under 206

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the most difficult circumstances of life on the plantations.The first colony to import indentured laborers from India was Mauritius, in 1834, the very same year slavery was abolished in the colonies. As I  have shown elsewhere (Kumar Penumala 2016, pp.  18–​37), while the system of indentured labor existed and was utilized by Europeans employing other Europeans long before this period, the dramatic increase in indentured servanthood during this period, and its application to Asian peoples by their colonial masters, was related in significant ways to the decline of slavery. Although slavery was formally abolished in 1834, different colonies actually ended it at different times. In Suriname (Dutch Guyana), for example, slavery ended only in 1863 (Choenni 2008, p. 108). In any case, the end of slavery placed enormous pressure on the colonies to import cheap labor. By the early nineteenth century the sugar industry had already taken off, especially in the Caribbean, and Jamaica had already been involved in sugar plantation for over a hundred years by this time (Ehrlich 1971, p. 168). Together with the desperate need on the plantations, which acted as a pull factor, there were a variety of push factors in India, such as periods of famine, a decline in the handicrafts industry, and the collapse of the traditional peasant system in rural India due to British taxation policy. These contributed to Indian desperation and a willingness to consider participating in the indenture system in the colonies (Jain 1989, pp. 11–​12). Between 1834 and 1910, about 450,000 indentured immigrants arrived in the French colony of Mauritius (Hollup 1994, p. 299). The arrival of indentured laborers in the Caribbean countries followed thereafter: Guyana in 1838,Trinidad in 1845, and Suriname in 1873 (Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991, p. 149). South Africa received indentured Indians between the years of 1860 and 1911, with an interregnum between 1866 and 1874 during which it did not receive any new laborers (Brain 1983, p. xviii). According to the Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, there are currently about 1.1 million people of Indian origin in the Caribbean and in Latin American countries (High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora 2001, p. xxi). In South Africa, the Indian community numbers more than a million, and in Mauritius its population is around 700,000 (Ibid., p.  xvi). We must also note that while the indentured labor force constituted the majority of Indian immigrants in the colonies, there were other immigrants listed as “passenger” immigrants (immigrants traveling for their own purposes, other than indentured labor), who also arrived in the colonies. South Africa, for instance, began to see the arrival of the passenger Indians from 1874 onwards. The most famous of these is no doubt Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–​1948), who came to South Africa in 1893 (Kumar 2013, pp. 10–​11).

Pluralism and internal diversity in the indentured communities In the context of this chapter, one of the factors that needs to be underlined is the emergence of pluralism within the colonies as a result of the arrival of indentured laborers, and also internal diversity within the indentured Indian community. In fact, the process of migration itself contributed to the diversification of religious and cultural practices among the laborers.To begin with, indentured workers entered a predominantly Christian environment dominated by Europeans.This invariably had an impact on the nature of Hinduism as it evolved in the various colonies. Scholars have noted how Hindus found ways to preserve and adapt Hindu culture in these predominantly Western environments—​though not exclusively Western, of course, since in the colonies there were also significant and influential African, Chinese, Portuguese, Javanese, Amerindian, and other subcultures (Naidu 2007, p. 3). In some colonies (e.g., Mauritius), Indians became the dominant group, and in other places they either remained a minority or competed with the other groups for social and political 207

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space.The formation of two major population groups,“Creoles” and “Hindostanis” in Suriname, and the consequent socio-​political ramifications, have been analyzed by Choenni (2014). With the emergence of indentured Indian immigrants identified as Hindostanis as the single largest ethnic group, “Suriname changed from being an African-​Caribbean society into a multi-​ethnic society” (Ibid., p. 408). But in places like Jamaica, Indians did not manage to become a reasonably dominant group because of the entrenchment of African peoples in the villages (Ehrlich 1971, p. 177). In Fiji, between 1879 and 1911, not only did indentured Indians join an already diversified society of native Fijians, Europeans, Chinese, Pacific islanders, and people of mixed ethnic parentage, but they were also internally divided into three major groups—​North Indian, South Indian, and Muslim (Grieco 1998, pp. 716–​17). However, from the socio-​political perspective, the common discursive division of Fijian society into “Indigenous Fijians” (or Fijians) and “Indo-​Fijians” is most significant, as each community has tended, historically, to denigrate the other in their respective attempts to dominate the national political discourse (Srebrink 2002, p. 189). There is also evidence of internal diversification where Indians managed to become established in concentrated areas in the various colonies. In such societies, caste has survived as a matter of identity, pride, and status, while shedding its traditional institutionalized, systemic structures.This has generally been the case with almost all the colonies where indentured Indian laborers settled. While many of the traditional practices that upheld caste have fallen away, Hollup notes that caste endogamy, which some communities practiced as a way of maintaining social prestige, helped perpetuate caste consciousness in the colonies of Fiji, Guyana, and Mauritius (Hollup 1994, p. 306). Nevertheless, in some colonies, such as Mauritius, where sub-​ ethnic differences within the Hindu community (as Hindi/​Bhojpuri, Tamil, and Telugu) have emerged, internal diversity is further accentuated (Ibid., p. 300). In the case of Trinidad, however, different dynamics are at play. There, numerically less dominant Indo-​Trinidadians have sought to assimilate themselves to and support more dominant Afro-​ Trinidadian culture in order to enlist the latter’s social and political support.They do this, inter alia, by actively sponsoring and promoting Afro-​Trinidadians’ Orisha religion, in hopes of advancing their own growing Indo-​Trinidadian middle-​class interests. Such strategies have redefined multiculturalism by placing emphasis on difference rather than on numbers and homogeneity. It must be noted that Afro-​Trinidadians, especially those who practice the Orisha religion, have over the years themselves incorporated Christian (Catholic), Hindu, and Kabbalah elements into their religious practice, although as Houk points out, there has been in the last few years an attempt to eschew Christian elements and Africanize the Orisha religion (Houk 1996, p.  446). Furthermore, the case of Trinidad is different in the sense that multiculturalism is premised not on the basis of a white (and by implication Christian) majority, as is the case in the United States and elsewhere, but rather on the basis of cultural difference where no single majority exists. As Castor has suggested, “difference [rather than homogeneity] is valorized and recognized as the basis for equality” (Castor 2013, p. 480). In the case of South Africa, the Indian community that arrived between 1860 and 1911 developed into four major groups—​Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Gujarati—​and became generally divided into North and South Indian communities. Additionally, class distinctions emerged between the indentured and passenger Indians (and their descendants). The Indian community in South Africa is further diversified by religion into Hindu, Muslim, and Christian groups. In South Africa, Christianity received greater support from colonial administrators, who allowed missionaries to work among the indentured laborers, although such missionary work did not result in any significant numbers of converts among the Indian community between 1860 and 1911 (Brain 1983, p. 229). Nevertheless, although in the period between 1860 and 1911 208

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Christians constituted only 1.4% of the total Indian population in South Africa (Ibid., p. 247), by the 2001 census their numbers had risen to 24.4%, with Hindus constituting 47.3% of the population, and Muslims accounting for 24.6% (Kumar 2013, p. 15). This substantial increase in the Christian population is primarily the result of Pentecostal evangelization since the 1980s (Pillay 1987). While the religious pluralism to which South Africans of Indian origin contributed was suppressed during the old social system, it has, since 1994, been embraced in the new society (Du Plessis 2016). Nevertheless, scholarship on South African Indians, and lay publications written largely for the community (e.g., Kuppusami 1993), have tended to minimize the presence of Christianity and Islam within it. For example, Arooran’s Indians in South Africa (1985) includes only two brief paragraphs on Islam and Christianity in its section on religion, while devoting significantly more space to Hinduism. This tendency is not peculiar to South Africa.Vertovec’s Hindu Trinidad (1992) circumscribes the Indian community in Trinidad, as implied by the title, as Hindu Trinidad. Such circumscriptions tended to perpetuate the perception of the predominance of Hinduism in discussions of religion in indentured Indian society. Similarly, most diasporic Indian organizations that have been established to promote one particular language grouping (e.g., Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, or Gujarati) tend to take for granted that their membership is Hindu and actively promote Hinduism rather than making their linguistic organizations inclusive of the different religions represented in their respective linguistic communities. The effect of such an approach within these linguistic communities is not only to marginalize members who adhere to other religions, but also to inhibit their participation in the activities that are promoted as broadly “Indian.” As a result, each religious group tends to organize its own activities along religious lines.This invariably contributes to the concretization of the lines between religious groups within the context of the South African Indian community (Kumar 2013, p. 106).

Relations between Hindus and Christians in the colonial Indian diaspora While it had not always predominated in the colonies, by the time of the arrival of indentured laborers, the various colonial administrations generally managed religious pluralism in their colonies with a policy of tolerance and accommodation, though one that also generally privileged Christianity in relation to other religions. With the exception of only a few colonies, Hindus constituted around two-​thirds of the Indian indentured laborers who settled in the colonies. This put Indian adherents of other religions, especially Christianity, in the minority category. On the one hand, this meant they naturally received less bureaucratic and political attention. On the other, Christians among indentured Indians still tended to receive greater help and support through the building of Christian schools, clinics, and orphanages. Brain has documented this dynamic in South Africa (Brain 1983, p. 229). Similarly, Quraishi suggests that Indian Christian converts received greater access to education and non-​agricultural employment in Trinidad during the colonial period (Quraishi 2015, p. 409). However, Quraishi also notes that up until the decolonization of India, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims in Trinidad interacted relatively harmoniously on the grounds of what they perceived to be their common ethnic identity, despite their internal religious differences (Ibid., p. 410).

Trinidad The social status of Christianity among the indentured Indian communities did undergo transformation with the changing political and social circumstances in the colonies. Notwithstanding 209

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the fact that Orisha worship and Kali worship in Trinidad and Tobago lend themselves to meaningful comparative study in understanding trance experience in religion (McNeal 2015), in the context of Trinidad, competition for control of the social and political space in the postcolonial period was not so much between white minority groups and non-​whites, but rather between Afro-​Trinidadians and Indo-​Trinidadians, and their respective cultural practices. Some scholars have described the relations between Hindus and Christians in Trinidad as a “clash of cultures” (Ryan 1999). As Castor notes, competition between French Catholics and British Protestants in Trinidad opened up spaces for “non-​Christian practices in the colony.” He continues, “The process of politicization and criminalization of African-​based religions has roots that stretch from British colonialism into the present” (Castor 2013, p. 480; here Castor refers in particular to the criminalization of Orisha religious practices during the colonial period). The negative impact of the Presbyterians’ racially exclusive mission (to Indians) on race relations in Trinidad has been explored by O’Callaghan. She also notes that Presbyterians’ extensive evangelizing of Indians in Trinidad also provoked a response from Hindu organizations that attempted to stem the tide of conversion by actively establishing Hindu schools and temples (O’Callaghan 1998, pp. 4–​5). Interestingly, those associated with Hindu schools seem recently to have begun insulating themselves from people in other race groups. For instance, in 2011, a Hindu school was accused of having denied admission to children of African origin (Wilkinson 2011, p. 16). Castor notes, The tying together of social position and political power to culture, religion, race, and class continues to shape relations of power and formations of identity in Trinidad while informing the dynamics of national politics. These cultural politics of identity and nationalism have their historical genesis in the Spanish and British colonial regimes and their attendant Christian religions. (Castor 2013, p. 480) Rommen’s work, for example, highlights how the Full Gospel Church in Trinidad deploys “gospelypso” music to negotiate cultural and political tensions (Rommen 2007). There are also attempts within Afro-​Trinidadian society to legitimize the Orisha and Spiritual Baptist faiths within the social and political discourse of Caribbean countries (Henry 2003). Mary Cagney has documented the deteriorating relations between Trinidad’s Hindus and Christians in recent years (Cagney 1999, p.  22). She points out that with increased political control by Indo-​Trinidadians, Hindus have become more confident and more inclined to proselytize among other religious communities. The Hindu emphasis on home and family has been used to recruit African people to Hinduism. Cagney also reports on incidents of Hindu violence against African Christians that culminated in the burning of one particular church in Trinidad three separate times. She concludes, however, that the conflict between Hindus and Christians is generally more about race than religion (note that it is African churches, not Indian churches, that have been the target of this violence).

South Africa In the context of South Africa, Christian missionary relations with Hindus began, in some ways, with Gandhi. Gandhi’s Christian friends, A.W. Baker and Dr. Lancelot Parker Booth, both attempted to convert him to Christianity (Goedhals 2014, pp. 6, 9). In an important sense, we must note that the religious competition between Christians and Hindus in South Africa is largely confined to the Indian community. The negative impact on Hindu–​Christian relations of Christian conversion, particularly through the Pentecostal churches, has been studied by 210

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a number of scholars (e.g., Oosthuizen and Hofmeyr 1970; Oosthuizen 1975; Reddy 1992; Pillay 1994: Pillay 1997; Nair and Naidoo 2010). These studies point to a gradually increasing level of mutual suspicion and competition between Hindus and Christians. To give just one example, when I was conducting fieldwork in the mid-​1990s, a Pentecostal church in the Indian township of Phoenix countered a local religious procession organized and sponsored by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) with one of its own. While open conflict between Indian Christians and Hindus does not exist, therefore, competition such as this, and mutual accusations in the media, are quite commonplace. Studies of conversion among South Africa’s Indians have shown that caste remains an important factor. Ojong notes, for example, that although caste as a systemic institution does not exist in South Africa, some residual elements (e.g., in marriage practices) can be identified in the context of conversion (Ojong 2012, p. 431). However, she recognizes that in addition to caste, there are also other forces at work, such as illness, poverty, and other social problems (Ibid., p. 442). Indian Christians are perceived to be of lower status by non-​Christian Indians in South Africa (as they are in India itself). Nevertheless, in the larger context of South Africa, Indian Christians are segregated (along with non-​Christian Indians) from whites and other race groups. Hence the role that race plays is critical to understanding the Indian Christian consciousness in South Africa (Kgatle 2017). For example, Ragwan identifies colonialism, apartheid, and ethnicity as key factors in the marginalization of Christians associated with the Indian Baptist Church in South Africa (Ragwan 2011). Indian Christians also feel a cultural affinity with other non-​Christian Indians in South Africa (Pillay 1994, p.  61). Although the Indian community in South Africa as a whole has had racial conflict with white and Black South Africans, there has been a relative absence of any conspicuous conflict between Hindus and Christians (Indian or otherwise). As seen in the literature cited above, this relative absence could be related to Indians’ general sense of being collectively excluded from white society regardless of religious identity, on the one hand, and their shared cultural elements, on the other. Nevertheless, there remains some mutual distrust between Hindus and Christians in South Africa regarding the issue of conversion, and occasionally there have been confrontations between the two groups related to this. For instance, in 1979, Hindu religious organizations objected to the building of an orphanage by an Indian Christian association. Hindu organizations perceived the building of the orphanage as a strategy to introduce Christianity to poor Hindus. Exacerbating the conflict, one of the association’s leaders accused Hindus of practicing idol worship. The Arya Samaj (an organization related to a reformist organization of the same name in India) forcefully rejected that accusation, while the ISKCON movement countered by accusing Christians of killing animals (Anonymous 1979).

Fiji In Fiji, the scenario seems somewhat different, since the European colonizers there were more forcefully critical of indigenous religious practices and intent on conversion of the natives to Christianity, which resulted in substantial loss of Fijian language, culture, and ritual life (Carey 1998, p. 127). In Fiji’s colonial discourse, Christianity was understood as the agent of civilization (Srebrink 2002, p. 188). Currently, Christians constitute around 65% of the Fijian population, while Hindus constitute around 28%. During the twentieth century, the mutual gulf between the native Fijians and the Indo-​Fijians widened, as the former saw the latter as guests whereas the latter perceived the former as uncivilized (Ibid., p.  189). Srebrink argues that although Christianity was a foreign religion to Fiji, the native populations adapted it “to their own 211

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cultural, social and political needs, to the point where it has become ‘indigenized’, as part and parcel of their societies” (Ibid., p. 191). In particular, Methodism became integrated with Fijian nationalism. It is from the perspective of this Christian nationalist consciousness that native Fijians viewed Indians as “pagans” and “heathens,” and hence outsiders, as opposed to the native Fijians who considered themselves the “chosen people” (Ibid., p. 192).When the democratically elected government of the Labour Party, which was largely backed by the Indian community, was ousted in a coup in 2000, most of the Methodist Church hierarchy supported the coup, some of them even calling for Fiji to declare itself a Christian state (Ibid., p. 193). In a sense, the conflict between Christianized native Fijians and Indian Fijians has less to do with the latter’s Hinduness and more to do with their Indianness (e.g., the fact that they speak Hindi, eat curry, etc.; Ibid., p. 192), which can be inferred from that fact that the conflict pits Fijian Christians against all Indians, whether Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim (though Indian Christians are in some ways caught in between). In 1989, for example, members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship group fire-​bombed not just two Hindu temples, but also a Sikh gurudwara and a Muslim mosque. The lawyer representing them claimed that “they were inspired by their faith to destroy the ‘idols’ being worshipped by the non-​Christians” (Ibid., p. 194). Seemingly, the native Fijians were either unaware of internal religious diversity within the Indian community, or they did not care that references to “idols” make little sense in the context of Islam or Sikhism. The role of charismatic Christian churches in this conflict is also significant. Philip Jenkins, for example, notes that they have formed a close alliance with the police to convert non-​Christians, provoking social disturbance (Jenkins 2011, p. 45). In the context of Fiji, religious conflict and the relations between native Fijian Christians and Indians (who are largely Hindu) is not merely about religion, then, but also, and perhaps more significantly, about racial prejudice and political control and domination.

Concluding comments Despite the signs and practices of caste showing some resilience in several of the former colonies covered above, it functions, at this point, more as a status symbol, and does not seem to play as large a role in Hindu–​Christian relations as it does in India (on which, see chapters by Fernandes and Thomas in this volume). There is some evidence, particularly from South Africa, that a sense of inferiority related to belonging to a low-​caste Hindu community may have encouraged some conversion to Christianity among diasporic Indians, but it would be an exaggeration to say that in the colonies there have been largescale conversion movements among lower-​caste Hindus adopting Christianity in an attempt to escape caste prejudice, as there have been in India. With regard to internal pluralism within Indian societies of the former colonies, ethnic identities running along the lines of language have been a significant variable. For instance, in places like South Africa, linguistic and religious identities are often conflated. When I inquire about religious affiliation, people often respond with ethno-​linguistic terms like “Hindi” or “Tamil,” thereby hinting that they are Hindus, respectively, of Hindi or Tamil background. In doing so, however, they have elided their linguistic and religious (Hindu) identity. Within Indian Christian communities, such elisions are absent. Since most Christians do not choose to identify themselves linguistically, the fact that most linguistically organized Indian organizations function in a way that presumes all members of their organizations are also Hindu has the effect of marginalizing Christians and souring their relations with Hindus. This has been a particularly significant feature of Hindu–​Christian relations in the case of South Africa and Mauritius. Nevertheless it remains the case that in the colonies, Indians’ ethnic identity has often trumped 212

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that of their internally diverse religious identities, such that Indians have remained relatively united—​despite religious differences—​in their conflicts and competition with other colonial populations.This has certainly been true, for the most part, in Trinidad, South Africa, Mauritius, and Fiji. This brings us to the central assertion of this chapter. In places such as South Africa, there have been no significant and enduring tensions between Hindus and Christians, except to the extent that the former question the latter’s motives and strategies of proselytization. In places like Trinidad and Fiji, however, Hindus are largely identified first and most saliently as Indians, and their relations with Christians, then, are tinctured by the dynamic of ethnicity/​race. In these colonies, indigenous populations have adopted Christianity, and have constructed it as an indigenous religion, such that indigenous Christian populations often pit themselves and their religion against “foreign” Indian populations and their “pagan” religions. At the same time, in both Trinidad and Fiji, ethnic/​racial differences have come to be mapped onto the politics of nation-​building, with nationalisms developing that construct Christianity as an essential element of national identity. In these contexts, then, the trajectory of Hindu–​ Christian relations is determined more by politics than by religious difference, per se. In places like South Africa, while whiteness was constructed, until the end of apartheid, as an essential element of national identity, and while Christianity was certainly used by the supporters of apartheid to bolster and justify its oppressions, the fact that Hindu–​Christian interactions and relations were largely confined to the Indian community insulated them from the influence of racial prejudice. It was almost as if the Indian Hindu community was too small to be recognized as a threat by white South African Christians. Because of this, while there were Hindu–​Christian tensions within the Indian community, they did not take on the nature of those in Trinidad and Fiji, that is, of an “indigenous Christian” community pitted against a putatively foreign Hindu one. Another important observation that could be made in regard to the three countries that have been the focus of the chapter is that while in South Africa both Hindu and Christian Indians consider themselves Indian first, and tend to ally with one another vis-​à-​vis other ethnic groups (despite Indian Christian reticence to participate, at times, in pan-​Indian activities), in places such as Trinidad and Fiji, Christian Indians seem to be more inclined to identify themselves first with the broader, trans-​ethnic Christian community. This perhaps explains why in Trinidad and Fiji, Hindu–​Christian relations are more governed by race relations than they are in South Africa. Nevertheless, in all of these situations, Indian Christians are, as it were, betwixt and between, never completely allied with the trans-​ethnic Christian community nor perfectly aligned with other non-​Christian Indians (Goh 2018, p. 12). Whereas in India the 1950s and ’60s witnessed a flowering of Indian Christian theologies utilizing Indian/​Hindu categories and ideas, and whereas Hindu Indians in the diaspora have held onto and perpetuated elements of traditional Indian culture, Christian Indians in the predominantly Christianized former colonies have not in the same way attempted to construct a distinctively (diasporic) Indian Christianity. The geographical and historical distance from India is surely one factor, but so too is the significant impact of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christianity in the lands these diasporic Christians call home. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians tend to deny the importance of “indigenization,” viewing and therefore discouraging attempts to indigenize the faith as a dilution of the gospel, as illicit “syncretism.” As Goh rightly points out, “For Indian Christians (unlike Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs) in Christian-​legacy countries, the social impact of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is insidious in that they threaten ethnic and cultural identities” (Ibid.). In the cases of South Africa,Trinidad, and Fiji, then, it is clear that Hindu–​Christian relations are complicated by the cultural distance between Hindus and Christians within the Indian 213

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community, on the one hand, and, on the other, by racial antagonism between African/​indigenous Christians and Hindu Indians. In some contexts, the former is the more salient and influential factor; in other cases, it is the latter. Taking these countries as representative cases, we may conclude that Hindu–​Christian relations in the former colonies of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific do not only take place within their diasporic Indian communities but transcend them. When they do, however, the factors of caste and language, so important within Indian diasporic communities, tend to be eclipsed by the broader dynamics of race and ethnicity. This is particularly true in places like Fiji, where we find Christianity adopted by indigenous peoples, constructed as an indigenous faith, and fused with the nationalistic projects of indigenous peoples. In such contexts, any discussion of interreligious relations inherently requires a simultaneous discussion of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Bibliography Anon. 1979. “Evangelist Causes New Orphanage Storm.” Post. January 24–​January 29, p. 7. Arooran, K.N. 1985. Indians in South Africa: With Special Reference to Tamils. Thanjavur: Tamil University. Brain, J.B. 1983. Christian Indians in Natal 1860–​1911:  An Historical and Statistical Study. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Cagney, M. 1999. “Hindu Christian Tensions Rising.” Christianity Today. March 1, p. 22. Carey, M.H. 1998. “Introduction:  Colonialist Representations of Indigenous Religions.” The Journal of Religious History 22(2): 125–​31. Castor, N.F. 2013. “Shifting Multicultural Citizenship:  Trinidad Orisha Opens the Road.” Cultural Anthropology 28(3): 475–​89. Choenni, C.E.S. 2008. “From Bharat to Sri Ram Desh: The Emigration of Indian Indentured Labourers to Suriname.” In Rai, R. and Reeves, P. (eds.). The South Asian Diaspora:  Transnational Networks and Changing Identities. London: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2014. “Ethnicity and Politics: Political Adaptation of Hindostanis in Suriname.” Sociological Bulletin 63(3): 407–​31. Desai, A. and Vahed, G. 2010. Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–​1914. Pretoria: HSRC Press. Du Plessis, G.A. 2016. “Apartheid, Religious Pluralism, and the Evolution of the Right to Religious Freedom in South Africa.” Journal of Religious History 40(2): 237–​60. Ehrlich, A.S. 1971. “History, Ecology, and Demography in the British Caribbean:  An Analysis of East Indian Ethnicity.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27(2): 166–​80. Goedhals, M. 2014. “Gandhi and His Christian Friends: Legacy of the South African Years 1893–​1914.” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 40(1): 1–​20. Goh, R.B.H. 2018. Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora: Abjected Identities, Evangelical Relations, and Pentecostal Visions. New York: State University of New York Press. Gonzales, J.L., Jr. 1986. “Asian Indian Immigration Patterns:  The Origins of the Sikh Community in California.” International Migration Review 20(1): 40–​54. Grieco, E.M. 1998. “The Effects of Migration on the Establishment of Networks: Caste Disintegration and Reformation among the Indians of Fiji.” International Migration Review 32(3): 704–​36. Henry, F. 2003. Reclaiming African Religions in Trinidad:  The Socio-​Political Legitimation of the Orisha and Spiritual Baptist Faiths. Barbados: The University of the West Indies Press. High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora. 2001. Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs. Hollup, O. 1994. “The Disintegration of Caste and Changing Concepts of Indian Ethnic Identity in Mauritius” Ethnology 33(4): 297–​316. Houk, J. 1996. “Anthropological Theory and the Breakdown of Eclectic Folk Religions.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(4): 442–​47. Jain, P. 1989. Racial Discrimination against Overseas Indians (A Class Analysis). New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Jenkins, P. 2011. “Trouble in Paradise.” Christian Century. May 17, p. 45.

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Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Kgatle, M.S. 2017. “A Socio-​Historical Analysis of the Sections in the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa from 1908 to the Present.” Verbum et Ecclesia 38(1): 1–​10. Kumar, P.P. 2013. Hinduism and the Diaspora: A South African Narrative. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. —​—​—​. 2016. “Victim Discourse and the Narrative of Indian Indenture Servitude.” In Kumar, P.P. (ed.). Contemporary Issues in the Indian Diaspora of South Africa. New Delhi:  Serial Publications PVT, Ltd., pp.  18–​37. Kuppusami, C. 1993. Tamil Culture in South Africa: Endeavours in Nurture [sic] and Promote It among the Tamils. Durban: Rapid Graphic Printers. Lai,W.L. 2004. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–​ 1918. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press. Lal, B.V. 2012, 2000. Chalo Jahaji:  On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji. Canberra:  Australian National University Press. McNeal, K.E. 2015. Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad and Tobago. Miami: University Press of Florida. Naidu, J. 2007. “Retention and Transculturation of Hinduism in the Caribbean.” Guyana Journal, March, pp.  1–​10. Nair, G.K. and Naidoo, G. (eds.). 2010. Celebrate Indian Christians in South Africa, 1860–​2010. Durban: Dalbridge Publishers. O’Callaghan, M. 1998. “Hinduism in the Indian Diaspora in Trinidad.” Hindu-​Christian Studies Bulletin 11(1): 2–​10. Ojong, V.B. 2012. “Indianness and Christianity: Negotiating Identity/​Cultural Values in the Context of Religious Conversion among South African Indians Living in Chatsworth, South Africa.” The Oriental Anthropologist 12(2): 431–​44. Oosthuizen, G.C. 1975. Pentecostal Penetration into the Indian Community in Metropolitan Durban, South Africa. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council Pretoria. Oosthuizen, G.C. and Hofmeyr, J.H. 1970. A Socio-​Religious Survey of Chatsworth. Durban:  Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Durban-​Westville. Pillay, G.J. 1987. “Pentecostalism within a South African Community: The Question of Social Change.” Mission Studies 4(1):39–​51. —​—​—​. 1994. Religion at the Limits? Pentecostalism among Indian South Africans. Pretoria: University of South Africa. —​—​—​. 1997. “Community Service and Conversion:  Christianity among Indian South Africans.” In Elphick, R. and Davenport, R. (eds.). Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Cultural & Social History. Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 286–​96. Quraishi, U. 2015. “Diffracted Diasporas:  Trinidad’s East Indians, Religio-​ Nationalism, and India’s Independence.” Journal of Social History 49(2): 406–​26. Ragwan, R. 2011. “The Narrative of the Baptist Association of South Africa and its Significance for the Indian Baptist Church in KwaZulu-​Natal.” Unpublished paper. Available at https://​repository.up.ac.za/​ bitstream/​handle/​2263/​18919/​Ragwan_​Narrative%282011%29.pdf. Accessed September 22, 2018. Reddy, D.C. 1992. “The Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa with Special Reference to Its Rise and Development in the ‘Indian’ Community” MTh Thesis, University of Durban-​Westville. Rommen, T. 2007. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ryan, S. 1999. The Jhandi and the Cross: The Clash of Cultures in Post-​Creole Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Multimedia Production Centre, The University of the West Indies. Srebrink, H. 2002 “Ethnicity, Religion and the Issue of Aboriginality in a Small Island State: Why Does Fiji Flounder?” The Round Table 364(1): 187–​210. Veer, P.v.d. and Vertovec, S. 1991. “Brahmanism Abroad: On Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion.” Ethnology 30(2): 149–​66. Vertovec, S. 1992. Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-​Economic Change. London: Macmillan. Wilkinson, B. 2011. “Race Comes to the Fore Again in Trinidad.” The New York Amsterdam News. October 27–​November 2, p. 16.

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PART IV

Sites of bodily and material interactions

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18 POPULAR RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AND SHARED RELIGIOUS SPACES James Ponniah

Temples, mosques, and churches dot India’s geographical space, in both urban and rural regions, and in both rich and poor neighborhoods, reflecting a diffused sense of the sacred that is deeply embedded in the minds and hearts of most Indians. While this diffused sense of the sacred makes Indians venerate various aspects of nature (such as mountains, rivers and trees) with awe and wonder, it also encourages and enables them to spontaneously view the sacred sites of their religious others with veneration. This attitude also reflects long-​held inclusive Indian views of others’ cultural and religious traditions, embodied in commonly uttered phrases that can be translated as “The earth is one family,” “All religions are equal,” “All religions are one,” “All religions are true,” and “All religions are the same” (Sharma 1979, p. 59).This essay seeks to explore how this inclusive view results in the production of shared religious spaces, and delves into the meaning, varieties, and dynamics of shared religious spaces.

What is a shared religious space? Shared religious space refers to the intersection of multiple faiths in a single sacred space. While Western scholars tend to conceive of religious and cultural traditions as discrete and monolithic, scholars of Indian religions contend that diversity and plurality have always been intrinsic to the Indian ethos and its religious traditions. While the generally peaceful co-​existence of India’s varied religious traditions through time can be attributed at least in part to widespread appreciation for unity in diversity, also significant is the broad fund of beliefs, customs, practices, and ritual/​symbolic codes that are common to the religions we call “Indic” (a term generally used to describe religions more or less autochthonous to India, such as what we call Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, in all their variety). These common beliefs and practices have naturally produced overlapping religious practices and given rise to the emergence of shared religious spaces. But religious practices and spaces are shared not only by these so-​called “Indic” religions, but also between them and other religions, such as Islam and Christianity, that Hindu nationalist critics periodically frame as “foreign,” because of their origins outside the subcontinent. This essay focuses on the gamut of Hindu–​Christian interactions in shared religious spaces, as they are embodied through popular religious traditions. Shared religious spaces in the multi-​cultural, multi-​ethnic, and multi-​religious nation of India can be either public, as in the case of shrines, or domestic, as in the case of devotees’ 219

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homes. They can be the organic product of popular belief systems, as in many of the instances mentioned below, or emerge from institutional initiatives. Among the latter are the Indian Christian ashrams that create interfaith environments through the combination of Hindu and Christian symbols and practices, and that from time to time produce interactions between Christians and Hindus as well. Since these ashrams are covered elsewhere in the volume, however (see Amaladoss’s chapter, for example), this chapter highlights the shared space of public and domestic shrines.

Shrines as shared religious spaces Numerous public shrines and holy sites attract people of different faith traditions on a daily basis. As the title of the chapter suggests, I seek here to explore the legacy of shared religious spaces in India as manifest in popular religious traditions. In this section, I provide a description of their multifaceted dimensions, while also engaging with various key themes and perspectives in the study of shared space, e.g., ritual dialogue, dialogue on the ground, shared vows, popular indigenization, collapse of religious boundaries, liminal space, etc. These themes emerge from the study of such sites by scholars like Selva J. Raj (2002, 2004, 2006, 2017),Vasudha Narayanan (2004) and Corinne Dempsey (2017). These scholars have unpacked the potential of popular religious beliefs and practices to transform shrines into shared religious spaces, while scholars like David Mosse (2012), Kalpana Ram (1991) and Rowena Robinson (2009) have shown how popular Christianity in India has drawn, in particular, upon non-​Sanskritic folk Hinduism. While the geographical focus of the works named above is South India, Mathew N. Schmalz (2011, 2016), Kerry San Chirico (2014), and Jerome Sylvester (2013) have drawn our attention to popular Hindu–​Christian spaces in the northern context of Khrist Bhaktas/​Panthis, which not only allow Catholics and Hindus to coexist and interact in a “bounded Catholic space” (Schmalz 2011), but also make it possible for Hindu devotees (mostly Dalit Chamars), to maintain a dual Hindu/​Christian identity. The subsections below discuss some of the important dimensions and themes related to these shared religious sites in India.

Shared spaces as shared indigenous cultural universe Despite their primary identities as “Hindu” or “Christian,” adherents of both traditions share a common religio-​cultural heritage. Shared religious sites make visible this heritage. In turn, this heritage makes it possible for Christians and Hindus to visit each other’s sacred sites and worship the deities of their religious others (Ponniah 2014). This shared heritage also generally survives the act of conversion from one religion to another. This common heritage makes possible the common popular religious assertion, as Kalpana Ram (1991), David Mosse (2012), and Rowena Robinson (2009) note, that local Hindu folk deities like Essaki and Christian divine figures like the Mother Mary and/​or Christian saints are kinsmen and kinswomen who perform similar religious functions. The polytheistic Hindu religious imagination, in which certain gods and goddesses are believed to possess greater powers than others to control malevolent deities, makes it possible for Hindus to incorporate Christian divinities into the Hindu pantheon and to accept the Christian position that Christian spiritual figures possess superior power to subdue evil spirits and malevolent deities. The power that these Christian figures are believed even by many Hindus to possess therefore depends upon a complex web of hierarchical relationships between Mary Mata (Mother), Christian saints, and Hindu gods and goddesses (Robinson 2009, p. 36).

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Further, as Mosse (2012, p. 12) argues, quoting Keane (2007, p. 22), the Catholic theology of immanence as displayed in Catholic sacraments through belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist lends itself to the identification of the sign with the signified and the symbol with the symbolized, such that they enjoy a relation of indexicality “in which the sign and the object of signification possess a real connection—​juxtapositional or causal.” Conversely, the common Indian religious view that substances can be shared and transacted not only among humans but also between humans and supernatural beings has made it easy for Indian Catholics “to make sense of the Eucharist in these terms relating to God through the ingestion of God’s substance,” and by the same logic to accept “the veneration of a saint as incorporation of the holy personage’s qualities through substances transferred in worship” (Mosse 2012, p. 13). This emphasis on the transference and acquisition of divine substance is materialized in Christian shrines through tactile practices involving objects such as water, earth, salt, leaves, and oil. While, because of this, Catholic sites frequently come to be constructed and perceived as loci of divine power with their objects of transference of divine substance made available to people of other faiths, especially Hindus, this very same dynamic also drives Christians to visit Hindu places of worship in search of similarly corporeal experiences (Raj 2006, p. 61). According to Robinson (2009), such interactions and appropriations may not take place across India in the same way because Hindu–​Christian relations and interactions differ from place to place, depending on the social, political, and evangelistic contexts in which people have embraced Christianity. For instance, she argues that the boundaries drawn between “Christian” and “Hindu” are much more rigid among Goan and Santhal Christians than, for example, among Tamil Christians in Ramnad district of Tamil Nadu.

Shared spaces and human objects The human body is a prime site for the interplay of cross-​cultural symbol systems. Because humans have bodies, they have something in common with others across cultures and religions (Bowie 2006 [2002], pp. 34–​39). As the human body is “the locus and principal instrument of religious experience” (Freeman 2011, p.  133), it is involved extensively in popular forms of Hinduism and Christianity. In their sacred sites, through embodied rituals such as begging, crawling, or rolling on the ground, devotees subject themselves to “a series of bodily deprivations and humiliations” (Raj and Dempsey 2016, p. 201), thereby employing their material body to attain mundane and spiritual rewards.The deployment of the material body in Christian shrines and sacred spaces in enactment of devotional rituals such as circumambulation, ritual tonsuring, ceremonial auctions (see below), or prostration reflects “the pervasive Hindu, indeed South Asian, religious assumption that one’s physical body can serve, with proper training, motivation, and preparation, as a medium and platform for expressing the devotees’ religious devotion, resolve, and fervor” (Ibid., p. 200). For example, ceremonial auctions involve a scripted ritual drama in which childless parents, who vowed they would, if blessed with a child, return their newborn to the shrine where they took the vow,“buy back” the child, through an open auction, which concludes only when the child’s father makes the last and highest bid (see Raj 2006, pp. 55–​56).

Shared spaces and common rituals/​ritual objects In sacred spaces like St. Anthony’s shrine at Puliampatti, Tamil Nadu, one seeks to gain access to divine power and spiritual energies not only in and through the medium of one’s physical

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body, but also by accessorizing that body with material objects. Among the material objects used at the shrine are those like “salt and neem leaves, [which are] two popular ritual items in the cult of Mariamman, the Hindu goddess of disease and healing” (Raj and Dempsey 2016, p. 201), or holy water, holy oil, sandal paste, garlands, medals, which “serve simultaneously as sacred terrain and devotional vehicle” (Ibid., pp. 200–​201). Similar devotional objects are found in a popular Charismatic center in Varanasi, where Hindus participants perform Hindu-​like puja before a portrait of Jesus (Schmalz 2016). The material objects employed at popular Christian sites therefore frequently resemble those utilized in popular devotional forms of Hinduism. Given the striking similarity in the votive material objects (and also in the ritual vows) found among Hindu and Catholic devotees, one can easily detect the family resemblance that exists in the material culture of Indian Christians (particularly Catholic Christians) and Hindus. According to Raj and Dempsey, material objects “drawn from a ritual repertoire that is both Catholic and Hindu, produce a ritual blending across religious boundaries,” and point to “complex negotiations and complicated identities,” that, for Christians, “predicate periodic excursions into the religious culture and ritual terrain of their religious others, especially, their Hindu neighbors” (Raj and Dempsey 2016, p. 201). Because of the existence of a shared interreligious ritual system, the common folk find it easy and comfortable to perform the same set of rituals both in their own shrines and in the shrines of their religious others. Shared ritual performances include the asanam (discussed below), chicken or goat sacrifices, cradle ceremonies, coconut sapling rites, circumambulations, ritual tonsures, ceremonial auctions, and bodily prostrations. The historical assimilation of local cultural rituals and ritual objects by Indian Christians was one of the spontaneous ways in which ordinary people contributed to the rooting of Christianity in Indian cultural soil and translated their putatively “Western” religion into an Indian cultural idiom. In so doing, Christians made their shrines welcoming to Hindus who came to feel at home performing, spontaneously, rituals of sameness (see below) in Christian shrines, while Christians, similarly, came to feel comfortable doing the same in Hindu shrines. The Khrist Bhaktas (“devotees of Christ”) of Varanasi are a particularly intriguing group in this regard. The Khrist Bhaktas are betwixt and between Hindu and Christian identity. While they generally do not identify as “Christian,” they partake in satsang (“truth gathering,” i.e., a religious gathering) services in the Catholic Matridham Ashram on the second Saturday of every month. These ceremonies inculcate devotion both to Christ and to the Virgin Mary. At the same time, the Khrist Bhaktas celebrate both Christian festivals (such as Christmas) and Hindu festivals, such as Deepawali and Gurupoornima. Gurupoornima is a celebration of the birthday of the head teacher, or acarya, of one’s religious lineage, and in this case involves a celebration of the birthday of the head priest of the Catholic ashram, following the patterns it would in a typical Hindu ashram (Sylvester 2013, pp. 76–​79). All this clearly and concretely suggests that Hindus and Christians in India “not only share a common physical and cultural geography, but also draw from common religious assumptions, worldviews, conceptual frameworks, ritual sources, and material culture” (Raj and Dempsey 2016, p. 201).

Shared spaces as sites of ritual dialogue In shared religious sites, interactions and dialogues take place between Hindus and Christians “at [the] grassroots level in the arena of popular piety and rituals” (Raj 2004, p. 41), but “often in opposition to and defiance of institutional norms and ecclesial prescriptions” (Ibid.). Raj describes dialogue on the ground as a phenomenon that “organically emerges from the lived experience, existential concerns, and human/​spiritual needs of Catholic laity and their Hindu 222

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neighbors with whom they live in daily dialogical relationship” (Ibid., p. 42). In their attempt to tap various sources of power to overcome challenging situations in life, Hindus and Christians in India “draw from each other’s ritual and religious resources and their common, shared cultural and linguistic data bank,” and in the process enact “rituals of sameness” (Ibid.). Rituals of sameness are imitative rituals through which religious practitioners imitate the religious or ritual behaviors of religious others, giving visibility to sameness rather than to differences that exist between people of different faith backgrounds. For instance, Christians perform rituals of sameness when they offer hair, sacrifice animals, or roll on the ground, which are practices “either simply adapted from popular Hinduism or patterned after Hindu rites” (Ibid., p. 41). Similarly, Hindus perform rituals of sameness when they participate in Catholic rituals like reciting of the rosary or partaking in the Eucharist.While doing so, devotees discover a religious other who is in many respects not entirely other, thereby not only transcending “the rigid and apparently impermeable ritual boundaries of their respective traditions” (Ibid.), but also disclosing “an openness to incorporate the religious assumptions that undergird these rituals” (Ibid.). Because this openness enables people to accept and understand others as they are in their mundane situatedness and religious embeddedness, it contributes to the transformation of people’s attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with regard to the religious other. Thus, rituals wield power over the construction of self (both individual and collective) and in the articulation, redefinition, and legitimation of cultural realities (Bell 1992). Reflecting on the efficacious role of rituals in sacred shrines, Raj observes, “in this sense, ritual also functions as a medium for encountering the ‘other’ and a model for dialogue on a profoundly experiential and existential level” (Raj 2004, p.  42). This dialogue on the ground, produced by people at shared sacred sites, differs from institutionalized initiatives of interreligious dialogue. While the latter draw upon the resources of upper-​caste, Sanskritic Hinduism (thereby excluding lower-​caste communities, who had traditionally been denied Sanskritic learning), the former borrows from popular and more vernacular forms of Hinduism. “Therefore while the former tries to artificially integrate the aspects of high-​caste Hinduism into Christian practices” and ends up becoming “least acceptable both to the inside practitioners and to the religious other, the latter emerges from within what is common to both of them (the Hindus and Christians) and thus does not surface as an alien factor” (Ponniah 2014, p. 221). Secondly, while institutional forms of interreligious dialogue are often text-​centric, these forms of dialogue on the ground are “grounded in practice—​in lay praxis and in lay ritual” (Raj 2004, p. 42). As such, as Raj observes, “these two dialogical models also reflect the power struggles and tensions between the centre and the periphery, between the religious elite and the masses” (Ibid.).

Shared space as loci of shared deities The sharing involved in common ritual systems also gets extended beyond the realm of rituals to shrines and deities, as well. For instance, Raj notes that it is not only Hindus who frequent Catholic shrines (such as the Shrine of St. John de Britto) to perform rituals and fulfill vows. Christian devotees of St. John de Britto also visit the shrines of famous Hindu deities, like that of Karupasami, which lies in a neighboring village (Raj 2006, p. 61). The shared veneration of Hindu and Christian deities does, however, observe certain rules. As David Mosse observes, Catholics may adopt “Hindu” ritual and aesthetic forms (but not images) along with shared attitudes to sacred power; but elements from clearly distinct provenance are not 223

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mixed…Hindus readily incorporate Catholic divinity into their practices, but Hindus worshipping at Catholic shrines (or visiting them for exorcism) do not try to give Christian saints Hindu identities or bring their own ritualists to mediate. Instead, at Catholic shrines Hindus find complementary qualities of divinity. (Mosse 2012, p. 14) Mosse identifies this form of mutual adoption and acceptance between Christians and Hindus as religious synthesis rather than syncretism. Christian deities with an interreligious clientele have acquired their privileged status of shared veneration through complex processes involving the interaction of popular religiosity, the teaching of Christian missionaries, and local dynamics of power and statecraft (Mosse 2012, p. 40). Being recognized within the region’s sacred geography, these shrines became centers of power and attracted royal patronage (Bayly 1989, p.  9), on the one hand, and received support (sometimes grudgingly) from Christian missionaries, on the other hand.The Christian missionary willingness to innovate and accept new ritual practices as authentically Christian “enabled popular shrines to be incorporated into the regional political system,” by producing “equivalence between Catholic and Hindu divinity in signifying and validating political orders” wherein “sovereignty became constitutive of the character of Christian divinities” (Mosse 2012, p. 40). These complex processes can be seen particularly in the case of St. James, who was “portrayed as divine warrior and protector,” a portrayal that “was compatible with prevailing notions of power among gods and men” (Ibid.). Secondly, missionaries accepted these ritual innovations in order to construct the Christian saint cult as an alternative to existing non-​Christian worship, so that saints, instead of “pagan” gods and goddesses, would become the recipients of sacrifices. But this in turn necessitated the introduction of new religious symbols and the multiplication of saints, which resulted in “the replication of recognizably Hindu forms of worship” (Ibid., p. 64). Over time, Christian saints came to be understood by local peoples in ways more and more similar to how they understood their local Hindu gods, often to the dismay of Christian missionaries. In the process, Catholic iconographic representations, symbols, and rituals acquired such a local flavor that they easily attracted Hindus into Christian places of worship. In such cases, Catholic pilgrims import[ed] a series of Hindu rites and ritual idioms into their pilgrimage practices and direct[ed] them to the European martyr-​saint, investing in him certain indigenous religious ideas, powers, and meanings largely derived from village Hinduism so that the European saint [came to resemble], in personality, power, and function, the tutelary deities of [his or her] Hindu counterparts. (Raj 2002, p. 102) Further, as Catholic saints came to be accepted as clan deities (kula teiyuvam), Christian spiritual figures came to be interpreted through the lens of caste as well. As a result, the cults of saints like St. Britto in Oriyur, Saint Anne at Arulanandapuram, or St. Anthony in Uvari are more an expression of caste identity than of religious affiliation. Thus, regardless of their individual religious loyalties, all members of these caste groups, Catholics and Hindu alike, regard [them] as their favorite clan or family deity (kula teiyuvam), to whom special honour and affection are accorded during the festival season. (Ibid., p. 87) 224

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Whatever their provenance and whatever the extent of their renown, the shared religious shrines in India offer avenues for people of different religious persuasions to come together and experience the power of the deities of their religious others.

Shared spaces and the collapse of religious and social boundaries While, as noted above, certain norms are observed even when Hindus and Christians worship each other’s saints and deities, religious spaces such as the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health at Velankanni, the Infant Jesus Shrine in Bangalore, St. Anthony’s shrine at Uvari, or St. John de Britto’s shrine at Oriyur can also become sites where religious borders blur or vanish altogether. A closer look at the research conducted by Raj (2004, 2006) at Uvari and Oriyur, and by Vasudha Narayanan (2004) in Velankanni, reveals that Hindu and Christian (and also Muslim) devotees converge in these sites at three levels. First, they come together in the same shrine spatially, under the same roof in a sacred site of the religious other. Second, they converge religiously, as one body of devotees enacting their shared faith in the deity irrespective of differences in religious identity. Third, they come together culturally, by employing a broadly shared set of rituals both at their own and at others’ religious sites. In such acts and occasions of convergence, Raj detects a “transgression of boundaries.” T   hat phrase, and the notion it expresses, epitomizes Raj’s ethnographic contribution to the study of vernacular Catholicism (Dempsey 2017, p. 195). Among the consequences of such boundary crossing are the following. First, a temporary suspension of institutionalized religious identity. In popular religious sites, devotees are concerned more about fulfilling the very localized ritual customs and rituals than in meeting the broader requirements of a particular religious tradition as a whole. T   his is evident “in the temporary relegation of official rituals such as the Mass to secondary status” (Raj 2002, p. 102). In this regard, one of the clergy observes, “We [clergy] preach about faith, the cross, and the kingdom of God but for them [rural Catholics] religion is pilgrimage, festivals, and rituals. Official Catholic rituals like the Mass and sacraments have only secondary importance” (quoted in Raj 2002, p.103). A second consequence of religious boundary crossing is ritual imitation. In shared religious spaces, it is not uncommon that the Catholic and Hindu pilgrims imitate each other. As a result, Hindus behave like Christians and Christians behave like Hindus. For example, it is not uncommon for Hindus to recite the Hail Mary before the meal and for Catholic devotees to perform common rituals, like animal sacrifice, or shaving their hair at religious shrines (Raj 2004, p. 40). Third, religious boundary crossing results in the emergence of new hybrid identities. By imitating religious others, Hindus and Christians evolve, enact, and publicly showcase their newfound, shared hybrid identity as the devotees of St. Anthony or St. John de Britto, for example, at least temporarily suspending, transcending, and adding to their ordinary identity as Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. Fourth, religious boundary crossing has the effect of widening the gap between clergy and the laity. While devotees commonly regard ritual border crossings as “necessary and efficacious instruments to provide relief from specific human and/​or spiritual crisis” (Raj 2002, p. 103), the clergy tend to view them with disdain and dismay. While the clergy still may accept these crossings out of resignation or for strategic reasons, they often do so with reluctance or indifference. As a result, the laity come to consider the clergy unsupportive and unpastoral, or even irrelevant. As one pilgrim quoted by Raj put it, “We do not care whether they approve or disapprove of our practices” (Ibid.). Shared sacred spaces can also facilitate the transcending of caste and class distinctions. For example, Raj (2004) draws our attention to the asanam tradition that is prevalent in southern 225

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Tamil Nadu. The asanam tradition involves a series of rituals that are conducted either before a vow is made, in hopes of compounding its effect, or in gratitude after receiving that for which one had made the vow (e.g., fertility, a new job, healing, etc.). It begins with thirteen days of fasting, abstinence, and penance at home, after which one performs a variety of rituals in a shrine. These rituals include a purificatory bath, the shaving of head hair, the ritual sacrifice of a goat or chicken, and the ritual feeding of thirteen beggars at the shrine.  “[The] Asanam tradition requires that the vow-​taker himself/​herself serves the food on banana leaves to a group of thirteen honored ‘ritual guests’ ” (Ibid., p. 38), usually beggars. T   he climax of the asanam rituals is the act of reverse begging. Having served the meal to the “ritual guests” on banana leaves, the principal vow-​taker goes on his/​her knees in front of each of the thirteen invited beggar guests and begs for a handful of food from each.“With the food [having been] collected through reverse begging, s/​he sits beside the thirteen beggars, and eats the ritual meal. Only after the ‘ritual guests’ have been fed to their satisfaction, can family members partake of the ritual meal” (Ibid.). This act of ritual feeding and hospitality involves a remarkable role-​reversal between the guest and the host, one which leads to “transgression and mixing up of social relations and religious distinctions” (Ibid., p. 39). In this way, Raj observes, two [typically] disparate categories of people, i.e. the socially and economically superior host and the inferior guest, are temporarily brought together in the mutually dependent relationship of the donor and donee in which both are simultaneously givers as well as receivers. (Ibid.) It is this reversal of roles that disrupts and reformulates the hierarchical relationship between the host who gives and the guest who receives.When it takes place between a high-​caste donor and a low-​caste recipient (as is often the case), it undermines the hierarchical logic of the Indian caste system, which fixes people’s identity and social status on the basis of birth. By making a high-​caste donor a beggar and a lower-​caste beggar a donor, and/​or by transforming the hosting Christian into one who begs from a Hindu (or vice versa), the asanam ritual complex provides “devotees a religious context and ritual platform to temporarily transcend the neatly defined social, caste, and religious identities and strictures that normally define human relationships in south India” (Ibid.).

Shared space as a liminal space Shared space is fundamentally a “liminal” space, to borrow Victor Turner’s (1969) term. In the context of a shared shrine, what happens is the temporary suspension of regular religious identities and hierarchies, both those of religious people and those of religious places. Turner also referred to such moments of suspended identities and hierarchies as communitas. For instance, when the devotees in Velankanni perform Hindu-​like rituals like shaving the head or offering coconut saplings, the religious boundaries of what is Christian and what is Hindu are blurred. As a result, the places and the people therein are neither this nor that. A  Christian, having rolled herself or himself on the ground in fulfillment of a vow, or a Hindu joining Christians in praying the rosary or participating in the Eucharist is neither strictly Christian nor Hindu. Similarly, the “Christian” shrine receiving a devotee’s offering of a basket of coconuts and flowers, and returning it back to the devotee as prasad (food that has been blessed by its contact with the divine), as is common at Hindu shrines, is not, in that context, strictly “Christian.” 226

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For similar reasons, the Matridham Ashram of the Khrist Bhaktas in Varanasi is neither fully Christian nor Hindu, if one conceives of those terms as mutually exclusive. What attracts Hindus to this Charismatic space is the possibility of belonging to Christ without belonging to the Church, a possibility that is translated into reality both by the Catholic clergy and by the Khrist Bhaktas, who appropriate various dimensions of materiality from both Christian and Hindu traditions, and from both more typically Western and Indian ritual forms (San Chirico 2014, p. 32). In this milieu, as Schmalz observes, the Khrist Bhakta “becomes not simply one who follows the path of Christ but one who travels the path between Christian and Hindu spaces” (Schmalz 2011, p. 100). Unlike in Victor Turner’s work, where liminality was only a temporary ritual phase, Raj’s study of Tamil vernacular Catholicism describes the liminality of Catholic shrine pilgrims as “an enduring state of mind and being, a way of life” (Raj 2002, p.104). These pilgrims, he observes, “exist in a state of permanent liminality, a certain transcendence and freedom from official structures and normative boundaries as well as a certain bonding and communitas with Hindu neighbors” (Ibid.). This permanent liminal identity makes it possible for pilgrims, who might otherwise identify as Hindu, to defy, in a guilt-​free manner, the doctrinal and ritual boundaries of normative Catholicism, to indulge in what appears as chaotic ritual behaviors, and to experiment with other redemptive possibilities and solutions to their human and/​or spiritual crises unavailable within official Catholicism. (Ibid.) Liminality can additionally become an attribute of the deity, according to Raj. Citing the example of St. John de Britto’s shrine, he argues that, though the saint’s statue is clad in European attire, people attribute to him powers and qualities that make him a local Hindu folk deity, He is a Catholic saint who “acts” like a Hindu tutelary deity. Located at the juncture between European and Tamil, Catholic and Hindu, high caste and low caste, he is a preeminent liminal figure reflected in his personality and powers. As such, he functions as a sacred metaphor reflecting the religious and cultural liminality of his Catholic pilgrims. (Ibid.) The liminality of shared shrine spaces also extends to the clergy. Informed by reason-​based theological education and directed by the Vatican’s regulations, the local clergy disdain popular hybridized ritual practices. Compelled by the laity’s predicaments, however, they relent and attend to the pastoral needs of lay people. Thus, in such shared spaces, “all the principal actors” become and behave like “liminal entities, each reflecting and reinforcing the other’s liminality” (Ibid., p. 105).

Domestic spaces as shared religious spaces In addition to publicly shared religious spaces, there exist domestic spaces wherein multi-​faith experiences are produced and celebrated. T   he process of identity-​blurring and ritual interactions between Christians and Hindus that begin in the liminal place of the shrine forge new but often lasting relationships that yield many social dividends beyond the ritual moment and context (Raj 2004, p. 41). Ritual hospitality extended to the religious other is, similarly, likely to yield 227

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positive social benefits both to the hosts and the guests as it helps expand their social network. In many cases, new friendships are forged between the host and pilgrim families, while in other cases, old bonds are renewed and strengthened since host families tend to welcome regular pilgrims. Pilgrims reciprocate by inviting their hosts to their homes. (Ibid.) Furthermore, the impact of such shared ritual-​based religious experiences can also extend beyond shrines and find new forms of identification with the deity. Upon returning home, common folk are likely to install pictures of the deities they have visited in their homes and integrate these gods into their pantheon of kula teiyuvam. While making the religious other’s deity a member of one’s own ritual household and divine fraternity, one may come to believe that the religious other is not a hostile stranger but rather a co-​pilgrim with whom one shares many things in common. Thus, as Raj rightly observes, “The ritual exchange at the shrine also exerts a profound effect on Hindu and Catholic devotees’ perceptions and assumptions about themselves, their personal religious identities, and their relationship with ‘religious others’ ” (Ibid.). Multi-​faith Hindu–​Christian religious rituals also take place in domestic spaces on such occasions as the commencement of house construction, wherein Hindu masons building Christian homes commonly would perform Hindu puja to ward off evil spirits. These Hindu rituals may coincide with Christian rituals of blessing conducted by the owner (Raj 2017, pp. 11–​12). Similarly, my own research on interfaith marriages among urban Indian women (Ponniah 2020) reveals how a marriage between a Christian and a Hindu invariably results in shared religious spaces and traditions. The interfaith couples, more often than not, without much inner conflict, are able to accept and practice, though very selectively, each other’s natal household religious traditions. They very thoughtfully draw upon, blend, and integrate beliefs and practices from more than one religious tradition. This integration often results in the construction of an interreligious domestic altar featuring deities from both Hindu and Christian traditions. These households, in most cases, become dynamic spaces with ritual practices drawn from more than one religious tradition.

Conclusion This essay has disclosed the nature of shared religious spaces in India as not only dynamic and fluid, but also inclusive, democratic, and complex. They are inclusive in the sense that they remain accessible to people of different faiths, castes, and classes. Their frontiers are open to all, as everyone can gain access to the divine energies and sacred powers available there through engagement with local customs and religious rituals. Shared religious spaces are also democratic in the sense that they do not generally discriminate against people on the basis of gender, caste, or class. They do not privilege one set of people over others. They are also democratic because they are less controlled by religious elites (i.e., the clergy). And finally, shared religious spaces are complex, in that they are sites wherein the identities of devotees, deities, religious leaders, and even the shrines themselves remain indeterminate, nuanced, and negotiated. These places give visibility to the Indian mind, which tends to view various dimensions of life, including religious difference, not through the binary logic of contradictions, but rather through the lens of synthesis and complementarity. While the former resents differences and produces conflicts, the latter accommodates and celebrates differences and creates harmony. It is the latter that is the need of the hour in our conflict-​r idden world today, and it is found abundantly in India’s shared religious spaces. 228

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Bibliography Bayly, S. 1989. Saints, Goddesses and Kings:  Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–​1900. Cambridge South Asian Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, C. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bowie, F. 2006, 2002. The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Dempsey, C.G. 2017. “Comparative Transgressions: Vernacular Catholicism in Tamilnadu and Kerala.” In Locklin, R.B. (ed.). Vernacular Catholicism,Vernacular Saints: Selva J. Raj on “Being Catholic the Tamil Way”. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 195–​208. Freeman, R. 2011. “Untouchable Bodies of Knowledge in the Spirit: Possession of Malabar.” In Michaels, A. and Wulf, C. (eds.). Images of the Body in India. New Delhi: Routledge, pp. 125–​55. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns:  Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley:  University of California Press. Mosse, D. 2012. The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India. The Anthropology of Christianity 14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Narayanan, V. 2004. “Sacred Land, Common Ground, Contested Territory:  The Healing Mother of Velankanni Basilica and the Infant Jesus Shrine in Bangalore.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 17(1): 20–​32. Ponniah, J. 2014. “Popular Religious Practices:  Alternative Grounds for Inter-​religious Dialogue.” In Dausner, R. and Eck, J. (eds.). Theologien in ihrer kulturellen Pragung. Regensburg:  Verlag Friedrich Pustet, pp. 216–​26. —​—​—​. 2020. “Women Make It Work:  The Story of Inter-​religious Marriages in Urban India.” In Ponniah, J. (ed.). Culture, Religion and Home-​making in and beyond South Asia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, pp. 133–160. Raj. S.J. 2002. “Transcending Boundaries, Transcending Turner: The Pilgrimage Tradition at the Shrine of St. John de Britto.” In Raj, S.J. and Dempsey, C.G. (eds.). Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines. Albany: State University of New York, pp. 85–​114. —​—​—​. 2004. “Dialogue ‘On the Ground’: The Complicated Identities and the Complex Negotiations of Catholics and Hindus in South India.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 17(1): 33–​44. —​—​—​. 2006. “Shared Vows, Shared Space, and Shared Deities: Vow Rituals among Tamil Catholics in South India.” In Raj, S.J. and Harman, W.P. (eds.). Dealing with Deities. Albany:  State University of New York, pp. 43–​64. —​—​—​. 2017. “Being Catholic the Tamil Way.” In Locklin, R.B. (ed.). Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints:  Selva J.  Raj on “Being Catholic the Tamil Way”. Albany:  State University of New  York Press, pp.  1–​16. Raj, S.J. and Dempsey, C.G. 2016. “Letting Holy Water and Coconuts Speak for Themselves:  Tamil Catholicism and the Work of Selva Raj.” In Pintchman, T. and Dempsey, C.G. (eds.). Sacred Matters: Material Religion in South Asian Traditions. Albany: State University of New York, pp. 195–​218. Ram, Kalpana. 1991. Mukkuvar Women:  Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. London: Zed Books. Robinson, R. 2009. “Negotiating Traditions: Popular Christianity in India.” Asian Journal of Social Science 37(1): 29–​54. San Chirico, K.P.C. 2014. “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region.” In Bauman, C.M. and Young, R.F. (eds.). Constructing Indian Christianities: Culture, Conversion and Caste. New Delhi: Routledge, pp. 23–​44. Schmalz, M.N. 2011. “Boundaries and Appropriations in North Indian Charismatic Catholicism.” In Schmalz, M.N. and Gottschalk, P. (eds.). Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances. Albany: State University of New York, pp. 85–​112. —​—​—​. 2016. “North Indian Materialities of Jesus.” In Pintchman, T. and Dempsey, C.G. (eds.). Sacred Matters: Material Religion in South Asian Traditions. Albany: State University of New York, pp. 67–​88. Sharma, A. 1979. “All Religions Are:  Equal? One? True? Same?:  A Critical Examination of Some Formulations of the Neo-​Hindu Position.” Philosophy East and West 29(1): 59–​72. Sylvester, J. 2013. Khristubhakta Movement: Hermeneutics of a Religio-​Cultural Phenomenon. Delhi: ISPCK. Turner, V. 1969. “Liminality and Communitas.” In Turner, V. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 94–​130.

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19 “RELIGION” AND HINDU–​ CHRISTIAN RELATIONS AFTER THE 2004 INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI Kristin C. Bloomer

I. On the morning after Christmas 2004, a megathrust 9.1 earthquake under the Indian Ocean pushed the Burmese tectonic plate over the Indian plate and sent a 100-​foot-​high tsunami barreling into the coasts of fourteen countries. Around 230,000 people died, making the event one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Differences tend to disappear in the face of death. Religion—​across denomination, affiliation, or creed—​often helps survivors cope. But religion, like capitalism, can also feed on disasters. Working toward a PhD in religion, I had arrived months before the tsunami in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to investigate the fluid nature of what we might call “Hinduism” and “Christianity” in the phenomenon of Marian possession. Fluid identities and exchanges between communities have long marked India’s coastal south. What I found in the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, however, was that even this “flow between religions,” words which themselves suggest difference, disappeared: everyone was leveled. The disaster bespoke a common humanity among the living and the dead. It evoked, too, common doubt as to the very existence of a benevolent god or protective mother figure. Within weeks, though, things changed again. As the tsunami’s undertow brought political and religious leaders, NGOs, and free-​market capitalism to fill the washed-​out void, a tide of money, competition, and fear renewed differences, threatening oneness as well as the earlier religious fluidity. The rupture between the Indian and Burmese plates caused social ruptures as well, as human need, greed, and tribalism remade the religious and environmental landscape. Now, fifteen years after the tsunami, while many of the hardest-​hit communities have recovered to some degree economically, new industrial plans for the coast imperil the ways of fishing people. “Competitive compassion” (Bindra 2005, p. 181), political vote-​mongering, the grasp of neo-​capitalism, Hindutva ideology (in opposition to the perceived threat of a minority Muslim population, Christian conversion, and foreign invasion) have revealed the darker sides of human nature. A divisive jockeying for money and status emerged from the undertow of the ensuing months and years. (On the inequitable power structures setting the stage for “elite 230

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capture” of resources, see McGeehan 2012, p. 14; Jasperro and Taylor 2011, pp. 283–​99; Karan and Subbiah 2011; and Klein 2007.) The creation of the very category of “religion” is a result of this sort of jockeying: a direct result of the sixteenth-​through eighteenth-​century European wars of religion and the accompanying colonization of   “non-​Christian” places like India (Asad 1993). From the time of these wars to the Indian Supreme Court’s November 2019  “Ayodhya” decision greenlighting the construction of a Hindu temple on a site where a Muslim mosque had long stood, and the December 2019 passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the notion not only of  “religion” as a discrete entity (as separate, say, from theology, or civil, secular society), but also of “each religion” (Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam) as discrete has persisted. Religious identities and practices, which can enjoy significant harmony and exchange during long periods of relative calm, often become concretized in historical moments of violence and schism. It is in such moments that bounded entities such as “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” and “religion” itself came to exist at all (Lincoln 2003, p. 3). To be sure, what we have come to call “religion” or “religious belief ” often helps people survive disasters. Catastrophes leave people grief-​stricken, shocked, and in need of answers, as well as basic necessities such as food, shelter, and water. Existentially, psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers called such moments “limit situations”—​situations that bring fright, guilt, finality, and terrible suffering (Jaspers 1932 [1917], p. 97). Similarly, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion, in part, as a human attempt across cultures to deal with “the Problem of Meaning,” that is, the limits of interpretability and the need to make order out of chaos (Geertz 1973, pp. 87–​125). Humans often reach for religion when their capacity for understanding is pushed to its limit. In the wake of a disaster like a tsunami or war, survivors also reach for stuff: a fix, a doctor, a handhold, a dry blanket, a fish, a piece of bread. In India, an estimated 18,000 people lost their lives in the 2004 tsunami, almost half—​ 8,000—​in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, where I had stationed myself. Within Tamil Nadu, most of those people—​more than 6,000—​died in Nagapattinam, a district on the Bay of Bengal economically driven by trading, fishing, agriculture, and tourism. Most of the deaths in the district occurred within a narrow, ten-​kilometer stretch of beach that reached south from the port town of Nagapattinam, after which the district is named, to Velankanni, another seaside town that hosts India’s largest shrine to Mary. (In Tamil, vēḷāṅkaṇṇi derives her name from vēḷāṇmai= “agriculture,” “paddy crop,” “fertile”; and kaṇṇi=“maiden,” “virgin,” thus, “fertile virgin.” Colloquially, many local people pronounce and understand the word as veḷḷāṅkaṇṇi: veḷḷai=“white”; kaṇṇi=“virgin,” thus, “white virgin.”) This major Roman Catholic pilgrimage center, also known as “the Lourdes of the East,” is called by English speakers simply, Velankanni, or the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health. Set in a heavily Christian area and drawing more Hindu than Christian pilgrims, it was an especially good place to study relations between Hindus and Christians. South India is more heavily Christian than other parts of the country. About 6% of Tamil Nadu’s residents are Christian, whereas Christians comprise only 2% of the Indian population nation-​wide. The majority of Tamil Christians are Roman Catholic. Though Christians are spread fairly uniformly around the state, their population is highest in the southern districts. Kanyakumari District, which sits on the southern tip of India, for example, is 50% Christian. (Muslims are more evenly spread throughout the state compared to Christians, though the percentage of both communities in the state population is nearly the same.) Nagapattinam is 3% Christian but draws heavy and constant flows of Christian pilgrims. I would have been there, in Velankanni, perhaps caught in those waves, had a friend’s son not fallen ill, causing us to cancel our trip at the last minute. My friend, C. Rosalind, was a 231

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31-​year-​old single mother in north Chennai, near where I lived, and was one of three Roman Catholic women about whom I was writing who claimed to be possessed by Mary (Bloomer 2018). We had intended to join the millions of Hindus, Christians, and Muslims who gather annually, especially at Christmas, to fulfill vows, pray for health and prosperity, and take a dip in the sea. In 2004, Christmas also fell on pournami (sometimes, purnima), or full moon, an auspicious day in the Tamil lunar calendar on which people cross religious lines and bathe in seas and rivers to wash away sins. The confluence of the two holidays drew even more people than usual to the ocean, which rose up and killed them by the thousands, Hindu and Christian alike. At 6:29 a.m. on December 26, 2004, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, I was shaken awake. Christ is born! The room swayed. Was I really awake? I blinked, and walked to the shimmying balcony. I scanned what I could see of the horizon; the ocean seemed steady. Had I stood on the patio another three and a half hours, I would have seen the sea rise and erase the shore, scraping the stretch of light-​brown sand I saw daily from my window and submerging the streets. Instead, having decided it was a small earthquake, I waited for the floor to stop moving and went back to sleep. At about 10 a.m., my phone rang. “Kristin, you don’t panic!” said Maheswari, a 30-​year-​old Tamil friend from across the street. She spoke in broken English. “You don’t panic! But the sea, the sea is coming inside! They say the sea is coming inside! Everybody running.” “What?” I said. She slowed down and told me to turn on the TV; she would call right back. I looked out the window. The streets were almost empty, except for a few families loading suitcases into cars. I turned on the TV. I started packing. Rather than leave my Besant Nagar neighborhood for higher ground as the US Embassy advised, however, I slung my pack over my shoulder and headed to Annai Velankanni Church—​ the “sister” church of the original Our Lady of Good Health—​a few blocks away, on the beach. The parish priest, swamped with phone calls, handed me a wad of cash for medical supplies, and I spent the day racing around on my scooter, distributing them to local fishing communities on the beach. But the supplies weren’t really needed. The dead were dead. And the main need, Fr. Bernard Lawrence told me upon my return, was not to minister here among the living, but further south, among the dead. The bishop had called. In Velankanni, scores of bodies were rotting in the sun—​and more still lay under rubble. He sorely needed volunteers to search for the corpses and bury them. By eight o’clock the evening after the tsunami, I was standing in the main hall of Annai Velankanni Church in Chennai, my bag slung over my right shoulder, my left sleeve rolled up, waiting behind about thirty young men for a tetanus shot. Some held onto each other, trying not to cry from fear as they braced for the needle. Outside, three vans waited, loaded with bags of donated clothes, rice, and packaged goods. By early morning we reached the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Velankanni. Many people called it a miracle that water had not entered the church. Otherwise, the town, covered in mud, had been largely leveled. The coconut and palm trees that still stood were bent and stripped of greenery, as in photos I’d seen of Hiroshima after the war; the energy released by this one earthquake was equivalent to 23,000 such bombs (Pickrell 2005). As the bishop had indicated, lines of bodies lay all down the main road. I walked past them down to the beaches with Rev. Father Santiago, Annai Velankanni’s assistant parish priest, a wavy-​haired, dimpled, 30-​year-​old Tamilian. With single-​minded purpose, he led the way across hot tidal flats and the rubble of what had once been village settlements, through cool, shallow tributaries, past sand 232

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piles and coconut groves. I lagged behind, giving wide berth to two pits where tractors were piling bodies, Christians and Hindus alike. Further away, another two tractors were pushing tree branches into piles for funeral pyres. “We should tell the Bishop about this!” one of the drivers shouted to Santiago over the grind of motors and gears. He was referring to the un-​Catholic practice of cremation. “We don’t want to get in trouble later!” “Over there!” another volunteer shouted, pointing across the flats and inlets to a group of low buildings and trees. “Over there” were still lots of bodies. The smell of death was heavy; its sickly pungency gathered in eddies and air pockets. We learned to use it, like dogs, to draw us to bodies under rubble. I picked my way cautiously over the wreckage of wood, palm branches, boat parts, tangled fishing nets and lines, glad for my tetanus shot. Many huts were collapsed or half-​standing. A few of us carried flashlights. “Oru pāppā!”—​a girl child!—​someone called.They had found a body under a collapsed wall of palm fronds.While several men worked on freeing the child, I backed into the half of the hut that was still standing. In that dark space, colorful wall hangings showed Mary in her popular forms beside images of the Brahminical Hindu goddesses Parvati, Lakshmi, and Saraswati, and a Velankanni church calendar. Fishing nets and clothes still hung from rafters. On one muddy shelf lay a small purse holding six rupees, two passport sized photos of a woman who appeared to be in her thirties, and a voter ID card: Election Commission Identity Card. Name:  Anjammal. Father/​Mother/​Husband’s name:  Thangavel. Age on 1-​1-​1995:  60. Address:  4/​29A2 Velankanni, Velankanni Nagamiapart IV, Kilvelur (TR); Nagapattinam (District). I ducked back out in time to see the men carry the girl’s body away on a sheet of bright orange plastic. An old man in a dhoti slipped by me into the hut and emerged with the purse, into which he had placed the photos and voting card. He pushed it toward me, gesturing toward the retreating orange tarp. My bodily reaction was to make sure these items did not get separated from the girl’s body. The men carried the body up the beach to a small cement building where police were taking photographs of the dead. Outside, a red diesel tractor pulling a flatbed on wheels—​like those used for hayrides in the rural United States—​put-​putted along the beach and parked in front of me. A man standing in the flatbed opened the back; human and animal bodies lay strewn together. Some of the human bodies were half-​dressed. Skin of various shades of brown and white shone waxily in the sun. Men and women’s bodies had been thrown together indiscriminately. In a place where even men and women married to each other are not to be seen touching, where only men can hold hands in public (and often do), where men and women sit on opposite sides of a bus, this pile-​up seemed particularly disrespectful. But no one else seemed to be thinking that way; everyone focused on the task at hand, not on religious rules and customs. Dogs, goats, and cats—​bloated, their fur sticky with salt-​water—​lay piled with the humans. As the truck filled, everything became a single, undifferentiated heap. Caste, religion, gender, species—​nothing seemed to matter here and now. In the late afternoon, I headed back to the Basilica and priests’ residence, past a large board covered with photographs of the grossly disfigured dead. Claimed by family members, these would become the only evidence, for those who did not witness burial or see the body, that a loved one had died. It would also come to be evidence for collecting insurance payments from the state. 233

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“Excuse me,” I said, approaching an avuncular man sitting at a small table to the right of the board. He held a notebook open to a long list of names. I showed him the purse and said it came from a house in which the body of a young girl had been found. He seemed less-​than-​optimistic that it would help with the girl’s identification. (Now, knowing how far bodies and household items were thrown, I can see how unlikely it was that the girl belonged to that house.) Gently, however, he took the purse and said he would personally do his very best to return it to the family. I made a mental note to follow up with the local priest and other authorities. As the church bells tolled noon, Father Santiago and I found shade at a table in front of the Basilica’s canteen. I pulled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of my purse and offered half to Santiago. He declined. He popped a hole in a small plastic bag of purified water and drank it. Flies hovered everywhere. At the other tables, dark-​skinned locals sat smoking and talking, wearing plaid dhotis. A man perhaps in his late forties with light-​brown skin and sharp features walked stiffly to a table and sat down alone. He wore a pale-​yellow sports shirt and trousers, a gold chain, and a gold ring. He looked like a shop owner. He looked at me. I looked away. “Gone!” he said to no one in particular. “Everything. Gone! Gālli (empty). Ha! This, India.” He swerved around and held out his hands, making a swooping gesture toward the church, the shops, the trucks loading and unloading bags of rice and donated goods. He spoke sometimes in Tamil, sometimes in English, perhaps for my benefit. He banged the table with his fist. “What, God?” He looked around, as if waiting for an answer. “What, God? God, eṅkē? (Where is God?)” No one answered. “God, nothing! God…NOTHING!” He dropped his head onto his arms and sobbed like a child. Some men glanced at him; some averted their eyes. I stopped eating. He raised his head and wiped his eyes on his shirt collar. “Virgin Mary! Ha! What is Virgin Mary?” He pulled a matchbox out of a breast pocket and asked a wiry, salt-​and-​pepper-​haired guy to his left for a smoke. “Thambi (little brother),” he beckoned. The man quickly handed him a bidi, and the sweet smell of tobacco with a hint of marijuana filled the air. Flies covered my sandwich. When I looked up again, the man was gone. If God wasn’t gone, was God good? By afternoon, Santiago and I were sitting together on a halved, upended boat.The waves, still angry, crashed fifty feet behind us. “Today I  saw a body,” Santiago said in a tone almost of confession, as volunteers carried another one by. “There was no flesh on the face.” He looked away, squinting. “Man or woman?” I asked. “It was a lady,” he said. “I think, an old lady.” “You’ve probably seen many dead bodies as a priest.” “No,” he said. “This is my first time.” We fell silent. “Look, there is another body,” he said, calm, even-​toned. “There.” We walked down the beach to find water. I asked him if the tsunami had tried his faith in God. He glanced at me and pulled away slightly. “God is not the reason for everything, you know,” he said. “Humans also create problems.” “Such as…” “Such as cutting down forests, pollution, building atomic bombs…” “But you can’t say that humans created this tsunami. A tsunami is an act of nature.” Everyone here, regardless of religious affiliation, seemed to be wrestling with the problem of theodicy—​ how a benevolent deity or deities could allow such suffering.

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“I think there is a saying in the Old Testament,” Santiago said. “It says…” He looked away, trying to remember the exact words. “Basically it says: It is foolishness to say we know God.” He may have been referring to Isaiah 55:8–​9: “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ ” Or, Job 26:14: “Behold, God is exalted, and we do not know him; the number of his years is unsearchable.” Or, Job 11:7: “Can you discover the depths of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty?”

II. Immediately after the tsunami, lots of people shook their fists in anger at the gods. Such intensity of feeling is part of the deep tradition of bhakti, or popular devotion, in the South. Anger toward a god implies an ongoing relationship; passivity or lack of feeling can be evidence of a deity’s non-​existence. The anger can go both ways. People across affected countries—​Indonesia, Thailand, India, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives—​spoke of the tsunami as punishment, regardless of religion (Paul and Nadiruzzman 2013). Many Hindus and Christians in South India blamed the gods or God (whom they often called cāmi, a word usually associated with Hindu gods, and an honorific which also can imply intimacy), or Mātā (Mary). I heard both Hindus and Christians blame the goddess Kāli. A survey of fishermen from 161 coastal villages in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and the Union Territory of Pondicherry—​across religious lines—​suggested that many fishing people believed that the sea goddess (kaṭal amma, literally “sea mother,” or Gangamma) was punishing them for their or someone else’s sins (Nirupama 2009). To calm her anger, many survivors offered flowers and milk to the ocean within a week of the disaster (Ibid.), and repeatedly after that. Fishermen still touched the sea and prayed to her before venturing out. Among both Christians and Hindus I  heard many concepts usually attributed only to Hindus: dōsham, “malignant bad luck,” such as being born under the wrong star; or fate (viti), sometimes believed to be “written across the forehead” at birth; or karma, the belief that misfortune in this life is punishment for sins committed in forgotten past lives. (Buddhists, such as those who survived the tsunami in Sri Lanka, also often shared this reference to karma.) Many people held humans as a group responsible. Among them was Rosalind, my friend and source possessed by the Virgin Mary. Her prayer community in Chennai blamed various human errors, from building nuclear power plants to contributing to climate change, and took the tsunami as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Rosalind like many other local religious leaders, seemed to be capitalizing on fear, using the tsunami to draw larger crowds to her prayer house. Hindus, likewise, talked about the coming of the Kali yuga (the last, and most degenerate “dark age”). Common people blamed corrupt politicians. Older people of both religions blamed younger people, who, they complained, were morally corrupt, paying no attention to caste difference while pursuing love marriages. (Killings related to inter-​caste marriages are not uncommon in Tamil Nadu; more than 180 were reported between 2016 and 2018 [Senthalir 2018].) “Proper” men and women blamed the loose ways of modern girls and women. Caste-​and gender-​related explanations, incidentally, were also common in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, which suffered the worst damage—​and among fundamentalists in general (on this, see Merli 2010, pp. 104–​11; on blaming women, see Paul and Nadiruzzman 2013, p. 71, and Kapur 2010). This moral blame game revealed another dark side of religion: It can be used to uphold “tradition,” enable violence, and resist change.

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Nine months after the killer waves, in September 2005, I returned to Velankanni for the last few days of the nine-​night, annual Feast of Our Lady of Health. I had come to see what, if anything, had changed ritually, materially, and attitudinally since the tsunami. As people worked through their shock, another sort of catastrophe unfolded—​one of unbalanced giving, envy, and corruption. Materially, NGOs had been flooding in from around the world. Within three months of the tsunami, more than 600 NGOs had arrived in Nagapattinam District alone, including the area’s biggest contributor, the Catholic charity Caritas International. Caritas gave US$485 million to tsunami survivors worldwide (Caritas n.d.). But still, in Nagapattinam, almost no permanent shelters had been constructed. Land disputes and lack of coordination were slowing progress. In some places, religious tensions were rising. In the state of Kerala, around the tip of India from Tamil Nadu, relief work had stalled after a fight between Hindu and Christian groups over new housing. Right-​wing Hindu groups were trying to stop reconstruction of homes for tsunami victims on the grounds that the church was using relief programs to convert Hindus to the Cross. Church leaders denied the charges, and a local administrator said the claims were baseless (Raman 2005). In Velankanni, meanwhile, the religious landscape seemed relatively calm. Hindus and Christians were still blending at the Basilica. Sitting just inside the entrance the morning of my arrival, Susairaj, a 55-​year-​old Hindu from the Pattina Thevar caste—​the majority caste from a seashore hamlet in Velankanni, which is mostly a fishing community—​told us that of the approximately 450 families in the hamlet, about half were Roman Catholic. They and the Hindus got along very well, he said: “If we have any problems, we solve them among ourselves.” When it came to prayer: “First we pray to Mātā. Then we worship all RC (Roman Catholic) gods (Jesus, God-​the-​Father, and the saints). After the tsunami, I had even more faith in Mātā.” Susairaj’s worship of all gods was not merely a penchant of locals. Everyone, it seemed—​ locals as well as pilgrims from afar—​spoke of worshipping both “RC” and Hindu gods, Mātā and Hindu goddesses. In the dizzying noon heat,Vinothakumari, 30, a Hindu who had traveled from Bangalore with her brother Velu, sat on the steps of the Basilica’s main stage, waiting for the festival to start. “Our family god (kulatēyvam) is Murugan,”Vinothakumari said, “and I worship all the ammans (goddesses).” She was planning to convert to Catholicism. But for now, she and her brother found it enough to worship Mātā local-​style, alongside the Hindu deities: “Before starting from my house, we lit the candle, prayed to Mātā, and came to Velankanni. After we reach home, we will light the lamp in the coconut, pray, and give sweets to everyone saying that we have come safely.” A married couple sitting nearby said they too pray to “all RC gods.” “But we worship Velankanni Mātā most,” said Sara, 28, who had converted to Catholicism from the (Protestant) Church of South India. “Mātā is very powerful,” added her husband Suriya, a Hindu. “So I came here. I like Hindu gods, also.” Jaya, 35, another Protestant woman married to a Hindu, said that she and her husband faced no problems worshipping across religious lines. “All gods are the same,” she said. “I worship all RC gods and I  also go to the Mariamman temple and pray. My husband also worships Christian gods.” Such was the vibe of combined faith and love at the Our Lady of Health festival. Down below in the settlements by the sea, however, things were less festive. Catholics and Hindus alike in South India tend to follow some form of shraddha, rites performed in honor of dead ancestors meant to help them move to the next realm, and people were still in their ritually prescribed year of mourning. They still grappled intensely with loss. Many felt anger at the

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Roman Catholic Church, which they said had not given fairly. Earlier that day, I  had seen Velankanni’s rector collect large donations from visitors who had requested a personal audience, and in the same afternoon turn families away who asked for small change because he had not seen them coming to church. In a small brick-​and-​cement house closest to the ocean, Manimeehalai, a dark, broad-​faced 42-​year-​old, stood from the cool floor to greet me, brushing the loose strands of her hair into a bun, and tucking the end of her yellow sari into her skirt. A Hindu from the fishing community, she had lost several relatives to the waves, but not her husband or six sons. She was now also raising a niece, 15, and a nephew, 10, who had lost his parents and siblings. Five years of accumulated assets and savings, cash stashed at home, were gone. “We lost everything,” Manimeehalai said. Caritas gave them an “upgrade,” a fiberglass boat to replace their lost catamaran. But a fiberglass boat required a motor, and a motor required petrol. Such well-​meaning gestures were creating new inequalities and problems. In many ways, Manimeehalai’s family had been lucky. Their house was standing, though it was possible they would have to move. The state was beginning to enforce coastal regulation zones (CRZs) requiring houses to be at least 500 meters—​the length of five football fields—​ past the high tide line. Hundreds of thousands of fishing people lived within these “buffer zones.” Media reports would soon surface that the government was using the opportunity to sell off prime beaches for hotels, shrimp farms, and fish hatcheries (Cohen 2011, p. 233; and Breaking Travel News 2009). At least Manimeehalai’s Hindu family was on good terms with the parish priest. Her two eldest sons had asked him for college fees, and he had given them each US$30.The 24-​year-​old wore a light-​yellow t-​shirt with a picture of Velankanni Mātā and the words “Helping Hands” (a tsunami volunteer organization) blazed across the front. It was only through the priest that the family’s boat and engine were fixed, she said. The village panchayat (village council), however, took Rs. 20,000 in government relief money intended for 52 families, including hers, she said, and redistributed it. “From that they gave Rs. 8,000 to people who have no boat,” she said. The remaining amount, they used for religious matters—​conducting a procession, or festivals at the Pillaiyar Temple, or renovating the “Mary Church.” The people who run the panchayat—​many of whom are merchants owning several shops each—​are rich, she said. “After the tsunami, they became very rich.” I asked Manimeehalai if this made her angry with god. “How can we find fault with god?” Manimeehalai said. “He created us; one day he is going to take us.We cannot say anything about him. Or, we can. But still, this great disaster would have happened. Sure, we can find fault with god.We can even come to the sea without worshipping. Still, to this day, though, when the men go for fishing, they touch the water and worship.What we wonder is,Why did the tsunami leave us? It could have taken us, too. It’s all we think about. It is so painful that god destroyed half the people and made the other half shed tears.” The son in the “Helping Hands” t-​shirt walked me up the street to where his widowed aunt lived in a one-​room house. Her eyes were dull with grief and lack of sleep as she rocked her 4-​month-​old baby in a bamboo cradle hung from the ceiling with ropes. The house was dark except for candles she had lit in front of her deceased husband’s portrait. I knew from Manimeehalai that this young woman had threatened suicide repeatedly. Yet just around the corner we ran into other relations—​a newly married couple emerging from the temple to Pillaiyar, the elephant-​headed god of new beginnings. The woman was visibly pregnant; her radiant smile spread toward me graciously.While many still grieved, hope, for others, was slowly renewing itself.

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III. On December 26, 2005, a year to the day after the tsunami, I  traveled back to Velankanni. Among my goals, beyond visiting friends and seeing the city’s memorial gravesite, was to search for Anjammal, the woman whose ID card I had found the year before. Newspapers had been reporting that while fishermen had gotten most of the attention and handouts, farmers were under extreme stress due to salt-​water incursion. Alcoholism among men was on the rise, along with unemployment. Many fishermen were still afraid to venture to sea. Women were pressured in numerous ways, from being expected to have their tubes untied so they could birth more children to having to gather water and travel further from crowded shelters to markets for work. In a society where women’s movements are tightly constrained, such changes exposed them to increased gender violence. Other reports, meanwhile, were coming in about discrimination regarding tsunami relief. The NGO People’s Watch found three types (from most to least prevalent): caste, occupation, and religion (Surendran 2014, pp. 54–​55). “The tsunami did not discriminate,” one fisherman said, “but the rich and powerful have discriminated against us.” On a much bigger scale, development plans enabled by the tsunami were beginning to emerge out of sight of many fishing people—​plans that threatened to affect their livelihoods. The Indian central government, with support from the World Bank and other international investors, was drawing up major schemes for industrial shipping ports, bridges, highways, and fisheries—​many of which would be located in the coastal regulation zones from which they were ousting fishing people. The “Sagarmala Programme,” the dream child of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—​announced before the tsunami, in 2003—​was first meant to help coordinate planning between the central government and the states for a comprehensive coastal infrastructure. The program had stalled when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his United Progressive Alliance (UPA) took power in 2004—​ but by the 2014 election season Prime Minister Narendra Modi (NDA) would re-​tout it, pump it up, and formally release it in 2016, spawning huge protests among fishermen. These, along with protests against an existing nuclear power plant on the coast south of Velankanni, would bring a backlash from right-​wing Hindu media sources. Articles would target churches for supporting protests, saying church authorities intended to foment unrest in opposition to Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s government because of the church’s rejection of the Hindutva ideology underpinning it. One of the proposed Sagarmala ports—​Enayam, planned for Kanyakumari District just south of Nagapattinam—​sparked several of these protests, mainly among fishing people who said that it would displace them and pollute the waters. In 2016,  hundreds of fishermen held a massive boat rally against the port with over 2,000 people protesting on the shore. A Catholic priest flagged off the protest, and church bells rang along the coast as protesters walked sixty kilometers of beach. The Muslim Jamath Federation urged the government to withdraw the proposal, saying it would damage the livelihoods of over one lakh (100,000) people. The Kudankulam Nuclear Plant, another piece of the Sagarmala plan, has also been a flashpoint for numerous protests in recent years. Roman Catholic and Protestant priests have showed solidarity with fishermen and other protesters who say the plant is a sitting duck for another tsunami and is releasing cooling water into the sea. Scholars said that “the tsunami provided an opportunity for the state to reinforce coastal regulation zones (CRZs), to the detriment of fishers.” “They want to apply the CRZs to the fishermen but not to the industries,” M. Kannan, a researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry, told me in November 2019. 238

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Of course, I didn’t know any of this would happen when I returned to Velankanni a year after the tsunami.The protests I encountered that 2005 Christmas season would be on a small scale. But they would mark the birth of this new chapter of opposition, struggle, and unrest. On the overnight Kanyakumari Express train from Chennai to Velankanni, after a collision between two cars threw many of us out of our bunks, I met a Church of South India (CSI) family—​Protestants—​coming to give thanks to Mātā for healing their son from fever. We boarded a bus together for the last leg, and from the Velankanni bus stand, they headed off toward the Basilica while I carried my bags a dusty quarter mile up the road to Hotel Sea Gate, waving away beggars. A portly Tamil Santa Claus in a white mask with white gloves and cane greeted me. He swayed silently back and forth, waved, and shook my hand. “Merry Christmas,” I said. White lights bedecked a small parking lot, and the unmistakably American voice of Jim Reeves sang “Jingle Bells” through speakers hung outside. I checked in and caught an early morning ride to the tsunami memorial with an auto driver named Arokkiyasamy, after the Virgin, who is also called ārōkkiya aṉṉai, or “Our Lady of Health” (ārōkkiya=“health”). His auto bore the name of his business,“Clinton Sound Service and Tsunami Announcer.” He had named his son “Clinton” after the American President. He showed me his megaphone and laminated signs, printed in Tamil: “Everyone stay calm.” “A peaceful procession is coming.” And, spelled phonetically, in Tamil letters: “Mee God blas aver diyar ons.” (May God bless our dear ones.) He drove me to the memorial for tsunami victims: a dismal expanse of cracked dirt surrounded by a green, corrugated metal fence with New Testament verses painted red in three different languages—​Tamil, English, and Malayalam: “Jesus says: Those who believe in me, even if they die, will live.” Arokkiyasamy and Mātāsamy, the caretaker, estimated more than 2,000 tsunami victims were buried here, Hindu and Christian. On the unmarked mass graves, here and there people had erected a stick or simple cross. Strewn over the mounds were remnants of memorial rites:  burning incense sticks; flower garlands drying in the sun; oranges, bananas, and the occasional sweet, left as food for loved ones. Christians as well as Hindus in South India observe the practice of feeding the dead, offering whatever food the deceased particularly loved. We came upon a couple praying to their young daughter, Abinaiya, who had been killed in the waves. The man, also named Arokkiyasamy, and his wife, Santi, had arrived as pilgrims that day, from Dindigul. “It is natural and just to get angry with god (cāmi),” the bereaved Arokkiyasamy said. “But I believe that that god (cāmi) will give me life.” “I have a lot of belief in this cāmi,” Santi added. “My daughter will again come into my womb.” She was referring to reincarnation, as well as to tubal ligation reversal. Santi wept, as her husband turned away, holding back tears. He squinted into the wind from the sea. The pressure that the tsunami placed on women’s bodies—​not only in some cases to pick up the slack left by depressed or out-​of-​work husbands, but also to conceive again—​was evident. This was true for both Christian and Hindu women, as the Indian government offered free reverse sterilization operations to women who had previously decided that they didn’t want any more children due to poverty (Cohen 2005). “If it is God’s wish, you will get another child,” the auto driver Arokkiyasamy said, trying to console Santi. “We have come with faith,” she said. “We have come with faith.” Arokkiyasamy dropped me near Konar Thoppu, the temporary tsunami relief shelter that to residents was no longer feeling temporary. Konar is the name for an ethnic community in Tamil Nadu thought to have once been herdsmen, and thoppu means “grove”—​but this was no grove, and the people here were no pastoralists. They were mostly fishing people and small merchants, and the “grove” was an expanse of cleared, low-​lying land that had flooded to shoulder height four times since the tsunami. The dirt-​floor barracks, row upon row of corrugated metal sheds, reminded me of South African shantytowns during Apartheid. It baked in the hot season. Each 239

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shed housing a family was eight by twelve feet. The Roman Catholic Church had temporarily lent the land for the shelters but would not sell it for permanent housing. Two days before I arrived, residents of Konar Thoppu had staged a protest.They had marched from the seashore to the panchayat office, then to the rectory at the Basilica, yelling epithets.The residents believed that private money for residential reconstruction had come to the panchayat, whose members in turn had handed it over to the rector. During the protests, the residents had tried to hand Rector Rev. Father Xavier a petition signed by more than 500 saying they did not want to move to private land that the district wanted to purchase for them. Among other problems, it was 800 meters from the sea. They said they would rather stay in Konar Thoppu. When they reached the rectory and demanded to meet with him, they were told he was sleeping. They stood there in the rain. Later, the priest drove by in his car, they said, and gave a statement that the church could do nothing for them. They continued to strike until the next day, but still he would not accept the petition. Finally, police came and threatened to shoot if the people would not move. One sub-​inspector of police threatened to beat them. As I walked through the camp, a woman who looked to be in her sixties passed me, headed to a local CSI church for prayer. Chest heaving, speaking in a deep rasp, she introduced herself as Devi. I asked why she was headed all the way to a CSI church rather than the Roman Catholic Basilica. “I went all over the place for treatment,” she said. “That’s where I was healed.” When she asked the Roman Catholic priest for a hundred rupees for asthma spray, he refused, she said. As more women gathered around us, it quickly became apparent that anger toward “Father” was not limited to Devi. Virammal, wearing an orange and red sari, was a devotee of Mātā Amritanandamayi, the internationally famous Hindu guru from Kerala known as “Ammachi” or “hugging Amma.” “Amma wanted to build houses for people in Velankanni, just like she did in Nagapattinam, but Father had said no,” Virammal said. She took a small photo of Ammachi out of her wallet and touched it to her eyes and lips. “One year has gone.” She threw up her palms. “What can we do?” By the end of 2006, Amritanandamayi had spent more than US$46 million on tsunami relief, including establishing seven relief camps and sheltering 100 families in Nagapattinam, according to her website. Thangam, another fisherwoman, added that the place to which the district wanted to move them was not safe for women. “It is too far,” she said. “We are afraid. Our girls cannot live there. The place is known as kolai kārar ūr (“murdering place”).” It is full of water, she said: “It sucks. It bubbles.” It is also far from the market, others chimed in; it is bounded on one side by dense forest, making escape from another tsunami, should one come, difficult. Devi shook her head. “You have such a holy mother here,” she said, referring to Our Lady of Good Health. She waved her hand despairingly toward the priests’ quarters. Meanwhile, ten families from Konar Thoppu, in similar despair, had recently converted to the Pentecostal Zion Church in Ivanallur, Nagapattinam. The pastor, Rev. Arthur Sella Raja, conducted faith healings and “casting out of demons” with a congregation of nearly 2,500. Sella Raja, who had nearly died after Hindu youths belonging to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh stabbed him repeatedly one night in 1989, said he got along fine with the Roman Catholic priests. “They encourage me because I am converting Hindus,” he said. When I spoke to Rev. Father Xavier later that day in his opulent office overlooking the Basilica, he confirmed the claims of the Konar Thoppu petitioners. But what could he do? The Church needed to save the better land for real estate expansion. “We have to think of our future,” he said. Indeed, since the Portuguese brought Catholicism to the Indian coast in the sixteenth century, the town had grown up around the Velankanni church.The church campus had expanded significantly over the years as the Roman Catholic Church acquired more coastal real estate. In addition 240

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to more than eight large tourist hostels and a canteen, recent developments beyond the immense Basilica included four separate and prominent chapels; a “Holy Path” leading to “Our Lady’s Tank” flanked with the stations of the cross; two community halls; an Institute for Marian Studies; a three-​story priests’ quarters; a large retreat center with conference hall and chapel; a primary school; a higher secondary school; a new residential colony and three separate living quarters for staff; a “Booking Office for Rooms” next to the bus station; a Home for the Aged and Abandoned; an orphanage; a Home for the Mentally Retarded; a school for the disabled and deaf; a hospital and dispensary; an open air auditorium; a tonsure hall; a “Depot for the Sale of Religious Artifacts”; a book stall; a museum dedicated to the display of gifts devotees had given Mary in thanks for her healing miracles; and a separate hall for the Exhibition on the History of Salvation. Meanwhile, in addition to the 664 families living in Konar Thoppu, hundreds of other families were living in shanties on the grounds of the local primary school. At the District Collector’s office in Nagapattinam, Additional District Collector Ranvir Prasad defended the church while expressing empathy with the homeless. The five acres of Konar Thoppu land, though it sometimes flooded, was valued at one crore (ten million) rupees (about US$200,000) per acre, he said. “The Church has communicated to us that they want this land for future purposes,” he said. “I recommended to the people that they not insist on this land.” Instead, he said, a private individual had agreed to sell the other land much cheaper.The twelve acres of private land was valued at a total of Rs. 1.65 crores (about US$320,000), he said. Non-​fishermen had agreed to it, but the fishermen had been reluctant, he said. That is because it is too far from the sea for many fishermen, I said. Prasad sighed. “It’s not like we’re building palaces for people,” he said. “We just want to get them out of temporary shelters.” His next appointment was with a representative from the Asian World Bank who had come to talk to the Collector about loans and associated development schemes. The representative, tall, light-​skinned, and sporting a neatly pressed shirt and trousers, handed me his card.“We consider it a great opportunity to help people here,” he said. A few days later, a vendor I had encountered at the fish market in Velankanni took me to find Anjammal, the woman whose ID card I’d found the day after the tsunami.The little girl we had found dead near the purse, it turned out, was no relation. Anjammal was in her sixties, sturdy, with short gray hair. A  Hindu born in Velankanni, Anjammal had lost her husband and two daughters long before the tsunami. Her surviving daughter, married three months now, had “saved her” from the tsunami by taking her a few days earlier to visit the prospective husband’s family in Thiruvarur, about seventeen miles inland. “Only after that I returned and saw the house ruined,” she said. The local Roman Catholic Church had given her “no help,” she said, beyond “one mat, rice in a vessel, and oil.” “Nothing else,” she said. “They did not give any pots and pans.” Anjammal’s family god (kulatēyvam) was Ayyappa. “I pray to Ayyappa as well as Mātā,” she said. “I pray to all the gods (cāmis). When the water came, I prayed to Mātā.” It was that simple. And yet I kept trying to make her choose. “You are a Hindu. Yet you worship Mātā,” I said. “We go to both the Hindu temple and the church,” she said. “I go to that temple, so I pray to that god. I go to this church (Velankanni), so I pray to this goddess (Mary).” After the tsunami, “they helped Hindus; they helped Christians,” she said, suggesting that her loyalty followed. “Among the Hindu goddesses, which is your favorite?” I asked. “I like Mātā (Mary).” “Do you worship Mariamman, Kaliamman, Lakshmi…?” Anjammal, a true survivor, looked at me quizzically. “To all gods (cāmis), the same shakti (power) is one.” 241

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Bibliography Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bindra, S. 2005. Tsunami: 7 Hours That Shook the World. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. Bloomer, K.C. 2018. Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India. New York: Oxford University Press. Breaking Travel News. 2009. “Tourism Development Undermining Millions in Tsunami Aid.” Breaking Travel News. December 23. Available at www.breakingtravelnews.com/​news/​article/​tourism-​ development-​undermining-​millions-​in-​tsunami-​aid/​. Accessed December 3, 2019. Caritas. n.d. “Caritas Marks 10 Years since Asia Tsunami.” Caritas.org. date unknown. Available at www. caritas.org/​2014/​12/​caritas-​marks-​10-​years-​since-​asia-​tsunami/​. Accessed December 3, 2019. Cohen, E. 2011. “Tourism and Land Grab in the Aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.” Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 11(3): 224–​36. Cohen, M. 2005. “In Tamil Nadu a Drive to Reverse Tubal Ligations after the Tsunami.” PRB.org. July 1.  Available at www.prb.org/​intamilnaduadrivetoreversetuballigationsafterthetsunami/​. Accessed December 3, 2019. Geertz, C. 1973. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Geertz, C (ed.). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana Press, pp. 87–​125. Jasperro, C. and Taylor, J. 2011. “Transnational Geopolitical Competition and Natural Disasters: Lessons from the Indian Ocean Tsunami.” In Karan, P.P. and Subbiah, S.P. (eds.). The Indian Ocean Tsunami: The Global Response to a Natural Disaster. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, pp. 283–​99. Jaspers, K.T. 1932, 1917. Philosophie.Vol. 2: Existenzerhellung. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Kapur, Anu. 2010. Vulnerable India: A Geographical Study of Disasters. Los Angeles: SAGE. Karan, P.P. and Subbiah, S.P. 2011. The Indian Ocean Tsunami:  The Global Response to a Natural Disaster. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Klein, N. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. Lincoln, B. 2003. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGeehan, K.M. 2012. Cultural and Religious Belief Systems, Tsunami Recovery and Disaster Risk Reduction in American Samoa in the Aftermath of the September 29, 2009 Tsunami. MA Thesis. University of Hawaii, Manoa. Merli, C. 2010.“Context-​Bound Islamic Theodicies: The Tsunami as Supernatural Retribution vs. Natural Catastrophe in Southern Thailand.” Religion 40(1): 104–​11. Nirupama, N. 2009. “Socio-​economic Implications Based on Interviews with Fishermen Following the Indian Ocean Tsunami.” Natural Hazards 48(1): 1–​9. Paul, B. and Nadiruzzman, M.D. 2013. “Religious Interpretations for the Causes of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.” Asian Profile 41(1): 67–​77. Pickrell, J. 2005. “Facts and Figures: Asian Tsunami Disaster.” New Scientist. January 20. Available at www. newscientist.com/​article/​dn9931-​facts-​and-​figures-​asian-​tsunami-​disaster/​. Accessed April 28, 2020. Raman, S. 2005. “Religious Row over Tsunami Relief.” BBC News, Kerala. May 24. Available at http://​ news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​south_​asia/​4574799.stm. Accessed December 1, 2019. Senthalir, S. 2018. “Love in Hosur: Couple Who Wanted to Build a Life across Caste Lines are Strangled, Thrown into River.” Scroll.in. Nov. 21. Available at https://​scroll.in/​article/​902683/​love-​in-​hosur-​ couple-​who-​wanted-​to-​build-​a-​life-​across-​caste-​lines-​are-​strangled-​thrown-​into-​r iver. Accessed April 28, 2020. Sugimoto, S., Sagayaraj, A. and Sugimoto, Y. 2011. “Sociocultural Frame, Religious Networks, Miracles: Experiences from Tsunami Disaster Management in South India.” In Karan, P.P. and Shanmugam, P.S. (eds.). The Indian Ocean Tsunami: The Global Response to a Natural Disaster. Lexington: University of Kentucky, pp. 213–​35. Surendran, S. 2014. Tsunami: Housing and Problems. Chennai: MJP Publishers.

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20 GENDER AND THE SOCIAL BOUNDARIES BETWEEN “HINDUS” AND “CHRISTIANS” Eliza F. Kent Among the key issues in the study of Hindu–​Christian relations is how social boundaries between the two religious traditions are constructed, maintained, and sometimes effaced or suspended. Neither tradition is a coherent, simple whole; both are internally variegated and have been transformed radically across both space and time. As Tomoko Masuzawa, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and others have argued, the world’s religious traditions as such are scholarly abstractions:  “All religions are new religions, every morning. They do not exist up in the sky somewhere, elaborated, finished and static:  they live in men’s hearts” (Smith 1959, p.  34; Masuzawa 2005). And, we might add in 2020, in the hearts of women and gender nonconforming people as well. But when we seek a more granular perspective of lived Hindu–​ Christian encounter, we face the daunting fact that on the Indian subcontinent, virtually every major variety of Christianity has, over time, encountered virtually every variety of Hinduism, from Syrian Orthodox Christians living alongside Sunni Muslims and Nayar Shaktas in Kerala to Pentecostal evangelists working—​much to the consternation of Hindutva activists—​among animist tribals in Rajasthan (Frykenberg 2008, p. 5; Dempsey 2004; Sahoo 2018). So, where to begin an examination of the place of gender in Hindu–​Christian encounter? Given the impossibility of providing a comprehensive overview, this essay examines the significance of gender in the history of Hindu–​Christian relations under British colonialism in order to illuminate how gender differences have been used, rhetorically and in practice, to reinforce, contest, or undermine the very boundaries constructed between “Christians” and “Hindus.” Employing a typology of religious boundary dynamics that I developed collaboratively with Tazim Kassam and the organizers and participants at the Ray Smith Symposium at Syracuse University (April 2004), I analyze two case studies that illuminate the centrality of gender in the negotiation of interreligious boundaries in South Asia.Whether social actors want to shore up, blur, or transcend the boundaries that divide one group from another (along religious lines, but also along ethnic, class, and racial lines as well), gender norms and representations of gender serve as excellent means of advancing that agenda. The socially constructed boundaries that delineate traditions are, when viewed from the standpoint of lived religion, infinitely malleable and surprisingly ephemeral, mere “lines drawn on the water,” in the words of the Mughal Prince, Dara Shikoh (Kent and Kassam 2013). Our 243

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typology noted four main types of boundaries that shape and are shaped by the interactions among people in a religiously plural environment:  boundaries may be attractive or porous, firmly drawn or suspended. We wrote, Whereas attractive boundaries invite confluence while affirming the differences between self and other, permeable boundaries facilitate movement and exchange back and forth, leading to the creation of new combinations as the self selectively adopts features of the other. Firmly drawn boundaries that separate and distinguish sometimes foment hostility and ignorance, but not always. Whether the result of schism or internal reform or sectarian differentiation, drawing boundaries that highlight distinctions between self and other can facilitate coexistence by recognizing and respecting real difference, without necessarily arousing antagonism. Finally, even though people recognize the significance of religious boundaries, they may choose to transcend them temporarily or permanently, so that their importance fades in the wake of more encompassing, inclusive concerns. It is important to point out that boundaries, whatever the type, not only separate but also bind and bring together what is on each side so that something new arises or something old is reshaped, whether fleetingly or more permanently—​a new community, a new text or ritual, or a new aesthetic style. (Ibid., pp. 11–​12; emphasis added) I use this four-​fold typology here as the framework for an argument that gender was central to the racialization of religion during the British colonial period, which rationalized the domination of Hindus (and people of other religions) by Christians on the basis of fixed characteristics assigned to the bearers of each religion. This is seen with particular clarity when we examine religious conversion, for, in crossing a major fault line in colonial Indian society, converts threatened the stability of a social order organized around firmly drawn lines distinguishing Hindu and Christian. Beginning with the East India Company (EIC) period of British colonial rule, I examine the attractive boundaries that brought European men (who were mostly Christian) into semi-​licit sexual relationships with Indian women (who were from a variety of religious communities, including Hindus). At this time, the attractive boundaries that were thought to animate those relationships were used to heighten the contrast between religions (and the ethnic groups closely identified with them), but often with a positive valence. Looking at the historical data surrounding these relationships suggests that they also gave rise to radical experimentation and innovation in identity construction, indicating that the hard boundaries between communities emphasized in colonial representations of interreligious relationships belied how porous they were in practice. During the second phase of British imperialism, the economic rationale for colonial rule was augmented by one of civilizational “uplift,” leading many to shore up the social boundaries between British and Indian, Christian and Hindu, “white” and “brown.” The racialization of religion emerged very forcefully at this time (Dyer 1997). Fixed attributes were assigned to (white) Christians and (brown) Hindus that justified granting social privileges to the former and denying them to the latter. The social boundaries between white Christians and brown Hindus were so firmly drawn that many felt that those who converted to the religion of the Other ought to transform their whole way of life (Mallampalli 2011; Kent 2015).Thus converts, especially high-​caste converts, occupied an unstable place amid the rigid categories of colonial society. The second case examines one such convert, Pandita Ramabai, whom controversy 244

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followed at every turn. Out of the fierce antagonism between Hindu modernists and Christian missionaries, gender norms arose as a major bone of contention and were used to draw firm boundaries between the two traditions. Pandita Ramabai (née Ramabai Dongre, 1858–​1922), a Brahmin convert to Christianity who achieved worldwide fame on the late nineteenth-​century lecture circuit, embodies the complexity of religious boundary management in the colonial period. In the later stages of her career, she tirelessly sought to transcend the sectarian boundaries that divided Protestants through participation in global ecumenical movements that would eventually give rise to Pentecostalism, even while she maintained firm boundaries between her community of new Christians and the surrounding Hindu milieu.

Gender relations during the Company Raj: attractive and porous boundaries According to our model, attractive boundaries draw together communities or individuals. But, rather than effacing the differences between the two entities, differences are heightened because they add something to the relationship—​an exciting encounter with an exotic other; an alternative way of being, thinking, or acting that provides relief to the individual seeking contact; or a mutually rejuvenating encounter of diverse perspectives. Relationships between lovers of different religious faiths has been (and continues to be) one of the primary arenas for Hindu–​ Christian encounter. One of the first lists of new Christians in India was compiled by the captain of the Portuguese fort in Cochin in 1514 and included the names of more than a hundred women, the wives and concubines of Portuguese men (Neill 2004, p. 118). How did couples within this interreligious and inter-​racial community conduct their religious lives within the home, in their natal families, or the broader community? How did they choose (or who made them choose) what practices, texts, and beliefs to retain or adopt, and which to drop? While we have little information with which to answer these questions about early sixteenth-​century Portuguese Christian communities, we know more about eighteenth-​century Protestant communities formed around British forts, where British soldiers maintained families with Indian women of diverse religious backgrounds. When Christian Britons first arrived on the Indian subcontinent as part of the English EIC (chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I to conduct business in India) they encountered an extremely decentralized political situation. The Mughal Empire had united large swaths of territory but was now in decline. As it disintegrated from 1600 to 1707, regional princes asserted their independence both economically and militarily. Along with the French (under the aegis of another merchant company, Compagnie des Indes l’est) and the Dutch (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), Britons entered the landscape as one more distinct community. Success in trade depended on developing and maintaining local relationships, at which the British excelled. Slowly consolidating its control over territory, the EIC had managed by 1757 to usurp power from the faltering Mughal Empire through canny negotiations with local princes, and edge out its European competitors through its military advantage at sea. During this period, many Englishmen not only learned Persian, Urdu, and other Indian languages to facilitate their collaborations with local power brokers, but also adopted Indian dress, customs, and lifestyle, including establishing relationships with Indian women and starting families. In this context of incredible diversity and shifting alliances, sexual relationships between European men and Indian women—​Hindu and Muslim—​were common. It was prohibitively expensive to bring wives from Europe or maintain the genteel households thought necessary for such women. Most soldiers and merchants only planned to stay in India for a short time, but years could lengthen into decades. Many have observed that the metaphor of sexual conquest 245

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served as an enticement for European men to join the colonial project, equating the “adventure” of seeking their fortune in the colonies with sexual adventures with native women (Said 1994). However, as historical anthropologist Ann Stoler has argued, sexuality served as more than a metaphor; it was materially involved in the construction of racial categories upon which the colonial project rested (1991). While lower and working class soldiers were expected to frequent the prostitutes who resided on the outskirts of the forts defending British goods, wealthy officers established their own households with native women in long-​term, though not often religiously sanctified, relationships (Ballhatchet 1980). Thus, not only were boundaries between colonizer and colonized created through the regulation of sexuality, but also hierarchies among the colonizers were reinforced (Stoler 1991; Kent 2004). Many documents from the period emphasize the “exotic” nature of women in these relationships. They highlighted differences between English men and the Indian women with whom they cohabited as a way to mark the transgressive, but perhaps for that reason exciting, nature of these sexual liaisons. Salacious descriptions of these differences abound in Thomas Williamson’s guide for newly arrived British soldiers and civil servants, the East India Vade-​ Mecum (1810). Williamson writes, Here it may not be out of the way to notice that strange medley of religion, and of interest, some may say of love, which is observable in the conduct of the native women, either residing under the protection of Europeans, or coming under the ordinary description of kusbeen [i.e., prostitutes]. Their rigid adherence to, or, at least, their superficial observance of, whatever relates to the purification of their persons, after contact, is admirable! It is not uncommon, among those professing immense purity, both of body, and of soul, to get up several times during the night, for the purpose of ablution. However ridiculous such a practice may appear, yet we cannot refuse to bestow some commendation on so strict an etiquette: lamenting, at the same time, that so much perseverance should be thrown away. (Williamson 1810, p. 347) Williamson goes on to note with apparent surprise how adherence to such purification rituals does not extend to the children born of these unions. While the mixed-​race children of such couples could freely eat with their mothers without concern for purity maintenance, the Indian mothers strictly regulated bodily contact with the British fathers through caste-​based taboos governing sexual contact and commensality (Ibid., p. 347). It is tempting to conjecture that the varying ways women applied such rules served as their own way of establishing social boundaries between “self ” and “other,” “us” and “them.” For its part, the EIC did not automatically recognize the children born to Indian mothers as “white” or “British” for purposes of inheritance or citizenship in England, though conversion to Christianity was one way to improve the chances of this. Such practices reflect how thoroughly intertwined “race” and “religion” were in drawing the lines between British citizens and Indian subjects. These practices and policies not only shaped lives of families and individuals in profound ways, but they also helped construct the categories of race so essential for empire (Stoler 1991, p. 53). Learning about the lives of such women is a daunting challenge for scholars because the colonial archive so effectively erased their presence. Church records recognize the individuality of mixed-​race children by listing their personal names, but many entries just listed “native woman” for the mother (Ghosh 2006, p. 18). The wills written by European men often obscured the religious differences (along with much else) of their native consorts, referring to them only with

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nicknames or Christian names that concealed their natal origins (Ibid., p. 18). The wills themselves suggest strong emotional bonds and the desire to provide for their families in the absence of legal recognition. And yet, these naming practices—​specifically their failure to note anything about the natal identity of these women—​suggests ambivalence about the “Indianness” of consorts, for inter-​racial and interreligious relationships compromised the ability of colonizers to maintain a clear “white” and Christian dominant class. Fortunately, a few wills written by elite women survive that provide insight into their creative self-​fashioning in complex, religiously pluralistic social worlds. For example, the will of a native woman who identified herself as Elizabeth reveals that she cohabited with numerous European men and had children by them, to whom she gave the fathers’ names. A money lender who died with several men deeply in her debt, the domestic articles she bequeathed included several gold crosses and rosaries indicating her status as a practicing Catholic; shoe buckles and pearl necklaces, suggesting she dressed in European clothes at least some of the time; and also gold jewelry of Indian design, suggesting she dressed in indigenous clothes and jewelry as well (Ibid., p. 138). In extremely diverse ways, the women (and men) who traversed the still somewhat fluid boundaries between European and Indian, Christian and Hindu fashioned selves that combined elements of the many cultures that coexisted in eighteenth-​century India. Because of their status as benefactors, power brokers, and property owners, the lives of a few elite concubines have been recorded in yet more detail. Begum Samru, a dancing girl who became the concubine and eventually widow and heir of Walter Reinhardt, a successful Austrian mercenary, is perhaps the most famous. After Reinhardt’s death she not only inherited the land he had been granted by the Mughal court, but also command of four army battalions (Ibid., p.154). A convert to Catholicism and wealthy patron of lavish Christmas feasts complete with fireworks and “nautchs” (bawdy dance and musical performances), she helped finance the building of a cathedral and donated £2,000 to the Pope in Rome (Ibid., p. 160). Another famous consort and convert was Raja Clarinda (or Rasa Clorinda), a Maratha Brahmin widow who resided with a British army officer, Henry Lyttleton, after her first husband’s death (Kent 2004, pp.  31–​38). She also sought baptism from the famous German Pietist missionary, Christian Friedrich Schwartz, but he refused on account of her unsanctified sexual relationship with Col. Lyttleton (for more on Schwartz, see Arun Jones’s chapter in this volume). After Lyttleton’s death, she inherited his estate near the Palayamkottai fort in southern India, and successfully petitioned Schwartz again for baptism. For the rest of her life, she used her influence and money to bring trained pastors to Palayamkottai and build up the small Christian community. A stone church whose construction she financed in 1783 stands to this day, known as Clarinda’s Church.Though she was arguably one of the principal founders of the famous and influential Tirunelveli Christian community, she was written out of the histories recorded by the first Indian Christian chroniclers because of her background. The early modern period in India was a time of astonishing diversity, with cultures, languages, religion, and polities interacting through relations of trade, war, alliance, and competition. The British entered this world as but one more actor in 1600, but by 1757, they attained political dominance over large swaths of territory. As British ambitions on the subcontinent grew, so did the felt need to establish order. The highly variegated panoply of social forms yielded by relationships between Indian women and European men, which had previously been tacitly permitted, increasingly became the object of scrutiny and shame. The disciplining of sexual relations and their classification—​as licit or illicit, fleeting or enduring, religiously sanctioned or unsanctioned—​helped to create the more rigid social categories that characterized British rule during the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Stoler 1991).

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Colonial era—​drawing and transcending firm boundaries The Sepoy rebellion in 1857 started in Meerut in North India, but its disruptive effects were felt throughout the subcontinent. The violent chaos of the rebellion prompted the transfer of administrative authority over British-​controlled territories from the EIC to the British Parliament. With this, the justification for British imperial presence in India shifted. Under the EIC, the prevailing rationale for British presence was economic: India provided a rich source of raw materials for British industry and lucrative markets for British manufactured goods, and British power was turned toward maintaining law and order so that commerce could continue unabated. In the wake of the violence surrounding the rebellion, however, public opinion shifted in favor of evangelicals who had long argued that the English had a moral duty to uplift the Indian people. This conviction was steeped in the racist theories of the day, which regarded Indians (along with other colonized people around the world) as a degenerate lot. But in contrast to even harsher climatological and evolutionary racist theories of the day, evangelicals differed in seeing Indians’ supposedly backward condition as capable of amelioration through education and, ideally, conversion to Christianity (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). This second phase of colonial rule was a time of heightening tension between Hindus and the small, but growing, Christian communities in India. Gender played a significant role in the polemics that erupted around the British insistence on their cultural superiority. The civilizational project of British rule (which had begun even under the EIC) targeted aspects of Indian culture and society considered especially “barbaric”: widow immolation (sati), child marriage, hook-​swinging, etc. (Hawley 1994; Nandy 1988; Mani 1998; Oddie 1995). Not all of these campaigns had to do with gender, but eventually the reform of Indian gender practices became a significant plank in the rhetorical platform for British imperialism. Gender norms surrounding everything from women’s education to the treatment of widows became used as an index of the relative cultural and racial superiority of the British over Indians, and their diametrical difference. While campaigns and legislation surrounding these issues were supported by diverse arguments, Christian missionaries vociferously contended that the main driver of civilizational “evolution” was religion. They regarded Hinduism as morally corrupting superstition responsible for the degeneracy of Indians, while Christianity, with its supposedly softening and ennobling qualities, was credited with the moral superiority and refinement of Britons. In this way, the racialization of religion—​specifically, religion’s shaping of gender norms—​was used to explain and justify the political domination of Indians by the British. But Indians were not just passive objects of this ideology. Nineteenth-​century colonial India saw the emergence of a lively public print culture that combined the prose styles of regional languages with the print technology and rhetorical techniques of Protestant missions. In reaction to missionary rhetoric and the legislative campaigns they fueled, many of the issues most vociferously debated in this emerging public sphere were related to gender norms and the proper functioning of the Hindu family.The home became the realm that colonized men could exercise complete authority over, standing in for their wounded sovereignty and thus fiercely defended. To cite historian Tanika Sarkar: If an alien, imposed modernity was represented as a series of deprivations…then nationalism could situate its emancipatory project only by enclosing a space that was still understood as inviolate, autonomous. Much of nineteenth century nationalism understood this space as the “Hindu way of life”…While liberal reformers described [Hindu domestic practices and customs] as a distortion of earlier purity and a major

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symptom of present decay, Hindu nationalists celebrated them as an excess reserved over and above colonization, any change in which would signify the surrender of the last bastion of freedom…Colonisation had made it imperative to introduce an absolute distinction between Self and Other. (Sarkar 2001, p. 36) Amplified by the rhetoric of heated pamphlet wars, nineteenth-​century polemics drew firm boundaries between Hindu and Christian, Indian and British, casting each as an implacable rival of the other. The public career of Pandita Ramabai (née Ramabai Dongre [1858–​1922]) took shape in this context. While the chapter by Arun Jones in this volume examines the significance of Ramabai in the context of Christian missionary–​Hindu encounters, here I focus on what her life and work reveal about how gender intersects with race and religion in the construction of boundaries between Hindus and Christians, as well as between Indians and Britons. Ramabai’s indomitable resilience carried her through four distinct “lives”—​peripatetic Brahmin pilgrim, progressive Hindu advocate for women’s education, embattled Christian convert, and leader of a multifaceted, non-​sectarian Christian institution fostering self-​reliance for impoverished women. Like Raja Clarinda she was long under-​recognized by nationalist historians of modern India; the racialization of religion still operative even to the present day in India made her loyalties to the nation suspect as a Christian convert. On the other hand, she has been lionized by historians of Indian Christianity. But because she conducted most of her work outside the institutional structures of Protestant denominations, she has been difficult to locate in that history. Ramabai was born into a pious but eccentric Chitpavan Brahmin family from Maharashtra. Contrary to the gender norms of the day, she was educated in Sanskrit by her mother, who had been taught as a bride by Ramabai’s father. As a child she traveled the length and breadth of India visiting pilgrimage sites, where the family earned alms by reciting the Puranas (Kosambi 2016, p. 265). However, a series of losses—​first her parents to starvation, and then her older brother to cholera—​left her in a precarious position as a single, unprotected woman. Having become active in progressive Hindu circles with her brother, in 1880 she married a young non-​ Brahmin man, Bapu Bepin Behari Das Medhavi, a Brahmo Samaji and attorney (Ibid., p. 17). Medhavi tragically died within two years of their marriage, leaving her a sonless widow with an infant daughter, Manorama. Ramabai’s advocacy of women’s education, combined with her Sanskrit literacy and powerful public speaking skills, attracted the attention of Maharashtrian Hindu reformer, M.G. Ranade, and she moved with Manorama from Bengal to Maharashtra. There she achieved modest fame as lecturer, author, and founder of the Arya Mahila Samaj, one of the first women’s organizations in India (Ibid., p. 28). Hindu reformers celebrated her as an eloquent speaker who could articulate what was needed to transform women constrained by traditional Brahminical mores into the educated but modest and patriotic ideal women they envisioned. In Maharashtra she also became acquainted with Christian advocates of women’s education, most notably Sister Geraldine, an Anglican nun with the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV). With the help of new social connections and the proceeds from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), Ramabai traveled to England to pursue a medical education, a rare accomplishment for women at the time. While living with the sisters of the CSMV in Wantage, she embraced Christianity and was baptized on September 29, 1883. This created a huge sensation both in England and India. While the late nineteenth century saw the conversion of thousands of socially marginalized Hindus, often in groups connected by family

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or village, the conversion of high-​caste individuals was rare. Conceived as much more than the mere exchange of one set of beliefs for another, popular opinion and colonial laws alike expected that religious conversion, especially for high-​caste converts, entail a dramatic lifestyle change such that British customs, clothes, and food habits were considered part of the package as well (Mallampalli 2011; Kent 2015). Ramabai vividly described the “bizarre” appearance of elite Indian Christians, whom she first encountered in the 1870s while roaming the continent with her brother: Here [in Calcutta] my brother and I  were once invited to attend a Christian gathering…There were chairs and sofas, tables, lamps—​all very new to us. Indian people curiously dressed like English men and women, some men like the Rev. K.M. Banerji and Kali Charan Banerji, whose names sounded like those of Brahmans but whose way of dressing showed that they had become “Sahibs,” were great curiosities. They ate bread and biscuit and drank tea with the English people and shocked us by asking us to partake of the refreshment. We thought the last age, Kali Yuga, that is, the age of quarrels, darkness, and irreligion, had fully established its reign in Calcutta… After a little while one of them opened a book and read something out of it and then they knelt down before their chairs and some said something with closed eyes. We were told that was the way they prayed to God. We did not see any image to which they paid their homage but it seemed as though they were paying homage to the chairs before which they knelt. Such was the crude idea of Christian worship which impressed itself on my mind. (Kosambi 2016, p. 268) As Ramabai’s shocked description suggests, the colonial-​era racialization of religion went both ways, with Hindus also erecting such firm boundaries between Hinduism and Christianity that converting to Christianity constituted transgression of the first order, entailing near transformation into a different species of person. Central to establishing what distinguished the two orders of being were gender norms. The controversy surrounding Ramabai’s conversion illustrates how important gender issues were to the agenda of both Christian missionaries and Hindu reformers such that she became a kind of “prize” in the contest between the two sides, possession of which would constitute a vindication of their position. Ramabai had been a fierce critic of Brahminical patriarchy long before she converted to Christianity. This critique was acceptable, even celebrated, in progressive Hindu circles so long as it was framed by the discourse of reform. But when she appeared to “switch sides” in the heated polemical battle between modernist Hindus and Christian missionaries, becoming “Mary Rama” rather than “Pandita Ramabai,” she was treated as a kind of race traitor (Ibid., p. 96). Leaders of the CSMV sought to groom her as a persuasive ally in their campaign to “civilize” Indians. But, like so many participants in the colonial civilizational project, they exhibited a curious ambivalence toward converts, fueled—​I argue—​by the racialization of religion.While they actively sought the conversion of Indians to Christianity, they were rarely satisfied with the extent, depth, or genuineness of that conversion. In the gap between how English Anglicans embodied Christianity, and how Indian converts did so, enormous pressure was exerted on the latter to conform to what the former assumed to be theologically correct, socially respectable, and culturally superior. For example, hailing Ramabai’s potential impact on the evangelization of India, Rev. Canon William Butler, vicar at Wantage and founder of the CSMV, wrapped his praise in typical colonialist condescension: “I think that Mary Ramabai’s knowledge of Indian 250

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ways, etc. will give her a power of influence which no English woman can have. All that she needs is an English development of her Indian brains” (Shah 1977, p. 45). When Ramabai’s deafness (a result of earlier hardship in her life) made a medical career unviable, she was sent for a broad education to the Ladies College in Cheltenham, whose principal was Dorothea Beale, a pioneer in women’s education in England. Here it became clear that Ramabai and her “Indian brains” were quite alert to the patronizing efforts of her spiritual mentors who insisted she hew the path they had envisioned for her. The power struggles between Ramabai and Sister Geraldine of the CSMV are well documented in their voluminous correspondence. There were protracted exchanges over theology, as Gauri Viswanathan has examined in depth (Viswanathan 1998, pp. 118–​52). Ramabai’s rationalism and intellectual independence did not permit her to accept the Anglican doctrine of the Trinity, along with several other teachings, which Geraldine called “divine mysteries” and Ramabai called “absurdities.” Relatedly, they fought about whether Methodists should be excluded from the Christian community as heretics and denied communion. They also quarreled over what scholars would now call Ramabai’s enculturation of Christianity, which Geraldine judged as “little clingings to caste prejudice” (Shah 1977, pp. 100–​101). Ramabai maintained the vegetarianism of her Brahmin roots, which created boundaries between herself and her British hosts at every meal, much to Geraldine’s annoyance (Ibid., pp. 100–​101, 153). They also debated whether Ramabai had to wear a crucifix and, if so, whether it should be inscribed in Sanskrit or only in Latin. “Do you think that [the] Latin language has something better in it than our old Sanskrit,” Ramabai wrote, “Or have you the same feeling for the Latin as the Brahmins have for the Sanskrit (i.e. to think it to be the Sacred Language and spoken by God and Angels)?” (Ibid., p. 28). Charging her Anglican mentors with attachment to ritual forms as fervid as that of the Brahmin priests of the religion she’d left behind, she not only exposes their hypocrisy, but also her sensitivity to how ritual forms create social divisions. However, the subject which aroused the most heated exchanges between Ramabai and her English mentors was whether Ramabai could teach Sanskrit to male college students during her stay at Cheltenham. Touched off by someone reading an advertisement of Ramabai’s services in a local newspaper, the controversy inspired not only Sister Geraldine herself, but three Bishops and the Rev. Canon Butler to weigh in on the potential “scandal.”The colonial ambivalence toward converts surfaced full force in their concern that Ramabai’s teaching of male college students would arouse her “pride,” vitiating her future usefulness in India. The repeated accusations of “pride” in these letters encode the ecclesiastical elites’ fears that, having deliberately crossed the boundaries constructed between Hindu and Christian, converts would assume they were “like us,” which threatened the English Anglicans’ sense of superiority. Such anxieties were resolved by insisting on the incomplete, insufficient nature of Indians’ conversion. Therefore, the prospect of Ramabai as an Indian woman teaching British men (even though “mere boys”) challenged not only the gender hierarchy that subjected women to men, but also the racial hierarchy which put Indians in the role of perpetual pupils. At stake in the controversy was the question, Who more accurately and fully understood the gender norms of India? Sister Geraldine and the bishops worried that if Ramabai’s countrymen came to find out she had been in close quarters with men, her sexual honor would be questioned, ruining her as a credible and respectable exemplar of Christianity. Ramabai rebuked the bishops and Sister Geraldine for their lack of trust in her personally. She also called out the colonialist epistemological arrogance that led these old “India hands” to presume to know more about Indian customs and gender norms than Ramabai herself. Geraldine’s plea that Ramabai “accept the opinion of those who from their knowledge of India and its people are far better judges than ourselves in the matter” was, wrote Ramabai, “plainly saying no less than that the 251

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people who are not of that country know India and its people far better than I do, who am born and brought up in it” (Ibid., p. 50). Ramabai countered with a very different portrayal of gender relations in India. Marathi women, like herself, move freely, she contended. Moreover, in India she had addressed crowds of men, and instructed young men, with no ill effect on her reputation (Ibid., p. 60). But most significantly, and remarkably given that she was virtually penniless and alone in England, she challenged the very basis of their assertion of control over her: that she should submit to their guidance as a convert, a woman, and an Indian. She wrote, I have a conscience, and mind and a judgment of my own; I must always think and do everything which GOD has given me the power of doing…I have just with great effort freed myself from the yoke of the Indian priestly tribe, so I am not at present willing to place myself under another similar yoke by accepting everything which comes from the priests as authorized command of the Most High. (Ibid., p. 59) Interestingly, though Ramabai directly asked Sister Geraldine, “Can you or your friends prove that giving lessons to boys is a wrong thing?” no parties in the exchange ever raised the Pauline interdictions against women teaching men (1 Cor. 14:  33–​35, 1 Tim. 2:11; Ibid., p.  59). It seems impossible that the parties to this conversation were unaware of how much the struggle in the West over women’s education, and women’s rights more generally, had to contend with Christianity’s own legacy of misogyny. One discerns here the power of white dominance to make itself invisible, while all attention focuses on Hindu gender norms (Dyer 1997). Moreover, it was Ramabai who advanced a Biblical argument in support of her right to teach men and boys. As Beale summarized, “In Christ she had learned that there was perfect liberty, and though there was necessarily a church order and subordination, yet in the Spirit, there was in Christ neither male nor female” (Shah 1977, pp. 48–​49). Ramabai ultimately relented on the question of accepting male students, but she soon countered by taking control of the Sisters’ education of her daughter. Rejecting all attempts to inculcate the doctrines of Anglicanism in Manorama, Ramabai went to the extent of marking up her daughter’s prayer books, indicating what she could and could not be taught (Ibid., pp. 85–​87), again to Sister Geraldine’s outraged annoyance. In 1885, Ramabai found an escape from the tension, when she accepted an invitation to the US from Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of Ramabai’s cousin, Anandibai Joshi, one of the first Indian women to receive medical training (Kosambi 2016, p. 121). With Bodley’s support, Ramabai launched a continent-​wide speaking tour, which catapulted her into the very public eye from which the Anglicans had tried so hard to shield her. Within months, she had formed her own non-​ sectarian association, the Ramabai Association, with dozens of membership circles around the country to raise support for the project she had long dreamed of: a non-​sectarian school for high-​caste Hindu widows. She condensed her lectures from this period into her most influential book, The High-​Caste Hindu Woman (1887), which sold 10,000 copies within a year (Shah 1977, p. xx). In all this, Ramabai capitalized on the existence of yet another public created by print media, this one global in reach. The success of Ramabai’s lecture tour and The High-​Caste Hindu Woman (1887) was bolstered by circulating among texts within the well-​established genre of tracts and books excoriating Hindu gender norms and laying blame for the racial degeneracy of Indians on the treatment of Indian women. Since the 1840s, zenana women’s missionary societies had been stressing the imperative of “rescuing” Indian women and girls from their “slavish” devotion to superstition and the narrowness of their worldview because 252

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of being kept in purdah (Kent 2004, pp. 81–​123). In this discourse, the child widow served as a condensed symbol of the “monstrous” abuse of women sanctioned by Hinduism: the cruel mistreatment, the forced drudgery, the sapping of life-​force from the faces of children blamed for the deaths of husbands sometimes decades older. Surrounding the figure of the child widow was also the specter of her vulnerability to “ruin,” a veiled reference to sexual abuse. All this is found in The High-​Caste Hindu Woman as well, but the critique carried additional weight coming from the pen of a woman who occupied exactly this victim category. Over the course of two years of nonstop travel, Ramabai and her associates raised 60,000 rupees to start the school, along with a pledge from donors for Rs. 15,000 a year for ten years to sustain it (Shah, 1977, p. xxi). She returned to India in triumph in 1889, and immediately began scouting locations for her school, the Sharada Sadan (literally, “Home of the Goddess of Learning [Saraswati]”; Ibid., p. 184). Synthesizing both the modern Hindu and the missionary critique of Brahminical gender norms, Ramabai drew Board members from Hindu progressives in India and diverse Protestant progressives in the US. Sharada Sadan served primarily Brahmin families “burdened” with child widows, who entrusted their daughters to the school with the understanding that, unlike schools run by Christian missionary associations, the Sadan would allow girls to maintain ritual purity and would not attempt to convert them. Ramabai did not directly instruct the residents in Christianity, but she neither hid her own convictions nor prevented her pupils from converting. After several girls sought baptism, and several Hindu progressives resigned from the Board in protest (including M.G. Ranade, one of her earliest supporters), Ramabai moved the school to Kedgaon in 1898, 100 kilometers from the cosmopolitan center of Pune. In Kedgaon, supported by her international network of donors and a steady stream of American women assistants, Ramabai built a more openly Christian, but non-​sectarian institution that educated women of diverse castes in both practical and academic subjects. Like Amy Carmichael’s Dohnavur Fellowship and Eva M. Swift’s Lucy Perry Noble Bible Institute for Women in South India, Ramabai’s institution served vulnerable single women (abandoned wives, child widows, women rendered unmarriageable due to disability, etc.; Kent 2004, pp. 102–​120). This utopian women-​only space, now called the Mukti (“liberation”) Mission, was, however, different in two ways. First was its commitment to transcending the intra-​Christian sectarian antagonism that fueled Sister Geraldine’s suspicion of Methodists, Unitarians, Baptists, and so on. Second was that it was led by an Indian woman. By remaining the school’s charismatic leader and figurehead, Ramabai inverted the racist hierarchy that excluded Indians from leadership roles, keeping them in roles of dependent studenthood. Famine struck the region in 1897, as it did regularly in regions across India in the nineteenth century, and over the next three years, hundreds of traumatized survivors took refuge at her mission. Once again, Ramabai discerned the vulnerability of women to sexual predation in a context of social disorder and extreme hardship. Her heartbreaking accounts of the famine described not only the emaciated corpses of humans and animals lying in the open, but also the sexual slavery that girls were forced into, sometimes with the tacit approval of British agents tasked with overseeing famine relief efforts (Kosambi 2016, pp.  217–​30, 232). By 1900, the Mukti Mission housed 2,000 residents, mostly impoverished low-​caste women, in whom the mission sought to foster self-​sufficiency through education and vocational training (Kosambi 1992, p. WS65). The residents cooked, cleaned and laundered for themselves while receiving both formal education and vocational training in “teaching, nursing, tailoring, embroidery, weaving, horticulture, carpentry, masonry, and even running a printing press” (Ibid.). Among the most remarkable elements of Ramabai’s extraordinary life, in which one sees so clearly her drive to transcend the social boundaries that structured colonial Indian society and 253

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Western Christendom, was her role in the origins of Pentecostalism. As reported by Ramabai’s American assistant, Minnie Abrams (a veteran woman missionary with deep roots in the Holiness movement), in June 1905, ten months before the Azusa Street revival, a matron came upon a dormitory of girls weeping, praying, and confessing their sins, while one girl in their midst testified that she had been awoken from her sleep by the powerful sensation of being bathed in fire (McGee 1999a, p. 515). Several months earlier, there had been a revival in northern India, itself sparked by a revival in Wales. Sensing cosmic changes afoot, Ramabai had sent Abrams and Manorama to Australia to investigate a revival happening there (Ibid., p. 517). Participants experienced these revivals as spontaneous outpourings of the Holy Spirit that signified the imminent advent of a new era in fulfillment of Biblical prophecies. Historians, however, discern the influence of a worldwide network comprised of conferences, print media, and people on the move that amplified millennial expectations and made possible the creation of a rapidly growing new variety of Christianity, Pentecostalism, which brought together Protestants across the sectarian boundaries that divided nineteenth-​century Protestants (Bergunder 2008, p. 11). With its roots in the nineteenth-​century American Holiness movement, Pentecostalism’s signature feature is its insistence on the direct experience of God in ecstatic states manifested in various forms of charismata (speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, etc.). This emphasis has had several ramifications. It not only empowered local Christians as authoritative leaders (rather than perpetual pupils in colonial Christian ecclesiastical hierarchies), it also facilitated the integration of Christianity into local contexts by endorsing the reality of local deities and traditions of spirit possession even if inverting their value (Meyer 1998). Thus, recognition of the outpouring of spiritual fire on the girls in the Mukti Mission dormitory as a descent of the Holy Spirit (and not a hallucination or heathenish superstition) signified the confounding of many of the lines dividing Hindu and Christian, brown and white, saved and heathen. Thanks to Pandita Ramabai’s wide circle of supporters, and Abrams’s tireless publicity, the Mukti Mission emerged as a new “center” of revivalistic fervor within the “vast and vague international network” of early Pentecostalism, receiving visits from missionaries of diverse denominations from all over the world, who traveled onwards, carrying the form of Pentecostal ecstatic worship to new places (Bergunder 2008, p. 11). Famously, Willis Hoover, a Holiness-​ influenced Methodist missionary, inspired by his experiences at Kedgaon, went on to found the first independent Pentecostal church in Latin America (Case 2006, p. 130–​31), where the growth of Pentecostalism has been nothing less than explosive. Much has been made of Ramabai’s defense of the revival which Ramabai articulated with her characteristically biting anti-​colonial wit. To detractors who charged that the girls’ ecstatic states amounted to “indecencies” committed by “hysterical women,” Ramabai replied, Why should not the Holy Spirit have liberty to work among Indian Christian people, as He has among Christians of other countries? And why should everything that does not reach the high standard of English and American civilization, be taken as coming from the devil? (Anderson 2006, p. 42) And yet, even in the comparatively more egalitarian and inclusive proto-​Pentecostal circles within which Ramabai and Abrams circulated, they had to conform to the ritual forms gaining recognition as genuine evidence of the Holy Spirit as opposed to heathenish superstition or diabolical subterfuge. In 1905, when the events in the Mukti dormitory first were witnessed, many Christian observers felt that the fire baptism fell short of the Pentecost described in the book of Acts; others denied its validity with the charge that it was “sensuous and superstitious…pure 254

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heathenism in Christian dress” (cited in McGee 1999a, p. 518). When Abrams and Ramabai read news about the Azusa Street revival in the pages of Apostolic Faith, one of the most influential newsletters advancing and giving shape to the emerging movement, they humbly acknowledged that “the deeper fullness of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost accompanied by the gift of tongues…had not yet been received” at Mukti, and they encouraged congregants to “tarry” (Anderson 2006, p. 41). Before long, the gift of tongues descended on the Mukti Mission as well. Bergunder’s definition of Pentecostalism as a network more than a “creed, an institution, or a place” is certainly apt, but the episode additionally reveals that influence did not and does not flow equally along this network. Specifically, the girls’ experience of the Holy Spirit as a bath of fire—​though in Minnie Abram’s perspective an adequate interpretation of the descent of fire described in Acts 2—​was not ever confirmed as a genuine outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Rather, the revival was only widely acknowledged when it took the form as recognized by white Pentecostals: speaking in tongues. Nonetheless, the Mukti Mission attained worldwide fame, and continued to attract donors and volunteers for decades, even after the death of Ramabai in 1922.

Conclusion Dara Shikoh’s metaphor comparing religious boundaries to lines on the surface of water captures their ephemerality and asserts their illusory quality against a vision of human oneness, for however many ripples flow across a pond, the body of water itself is one. What it fails to capture, however, are the power dynamics—​sometimes playful, sometimes bitterly fierce—​that shape what happens at the interface of encounter. As this exploration of Hindu–​Christian encounter in colonial India demonstrates, whether attractive or porous, firmly drawn or transcended, religious boundaries themselves not only serve efforts to subordinate others (and resist such subordination), they intersect with other kinds of socially constructed divisions, especially divisions of race and gender. As is clear in the sexualization of the “exotic” Hindu concubine in the eighteenth century and the fierce polemics between modern Hindus and Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth, perceptions of how others’ religious differences shape gender norms were mobilized to reinforce a sense of racial superiority among white Britishers. And, as my analysis of the several distinct phases of Pandita Ramabai’s life suggests, such efforts to create a securely bounded, and superior, community identity in a world of irreducible difference often produces rebels like Ramabai, whose striving for a deeper experience of religious truth led her to bridge or even transcend so many of the boundaries that constructed the racial, gender, and religious hierarchies of her day.

Bibliography Anderson, A. 2006. “Pandita Ramabai:  The Mukti Revival and Global Pentecostalism.” Transformation 23(1): 37–​48. Ballhatchet, K. 1980. Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–​ 1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bergunder, M. 2008. The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Case, J.R. 2006. “And Ever the Twain Shall Meet:  The Holiness Missionary Movement and the Birth of World Pentecostalism, 1870–​ 1920.” Religion and American Culture:  A Journal of Interpretation 16(2): 125–​60. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Eliza F. Kent Dempsey, C.G. 2004. Kerala Christian Sainthood:  Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India. New York: Oxford University Press. Dyer, R. 1997. White: Essay on Race and Culture. London and New York: Routledge Press. Frykenberg, R.E. 2008. Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, D. 2006. Sex and the Family in Colonial India:  The Making of Empire. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Hawley, J.S. (ed.). 1994. Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press. Kent, E.F. 2004. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New York: Oxford University Press. —​ —​ —​ . 2015. “Civilization and Conjugality:  Indian Christian Marriage in Law and Literature.” In Ramberg, L. and Basu, S. (eds.). Conjugality and Beyond: Sexual Economies, Citizenship and the Marital Form in India. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Kent, E.F. and Kassam, T.R. (eds.). 2013. Lines in Water:  Religious Boundaries in South Asia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Kosambi, M. 1992. “Indian Response to Christianity, Church and Colonialism:  The Case of Pandita Ramabai.” Economic and Political Weekly 27(43):WS61–​WS71. —​—​—​. 2016. Pandita Ramabai: Life and Landmark Writings. New York: Routledge. Mallampalli, C. 2011. Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India:  Trials of an Interracial Family. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Mani, L. 1998. Contentious Traditions:  The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley:  University of California Press. Masuzawa, T. 2005. Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGee, G.B. 1999a. “‘Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire!’ The Mission Legacy of Minnie Abrams.” Missiology: An International Review 27(4): 515–​22. —​—​—​. 1999b. “‘Latter Rain’ Falling in the East: Early-​Twentieth-​Century Pentecostalism in India and the Debate over Speaking in Tongues.” Church History 68(3): 648–​65. Meyer, B. 1998. “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’:  Memory and Post-​colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28(3): 316–​49. Nandy, A. 1988. “Sati in Kaliyuga.” Economic and Political Weekly 23(38): 1976. Neill, S. 2004. A History of Christianity in India: 1707–​1858. New York: Cambridge University Press. Oddie, G.A. 1995. Popular Religion, Elites, and Reforms: Hook-​Swinging and its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800–​1894. New Delhi: Manohar. Ramabai Sarasvati, P. 1887. The High-​Caste Hindu Woman. Philadelphia, PA: Jas. B. Rodgers Printing Co. Sahoo, S. 2018. Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, E.W. 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sarkar,T. 2001. Hindu wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shah, A.B. 1977. The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai:  Compiled by Sister Geraldine. Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture. Smith, W.C. 1959. “Comparative Religion: Whither—​and Why?” In Eliade, M. and Kitagawa, J.M. (eds.). History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 31–​58. Stoler, A.L. 1991. “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia.” In Leonardo, M.d. (ed.). Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 51–​101. Viswanathan, G. 1998. Outside the Fold:  Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Williamson, T. 1810. The East India Vade-​Mecum,Vol. 1, or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for Military, or Naval Service of the East India Company. London: Black, Perry and Kingsbury.

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21 RITUAL AND RITUALIZATION IN HINDU–​C HRISTIAN RELATIONS Reid B. Locklin

According to a widely circulated report, some time after their first arrival in India in 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and several members of his crew had occasion to visit a Hindu temple. Da Gama offered reverence at the temple, the story relates, not because he was especially open-​minded, but because he mistook it for a church belonging to a lost tradition of Christianity. In the years that followed, the colonial powers of Goa would endeavor mightily to correct this mistake, enacting a severe iconoclastic program of mūrti suppression while also, at the very same time, replicating local patterns of Hindu ritual life in new forms of Catholic devotion (Henn 2014). For these European Christians, as well as their South Asian Hindu, Muslim, and Eastern Christian interlocutors, ritual performance emerged as a significant arena of recognition, conflict, and creative engagement. This single episode of Hindu–​Christian encounter can be read as symbolic of a broader theme in the history of these traditions’ ongoing relation. From the distinctive architecture of ancient churches of the Thomas traditions of Kerala to new forms of pūjā devotional worship pioneered by leaders of the Christian ashram movement (on which, see the chapter by Amaladoss in this volume), the negotiation of Christian identity in South Asia has often taken a ritual idiom (Menachery 2010; Collins 2007). Such adaptations have sometimes been warmly accepted; at other times, they have become the object of sharp critique from one, both, or multiple sides of the relationship (Raj 2000). They have also nearly always been accompanied by theological arguments—​arguments about the place and role of worship in religious life, arguments about the value of the Hindu or Christian religious other. As with Vasco da Gama and the colonial powers that would follow in his wake, the ritual lives of particular Hindu and Christian communities have functioned both to define boundaries and to cross them.The negotiation of ritual theology and performance thus emerges as an important element of a broader negotiation of religious and social identities (Robinson 2003). In his study of South Asian Christianity, the Anglican theologian Paul Collins includes under the “ritual” rubric those explicitly Christian forms of liturgical worship that come into dialogue with Hindu parallels, including religious processions, consecration of sacred spaces with a camphor lamp (ārti), and above all the celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the blessing and distribution of Eucharistic bread and wine (Collins 2007, pp. 137–​65). In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, by contrast, the theorist Catherine Bell has recommended a broader approach to ritual,

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one that extends its scope to a range of activities characterized by what she calls their “ritualization” or “privileged differentiation” relative to their cultural contexts (Bell 1992, pp. 88–​93; see also, Bell 1997, pp. 81–​82). What renders any particular activity as ritualized, according to her interpretation, is not reducible to questions of formality, repetition, or theological valorization, though any of these may have a role to play. Instead, more basically, ritualization refers to a practice’s capacity “to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities” (Bell 1992, p. 74). Ritualized practice can be as formal as a high Latin Mass, as informal and spontaneous as a Quaker meeting, or as apparently secular as a boxing match, so long as it sets itself clearly apart from other, more ordinary ways of acting in that social context (see Bell 1997, pp. 138–​69). Informed in part by Bell’s account, in this chapter I  explore ritual and ritualization as a theme of Hindu–​Christian relations in three different respects:  ritual as a rich source of conceptual material for negotiating the relationship between Hinduism and Christianity as theological traditions; ritual as an embodied means of cultivating dialogue and relationship among actual Hindus and Christian devotees in India; and ritual as a fruitful metaphor for understanding the scholarly discipline of Hindu–​Christian Studies in the contemporary North American academy. Due to the nature of the subject area and my own limited expertise, the cases I have selected to illustrate each of these themes tend to highlight the mutual relation of Catholic Christianity and Sanskritic Hinduism. Catholicism is not the only Christian tradition with a special focus on ritual practice (e.g., Moore-​Keish 2008), nor are Christian attempts to engage with Sanskritic Hindu ritual forms beyond critique, particularly from the perspective of Dalit liberation theology in India (e.g., Clarke 1998; Sherinian 2014). Nevertheless, I am hopeful that an examination of this particular relationship will provide a useful window and entry point for considering ritualized practice as a site of negotiation for Hindu–​Christian relations more widely.

Ritual material: Hindu and Christian theologies of sacrifice Thoughtful Hindus and Christians have reflected theologically on ritual in the context of their ongoing relationship, both in India and in the West. Such reflection invariably, at least to some extent, serves apologetic purposes, recasting the religious other in terms of the home tradition. Yet, not a few scholars have also identified particular ritual forms, and their attendant theologies, as fruitful sites for mutual learning and authentic enrichment. The question of ritual sacrifice has attracted special attention, particularly the ostensibly bloodless sacrifices enacted in the Christian Eucharistic liturgy and Vedic yajña, respectively (Denny 2013). One striking example is Ravi Ravindra, an Indian physicist and comparativist whose teaching career brought him to eastern Canada. In his work The Yoga of the Christ, Ravindra offers a Hindu re-​reading of the Christian Gospel of John. Specifically, he self-​consciously attempts to move beyond a “fixed, externalistic notion of what Christianity is” to a deeper, philosophical interpretation of the tradition (Ravindra 1992, p. 7). This interpretation is highly spiritualized, even by the standard of the so-​called “spiritual gospel” of John, and it is informed by frequent cross-​references to passages and themes drawn from classical Hindu sources, particularly the Bhagavad-​Gītā and the Yoga-​sūtras of Patañjali. Nowhere is Ravindra’s pattern of spiritualization more evident than in his approach to Jesus as a “paschal” or Passover sacrifice for liberation from bondage, a central theme of most Eucharistic theology. In explaining Jesus’ status as the “Lamb of God,” for example, he draws a contrast between “lambs of nature” preoccupied with “physical freedom from bondage” and those “lambs of God” who see “spiritual freedom from sin” (Ibid., p. 23). With regard to the 258

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teaching in John 6 that one must eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood, Ravindra clarifies that the body under consideration is not a “gross physical body” but a “subtle body”—​a “more subtle” materiality, in accordance with yogic anthropology and contemporary physics—​that ignites and animates the spiritual life of the devotee through a transfer of energies (Ibid., pp. 78–​ 81). So too the crucifixion of Jesus is read as a symbolic enactment of a universal, existential pattern already at work in the wider cosmos (Ibid., pp. 151–​52, 209–​14). As Ravindra writes in another place: The Christian notion that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself in order to take away the sins of the world is of fundamental importance. This needs to be understood in its cosmological sense in which sacrifice is continually needed in order to maintain the cosmos.The preservation and maintenance of ṛta (cosmological order) depends on the proper relation between earth and heaven. This proper relation is based entirely on yajña…Yajña is the central thread binding together human souls with the souls of the gods for everywhere and in everything “the all pervading Brahman is ever established in yajña” (Bhagavad Gīta 3:15). (Ravindra 2005, pp. 97–​98) Ravindra speaks the language of ritual sacrifice here, but it is obviously highly abstracted. One is hard pressed to find references to the literal, embodied performance of Eucharist, pūjā, or even yogic discipline. Instead, Ravindra appeals to the lived, self-​sacrificial commitment to love and spiritual contemplation, to which Christ’s cross, on this reading, bears profound witness. The influential Indian-​Spanish priest and interreligious philosopher Raimon Panikkar has similarly identified “sacrifice” (yajña) as “the quintessence of the Vedic revelation” and, at least arguably, the essential character of all reality (Panikkar 1977b, p. 347). He suggests in his extraordinary study, The Vedic Experience, that we view ritual sacrifice as a repeated, symbolic enactment of the “texture of the universe” (Ibid., p. 348). In what does this texture consist? It is, in one of Panikkar’s oft-​repeated formulas, a “cosmotheandric communion” of world, God, and humanity, richly symbolized in the Ṛg-​Veda’s Puruṣa Sūkta as the dismemberment and re-​constitution of the Cosmic Man (Ibid., pp. 72–​77; see also, Erik Ranstrom’s essay in this volume). In an essay published in a Catholic journal, moreover, Panikkar applies the same rubric of cosmotheandric experience to Christian ritual, and he makes the connection to the Vedas explicit (Pannikar 1977a, p. 17). Panikkar’s fellow Indian priests, Jose Thachil and Louis Malieckal, have further developed this point of comparison, drawing Vedic theologies of sacrifice into conversation with modern ritual theory, the mystical theology of Pseudo-​Dionysius, and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church (Thachil 1985, 1989; Malieckal 1989a, 1989b). Both theologians agree that sacrifice as such is fundamental to Hindu and Christian traditions, and both conclude from their comparative studies that ritual performance should ideally lead to interiorization and expression across all activities of life. “Thus,” Thachil writes, “the sacrifice one offers in the Church or yajñaśālā, has to inspire a believer to live a sacrificial life in the world” (Thachil 1989, p. 340). For Ravindra, Panikkar, Malieckal, and Thachil, to greater or lesser extents, ritual sacrifice provides a symbolic, conceptual bridge between Hinduism and Christianity, a bridge that takes shape in particular religious rites from each tradition but ultimately refers beyond such rites to the deeper, ontological constitution of the created world. Others seek this bridge through engagement of the particular and at the level of performance. In one of his early essays, for example, the Jesuit comparativist Francis X. Clooney, SJ (1985) traces successive layers of classical Mīmāṃsā ritual theory, broadly understood to include both the Pūrva or early Mīmāṃsā 259

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of Jaimini (c. 200 BCE) and the later, devotional Uttara Mīmāṃsā of the Vedāntins Rāmānuja (1017–​1137 CE) and Vedānta Deśika (1268–​1369 CE). Such close engagement, he suggests, provides new resources for articulating a “non-​covenantal” theology of Christian Eucharist, one rooted in “the full acceptance by Jesus of the human place in the sacrificial world” (Clooney 1985, p. 379). Paul B. Courtright’s essay,“Looking at Eucharist through the Lens of Pūjā” attends not only to theory but also to actual, embodied practice. Drawing together rich descriptions of a major annual pūjā celebration dedicated to the god Ganeśa and a performance of Easter liturgy in the Anglican tradition, Courtright models a “modest” approach to comparison, seeking a “more nuanced” understanding of Christian practice and “pursuing what appears to be family resemblance across areas of difference” without seeking a general theory of ritual (Courtright 1998, pp. 425–​26). Courtright’s modest approach to comparison—​though non-​confessional in its interpretive perspective—​closely resembles Clooney’s practice of contemporary comparative theology, especially in its resistance to “field theories of religion” (Ibid., p.  425; see also Hahnenberg 2000; McLaughlin 2005; and Locklin and Nicholson 2010). Somewhere between the broad, metaphysical visions of Ravindra and Panikkar and the close, studiously non-​committal attention to detail modeled by Courtright stand several studies that look to the practice of ritual sacrifice as a resource for thinking more broadly about Hindu and Christian theologies of sacrifice and for inspiring ethical commitment. In what may be the most extensive comparative study of yajña and Eucharist in English, tellingly entitled Sacrifice and Cosmos, George Praseed deploys Hindu ritual materials to draw renewed attention to those particular Christian theologians who unfold the Eucharist in the context of cosmic renewal, including Maximus the Confessor, Lossky, Zizioulas, and Teilhard de Chardin. In sharp contrast to Ravindra, Praseed concludes that regular, exterior performance of rituals such as Eucharist liturgy and the pañca-​mahāyajña, or five great sacrifices of Vedic Hinduism, are vital, insofar as they instill a deep consciousness of one’s deep relatedness and ethical obligation to God, to other persons, to the dead, to all living beings, and, finally, to the revelatory word that discloses the holistic, relational bond (Praseed 2009, pp. 323–​46). Christopher Chapple also highlights the element of “relationality” in Jewish, Christian, and Hindu sacrificial practices, but his interpretation is directed more specifically to addressing the present ecological crisis. “In order to foster a sustainable economic and political and psychological state of affairs,” he writes, “people need to adopt new models of sacrifice…Personal identity, rather than being tied to the acquisition and manipulation of things, can be measured in terms of one’s connectivity with others and with the primary source of revelation, the earth community” (Chapple 2008, p. 235). Though it is not explicitly comparative, the Hindu theologian Anantanand Rambachan’s ethical re-​reading of the pañca-​mahāyajña in terms of a “yajña mode of being” carries a similar message of ecological care and sustainable living (Rambachan 2015, pp. 143–​44). Some readers may find these scholarly engagements of Hindu and Christian theologies of sacrifice somewhat dry and elite, and in some ways this judgment rings true. All of these scholars—​even Clooney and Courtright—​stand at significant remove from the practices they are engaging. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that even the philosopher Raimon Panikkar titled his anthology The Vedic Experience in the conviction that Vedic ritual reflects a basic, existential dimension of human experience, and in the hopes that this existential reality might be communicated to a contemporary audience (Pannikar 1977b, pp.  4–​5). Each interpreter, in his own way, keeps one eye on the textual sources and one eye on fostering improved, deeper connections between actual Hindus and Christians in the social and political spaces they share in South Asia, Europe, and North America. In the cases of Praseed, Chapple, and Rambachan, the concern cuts deeper still, to the continued existence of humankind on this planet. Few

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would disagree that these are pressing concerns, and they are suitably worked out through the no less profound, pressing material of ritual.

Ritual means: hybrid practice and embodied dialogue The ritual life of Tamil Catholics in South India defies tidy, conventional categories like assimilation, differentiation, and othering, since the complex negotiations characteristic of this lived tradition often involve both assimilation and differentiation. This dynamic reflects/​reveals their hybrid and liminal cultural and religious condition where boundaries are not fixed or absolute but constantly fluid, permeable, and negotiable. (Raj, in Locklin 2017, p. 12) This passage by the late ethnographer, Selva J. Raj, concludes a programmatic essay entitled “Being Catholic the Tamil Way,” first published in 2008 and since incorporated as the title piece in an edited collection of Raj’s scholarly oeuvre (Locklin 2017). It can be read as a short précis of his important contribution to the study of ritual exchange in Hindu–​Christian relations. As an ethnographer, Raj used categories like “hybridity” and “liminality” descriptively, to account for the particulars of ritual performance in the Tamil Catholicism of his field sites. He also used them prescriptively, to advance the hybrid, liminal patterns he observed in these sites as an embodied alternative to an overly conceptual and institutionalized approach to Hindu–​Christian relations, such as those surveyed in the previous section of this chapter. If these relations are “constantly fluid, permeable, and negotiable” in the experience of South Asian Catholics on the ground, Raj’s work suggests, then fluidity, permeability, and continual negotiation emerge as desirable characteristics on the part of those who want to foster dialogue and ever deeper relationships in the present day (for more on Hindu–​Christian hybridity in ritual practice, see James Ponniah’s chapter in this volume).1 Though his research touched a number of different areas in South Asian Studies, the core of Raj’s interest focused on popular ritual practices at four Catholic shrines in rural Tamil Nadu, two dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua and two associated with the missionary martyr, St. John de Britto. He observed that the popular religiosity at these sites, though ostensibly dedicated to European figures, revealed a much more profound indigenization of Christianity than more self-​conscious, elite attempts to sponsor Christian ashrams or inculturate the liturgy. At the shrine of St. Anthony in the coastal village of Uvari, for example, Raj observed a variety of rituals that drew Tamil Hindus and Catholics together in a shared pursuit of this-​worldly goals of healing and health. Such rituals included rites of fasting, hair shaving, chicken or goat sacrifice, and communal meals with the poor every Tuesday (Ibid., pp. 79–​82, 177–​92), as well as a thirteen-​day festival celebrating the saint’s feast every year (Ibid., pp. 115–​38). On the one hand, these healing rituals implicate Hindu villagers in distinctively Catholic practices, such as praying the rosary, and they frequently take St. Anthony as their own family or village deity; on the other, they also draw the Catholic shrine itself into a distinctively “indigenous worldview and epistemology” by “investing in St. Anthony miraculous powers and attributes traditionally associated with Hindu tutelary deities” (Ibid., p. 128). Raj extends his observations to include the whole system of ritual vows (nerccai) evident not only at Uvari, but throughout the Tamil countryside. Such vows enact a contractual arrangement with the deity, such that devotees undertake ritual hair shaving, presentation of

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coconut saplings, animal sacrifice, and other arduous works in return for some benefit, such as healing or fertility. In one entertaining rite, couples arrange for their newborn children to be put up for sale and sold back to them in a “carefully orchestrated ceremonial auction” (Ibid., p. 77, 164–​67). In most respects, nerccai vows function identically in both Catholic and Hindu religious contexts. “This suggests,” Raj concludes, “that, with some minor variations, Catholics and Hindus share a common ritual system” (Ibid., p. 83).This “common ritual system” is better identified as Tamil, rather than Hindu. The Hindu gods set in parallel with Saints Anthony and John de Britto are regional, village deities like Isakki Amman and Karupannasami, rather than such pan-​regional figures as Śiva or Viṣṇu. Nevertheless, this shared ritual patrimony grounds a real, living sharing across the boundaries of Hindu and Christian traditions. At Uvari, Raj reports, Hindus constitute nearly 80% of the pilgrims seeking healing from Saint Anthony (Ibid., p. 82). Raj is not unique in drawing attention to religious hybridity in popular ritual practice: we will have occasion to look at a number of similar approaches to South Asian traditions at the end of this section, and Raj frequently drew comparisons to prior studies of popular Christian traditions in Greece and Spain. What distinguishes Raj’s work is his insistence that such hybrid ritual practice constitutes a distinctive, desirable form of Hindu–​Christian dialogue. In a work published in the theological journal Vidyajyoti in 2005, Raj offered a critique of what he called “institutional indigenization” of the Christian ashram movement and the liturgical inculturation movement that emerged in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (in Locklin 2017, pp. 31–​34). He contrasts such institutional initiatives against the “popular inculturation” evident in nerccai vow rituals, as well as funerary rites that incorporate the “form, content, and procedure” of popular Hindu traditions (Ibid., p. 40). Raj sums up his analysis as follows: Unlike the contrived institutional inculturation, popular inculturation organically emerges from the lived experience, existential concerns, and human needs of Catholic laity and their Hindu neighbours with whom they live in daily dialogical relationship. They draw from each other’s ritual and religious resources and their shared common cultural and linguistic data bank. While institutional inculturation relies heavily on Brahminic and Sanskritic Hinduism, popular lay inculturation draws on popular lay Hinduism…More importantly, institutional inculturation is a contrived, top-​down strategy initiated by the elite, whereas popular inculturation is a grass-​roots experience of the laity or religious masses that organically emerges from their lived experience and human needs. (Ibid., p. 41) Elsewhere, Raj specifies such popular practices as instances not merely of inculturation, but also of authentic interreligious exchange, rooted in “the world of rituals rather than the sophisticated world of theological concepts and categories” (Ibid., p. 189). One important aspect of ritual dialogue, in Raj’s account of it, is the fact that it is embodied, rather than purely conceptual. Commenting on the Tuesday rituals at Uvari, for example, Raj notes that such rites directly implicate devotees’ bodies in authentic encounter with and transformed perception of the “religious other.” Through shared pilgrimage, shared sacrifice, and ritual meals that incorporate explicit practices of reciprocity and status-​inversion, Hindus and Catholics develop a shared, embodied identity as “devotees of St. Anthony” and members of the same “ritual household” (Ibid., p. 188). In many cases, religious elites are reduced to a strictly marginal role in these rites, as when one priest offers an initial blessing of a major procession

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before being “whisked away” to his residence (Ibid., p.  147) or when another is “conspicuously absent” from one of the aforementioned “baby auctions” at the Shrine of St. Anne in Arulanandapuram (Ibid., p. 168). Raj quotes one pastor as follows: “We [clergy] speak about faith, the cross, and the Kingdom of God, but for them [rural Catholics] religion is pilgrimage, festivals, and rituals. Official Catholic rituals like the Mass and sacraments have only secondary importance” (Ibid., p. 106). Despite his own status as a priest for most of his scholarly career, Raj contended that the ritual dialogue of popular Tamil Catholicism is neither naïve nor superstitious, but a coherent, efficacious approach to Hindu–​Christian dialogue and exchange. Raj’s approach also affirms the importance of materiality and the body as sites of religious significance in the common Tamil epistemology and ritual repertoire, shared by Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims alike (Ibid., pp. 149–​50). Tamil Catholics participate in this epistemology and draw freely upon this repertoire without any confusion about their distinct identity as pious Catholics. In one telling example, Raj describes his elder brother’s decision to sponsor a sacrificial pūjā to sanctify the plot of a new home. After the brother’s Hindu mason killed a chicken and sprinkled its blood on the foundation and the corners of the plot, Raj’s sister-​in-​law followed with holy water and Catholic votive offerings so that “Jesus might guard our family and protect our new home” (Ibid., p. 11). “By her ritual actions,” Raj concludes, “she was letting her Hindu workers know that while she shares Hindu religious ideas and ritual idiom, she also has a different religious identity and a distinct ritual tradition” (Ibid., p. 12).The ritual performance served as an occasion both to affirm a sense of religious solidarity and to assert religious difference. Raj’s work in the area of ritual dialogue is distinctively Catholic and distinctively Tamil. But it has deep affinities with a significant, and growing, body of ethnographic and historical scholarship. In one widely read work, Susan Bayly draws on several case studies from 1700 to 1900 to argue that South Asian Christianity and Islam should be regarded as “fully ‘Indian’ religious systems” with highly indigenized structures of “worship and social organisation” (Bayly 1989, p. 454). Eliza Kent has brought out comparable dynamics in the ritual lives of Tamil Protestants (Kent 2017), and Muthuraj Swamy has extended Raj’s critique of institutionalized dialogue through his own fieldwork among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians of various traditions in the district of Kanyakumari (Swamy 2016). An increasing number of studies draw attention to questions of gender in ritual performance, hybridity, and Hindu–​Christian exchange (Dempsey 2001; Kent 2010; Bloomer 2018). Finally, several volumes of collected essays have extended the inquiry beyond South India to Christian communities across the subcontinent (Raj and Dempsey 2002;Young 2009; Bauman and Young 2014). In many scholarly reflections on interreligious dialogue in Europe and North America, participation in the ritual life of another tradition is characterized as a significant transgression, motivated by confusion or deliberate intransigence (see Moyaert and Geldhof 2015). The work of Selva J. Raj on ritual dialogue in South Asia may be read to affirm this instinct at least in part, insofar as he draws attention to the sheer power of ritualized practice to shape personal and communal identity and to embody core assumptions about reality. For precisely this reason, however, he commends popular ritual transgression across boundaries of religious difference as a spontaneous, uniquely potent means of Hindu–​Christian dialogue and exchange.

Ritual metaphor: Hindu–​Christian Studies as a ritualized practice In his 1977 essay “Man as a Ritual Being,” in addition to making an explicit connection between the Christian celebration of Eucharist and Vedic sacrifice, Raimon Panikkar also defends an

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enlarged “notion of rite” to include ostensibly secular activities in the areas of social service, art, and human relationships (Panikkar 1977a, pp. 19–​21). “Not every love relationship,” he writes, or any medical service, or each work of art, is automatically a rite—​nothing is a rite automatically—​but only those actions which somewhat transcend the intention of private usefulness or egoistic pleasure and intend a collaboration for the welfare of the world. (Ibid., pp. 20–​21) For Panikkar, the key element of any ritual act is its specific intention: “The ritual intends the transcendent in a transcendent way” (Ibid., p. 10). But this means that any embodied practice, imbued with the same intention, becomes a kind of ritual performance. For the purpose of this essay, moreover, Panikkar’s proposal suggests that even the disciplined study of Hinduism and Christianity in their mutual relationship might become, from one point of view, interpretable through the lens of ritual. Though there is little overlap in their respective understandings of ritual itself, Panikkar’s conviction that “nothing is a rite automatically” receives strong support from the theory of ritualization developed by Catherine Bell, discussed briefly above. According to Bell, one of the defining features of “ritual-​like” activities and a primary strategy for ritualization can be found in such activities’ more or less self-​conscious character as “performance” (Bell 1997, pp. 159–​64; Bell 1998). In some cases, such as parades, public liturgies, or sacred theater, ritualized practice takes the form of performance in a very literal sense. But this need not be the case. For the ritual participant, as well as the theorist, the performative character of the ritualized practice depends more upon its explicit or implied “framing” as performance, as “something other than routine reality,” with its own internal coherence and “condensed totality” (Bell 1997, pp. 160–​61). On the analogy of theater performance, ritual performance can evoke an alternative worldview that simplifies aspects of “routine reality,” orders them in a distinctive way, and thus aims to effect some transformation. Bell’s analysis opens a number of avenues for further study in the emerging field of Hindu–​ Christian Studies. In my book, Liturgy of Liberation, for example, I approached the Hindu teaching tradition of Advaita Vedānta through the lens of ritualized practice, rendering it comparable to Christian practices of worship, spiritual discernment, and ethical striving (Locklin 2011). As I conclude this chapter, however, I suggest that we also look to Hindu–​Christian Studies itself—​including philosophical and theological explorations of Panikkar, Malieckal, Clooney, Courtright, and Praseed, among others, and the ethnographic studies of embodied practice, like those of Selva J. Raj—​as a form of ritualized performance. Consider Francis X.  Clooney’s slim volume, The Future of Hindu-​Christian Studies. This work consists primarily of the Teape lectures, delivered by Clooney in Chennai, Kolkata, and Cambridge between January 2015 and May 2016. Each of the three main lectures identifies a particular social and rhetorical “space” of Hindu–​Christian scholarly encounter:  the Jesuit missionary project in India, beginning in the seventeenth century; Hindu engagements of Western thought in late modernity; and the contemporary discipline of Religious Studies in the North American academy. Intriguingly, in a prologue and epilogue added to these three lectures as they were being prepared for publication, Clooney frames the work as a whole as a “quest for a shared space,” a “ ‘third space’ in which Hindu and Christian intellectuals can meet, learn from one another fruitfully and in a way that demeans neither tradition, and facilitate a learning possible only in that shared space” (Clooney 2017, p. 10). The authentic practice of Hindu–​Christian Studies, one that fosters true intellectual exchange, requires a very particular 264

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space for its effective performance. In the terms provided by Bell’s ritual theory, we might say that Clooney frames the practice of this discipline as “something other than routine reality”—​ that is, as something beyond the prior, established spaces occupied by Jesuit missionary scholars, prominent Hindu academics, public intellectuals, and those treading the conference circuit of the American Academy of Religion, as surveyed in the book’s main chapters. It is perhaps worth noting that, among these three conventional spaces, it is contemporary Religious Studies that offers the most possibility for the imagined “third space” Clooney describes. But the two are not identical: Given that the historical and intellectual forces undercutting Christian intellectual hegemony will also tend to undercut any faith perspective, one cannot simply presume that the study of religions will favour a Hindu view or automatically sustain an intellectual and spiritual community of Hindu and Christian scholars. (Clooney 2017, p. 109) Hindu–​Christian Studies thus requires a special, metaphorical space for its practice. In the epilogue, Clooney further narrows this space to identify it primarily with the practice of theology, defined as “faith seeking understanding” in both Hindu and Christian traditions (Ibid., p. 112). It also requires very special practitioners, those who come prepared with A mature—​ or (ever-​ )maturing—​ interiority to foster rootedness in one tradition while cultivating deeper openness to another. Although scholarly expertise—​linguistic skills, historical awareness, the ability to read critically—​is indispensable, interreligious theological learning must be a transformative learning indebted to the religious other, grounded and open, it learns to “see inside” that other tradition. (Ibid., p. 113) Clooney goes on to enumerate a list of virtues required for this study, borrowed in part from Catherine Cornille (2008): “epistemic humility,” “commitment,” “interconnection,” “empathy,” “risk-​taking,” “patience with ambiguity,” “new dwelling,” and “marginality” (Ibid., pp. 113–​14). Scholars of Hindu–​Christian Studies must learn “to live of the margins of one’s own community, wherein most have not engaged in similar, border-​crossing experiments” (Ibid., p. 114). Finally, Clooney returns to the “space” of the discipline, a space constituted by such hospitable, empathetic, marginal persons. This space is “other than the one of traditional Hindu–​Christian encounters in India”; it is, instead, “a space irreducible to what one community or another thinks appropriate, but wherein learning fosters habitual reciprocity” (Ibid., p. 124). Amidst these rather abstract, metaphorical, and aspirational passages, Clooney does offer concrete examples of persons engaging the practice he describes. These examples include his own work as a Jesuit scholar and comparativist, alongside studies by other Christian theologians such as Martin Ganeri and Michelle Voss Roberts, by self-​identified Hindu interlocutors like Jonathan Edelmann and Chakravarthi Ram-​Prasad, and by a South Asianist and comparative philosopher, Ankur Barua (Ibid., pp. 115–​23). Importantly, each of these figures can be readily identified with one or more of the lineages traced earlier in the book: Clooney and Ganeri are members of Catholic religious orders, Edelmann and Ram-​Prasad are Hindus engaging Western thought, and all of these scholars hold academic posts in Religious Studies or a related field.The unique space that Clooney imagines for Hindu–​Christian Studies, then, is not a literal space outside the more well-​traveled, “traditional” spaces of his earlier accounts. It is a metaphorical space constituted not by a particular religious tradition, institutional location, or transcendental 265

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intention, but by a distinctive set of personal dispositions and a particular kind of intellectual performance. It is, at least arguably, a space created and sustained by Hindu–​Christian Studies itself, as a ritualized practice. If one grants this claim, then the practice of Hindu–​Christian Studies, as an elite, scholarly practice, might be imaginatively imbued with the various qualities of ritual we have encountered earlier in this chapter. Like the Bread of Life of Ravindra’s account, it facilitates a transfer of subtle energies and spiritual advancement for those who partake rightly of it. Like the Vedic yajña in the hands of Panikkar or Praseed, Hindu–​Christian studies aims for the transcendent, for the creation and sustenance of cosmic order. Like a head-​shaving rite at a shrine in Uvari, it mediates an authentic, organic encounter with the religious other, even as it draws its participants together in a common epistemology and a shared repertoire of practical and discursive practices. And, like Raj’s sister-​in-​law sprinkling holy water after the blood of sacrifice on the plot of her new home, the practice of Hindu–​Christian studies entails both the cultivation of solidarity and the assertion of religious difference.2

Notes 1 The paragraphs that follow draw substantively on similar presentations of Raj’s thought in two previous publications (Locklin 2016a, pp. 128–​30; Locklin 2016b, pp. 364–​70). 2 I am grateful to Alison More, Michael O’Connor, Colleen Shantz, and Natalie Wigg-​Stevenson for comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as to Michelle Voss Roberts and Chad Bauman for their editorial guidance. The chapter is much richer as a result of their suggestions.

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Ritual and ritualization Kent, E.F. 2010. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2017. “Vernacular Christianities: Tamil Catholics and Tamil Protestants.” In Locklin, R.B. (ed.). Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints:  Selva J.  Raj on “Being Catholic the Tamil Way”. Albany:  State University of New York Press, pp. 209–​24. Locklin, R.B. 2011. Liturgy of Liberation: A Christian Commentary on Shankara’s Upadeśasāhasrī. Leuven: Peeters. —​—​—​. 2016a. “Constructing Boundaries by Crossing Them: Contemporary Comparative Theology as a Practice of Community Self-​definition.” In Brecht, M. and Locklin, R.B. (eds.). Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 126–​38. —​—​—​. 2016b. “ ‘Ritual Dialogue’ and the ‘Dialogue of Life’: The Contribution of Selva J. Raj.” Science et Esprit 68(2–​3): 363–​76. —​—​—​ (ed.). 2017. Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints: Selva J. Raj on “Being Catholic the Tamil Way”. Albany: State University of New York Press. Locklin, R.B. and Nicholson, H. 2010. “The Return of Comparative Theology.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 13(1): 3–​13. Malieckal, L. 1989a. “Sacrifice: Core of Vedic Religion and Christianity.” Journal of Dharma 14(4): 313–​28. —​—​—​. 1989b. Yajna and Eucharist: An Inter-​religious Approach to theTheology of Sacrifice. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications. McLaughlin, M.T. 2005. “Mimamsa and Eucharist:  Starting-​Points for Postmodern Hindu-​Christian Comparative Theology of Ritual.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 18(9): 32–​39. Menachery, G. 2010. “Ancient Kerala Christian Art:  Art and Architecture of the Ancient Christians of Kerala.” In Pulikkan, P. and Collins, P.M. (eds.). The Church and Culture in India, Inculturation: Theory and Praxis. Delhi: ISPCK, pp. 115–​23. Moore-​Keish, M.L. 2008. Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Moyaert, M. and Geldhof, J. (eds.). 2015. Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue:  Boundaries, Transgressions and Innovations. London: Bloomsbury. Panikkar, R. 1977a. “Man as a Ritual Being.” Chicago Studies 15(1): 5–​28. —​—​—​. 1977b. The Vedic Experience:  Mantramañjarī:  An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Praseed, G. 2009. Sacrifice and Cosmos: Yajña and the Eucharist in Dialogue. New Delhi: Decent Books. Raj, S.J. 2000. “Adapting Hindu Imagery: A Critical Look at Ritual Experiments in an Indian Catholic Ashram.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37(3–​4): 333–​53. Raj, S.J. and Dempsey, C.G. (eds.). 2002. Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rambachan, A. 2015. A Hindu Theology of Liberation:  Not-​Two Is Not One. Albany:  State University of New York Press. Ravindra, R. 1992, 1990. The Yoga of the Christ: In the Gospel According to St. John. Shaftesbury: Element. —​—​—​. 2005. “Jesus Is Not an Idol.” In Barker, G.A. (ed.). Jesus in the World’s Faiths: Leading Thinkers from Five Religions Reflect on His Meaning. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, pp. 92–​99. Robinson, R. 2003. Christians of India: An Anthropology of Religion. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Sherinian, Z.C. 2014. Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Swamy, M. 2016. The Problem with Interreligious Dialogue: Plurality, Conflict and Elitism in Hindu-​Christian-​ Muslim Relations. London: Bloomsbury. Thachil, J. 1985. The Vedic and the Christian Concept of Sacrifice. Alwaye: Pontifical Institute of Theology and Philosophy. —​—​—​. 1989. “The Theology of Religions and Sacrifice.” Journal of Dharma 14(4): 329–​42. Young, R.F. (ed.). 2009. India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding—​Historical,Theological, and Bibliographical—​in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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22 AESTHETICS, ART, AND VISUAL CULTURE IN HINDU–​ CHRISTIAN RELATIONS Patrick M. Beldio

Conventionally, religious practitioners contrast the focus of social justice with that of the contemplative or inner dimension of human experience and find it difficult, if not impossible, to hold both together. Creativity can be exclusively allied with the inner dimension, permitting for some a disregard for the arts and the value of beauty in favor of initiatives of social engagement and the value of justice, or for others with a more contemplative personality, a disregard of communities in need in favor of self-​expression in a creative practice. This often-​unresolved tension also exists in the larger secular art context.The pressures to be relevant to current notions of social justice stimulate many contemporary artists to use art as a form of activism, unconcerned for or even hostile to traditional notions of beauty as either an aesthetic quality or a spiritual value. Indeed, such qualities and values of beauty are implicated in many social and cultural structures of oppression, so beauty can be an object of scorn as much as religion in the contemporary secular art world (see Danto 2003, Elkins 2004, and Arya 2016). However, the arts, architecture, and visual culture can be a means to unite the seeming opposites of beauty and justice, of the inner and outer life, and of spiritual union and selfless service to others. In fact, this coherence of the inner and the outer by the arts is one of the chief benefits of full and mature Hindu–​Christian relations. This chapter will briefly describe some important scholarship on Hindu–​Christian relations in aesthetic theory, creative practices, the arts, and visual culture. It will place these diverse studies in historical context, and it will conclude by observing some emerging trends. I approach this topic as a trained scholar in theology and religious studies, a professional sculptor, and a person who follows a spiritual practice founded by a twentieth-​century Indian teacher.1

Global contexts Part 1 The first Christians in India, according to local tradition, came in 52 CE with the Apostle Thomas, who founded many churches on the western coast of southern India (for more on the St. Thomas Christians, see Thomas’s chapter in this volume). The Thomas Christians built their own cultural identity without much of an interest in mission, which is not too surprising given their minority status in an already rich religious environment. According to 268

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Anand Amaladass, SJ, and Gudrun Löwner, there is evidence that they integrated Hindu forms of art and architecture right from the beginning into their worship and spiritual practice (Amaladass and Löwner 2012, pp. 15–​17). While Christianity remained what we might call a “introverted” minority in India and developed as a protected religion by civil authorities, in the western hemisphere, over the next fifteen centuries, the Christian paradigms of “martyr,” “monk,” and “mendicant” (the first in a politically unprotected context until the fourth century, and the latter two in politically protected contexts afterwards) gave way to the paradigm of “missionary” in the fifteenth century, which resulted in the introduction of an extroverted and more muscular version of Christianity to India’s shores. The Portuguese began a new chapter of interreligious exchange in Kerala and Goa, with highly developed and triumphant European forms of art and architecture. The Portuguese also brought with them the first Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans to help unite the new territories under a new culture and religion.The Jesuit legacy is enshrined in baroque Indian churches that contain holy relics like the body of St. Francis Xavier, located in the Bom Jesus basilica in Old Goa. Amaladass and Löwner (Ibid.) note that the artists and craftsmen of this time were not Christian.To encourage conversion to Christianity, a Goan law was passed to allow only Christian artists to be heads of guilds. Art business was good, as the New World provided a lucrative market for ivory carvings of saints, the Nativity, and Mary. Indian converts also began to replace imagery of Hindu gods and goddesses with Catholic saints, and identical to Hindu custom, Indian Christians held great processions in the saints’ honor. As for the artwork of this period, one can discern Hindu and Buddhist influences in many of the works of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Ibid., pp. 19–​33). Jesus, like Krishna, was often represented as a child in playful scenes, while other images of the Christ remind one of the Buddha in hairstyle and gesture. One reviewer of Amaladass and Löwner’s important book notes, The first chapter is about the statuettes made of wood, ivory, glass and gold leaf in Goa. Interestingly, the image of the Good Shepherd dominates among them. Is this a reference to Krishna, the famous shepherd of India? Or was the crucifix too crude for the Indian imagination? (Bakker 2012, p. 307) This topic deserves more comparative study. Alongside the Risen Christ, the Good Shepherd was one of the dominant forms of Jesus for ten centuries in Europe. The crucifixion emerged relatively late—​with the Gero Cross in Cologne, Germany—​as the most influential form in that religious context. In these early centuries, perhaps owing to the Christian minority status or the Indian habitus of the time to absorb whatever culture and spiritual practices entered the subcontinent, it is not easy to categorize the impact of Christianity on Hindu art and architecture (See Michaels 2004, pp. 3–​12). The influence of Islam is another complex and significant story that bridged subsequent centuries of Hindu–​Christian relations in art and architecture in South Asia. However, Amaladass and Löwner state that not much development occurred “in the 250 years between the end of interest in miniatures at the court of Aurangzeb in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the beginning of the Bengal Renaissance early in the 20th century” (Amaladass and Löwner 2012, p. 101). The first British to come to India in the seventeenth century patronized Indian art, interested from the point of view of tourists wanting evidence of their travels for friends and family back home. However, their text-​based style of Christianity and suspicions of Catholic influence took Christian art out of fashion. 269

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Eventually, especially in the nineteenth century, the British developed colonial aspirations and belittled Indian culture. This attitude became an organized program of colonial dominance via cultural education. Ashis Nandy notes that Colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the process it helps to generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporary entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in the structures and in minds. (Nandy 1983, p. vii) The British used the arts as a means for psychological domination, training Indians in Western methods and glorifying Western aesthetic standards of beauty while denigrating Indian ones, often allying these standards with religious (Anglican Christian) authority.

Part 2 To understand British cultural dominance of India and its impact on Hindu–​Christian relations today, it is helpful to contrast the trends of European and Indian art history before Indian Independence in 1947. Broadly, and following the interpretations of Sri Aurobindo (1872–​ 1950) in his assessment of Indian and European cultures as they developed and led to his context of colonial India, I would argue that these art histories express two different forms of growth during the premodern periods: the art of European cultures expressed a growth in consciousness that was increasingly turned outward toward mastery of the material world, and the art of the Indian cultures expressed an upward and inward focus on mastery of spiritual states of consciousness (Sri Aurobindo 1997a, pp. 383–​410 and 443–​72; 1997b, pp. 255–​313; 2003; Beldio 2016, pp. 37–​115). Subsequently, the binaries of material and spiritual mastery lost meaning in the aftermath of world wars, the collapse of empires, and the reorganization of global affairs through fraught processes of the Cold War. Though the following cursory remarks oversimplify the case, they may serve as a general outline for further study (see Mitter 1992 and 2007). Indian ancient art expressed a consistent engagement with spiritual (Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain) practice and goals, and as a loosely cohesive cultural production endured as late as the seventeenth century (See Huntington 2001, pp. 509–​616). These masterpieces of sacred art and architecture served spiritual purposes. They expressed the simplest devotionalism, indicative of the belief that an offering and pure faith could assure the material well-​being of humankind. Through the creation of religious buildings and images showing beings who personified aspects of the universe and its irrevocable truths, the peoples of South Asia were able to interact daily with celestial beings, as if they were near neighbors. (Huntington 2001, p. xxiii) This is not to say that patronage and reception of Indian sacred art did not have its own complex allegiances to political, worldly powers. However, one of the primary motive forces for this cultural production came from a sincere aspiration to express spiritual truth and experience. For example, Stella Kramrisch writes that classical Indian sculpture sought to manifest, not the physical body (sthūla deha), but that which stands behind it, the “subtle body” (sūkṣma deha), which contains the cakras, the seven “wheels” or “centers” that hold different levels of life energy that 270

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are awoken and lifted during processes of spiritual growth and eventual union with the divine (Kramrisch 1983, p. 3). Hindu sacred visual art, architecture, dance, drama, poetry, and philosophical thought on aesthetics is highly refined and diverse. Hindu traditions of temple architecture and sculpture were codified in many religious manuals known collectively as the Śilpa Śāstras (“Science of Arts and Crafts”) and Vāstu Śāstras (“Science of Architecture”).They describe the roles of different craftspeople, the use of religious practices and astrology in the creation of sacred art and architecture, as well as iconographic rules for sacred placement and design of space and objects. Hindu sacred painting is based upon what is known as the ṣaḍaṅga or “six limbs,” the origin and date of which are not certain, as they were most likely handed down orally from master to student. The most organized written version appears in a commentary by Yaśodhara on Vātsyāyāṇa’s Kāma Sūtra by the first century: “Thus is painting six-​limbed: differentiation of forms, proportions, sentiment, arrangement of beauty, likeness, and style of color, and brushwork” (see Agrawala 1981, pp. 47–​84). Hindu aesthetic tradition finds its foundation in the Nāṭya Śāstra (“Science of Dance/​ Drama”), an ancient text that narrates the origins of dance in a cosmic battle between gods and demons. As scholar Katherine Zubko writes, it also provides a thorough listing and explanation of types of aesthetically pleasing motions possible for each body part, costuming and musical accompaniment, entire movement sequences, and…a detailed mechanistic formula for the production of rasa (mood, flavor) as an ideal aesthetic experience to be created by the artist to be tasted by the audience-​perceiver (rasika/​sahṛdaya). (Zubko 2014, p. 12) The most important commentator of the Nāṭya Śāstra and its formula for rasa is the Kashmir Shaivite philosopher and theologian Abhinavagupta (tenth to eleventh century), who taught that aesthetic experience is similar to spiritual experience and that properly crafted artworks—​ whether dance, drama, or poetry—​can stimulate, in the properly prepared audience member, levels of transcendence of one’s limited self. He emphasized the śanta rasa (“taste of peace”) in his commentaries, the Abhinavabhāratī and the Locana. Christian liturgical art and architecture in Europe has its own history of refinement. Roughly between 1350 and 1860, artists gradually abandoned the creation of art that was praised for its ritual potential and its ability to strengthen social cohesion and belief, whether in Christianity or in a monarch. They experimented with mimetic art and visual culture that emphasized the individual identities of both the artist and the patron over social and religious identities. Art became increasingly predicated on imitating the physical world as conceived by the senses and brain. From a contemporary vantage point, Vasari’s 1550 book, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, is not necessarily a history of art but “a history of a norm” (Belting 1987, p. 2). However, art history as a proto-​academic discipline was born at this time, and it was accomplished in a normative fashion: artworks that were considered worthy of historical note faithfully imitated physical appearances to celebrate and even surpass the heroic ideals of antiquity or any other ancient culture. In painting, for example, the narrative of “real” art history was told as a development of styles that led to the perfection of human skill to capture a record of human three-​dimensional visual perception on a two-​dimensional  plane. The idea that art is sui generis and free from religious authority and purpose gained full maturity later in the epoch. It was given philosophical articulation after Alexander Baumgarten’s 271

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eighteenth-​century coinage of the term “aesthetics,” or knowledge given by perception of the senses, emphasizing individual sensory experience over society or religion (Baumgarten 1954, p. 78). This philosophy blossomed into speculation about art as such, leading to the birth of art criticism and the aesthetic analysis of beauty apart from its relationship to its context and the people it may have served. As a result, art become an expensive commodity and luxury of the wealthy, endowed with the power to elevate some people to upper classes and demote most others to lower classes. The end of this period occurred right before the Impressionists in the late nineteenth century started to “blur” reality with their loose and painterly brush strokes—​or rather, through the idiosyncratic way they applied paint and treated their subject, they started to focus on something new in reality: one’s personal, internal feeling about the subject matter.The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries were a complex time of hybridism between mimetic ideals and a new birth of the Modernist turn to the subject, which resonated with trends in European philosophy. This turn was not just intellectual and psychological. Many well-known artists of the twentieth century began to turn to spiritual traditions of the eastern hemisphere to support their subjective searches and creative practices, finding spiritual inspiration for their modernist and postmodernist experiments (see Munroe 2009). Colonial England was one of the chief contexts for the crisis and potentials of Modernism. On the one hand, England used mimetic values in masterful ways for empire building and for the psychological domination of the Indian sense of identity. Partha Mitter defines the British aesthetic norm as “mimetic art seen through Victorian eyes, which added two further conditions: a lofty moral purpose and the propensity of progress” (Mitter 1994, p. 242). Compared to Victorian salon art, ancient Indian art seemed crude to the Enlightenment-​formed sensibilities of most British intellectuals and the upper class. In their view, Indian art was barbarous, backward, and primitive. It lacked evidence of the material mastery and scientific advancement of their modern age. Mitter writes, “There was a general tendency to confuse artistic quality with technical advances, a reflection of the dominance of science and technology in Victorian Britain. Scientific thinking had undoubtedly contributed dramatically to the study of art, but it had the effect of placing technological criteria on a pedestal. Judged in this way, Indian art fared rather poorly” (Ibid., p. 223). On the other hand, there were English sympathizers like E.B. Havell, the father of Indian art history, who led a cultural nationalist movement based on valuing and interpreting Indian art and culture on its own terms of spiritual aspiration and experience. Mitter dates the beginning of the National Art Movement in Bengal at about 1896 with the friendship and intimate collaboration of Havell and the renowned painter, Abanindranath Tagore, nephew to Rabindranath Tagore (Ibid., pp. 279–​306; Banerji 2010).This duo sought to restore Indian artistic forms through art schools and galleries in the face of Victorian forms, not just to establish Indian artists who mastered Western methods and practices.The cultural nationalist movement in general relied on a revised history of India, constructing an ahistorical and unified Hindu identity that could compete with the hegemonic British identity of the same ahistorical character. Other Indians favored this selective and not entirely self-​conscious construction of history. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sister Nivedita of the Ramakrishna Mission, and Japanese scholar and art curator Kakuzo Tensu Okakura were also instrumental in this movement, creating what they saw as a “pan-​Asian” movement. Cultural nationalism and pan-​Asianism turned the weaknesses of Asian material progress “into a virtue…for it enabled them to resist the evils of technological progress” (Mitter 1994, p. 244). The English Arts and Craft movement also embraced traditional Indian design and ornamentation, anxious about technological progress as well. The innovations of the Industrial Revolution all but destroyed traditional methods of artisans and their high quality of craftsmanship in England, which led to a desire to defend and extend a way of life that was closer to nature and preserved folk traditions. India became a crucial resource for this movement that 272

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had its roots in the Romantic period yet  also shared Modernist concerns (See Mitter 1992, pp. 221–​51).

Selections of current scholarship As this brief overview demonstrates, the fraught colonial past impacts the history of Hindu–​ Christian relations in the arts in many ways, causing Hindu artists, practitioners, and theologians to be reluctant to engage with Christianity in the same measure or with the same interest as that by which Christians seek to engage Hindu traditions. Indians have tended to find inspiration in Western secular cultural forms more than religious ones, so that Modernist and Post-​ modernist movements of Europe and North America influence Indian artistic development in more significant ways (see Mitter 2007 for this history of cultural exchange until 1947). Indians also adroitly incorporated Western technologies and new media to negotiate their experiences of British colonialism, Independence, and Partition as well as to express traditional religious aspirations in a new context. Christopher Pinney’s and Rachel Dwyer’s scholarship in religion and visual culture provides helpful writings on the ways in which Indians used print media like photography and lithography, as well as cinema in this regard (Pinney 2004 and Dwyer 2006). Understanding this difficult history, Michelle Voss Roberts’s experience as a musician and her scholarship in comparative aesthetic theological work provides a very helpful model for both Hindu and Christian theologians to produce skilled reflection in our post-​modern and postcolonial contexts. Her work, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion (2014), is a critical study in Hindu aesthetics based on Abhinavagupta and his theory of rasa. It mines the texts and traditions of spiritual aesthetics in Hinduism to illumine the depths of her own Christian tradition and social location with an eye to an amelioration of human suffering. Rasa, meaning sap, flavor, or essence, denotes the essence of a thing and the deep emotional responses to it, leading one to “taste” it or even, in rare instances, to taste the divine that binds the taster, the object, and the taste in a differentiated unity. There is no room here to give Voss Roberts’s work its proper due, but we must recognize the advance her study makes in Hindu–​ Christian relations. Given the current growth of Christianity in non-​European countries, a critical and sustained reliance on philosophical schools of thought native to these cultures (like rasa theory in India) in her own approach to theology provides much-​needed aid in the development of Christian thought, practice, and experience. Voss Roberts recognizes the difficulty mentioned at the start of this chapter, the potential conflict between an interior spiritual approach and an exterior focused life of service. As she writes, “This venture into the realm of emotions and the arts has opened a discursive space amid the polarities often attributed to aesthetic experience in religion–​–​polarities of mind and body, transcendence and immanence, and interior and exterior.” Art may bring consciousness away from the body and the earth; however, she continues, with a proper understanding of rasa, we “see emotion as simultaneously transcendent and immanent. The sentiments are rooted in contextual factors and physical cues that evoke embodied responses; yet when we savor them as such, we become aware of partaking of something holy” (Voss Roberts 2014, p. 159). Such a harmonization of body and the sacred can lead to action that liberates the oppressed. More recently scholars have begun to study interreligious interaction between Hindus and Christians through visual and material culture. In the midst of what is called a material turn in the study of religion, there is a movement to deconstruct the dominance of text-​centered analysis that is based in hermeneutics and semantics, what Brigit Meyer calls “the mentalistic approach enshrined in dominant genealogies” of scholarship (Meyer 2012, p. 35). An overarching goal of these scholars is to construct a material approach to the study of religion that would not replace 273

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textual-​mentalistic ones, but augment and transform inquiry so that it would account for the use of physical objects by human bodies, not just the “immaterial” values, ideas, and beliefs of a given community to mediate divine presence. The work of the late Selva Raj is notable in this field. Raj began as a Catholic priest who taught philosophy and theology in Calcutta. Inspired by the life and work of Mother Teresa with those on the margins, he finished his work as a scholar of material and visual culture of Tamil lay Catholics and the ways in which folk and Hindu religious forms shaped their identity. Raj’s focus on Hindu and Christian visual culture reveals an ongoing tension between laity and clerics and the ways they interact with Indian religions. In his study of the thirteen-​day festival at the Shrine of St. Anthony in Puliampatti in Tamil Nadu, he contrasts the sparsely attended masses and official ceremonies led by clerics with the final day of the festival when throngs of lay pilgrims take over the activities and mix local folk and Hindu objects and practices. Raj comments that such lived religious practice with material culture is a form of enduring and genuine interreligious dialogue that contrasts with the abstracted theologies of the clerical class. He writes, Tamil Hindus and Catholics not only share a common physical and cultural geography, but also draw from common religious assumptions, worldviews, conceptual frameworks, ritual sources, and material culture. The festival tradition at Puliampatti offers an illustrative micro case-​study for the multiple exchanges occurring at the grassroots level that accounts for the family resemblances and striking uniformity in the votive objects used by Hindu and Catholic devotees. This phenomenon of shared systems serves as a metaphor for the culture of dialogue that defines south Indian religious praxis. (Raj, quoted in Raj and Dempsey 2015, p. 202) In the field of the visual arts, Amaladass and Löwner chronicle a modern history in India of non-​Christian artists who utilize Christian themes (2012, pp. 101–​36, 137–​92) and Christian artists who incorporate Hindu themes (Ibid., pp. 193–​327) that is quite remarkable in its variety and scope.The influence of the crucifixion figures prominently in the work of many of the non-​Christian artists, as, for example, in the paintings of Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–​2011), a Muslim; Krishen Khanna (b. 1925), a Hindu; or Jehangir Sabavala (1922–​2011), a Parsi. These artists give thoughtful and feeling-​ful attention to both Western and Indian artistic forms as they also engage current events and issues like race, religion, and globalization. Amaladass and Löwner note that Christian themes are diminishing in contemporary Indian art and that Buddhist ones are more popular and lucrative at the moment, given “a widely expressed longing in the hectic Westernized Indian elitist society which is searching for the post paradise of peace and wisdom in a minimalistic environment” (Ibid., p. 192). Since the Bengali Renaissance, Christian artists in India have made work that consciously incorporates Indian imagery and religious symbols to inculturate the gospel.Though there were those artists who rejected Indian forms for Western ones, most “painted indigenized theology,” as the 1949/​50 Vatican mission art exhibition in Rome and the 1956 Christian Art Exhibition of the Methodist Church in India demonstrate (Ibid., pp. 193–​94). Amaladass and Löwner write that the insights from the Second Vatican Council came at the right time and helped the progressive and prophetically thinking Indian Christians to put their ideas into practice. In growing numbers more and more churches were built in Indian styles. Ashrams as 274

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living and praying communities modeled after the Hindu way of life but filled with Christian contents came more and more into being. (Ibid., p. 193) This development in the Catholic church led to “efforts in the field of inculturation through painting, architecture, music, and dance.” Such efforts persevere today, but with a shift of focus from Brahminic Hinduism to the traditions of Adivasis (tribal or folk religions) and the Dalits who make up about 80% of the church membership. “These Dalit and tribal Christians forcefully reject Christian art influenced by the dominant caste groups, because when they became Christians their intention was to break away from such oppression” (Ibid., p. 194).The Protestant emphasis on word over image accounts for their keen interest in music but comparable lack of inculturation through the arts and architecture. However, in reviewing significant artists like Francis Newton Souza (1924–​2002), Frank Wesley (1923–​2002), Sister Geneviève (1919–​1995), and Jyoti Sahi (b. 1944)–​–​to name just a few Christian visual artists–​–​Amaladass and Löwner show how passionately these Christian artists love India and Indians through their paint brushes and other tools. Divergent theologies can be seen in these oeuvres, with Sister Geneviève on one end of the spectrum in her belief “that only the faithful believer can properly paint Christ” (Ibid., p. 262), and Jyoti Sahi, for example, at the other extreme, in his creation of an ashram for artists of all faiths that encourages creating across traditions (e.g., Sahi 1980, 2010). Sister Geneviève represented a minority opinion among the artists that Amaladass and Löwner describe, though it must be recognized that most Indian Christians today are weary of the use of Hindu symbols, imagery, or practice in their churches and homes, let alone the use of Christian symbols and imagery in Hindu contexts by Hindu artists.With the rise of Hindu nationalism and its suspicion of the use of inculturation for the purposes of proselytization, there is an equal and opposite zeal to keep these boundaries rigid and guarded as well.

Emerging trends I can only gesture at emerging trends in Hindu–​Christian relations in art and aesthetics. Interesting work is being done that supports greater cultural convergences, even as such work is threatened by or awakens strident nationalisms and fears that accompany changing boundaries of identity in traditional religious communities. I would characterize these new religious and cultural integrations as creative and spiritual practices that exist in what Homi Bhabha calls “the third space.” This is a hybrid cultural context in which the meeting of two or more cultures occasions the disruption of homogeneous national, cultural, and religious identities to emphasize something more fluid and open ended (Bhabha 1994). Francis Clooney has recently employed this fertile theoretical work in service to Hindu–​Christian study, defining the third space as the “neutral ground between the interlocutors which become explorative for both sides, and in which mistakes can be honestly made, risks taken, and genuinely new insights, views, and policies constructed” (Clooney 2017, p. x). This space, as Clooney describes it, is a temporary one where one meets the other in sincere exchanges that amplify and challenge the participants. His goal is to return to the home tradition, seeing it anew in the light of the other religion. I would add, a potentially new art may also be created in this context, an art that is itself an attempt to manifest a spirituality of the third space and not necessarily of the home traditions alone. This may signal the possibility that one might not leave the third space but regard this new space as a kind of home itself. The following are examples of this potential. 275

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Katherine Zubko’s creative practice as a dancer informs her religious studies scholarship in Bharata Natyam, or Indian classical dance, which expresses these ideas of the third space in fascinating ways. Using performance theory, her book Dancing Bodies of Devotion critically explores contemporary experiences of Bharata Natyam and a devotional form of rasa (bhakti rasa) in a cross-​cultural and interreligious context. This ethnographic study of dancers, who use traditional sacred dance forms and the text Natyam Śastra, inflected by Abhinavagupta’s commentaries, is guided by the use of the body to discover and express ultimate meaning and reality. Zubko’s research reveals how Bharata Natyam is being utilized to decentralize religious, cultural, and even gender boundaries in the service of experiential knowledge and “taste” of the divine in our contemporary context. For both the performer and the audience members of Bharata Natyam, bhakti rasa can be awoken in an experience of a performance of the life of Jesus as deeply as a performance of the life of Krishna. Bhakti rasa can be experienced and understood at the level of the body, a crucial place of knowing the third space (Zubko 2014). Dalit and Adivasi Christian visual art is also a significant emerging trend in Hindu–​Christian relations. Jyoti Sahi has championed this focus since the early 1980s, working primarily from within the structures of the Catholic Church to reach out to other Indian religions. In both his creative output and his written works, he places high Sanskritic culture, Indian folk traditions, and Dalit Christian theology in creative correlation with each other. His use of the word Dalit, which means broken or crushed, finds appropriate application to the suffering Jesus as well as Mary and Indian feminine images of God (Sahi 2008). He writes that “The term dalit…implies one who is crushed like the earth itself—​broken by the cultural realities of a social order that enslaves and marginalizes those who are exploited” (Sahi 2008, pp. 62–​63). Sahi seeks a union of justice and beauty in his work, a way to create culture and a way of life that can discover the risen Christ within the brokenness of the Earth and those who are marginalized like the Christian dalits of his community near Bangalore. Sahi writes in his autobiography, “Ultimately I feel that Christian art aspires to a new heaven and a new earth,” which is given greater import and intensity because of his engagement with Hindu traditions (Sahi 1986, p. 169). A comparable aspiration exists in the Integral Yoga of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878–​1973) and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872–​1950), whom Sahi often cites. Their work as both artists and gurus holds potential for future development, in my estimation, as they sought to manifest what I have called a “descendent” spiritual practice that is a kind of third space (Beldio 2018a). They sought to bring down into matter a very refined level of consciousness, which they called “the Supermind,” to replace the predominant mental consciousness. For them this descent is necessary to transform the Earth so that all physical reality would be a fitting and enduring home for the Divine. On a metaphysical level, this involves the permanent dissolution of any boundaries between heaven and Earth so that a new third reality, what the Mother often called “the new creation,” would manifest. In service to this goal, the Mother worked for about fifty-​two years with different students to make art that expressed in the physical world of forms, the supramental realities of truth, love, purity, and beauty. Together with her student Huta, she painted a series of 472 oil paintings of Sri Aurobindo’s poem Savitri–​–​itself a work that seeks to manifest the supramental world in poetry. This painting series is an example of what they termed “the future art” that celebrates and even participates in the supramental transformation of the Earth (See Sri Aurobindo 2000; and Beldio 2016, pp. 272–​324). This project was completed in the context of an intentional community, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It houses over eighty departments offering members ways to practice active selfless service with an aspiration to bring down supramental force into their bodies, activities, architecture, art, and visual culture. I have critically compared this

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creative yoga with Franciscan spirituality, finding what might be called spiritualities of the third space in a convergence of gender, culture, and personal spiritual experience through the arts (Beldio 2015). Besides this research in the Integral Yoga, my two-​decade participation in Sufism Reoriented founded by Meher Baba (né Merwan Irani, 1894–​1969) also informs the idea of third-​space spiritualities and attendant creative practices. Meher Baba’s life and teaching is an example of spiritual and cultural convergence that draws upon Christian, Sufi, and Vedantic influences. Contemporaneously with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, he sought to bring about a new consciousness that is based on the achievements of Western culture’s mastery of matter and Asian cultures’ mastery of spiritual planes of consciousness. He claimed that this new consciousness, which is neither material nor spiritual but what he broadly called “intuition,” would manifest what he named “the new humanity” and a “new world culture” in the coming centuries (Conner 2013; Meher Baba 2007, pp. 17–​25; Meher Baba 1985, pp. 142–​44; and Beldio 2019). Meher Baba also inspires my own creative practice as a sculptor to celebrate and support convergences of Sufism, Christian mysticism, and Advaita Vedānta through art and beauty (Beldio 2018b).

Conclusion The history of art, aesthetics, and visual culture in the relationship of Hindus and Christians has been and continues to be very creative. In this brief overview of historical relations, some important recent scholarship and creative output, and new trends, we can note evidence of a new potential for the thesis of this chapter. All forms of the arts, architecture, and visual culture can be a means to unite the seeming opposites of the inner and outer life of spiritual union and selfless service to others. Indeed, one of the central benefits of mature Hindu–​Christian relations is the integration of the inner and the outer by the arts. The arts hold this integrative capacity because of the very nature of the creative process itself. Creativity in service and devotion to the divine in both Hindu and Christian paths is a task to manifest the formless in form, to transform matter so that it manifests spirit. This work creates something new that can inspire creativity, growth, and beauty in others. Painful events of the twentieth century have birthed this new potential for art to unify the inner and the outer in Hindu–​Christian relations:  the traumatic experiences of world wars, the dissolution of the British Empire, and the Cold War. Owing to these events, boundaries have been dissolved. The material mastery of the Christian West, preoccupied with an outward turn of consciousness, has increasingly become more open to what Indian culture has to offer. The spiritual mastery of India, in a largely Hindu context and preoccupied with an inward and upward turn of consciousness, has become more open to what the cultures of the Western hemisphere have to give. Whatever the outcomes of these new ways of relating and the fears that also accompany them, the arts will express the wisdom of Hindu and Christian traditions, offering means to unite the inner life of the spirit with the outer life of matter, integrating justice and beauty in new ways.

Note 1 I was first formed in the Roman Catholic tradition in the American context. For the last two decades I have been an active member of an American spiritual order called “Sufism Reoriented” founded in 1952 by Meher Baba (1894–​1969). See www.sufismreoriented.org. (Accessed July 10, 2019). I have been a professional sculptor for over 25 years. See www.reunionstudios.com (Accessed July 10, 2019).

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Bibliography Agrawala, P.K. 1981. On the Ṣaḍaṅga Canons of Painting.Varanasi: Ratna Printing Works. Amaladass, A. and Löwner, G. 2012. Christian Themes in Indian Art from Mughal Times till Today. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers. Arya, R. 2016. “Spirituality and Contemporary Art.” In Burch Brown, F. (ed.). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford University Press. Available at https://​ doi.org/​ 10.1093/​ acrefore/​ 9780199340378.013.209. Accessed May 7, 2020. Aurobindo, S. 1995. Savitri. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. —​—​—​. 1997a. The Renaissance and Other Essays on Indian Culture. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram  Press. —​—​—​. 1997b. The Human Cycle. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. —​—​—​. 2000. The Future Poetry. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. —​—​—​. 2003. Early Cultural Writings. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Baba, M. 1985. Listen Humanity. Atlanta, GA: In Company with Meher Baba. —​—​—​. 2007. Discourses. Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Foundation. Bakker, F.L. 2012. “Review of Anand Amaladass’s and Gudrun Löwner’s book Christian Themes in Indian Art.” Book Reviews/​Exchange 41: 307–​08. Banerji, D. 2010. The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Baumgarten, A. 1954. Reflections on Poetry. Aschenbrenner, K. and Holthe,W.B. (trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Beldio, P. 2015. “The Androgynous Visual Piety of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and St. Clare and St. Francis.” Journal of Hindu Christian Studies 28(4): 11–​32. —​—​—​. 2016. “Art and Beauty, Opposition and Growth in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.” PhD Dissertation, Catholic University of America. —​—​—​. 2018a. “The Integral Yoga of the Sri Aurobindo Aśram:  Gender, Spirituality, and the Arts.” In Modern Hinduism in Text and Context.Vemsani, L. (ed.). New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. —​—​—​. 2018b. “The Creative Process: The Trouble with Mediating Divine Presence in Matter.” Intégrité 17(1): 32–​48. —​—​—​. Forthcoming. “Meher Baba’s Spirituality of Sustainability and Transformation.” In Sherma, R. and Bilimoria, P. (eds.). Sustainable Societies: Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Responses. New York: Springer. Belting, H. 1987. The End of the History of Art? Wood, C.S. (trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bharata. 1980. Naṭyaśāstra of Bharatamuṇi,Vol. I. Bare Text of Chs. I–​VII (with Commentary Abhinavabhāratī on Adhyāya VI only). Kavi, M.R. and Ramaswami, K.S.S. (eds.). Baroda: Oriental Institute. —​—​—​. 2006. Naṭyasastra of Bharatamuni: Text, Commentary of Abhinava Bhāratī by Abhinavaguptācārya and English Translation.Vol. 1. Ghosh, M.M. (trans.). Kumar, P. (ed.). Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Company. Clooney, F.X. 2017. The Future of Hindu-​Christian Studies: A Theological Inquiry. New York: Routledge. Conner, M.C.W. 2013. “Meher Baba’s Most Important Meeting:  The Union of East and West.” Love Street Breezes. 8–​ 26. Available at:  http://​lovestreetbreezes.org/​issues/​LSB-​January-​2013-​web.pdf. Accessed: July 7, 2019. Danto, A. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Dwyer, R. 2006. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. New York: Routledge. Elkins, J. 2004. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge. Huntington, S.L. 2001. The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. Boston, MA: Weatherhill. Huta. 2001. “My Savitri Work with the Mother.” Invocation 12: 7–​20. Ingalls, D.H.H., Masson, J.M. and Patwardhan, M.V. 1990. The Dhvanyāloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kalchuri, B. 2019, 1971. Lord Meher, The Biography of Avatar Meher Baba. Available atwww.lordmeher.org/​ rev/​index.jsp. Accessed July 7, 2019. Kramrisch,S.1983.Exploring India’s Sacred Art.Miller,B.S.(ed.).Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania  Press. Meyer, B. 2012. “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence:  Towards a Material Approach to Religion.” Lecture at the University of Utrecht. Michaels, A. 2004. Hinduism Past and Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitter, P. 1992. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —​—​—​. 1994. Arts and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–​1922:  Occidental Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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23 CHRISTIAN AND HINDU RESPONSES TO CHRISTIAN YOGA PRACTICE IN NORTH AMERICA Christopher Patrick Miller Ritual sharing is an important site of interreligious relations, as James Ponniah demonstrates elsewhere in this volume. Such sharing can be met—​by those whose rituals are being shared—​ with pride and appreciation, or with consternation and accusations of illicit appropriation. Nowhere are these complex dynamics more evident than in the context of yoga. This chapter features common Christian responses to yoga in North America (mainly in the United States), as well as common Hindu responses to Christians who practice yoga in North America. It begins with a brief overview of the historical roots of Christian understandings of yoga, as these understandings were crystallized during India’s colonial period in ways that continue to influence contemporary Christian perceptions. In the subsequent three sections, Christian responses to yoga in North America are broadly construed as “anxious,” “ambivalent,” or “accepting” in nature. The categories of anxiety, ambivalence, and acceptance are by no means final or impermeable, though they do provide a useful framework for classification. Finally, the chapter discusses Hindu responses to Christians who practice yoga. While both historical and contemporary popular Hindu discourse is characterized by widespread acceptance of most anyone practicing yoga, it is also important to take into account historical and contemporary critiques from various Hindu voices concerned with Westerners appropriating and practicing yoga on their own terms. Though these Hindu critiques are not always aimed explicitly at Christians, Christian yoga practitioners are frequently implicated in them.

Roots of Christian responses to yoga: colonial Orientalism, missionary zeal, and the Romantics During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperialist British Orientalists sought to understand, “civilize,” and manage Hindu colonial subjects according to Hindu religious law. Steeped in their own Christian worldview and their appreciation for the putative authority of religious texts, the British accomplished this task by working with a small number of Hindu elites in and around Bengal in order to deem particular Sanskrit texts conducive to the colonial mission as “classical” and/​or “canonical” to Hinduism, while simultaneously disregarding or even admonishing other texts that posed a threat to the British Christian worldview and 280

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colonial interests. Some of the most significant yoga texts “canonized” during this period were the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā and Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (cf. White 2014). With the help of Sanskrit scholars such as William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and Monier Monier-​Williams, the British translated these and other texts in order to support, as Monier-​Williams captured quite succinctly in his introduction to his famous Sanskrit–​English dictionary, the efforts of  “all those zealous men who have devoted themselves to the social, religious, and intellectual improvement of the natives of our Indian Empire” (Monier-​Williams 1899, p. x; emphasis mine). At least in part, British Orientalists canonized particular yoga texts as a response to the two types of yogis the British East India Company (BEIC) encountered when they arrived to the subcontinent for imperial conquest. On the one hand, there were established bands of armed yogi warriors who controlled important trade routes and extorted British financial resources, posing a significant threat to British imperial interests.The British had no interest in supporting such yogis. On the other hand, the British also encountered yogis belonging to non-​violent, meditative, and devotional religious orders who posed little threat to Company interests. In 1773, Company Governor-​General Warren Hastings responded to these two categories of yogis by outlawing and condemning the former “sinister yogis” (White 2009) while simultaneously condoning the latter yogis whose pacified forms of devotional and disembodied religiosity resembled the yogas found in the Upaniṣads, the Yoga Sūtra, and the Bhagavad Gītā, and were therefore most compatible with a Protestant Christian ethos. European Christian missionaries took a decidedly different approach than the BEIC toward Hindu texts and the management of the Hindu population. Rather than managing what they perceived as “degenerate” and “backward” Hindus according to Hindu text and custom, as Hastings had intended, missionaries instead insisted on assimilating the Hindus into European culture by converting them directly to Christianity. In this regard, evangelical Christians following the popular work of Company translator Charles Wilkins (1749–​1846) understood the Bhagavad Gītā to be a text capable of helping Hindus and yogis overcome what Christians perceived as backward, polytheistic religious practices, such as those involved in the practice of haṭha yoga. Though still falling short of true religion, from the missionary perspective, the supposedly monotheistic Bhagavad Gītā represented a step in the right direction for Hindus. As such, focusing on the Gītā was conducive to achieving the goals of Christian missionaries, such as famous evangelical Charles Grant (1746–​1823), who were seeking to convert backward Hindus to the religion of empire (cf. Davis 2014). The colonial-​era typology of the 1) “sinister yogi” affiliated with embodied, worldly forms of haṭha yoga versus 2) the devotional, meditative, or “Protestantized” Advaita-​Vedānta nirguṇa bhakti yogi whose interpretations of ultimate Reality were most compatible with the European Christian worldview, laid the groundwork for the varying Christian interpretations of yoga which persist into the present. (Advaita Vedānta is a philosophical system that was codified by the eighth to ninth century CE South-​Indian theologian Shankaracarya, the soteriological aim of which is to move beyond the world and its material manifestations of the Absolute with attributes [saguṇa], thereby realizing that one’s self [ātman] is one and the same as the undivided, attributeless [nirguṇa] Absolute known as Brahman.) Due to subsequent discourse produced by organizations such as the Theosophical Society—​who like others had inherited the demonizing attitude of the British—​haṭha yoga, which was associated with any form of yoga concerned with the body and world, received a negative reputation in the eyes of many Europeans and Americans. Instead, these Europeans and Americans were more willing to accept disembodied, meditative yoga teachings as found in the Upaniṣads, the Yoga Sūtra, and the Bhagavad Gītā. Ironically, haṭha yoga was later revived by Christian organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and reinvented as a form of physical culture and muscular 281

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Christianity that also eventually contributed to the popularization of the postural yoga practice ambitiously undertaken by many Christians alongside Patañjali et al., in modern yoga studios today (Singleton 2010; also, see below). In this way, missionary zeal and colonial Orientalist Sanskrit translation projects aimed at managing and civilizing a degenerate Hindu population inadvertently paved the way for various forms of Romantic Orientalist approaches to yoga that were much more positive in outlook. In their search for spiritual truths and what they perceived as the lost spiritual cradle of civilization, Romantic Orientalists (many of whom never visited India), such as Germany’s Johann Herder (1704–​1803), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–​1829), and August Schlegel (1767–​1845) turned to those yoga texts previously reified as canonical by the British with great hope. Lacking any imperial interests in India, many also turned to yoga texts to find spiritual techniques for experiencing god. Others, and most notably renowned nineteenth-​century German philologist, Max Müller (1823–​1900), appreciated the meditative and disembodied traditions found in Sāṃkhya-​ Yoga and Advaita Vedānta, which for him represented more authentic philosophical traditions that had degenerated into the nefarious forms of embodied haṭha yoga witnessed by the British and other European visitors in India. With varying degrees of acceptance and ambivalence, other Romantic Orientalists explored forms of tantra and haṭha yoga that the British would have viewed with great suspicion. For example, Sir John Woodroffe (1865–​1936) used the penname “Arthur Avalon” to author what would become popular monographs outlining the powerful and often sexualized serpentine force of kuṇḍalinī in tantra and haṭha yoga. Though sharing Avalon’s appreciative approach to kuṇḍalinī yoga, scholars such as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–​1961) gave stark warnings to Westerners indoctrinated in the Christian worldview who might be interested in such practices. Most significantly, Jung and others suggested that such forms of yoga could have severe negative consequences including the potential to cause madness or even death. Not all in the Romantic milieu approached yoga with mere acceptance and/​or ambivalence, however; many instead were deeply anxious or suspicious about it. Arguing with the Romantics, for example, German Christian philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–​1831), who was neither a Sanskritist nor a yoga practitioner, denounced the Yoga Sūtra and the Bhagavad Gītā, suggesting that yoga produced an irrational dream-​state consciousness that ultimately fell short of the fullest expression of spirit as found in Jesus Christ and Christianity. These warnings, as well as the aforementioned idea that there could be a lurking serpentine force—​which intimated a certain demonic biblical serpent from the Garden of Eden—​would later add fuel to Christians’ suspicions that the devil was lurking in yoga’s details. Selectively internalizing, and eventually expanding the many Orientalist stereotypes of yoga enumerated in this section, conservative and liberal forms of American Christianity would later respond to yoga with varying degrees of anxiety, ambivalence, or acceptance. The next three sections present specific examples of the ways in which these sentiments have manifested, and continue to manifest, in America.

Christian anxiety toward yoga Throughout their history, Protestants have repeatedly associated the devil with phenomena considered a threat to Christian tradition and faith.Within many conservative Protestant circles, yoga has been condemned in similar terms. Indeed, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suspicious conservative Christians often distrusted and even whole-​heartedly rejected what they considered sinister “Hindoo” yogis and other American disseminators of yoga who were seemingly exposing Christian men (and perhaps more importantly their 282

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women) to menacing, demonic, sexual, irrational, and mentally disturbing forces. The earliest manifestations of these forms of “Christian yogaphobia” (Jain 2015, p. 143) manifest in cases such as that of Anthony Comstock. Comstock was a US postal worker and founder, in 1873, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. With a deep fear of the body and sexuality, Comstock used his position in the Postal Service to attempt to censor and assault any form of thought or practice including, for example, Ida Craddock’s provocative “Church of Yoga,” that threatened what he perceived as true Protestant American values (Ibid., p. 22). Following these early critiques, contemporary Christian anxiety toward yoga in North America has continued to manifest in a number of forms. These include the ideas that yoga invites demonic possession, makes practitioners more licentious, or constitutes idolatry. Other more sophisticated critiques warn that yoga creates confusion for Christians that could threaten their faith and render them “post-​Christian.” In any case, these Christian critiques mistakenly essentialize yoga as an ancient monolithic tradition that is “Hindu” (Ibid., p.  133) as well as signal deep insecurities concerning the loss of faith in what many fundamentalist Christians perceive to be a unitary and monolithic Christian tradition. In 2018, evangelical mega-​church pastor John Lindell paradigmatically showcased contemporary Christian anxieties toward yoga when he warned his Missouri congregation about yoga’s “Hindu roots,” as well as the capacity for any kind of yoga to “open you up to demonic power” (Smith 2018). Lindell critiqued the lotus posture (padmāsana), for example, for having “sexual connotations” (Ibid.).Yoga, according to Lindell, also encourages Christians to break the first of the Ten Commandments found in the Old Testament, which proscribes Christians from worshipping other gods before their Christian god. The popular sun salutation, the pastor reasoned, was devised to worship Sūrya, the sun god found in Hinduism. Chanting mantras (sacred sonic formulae) containing the names of Hindu gods and goddesses, the pastor further argued, was similarly idolatrous. Lindell’s fears and warnings reproduce popular tropes about yoga typically disseminated by Protestant evangelical Christian leaders, though also shared by other Christians including, for example, more conservative members of the Catholic Church. Some of the main ideas expressed here are that yoga has the capacity to open one up to demonic possession, that yoga promotes the worship of false idols, and that licentious behavior is always a lurking threat. As recently as 1989, Catholic Cardinal Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict) similarly sought to rectify the “problem” of “non-​Christian forms of meditation,” including yoga, the somatic practices of which were, he argued, symbolic of “idol” worship and could lead to “a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead to psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations” (Ratzinger 1989). Though hyperbolic and clearly a legacy of Orientalist imagination, both Ratzinger’s and Lindell’s insecurities surrounding yoga’s alleged capacity to create states of demonic possession and psychic disturbance are not completely unfounded. Many yoga texts emphasize that “possession” of people’s bodies and concomitant altered states of consciousness are a fundamental aspect of practice (White 2009), while others suggest that certain yoga practices are in fact intended to invite a chosen goddess to possess the yoga practitioner (Mallinson 2007, p. 26). Nevertheless, for Christians to claim that such forms of possession are “demonic” betrays religious illiteracy that grossly misrepresents the intentions of such practices in their many and varied expressions in yogic literature and contemporary expression. Indeed, the possession practices mentioned here are, generally speaking, not a feature of the popular postural yoga that Christians tend to fear and critique. That is, of course, unless we consider the fact that some of the postures currently practiced in places such as 24 Hour Fitness, the YMCA, and other gyms are found in haṭha yoga texts as both postures (āsana) and seals (mudrā) intended 283

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as preliminaries for stimulating the female kuṇḍalinī and śakti forces understood to reside within the practitioners’ subtle body (e.g., matsyendrāsana and mahāmudrā in the Haṭhapradīpikā). Nevertheless, the majority of modern postural yoga is functioning according to biomedical understandings of the human body and mind that are emphatically not found in pre-​modern haṭha yoga texts and praxis. Other more sophisticated Christian critiques of yoga have come from the teachings of Al Mohler and Elliot Miller. Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, fears yoga’s contributions to the creation of a “post-​Christian” world. In a popular and widely read 2010 article titled “The Subtle Body—​Should Christians Practice Yoga?” Mohler warns: “Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a ‘post-​ Christian, spiritually polyglot’ reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?” (Mohler 2010). Echoing the early ideological concerns of Hegel (whose work Mohler is no doubt familiar with on account of his own scholarly work in systematic and historical theology), Mohler continues, “We are not called to escape the consciousness of this world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness, but to follow Christ in the way of faithfulness” (Ibid.). While Mohler initially essentialized yoga here as a fundamentally Hindu practice, as we would expect (cf. Jain 2015, p. 148), ten years later in 2020 he expanded his critique to consider yoga as both a Hindu and a Buddhist practice grounded in the efficacy of somatic techniques. Most specifically, he made the following comments in response to a bill in the Alabama Legislature that eventually lifted a ban on the practice of yoga in public schools: [Yoga] is deeply based in both Hinduism and Buddhism and the traditional meditative practices that are inseparable from yoga as physical movement involve those traditional Buddhist and Hindu teachings, and it shows up not only in the word “Namaste,” it shows up even in the basic philosophy of what the body is doing. (Gryboski 2020) Mohler also included the contributions of American Transcendentalism and New Thought in his critique.What is perhaps most interesting about these and other statements Mohler makes in this article is that they suggest he is engaging recent modern yoga scholarship that problematizes his previous Hindu origins theory of yoga (Jain 2015), the use of yoga as an embodied ritual (cf. C. Miller 2018a; Foxen 2017), as well as the use of yoga in public schools (cf. Brown 2019). Nevertheless, Mohler does so in order to continue to advance a Christian fundamentalist argument against Christians practicing yoga. In addition to Mohler, evangelical fundamentalist Elliot Miller perceives yoga as a threat and suggests that “a probing Christian analysis of yoga is urgently needed” (Miller 2008a, p. 2). To fulfill this need, Miller published a three-​part journal article series in the Christian Research Journal that was laden with casuistic theological arguments against yoga (Miller 2008a; 2008b; and 2008c). Online versions of Miller’s articles also appear with an image of a woman meditating with a serpent running up her spine, which is meant to showcase kuṇḍalinī as synonymous with the demonic serpent from the Garden of Eden. Unsurprisingly, in Part 1 of the series, Miller tends to conflate concepts from Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Haṭhapradīpikā to reify a Hindu yoga tradition, the “classical” version of which is “Raja Yoga” as found in the Yoga Sūtra (cf. Birch 2014). Like Rajiv Malhotra (see below), Miller argues that classical “Raja Yoga” seeks oneness with god. This is a goal, as he argues in Part 2, “which is…incompatible with Christianity. It is designed to fulfill non-​Christian mystical objectives, it tends to engage the participant in idolatry, and it has spiritually dangerous connections 284

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to the occult” (Miller 2008b). Finally, in Part 3, Miller suggests that the devil is hiding just below the surface of today’s seemingly innocuous physical haṭha yoga practices. Yet he also suggests that Christian alternatives such as Laurette Willis’s “Praise Moves” (see below) could provide a viable alternative for Christians. Throughout the three-​part series, Miller’s research sources and reasoning demonstrate clearly how evangelicals continue to internalize early colonial Orientalist representations of yoga in ways that are largely intolerant, derogatory, and xenophobic. Whether through popular or through more sophisticated theological discourse, we can see here how Lindell, Mohler, and Miller are playing the role of a contemporary Anthony Comstock, seeking to censor spiritual or religious practices—​in this case yoga—​which they have deemed threatening to their fundamentalist Christian faith and values.

Christian ambivalence toward yoga In 2013, Jennifer and Stephen Sedlock were concerned about their children’s participation in yoga programming at their school in the Encinitas Unified School District (EUSD). The Sedlocks were Christians, and their children were engaging in yoga practices funded by an organization grounded in the teachings of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga Yoga.The Sedlocks and other parents were concerned that performing sun salutations (sūrya namaskāra) and chanting the mantra “oṃ” essentially involved their children in practices they considered Hindu. Even though children were not required to acknowledge a sun god or chant mantras, some parents remained suspicious of the intent of EUSD’s yoga programming. Even just practicing yoga exercises, they reasoned, might lead their children to explore Hindu ideas outside of the classroom, therefore rendering a seemingly innocuous practice quite threatening to their children’s faith. After visiting and speaking with district officials and yoga teachers, however, some Christian parents’ anxieties were allayed and they became more at ease with their children participating in yoga in so far as it was framed as physical fitness. Nevertheless, with the help of the conservative Christian-​based National Center for Law and Policy, the Sedlocks brought EUSD to court for encouraging what the Sedlocks deemed to be a “religious” practice in public schools. After engaging several expert witnesses (religious studies professors among them), the court sided with EUSD, deeming yoga a non-​religious practice.With a high degree of uncertainty and ambivalence toward the court’s decision, as well as toward the trend of having yoga programming in schools, scholar Candy Gunther Brown recommends “a voluntary, opt-​in model of informed consent” that discloses to parents and children “whether practices may or may not be appropriate for them, given their personal backgrounds, circumstances, beliefs, values, and goals” (Brown 2019, p.  300). Following her extensive research and participation in the EUSD case, Brown offers this approach in order to give Christian parents the option to opt in or out of school district yoga and mindfulness programming based on their individual informed judgment. As with the fear of demonic possession, many Christian parents’ fears that yoga has the potential to pique their children’s curiosity about Hinduism are excessive, though not completely unfounded. It is not uncommon, first of all, to hear proselytizing non-​Christian or post-​ Christian yoga practitioners, teachers, and gurus (Lucia 2019) suggest how important it is to “get people on the mat” so that they will eventually feel self-​inspired to study “yoga philosophy” more deeply. Furthermore, in the view of many Hindus (and, increasingly, scholars) the extent to which one is a “Hindu” can in many cases be determined by the value one places on the performance of certain embodied ritual actions, rather than (or in addition to) mere assent to particular beliefs or creeds. In this regard, some scholars of yoga have suggested that particular types of modern yoga constitute forms of embodied ritual action that implicate practitioners 285

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in South Asian subtle body logics (cf. C.  Miller 2018a; Foxen 2017) and Hindu dharmic subjectivity (Alter 2000). Determining if a particular yoga system is intended to accomplish these or similar aims requires a careful case-​by-​case study of individual yoga systems and their disseminators’ somatic logics. Ashtanga Yoga is certainly a system of yoga tied to Pattabhi Jois’s deep Hindu identity and teachings, and members of the Ashtanga Yoga community are known to adopt fundamentalist attitudes toward what they perceive to be ancient and authentic postural yoga practices grounded in the Yoga Sūtra and the Vedas. These fundamentalist attitudes clearly reflect a blend of North American Judeo-​Christian and Romantic Orientalist concerns, though more importantly, they also suggest that Ashtanga Yoga is intended to lead practitioners toward adopting a universalistic Hindu worldview grounded in Jois’s prescribed daily embodied ritual action found in his well-​known postural series. As was true in the EUSD case, some Christians are willing to accept yoga as long as the practices undertaken are limited to the physical postures alone and do not involve any perceived esoteric elements, such as chanting mantras or worshipping Hindu gods and goddesses. We can trace some of the origins of this ambivalence about yoga to the adaptation, by the YMCA, of yoga postures (āsana) into the organization’s physical culture regimens developed in the nineteenth century. More specifically, the YMCA appropriated physical Indian yoga postures and combined these postures with other exercises in order to develop Christian men’s minds, bodies, and spirits. The YMCA did so to serve and demonstrate Christian piety according to the logic of the broader physical culture movement known as muscular Christianity (Singleton 2010). Under this guise, The YMCA made significant contributions to the spread of yoga as a physical fitness regimen. Some contemporary Christians’ willingness to accept yoga so long as it is perceived as a physical fitness exercise clearly reflects the YMCA’s Christian ethos and early attitude toward yoga. Nevertheless, other Christians, such as pastor John Lindell (discussed above), who deeply fear the possibility that yoga practice could lead to demonic possession, remain skeptical even of the YMCA’s yoga, and continue to be concerned about yoga’s omnipresence in America’s cultural landscape: “Yoga it seems is everywhere. For example, if you go to the local [YMCA] and you click on the ‘Healthy Living’ link, you will find no less than 31 references to yoga” (Smith 2018). Other evangelical Christians have vehemently rejected yoga for the reasons mentioned in the previous section, while still maintaining that postural embodied practice constitutes a legitimate Christian preoccupation. Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is “Praise Moves,” founded by Dr. Laurette Willis. A former yoga practitioner herself,Willis turned to Christianity while eventually rejecting yoga due to her perception of yoga as a practice that can make people “defenseless targets for the enemy’s New Age religion,” and a tool, that serves as the “missionary arm of Hinduism” too often wielded by transnational gurus (2010a). By “enemy,” Willis is rather explicitly referring to the devil. Despite rejecting yoga as demonic, Willis has developed a popular series of psychosomatic practices reflecting the concerns of muscular Christianity. These practices are intended as an alternative to Christian forms of yoga that in Willis’s view have not adequately erased its Hindu elements. The goal of Praise Moves is to help individuals “become a Fit Witness for Christ in spirit, soul AND body” (Willis 2010b). What is important to note here is that many, but not all, of Willis’s 140 or so postures resemble those found in yoga studios, though each is explicitly connected to some aspect of Christian scripture or the Hebrew alphabet. Such a strategy suggests an ambivalent attitude toward yoga as it incorporates yoga postures into a fundamentally different theological rubric. Furthermore, Willis’s approach reflects the Christian predilection for scripture and belief as the key indicator of religious experience, whereas embodied practice here in the form of postures—​ which would be primary for a Hindu—​is in and of itself relegated to a subordinate role. 286

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Following these distinct cultural logics, we might therefore say that Willis is a yogin(ī) in form, but not in name.

Christian acceptance of Christian yoga Liberal Christian Americans living in the same historical milieu as conservative Anthony Comstock frequently adopted approaches to yoga similar to those found in early Romantic Orientalist scholarship. Impressed by the neo-​ Vedāntic meditative teachings of Swami Vivekananda, inspired by the musings of the American Transcendentalists, and with increasing access to texts such as the Bhagavad-​Gītā and Yoga Sūtra, many liberal Christians found much to admire in yoga.Vivekananda, having in major part learned his Protestantized form of Vedānta from the Brāhmo Samāj, was a product of a transnational Hindu Renaissance wherein yoga was dramatically reformed in the face of the imperialist Protestant Christian ethos of the British.The Brāhmo Samāj was founded by and comprised of Hindu elites who not only assimilated colonial and Romantic Orientalist discourse concerning what constituted the official yogic “canon,” but were themselves inspired by and in dialogue with American forms of liberal Christianity including Unitarianism and Deism. Thus, the yogas promulgated by early gurus in America had already been primed for a liberal Christian audience. (For more on Vivekananda, see Rinehart’s chapter in this volume; for more on the Brāhmo Samāj and its founder, Rammohun Roy, see Killingley’s chapter.) In the generation that followed, Vivekananda’s teachings paved the way for kriyā yoga guru Paramahansa Yogananda to teach yoga under the guise of “original Christianity” through the Self-​Realization Fellowship (SRF). For liberal Christians seeking unmediated experience of god, the main attraction of Yogananda’s purportedly universal teachings was most certainly his incorporation of Jesus Christ into a Hindu yoga lineage that promised direct experience of the divine.Yogananda developed his teachings from exposure to ideas from the Hindu Renaissance as well as his own guru’s teachings, which sought to show the equivalence between the Vedas and the Bible (Yukteswar 2006). Like many Indians, he encountered European Christian missionaries in India attempting to learn the Vedas in order to better equip themselves to convert what they perceived to be “heathen” and “primitive” Hindus to their own Christian worldview. More significantly, during his undergraduate years at Serampore College in India (a Christian college), Yogananda became well-​versed in Christian theology and the methods Protestants used to convert Indians. He would later deploy these same methods in America to convert his Christian audiences to kriyā yoga (cf. C. Miller 2018b). Liberal American Christians who did not convert to Yogananda’s SRF nevertheless used the newly canonized Yoga Sūtra as a manual for yogic technique. Often with the encouragement of Hindus, these Christians qualified their acceptance of yoga as a valid spiritual practice on the precondition that Christian practitioners understood Jesus to be Patañjali’s iṣṭa-​devatā (chosen tutelary deity), substituted God the Father for Patañjali’s ambiguous īśvara (Lord, Supreme Being), and/​or interpreted prāṇāyāma (breath control) as a mediating practice between the practitioner and the Holy Spirit (cf. Chapple 2011, p. 140; Corigliano 2017, p. 23; Prabhavananda and Isherwood 1953, p. 34). These practitioners also understood Patañjali’s five yama (ethical restraints) and five niyama (moral observances) collectively as a new set of ten commandments (cf. Sivananda 1999, p.  27). In many instances, self-​ serving middle-​ class white Christians appropriated yoga as such in order to rediscover techniques for achieving communion with their god and to strengthen their faith and Christian identity. Christians continue to appropriate yoga in such a manner in the contemporary period. For example, evangelical Christian Reggie Harris, who has expressed explicit disappointment and 287

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anger toward pastor John Lindell’s aforementioned critiques of yoga, says that, “I know my relationship with the Lord…has gotten deeper through yoga…yoga transcends religion” (Smith 2018). Employing a similar logic, Christian-​based yoga studios have begun to emerge to facilitate yoga as a universal and valid form of Christian spiritual practice.Yahweh Yoga, for example, is “a Bible based school” and believes “every word in the Bible is Truth.” The studio seeks to “increase the kingdom of Jesus Christ by establishing, providing, and maintaining a Christian yoga studio and teaching academy that honors God in all business and ministry endeavors” (Yahweh Yoga  n.d.). Beyond Protestants who accept yoga with the (often implicit) goals of nurturing muscular Christianity and direct experience of god, some strands of North American Catholicism also accept yoga with their own specific objectives in mind. Catholic acceptance of yoga has roots in Vatican II’s groundbreaking Nostra Aetate (1965), a landmark Church document that acknowledged that other religious traditions “often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (Paul VI 1965). However, reflecting something like Cardinal Ratzinger’s suspicion of yoga (as discussed above), the document also states—​in more of a Hegelian fashion—​that it is only Christ “in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself ” (Ibid.). Thus, all non-​Christian religions, including Hinduism, and by extension practices perceived to be associated with Hinduism (including yoga), perpetuate potentially true and yet ultimately unfulfilled religious revelation according to Vatican II Catholic Church theology. Early participants in the field of Catholic comparative theology and interreligious dialogue conveyed the spirit of Nostra Aetate quite well. Indeed, their comparative methodologies called for a retrieval of theory and praxis from other religious traditions with the primary aim of strengthening their own Catholic faith, identity, and experience of god. While this comparative methodological approach has since rightfully come under academic scrutiny for its racist and colonial heritage (cf. Tiemeier 2019), yoga had found and continues to often find itself the object of Catholic fascination.Very much a part of this early interreligious comparative project in the mid-​twentieth century, both Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s (1915–​1968) Zen practice in Kentucky and Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths’s (1906–​1993) contemplative ashram movement in India inspired Catholics far and wide to rediscover their meditative capacities. During a trip to Monterey Bay in the early 1990s, Griffiths “thought California was definitely where it (The Spirit) was happening!” and his yogic legacy continues to be celebrated there (Rendler-​Bregman 2016). Just a few decades before, Benedictine Jean Marie Dechanet published his influential Christian Yoga (1960) in English for a 1960s Catholic readership, suggesting from his own experience that the asceticism and discipline of yoga helped him experience the flow of Christ’s grace within. Subsequently John Main (1926–​1982) and Thomas Keating (1923–​ 2018) respectively introduced “Christian Meditation” and “Centering Prayer” to Americans and Canadians in the 1960s and 1970s. Christian Meditation and Centering Prayer are particularly notable because both were and remain very popular in Catholic and Protestant circles, while also being significantly influenced by yoga practices, as well as Zen, Transcendental Meditation, and Hindu mantra techniques (Lee 2018). Today, some American Catholics continue to perpetuate these early practices as they seek to have direct experience of their god. For example, the organization known as Ignatian Yoga (ignatianyoga.com)—​well aware of the problematic appropriation issues involved—​combines Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra with Ignatian Spiritual Exercises in ways that maintain the distinctiveness of both traditions. Finally, other Catholics unconvinced by the Catholic Church’s teachings are known to leave the Church to convert to what they speciously perceive to be non-​dogmatic yoga traditions such as Yogananda’s Christ-​friendly SRF. 288

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At this point, we have evaluated Christian responses to yoga in America, which manifest, in different contexts, as anxiety, ambivalence, or acceptance. What remains to be explored is what Hindus make of Christians practicing yoga in North America (and more broadly).

Hindu perspectives on Christians practicing yoga Generally speaking, those who identify as Hindu celebrate and appreciate Christians who practice yoga, though as this section will show, there are exceptions and nuances to this rule. A brief return to India’s colonial period will help us understand the roots of contemporary Hindu responses to Christians practicing yoga in North America. In the face of imperialist British Christianity, a number of Indian organizations arose espousing differing views on how Indian culture, including yoga, ought to be disseminated publicly. On the one hand, elite cosmopolitan Indians with a global vision for Hinduism, like those belonging to the Brāhmo Samāj, constructed a universal form of Hinduism that they intended to present to the world as on par with (and perhaps superior to or at least more accommodating than) Christianity. Swami Vivekananda and many of the gurus who followed him to America in later generations (e.g., Paramahansa Yogananda) were significantly influenced by the Brāhmo Samāj. Following the organization’s rubric, they developed Protestantized forms of yoga as a form of cultural soft power to win the hearts, minds, and bodies of their American audiences, while strongly encouraging their followers to practice yoga. What mattered most for these modern disseminators of yoga, steeped as they were in their inclusivist neo-​Vedāntic theologies, was that a Westerner, and in many cases a Christian Westerner, practiced and judged yoga according to their personal experience (rather than just believing in yoga or Hinduism). When they did practice, these Westerners were implicating themselves in the various subtle body logics found in different yoga traditions and, from the perspectives of their Hindu gurus, into the accommodating and action-​oriented logic of Hinduism. For late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century liberal Christians seeking techniques to know their god, Hindu gurus provided a new toolkit for producing novel forms of so-​called Christian religious experience. On the other hand, Dayananda Saraswati’s (1824–​1883) Ārya Samāj and other later nationalist organizations, such as K.B. Hedgewar’s (1889–​1940) Rāshtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS), opposed spreading universal forms of Hinduism around the world. Instead, they sought to use new forms of exclusivist nationalist Hinduism and yoga domestically to mobilize Indian youth in the independence struggle against the British, Christians, and Muslims, as they imagined their ascetic warrior forebears to have done (cf. Pinch 2006). Other spiritual leaders during India’s colonial period, such as Rāma Liṅga (1823–​1874), developed vernacular yoga systems (in Rāma Liṅga’s case a Tamil system) involving magic and practices such as raising the dead (Weiss 2019) that would be anathema to Christians both past and present. Today, those Hindus who reject Christians practicing yoga often do so from a perspective that is informed by similar nationalist and vernacular visions of yoga, while those who accept Christian forms of yoga to varying degrees tend to have a more global vision of yoga as a universal spiritual practice more in line with the vision of the Brāhmo Samāj,Vivekananda, and Yogananda. Thus, despite the predominance of Hindus who, having internalized the globalizing logic of organizations such as the Brāhmo Samāj, accept Christians practicing yoga, a number of contemporary Hindu voices have protested against Christian yoga practice. However, many of these Hindu voices in fact speak more broadly to white Westerners who practice yoga, whether they are Christian or not. These essentializing Hindu arguments are generally made by Hindu elites against what they perceive as Westerners’ appropriation of a monolithic Hindu yoga tradition into forms of predominantly white athletic postural yoga traditions that pay little to no tribute 289

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to yoga’s alleged Hindu roots (Jain 2015, p. 142). Nevertheless, because a national and eventually transnational Hindu identity was reified as a direct result of India’s colonial encounter with the British Christian worldview and its concomitant imperial interests, we may understand suspicious Hindu reactions against Westerners practicing yoga as an implicit protest against the colonial Christian ethos that made Western yoga practice possible in the first place. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has been the most vocal in speaking out against Westerners appropriating and practicing yoga.The Foundation’s “Take BackYoga” campaign mistakenly constructs yoga as a fundamentally Hindu practice and therefore desires more acknowledgment of yoga’s putatively Hindu roots (Ibid.). With great irony, although the HAF seeks to critique Western claims to yoga, the organization does so in an idiom exposing internalized Protestant, colonial, and Romantic Orientalist assumptions regarding what comprises proper yoga and the concomitant yogic “canon.” Such assumptions are evident in the organization’s attempt to portray “yoga as a life-​long practice dedicated to achieving moksha, or liberation/​ union with God” (HAF 2016). Furthermore, under the assumption that the Yoga Sūtra and the Bhagavad Gītā are the ur-​texts of yoga, the HAF also assumes that modern postural yoga, which focuses mainly on physical exercises and health, fits into the second-​rate category of haṭha yoga (which, as we have already seen, is a Protestant idea emerging from India’s colonial period). Though critical, the HAF does not necessarily want Westerners to stop practicing yoga. Instead, they tend to demand that those in the West who are teaching and practicing yoga acknowledge yoga as a fundamentally Hindu practice. More recently, in 2019, artist Chiraag Bhakta hosted a #whitepeopledoingyoga photo exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. Bhakta’s exhibition, which challenged white audiences to reflect upon the idea of cultural appropriation, caused his white sponsors at the museum much anxiety. However, though certainly biting in nature, the exhibition was not, ultimately, intended to make white people stop practicing yoga. Instead, it challenged them to face their white privilege, their Orientalist fantasies, and their appropriation of foreign cultural elements within a capitalist framework. Such a challenge might also be leveled against the Western appropriation of many other features of Indian culture, such as food and music. Significantly, among the images included in the exhibition were depictions of Christian Yoga, including the cover of Dechanet’s aforementioned Christian Yoga (Bhakta 2019). Other Hindu critiques similar to Bhakta’s have come from religious studies scholar Shreena Gandhi, who, in conjunction with activist Lillie Wolff, writes:  “Yoga, like so many other colonized systems of practice and knowledge, did not appear in the American spiritual landscape by coincidence; rather, its popularity was a direct consequence of a larger system of cultural appropriation that capitalism engenders and reifies” (Gandhi and Wolff 2017). Like Bhakta, Gandhi and Wolff do not want white people to stop practicing yoga. Rather they ask them merely to attempt to “understand how the history of yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy” (Ibid., emphasis in original). Though protests against Westerners (many of whom, even if not Christian, have no doubt often internalized a Judeo-​Christian ethos) practicing yoga predominate in contemporary Hindu critiques, there are specific instances wherein Hindus do make explicit arguments against Christians practicing yoga. Concerned with the issue of cultural appropriation, for example, the HAF wrote a letter to the editors of TIME Magazine in 2005 in response to an article about Christian forms of yoga characterized as “Stretching for Jesus” (Cullen 2005). The HAF lamented the Christian appropriation of yoga for Christian ends, suggesting that “some churches seek to exploit Hindu pluralism, and its gift of yoga, to increase their own legion of churchgoers” (HAF 2005). More recently, in 2011, HAF wrote a letter to the Star Tribune, arguing that Holy Yoga Global LLC, a Christian yoga studio 290

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movement, in fact “delinks yoga from Hinduism and is precisely what the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign seeks to call out” (HAF 2011). In addition to the HAF, the International Center for Yoga Education and Research (ICYER), based in Puducherry (previously Pondicherry) makes frequent critiques of the ways in which Westerners practice yoga. These critiques often extend to Christian practitioners of yoga in North America. The Center was founded by Swami Gitananda Giri, a half-​Irish, half-​Sindhi medical doctor who spent many years in Canada as a doctor and yoga teacher, eventually becoming a yoga guru in South India. Most often, ICYER’s critiques refer to what ICYER perceives as materialistic Westerners practicing physical forms of haṭha yoga devoid of Patañjali’s ethical content (yama and niyama). Though ICYER levels such critiques, it does, generally speaking, still accept Western yoga—​flawed as it is from their perspective—​as redeemable. With regard to Christian forms of yoga specifically, an article on ICYER’s website suggests that “Christianity and Yoga are fully capable of reinforcing each other” as long as one is willing to concede that yoga is fundamentally Hindu. ICYER adopts a perennialist view of religion and religious experience with repeated insinuations that advocate for the preeminence of Hinduism, ultimately suggesting that Christian faith is fulfilled through Hindu yoga practice (Anandhi n.d.), rather than the other way around, as India’s former colonial masters would have suggested. In a similar vein, German-​born Canadian citizen Georg Feuerstein (1947–​2012), a scholar-​practitioner of yoga and author of the popular book, The Yoga Tradition (2008), once suggested that “we should not speak of a Christian Yoga, unless it is indeed a hybrid between Christianity and Hinduism” (Feuerstein 2008, p. 94). Like countless other self-​identified Hindus and ICYER itself, Feuerstein characterizes yoga as fundamentally Hindu. Among the explicit arguments against Christians practicing yoga, Rajiv Malhotra provides one of the most elaborate, though no less essentializing, critiques. With regard to postural yoga, Malhotra describes Christian yoga as an “oxymoron” (Malhotra 2010), since Christians cannot practice yoga in so far as it “runs contrary to the belief that the body will lead humans astray” (Ibid.). Although Malhotra agrees that yoga can provide spiritual benefits to most anyone, he also explicitly agrees with Mohler (see above) in many ways, ultimately arguing that yoga’s ontological aims are fundamentally incompatible with Christian doctrine. Here Malhotra, like the HAF, betrays a non-​dual, neo-​Vedāntic understanding of yoga wherein practitioners’ ultimate goal is to unite with god to become a jīvanmukti, a goal that he finds incompatible with Christianity insofar as Christianity maintains “an infinite gap between God and the cosmos” (Ibid.).

Conclusion As we have seen, both Christian and Hindu responses to Christians practicing yoga have historical provenance in the colonial and Romantic Orientalist discourse produced during India’s colonial period, as well as in the yoga discourse espoused by nationalist and transnational gurus and religious leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Preoccupied with belief and scripture, Christian responses to yoga in America fluctuate between anxious, ambivalent, and accepting in nature. Anxious responses tend to entail fear of the devil, warnings against idolatry, and general distress over yoga’s potential to dilute Christian faith and thereby create a “post-​Christian” world.Those who accept yoga solely on the grounds of physical fitness or within the ethos of muscular Christianity tend to exhibit what has been identified as an ambivalent attitude toward yoga, while others who fully accept yoga do so as a means to strengthen their faith and experience of god, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit.

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More concerned with what one does than what one believes, Hindus tend to accept when Westerners, including Christian Westerners, practice yoga in North America. Nevertheless, some Hindus do critique the practice of yoga by Westerners as part of a larger critique of cultural appropriation, white supremacy, colonialism, or capitalism, and in doing so often implicate Christians in their critiques. In specific cases, Hindus have explicitly leveled critiques against Christians practicing yoga in North America, sometimes agreeing with the arguments of their Protestant counterparts that yoga is an essentially Hindu practice. At stake in all Hindu arguments for or against Christians practicing yoga is the question of whether or not this is true, that is, whether or not yoga is a uniquely Hindu practice, or instead a universal practice for all of humanity independent of religious identity.

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Responses to Christian yoga practice Malhotra, R. 2010. “A Hindu View Of ‘Christian Yoga’.” Rajivmalhotra.com. November 8. Available at https://​rajivmalhotra.com/​library/​articles/​hindu-​view-​christian-​yoga/​. Accessed November 17, 2019. Mallinson, J. 2007. The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of an Early Text of Haṭha Yoga. New York: Routledge. Miller, C.P. 2018a. “Embodying Transnational Yoga.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Davis. —​—​—​. 2018b. “World Brotherhood Colonies:  A Preview of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Understudied Vision for Communities Founded Upon the Principles of Yoga.” Yoga-​Mimāṃsā 50(1): 3–​9. Miller, E. 2008a. “The Yoga Boom: A Call for Christian Discernment. Part 1: Yoga in Its Original Eastern Context.” Christian Research Journal 31(2). Available at www.equip.org/​?s=volume+31. Accessed May 1, 2020. —​—​—​. 2008b. “The Yoga Boom: A Call for Christian Discernment. Part 2: Yoga in Its Western Context.” Christian Research Journal 31(3). Available at www.equip.org/​?s=volume+31. Accessed May 1, 2020. —​—​—​. 2008c. “The Yoga Boom: A Call for Christian Discernment. Part 3: Toward a Comprehensive Christian Response.” Christian Research Journal 31(4). Available at www.equip.org/​?s=volume+31. Accessed May 1, 2020. Mohler, A, Jr. 2010. “The Subtle Body—​Should Christians Practice Yoga?” The Christian Post. September 21. Available at www.christianpost.com/​news/​the-​subtle-​body-​should-​christians-​practice-​yoga-​ 46883/​. Accessed November 17, 2019. Monier-​Williams, M. 1899. A Sanskrit-​English Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Paul VI. 1965. “Nostra Aetate.”Vatican.va, October 28. Available atwww.vatican.va/​archive/​hist_​councils/​ ii_​vatican_​council/​documents/​vat-​ii_​decl_​19651028_​nostra-​aetate_​en.html. Accessed November 17, 2019. Pinch, W. 2006. Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prabhavananda and Isherwood, C. (eds). 1953. How to Know God:  The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. New York: Routledge. Ratzinger, J. 1989.“Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation.” Vatican.va. October 15. Available atwww.vatican.va/​roman_​curia/​congregations/​cfaith/​documents/​ rc_​con_​cfaith_​doc_​19891015_​meditazione-​cristiana_​en.html. Accessed November 17, 2019. Rendler-​ Bregman, Z. 2016. “Sangha Shantivanam Summer 2016 Update.” Bedegriffiths.com. May. Available atwww.bedegriffiths.com/​author/​lisa/​. Accessed December 15, 2019. Singleton, M. 2010. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivananda, Sri. 1999. Easy Steps to Yoga. Tehri-​Garhwal: The Divine Life Society. Smith, S. 2018. “Megachurch Pastor Says Yoga Has ‘Demonic Roots,’ ‘Diametrically Opposed to Christianity’.” The Christian Post, November 13.Available at www.christianpost.com/​news/​megachurchpastor-​says-​yoga-​demonic-​roots-​diametrically-​opposed-​christianity.html. Accessed November 17, 2019. Tiemeier, T. 2019. “Teaching Comparative Theology after Charlottesville.” In Babka, S.P., Procario-​ Foley, E. and Yocum, S. (eds.). You Say You Want a Revolution?:  1968–​2018 in Theological Perspective. New York: Orbis Books, pp. 49–​60. Weiss, R. 2019. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religion on the Margins of Colonialism. Oakland: University of California Press. White, D.G. 2009. Sinister Yogis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —​—​—​. 2014. The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Willis, L. 2010a. “ ‘Christian Yoga?’ No, Yoga and Christianity Do Not Mix.” Praisemoves.com. Date unknown. Available at https://​praisemoves.com/​about-​us/​why-​a-​christian-​alternative-​to-​yoga/​. Accessed November 17, 2019. —​ —​ —​ . 2010b. “Welcome to PraiseMoves!” Praisemoves.com. Date unknown. Available at https://​ praisemoves.com/​. Accessed November 17, 2019. Yahweh Yoga. n.d. “About Yahweh Yoga.” Yahwehyoga.com. Date unknown. Available at http://​ yahwehyoga.com/​about/​about-​yahweh-​yoga/​. Accessed November 17, 2019. Yukteswar, Sri. 2006. The Holy Science. Los Angeles: Self-​Realization Fellowship.

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PART V

Significant figures

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24 RAMMOHUN ROY Dermot Killingley

To call Rammohun Roy (1772?–​1833) a “Hindu” or a “Christian” (or both, or neither) would be an over-​simplification; yet Rammohun was undoubtedly a pioneer of Hindu–​Christian relations, setting reference points for later disputes and dialogue. The first Indian intellectual to be internationally known while still living, he corresponded regularly with leading figures in the English-​speaking world, both Christians and free-​thinkers, and some of his works were reviewed in British, American, French, and German periodicals. His activities were frequently reported in the English-​language and Bengali-​language press in Calcutta (now Kolkata). The term, “Hindu,” in Rammohun’s time was not necessarily a religious label, as is clear from the fact that it was common in the nineteenth century to speak of “Hindu Christians.” When Sir William Jones addressed the Asiatic Society in Calcutta “On the Hindus” in 1786 (Jones 1799, pp. 19–​34), he spoke of their language, literature, arts, and sciences, using the words “Hindu” and “Indian” interchangeably. Ethnic and religious labels were not always distinguished; Muslims were often referred to as “Moors” or “Turks.” “Hinduism,” on the other hand, is definitely a religious label, referring to what was also called “the Hindu system of religion.” It became current around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Rammohun was probably the first Hindu to use it (Pennington 2005, p. 60, 201 n. 2). In 1816, he used it twice: once with approval, and once with regretful disapproval. He wrote, “I have urged in every work that I have hitherto published, that the doctrines of the unity of God are real Hindooism, as that religion was practised by our ancestors, and as it is well-​known even at the present age to many learned Brahmans” (Roy 1906, p. 90). Here, he not only looks back to an unspecified past for the true Hinduism, but he also holds that it is still remembered. He explains that his purpose in publishing translations of ancient Sanskrit texts, as he had begun to do in the previous year, is to make this true Hinduism better known, both to his countrymen and to Europeans. Previously, also in 1816, he used the word in reference to what he considered false Hinduism, overly preoccupied with rules of purity. “For the chief part of the theory and practice of Hindooism, I am sorry to say, is made to consist in the adoption of a peculiar mode of diet” (Ibid., p. 73). A later reference to Hinduism, in 1823, uses what has since become a familiar, if questionable, trope:  the “mild and liberal spirit of universal toleration which is well-​known to be a fundamental principle of Hindooism” (Ibid., p.  179). In this work, Rammohun was writing

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pseudonymously in the guise of a Hindu pandit. Here, and elsewhere, he uses “Hindooism” as a term parallel to, and contrasting with, “Christianity” (Ibid., pp.  194, 675, 688, 889, 893, 897, 899, 900). Though he was familiar with Muslim culture, to such an extent that Hindu opponents objected to his Mughal style of dress, he says little about Islam in his Bengali and English writings. On the other hand, he says much about both Hinduism and Christianity, and how Hindus and Christians should respond to each other’s beliefs and practices.

Rammohun’s life Much of Rammohun’s early life is obscure, and much of what has been written about it, in his time and later, is unsupported (and in some cases contradicted) by documentary evidence. The date of his birth is uncertain; 1772 is generally accepted, and is the best attested, but contemporaries reported other dates, ranging from 1774 to 1784. Much more is known about his time in Calcutta from 1815 to 1830, and more still about his last years in England, from 1831 to 1833, the year he died in Bristol (Carpenter 1866; Zastoupil 2010). He was born into a Vaishnava Brahmin family in Burdwan district. His ancestors had held offices under the Nawabs of Bengal, and the title Roy (Bengali rāýa,“king”), which Rammohun and others in the family used in preference to their Brahmin title Bandyopādhyāya, had been conferred on his great-​grandfather by the Nawab ruling at the time (Collet 1962, p.  2). Contemporary memoirs, followed by later biographers, speak of his having studied Sanskrit in Varanasi and Arabic in Patna; but while he certainly knew these languages, and also Persian, it is uncertain where he learnt them. A turning point in his life came around 1797, when he engaged in business in Calcutta (Ibid., p. 15), and thrived there while his family’s fortunes declined. Such changes of fortune were typical of the period following the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which fixed the revenue due to the government from each piece of land. This led to the ruin of many former zamindar (land-​ holding) families, while wealth flowed to Calcutta. Rammohun’s business included lending money to the East India Company’s young British employees, and it was probably in this way that he made the acquaintance of some of them, as well as some independent British entrepreneurs. For a period from around 1800 to 1815, he was intermittently employed by individual civil servants as a private manager, and sometimes by the Company itself as a revenue officer. It was early in this period that Rammohun wrote his first work, the Tuḥfat al-​Muwaḥḥidīn. It was then, too, that he became familiar with English, and with European ideas. John Digby, a British official for whom he worked between 1806 and 1814, recalled how he did so, in his introduction to a collection of Rammohun’s English works published in London in 1817: By perusing all my public correspondence with diligence and attention, as well as by corresponding and conversing with European gentlemen, he acquired so correct a knowledge of the English language to be enabled to write and speak it with considerable accuracy. He was also in the constant habit of reading the English newspapers, of which the Continental politics chiefly interested him and from thence he formed a high admiration of the talents and prowess of [Napoleon,] the late ruler of France. (Quoted in Ibid., p. 24) Digby’s recollections suggest that Rammohun’s earliest intellectual interests were political, rather than religious. Indeed, Rammohun remained politically engaged throughout his time in Calcutta. In England, he took a keen interest in Indian affairs, and in the 1832 Reform Bill; he 298

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even contemplated entering Parliament, at the instigation of Jeremy Bentham (Ibid., pp. 392–​ 93; Zastoupil 2010, pp. 151–​62). However, the Unitarianism in which he found support for his religious ideas, and to which many of his British associates adhered, was intimately entwined with radical politics (Zastoupil 2010, pp. 17–​22), and he himself saw the confrontation of true and false religion in terms of a struggle against privilege and power. His last employment by the East India Company was on a mission to Bhutan in 1815 (Collet 1962, pp. 39–​41; Killingley 1993, p. 7). This is probably the basis of the erroneous story that Rammohun visited Tibet, of which Bhutan was often considered a part (Killingley 1993, p. 19). The story was sometimes expanded to suggest that while in Tibet Rammohun “gave himself with much zeal to the study of Buddhism, and had many controversies with Buddhist priests” (Ibid.). This expanded story contributed to portrayals of Rammohun as “Probably… the first earnest-​minded investigator of the science of comparative religion that the world has produced,” who “spared himself no trouble in endeavouring to master the several languages of the world’s sacred books” (Williams 1883, p. 479). In actuality, however, his writings show no evidence of first-​hand knowledge of Buddhism. During the same year, 1815, Rammohun settled in Calcutta and began the publications that made him internationally known. He was also active in journalism and collaborated with Europeans and fellow-​Bengalis in educational projects. He was well known among the Bengali elite of Calcutta, known as the bhadralok (“good people”). Among this class, those inclined toward reform considered him a leader; to conservatives, he was an enemy. He was familiar with the European society of the city, though he limited his contact with Europeans somewhat in order to observe Hindu prohibitions against inter-​dining with members of other castes and communities. He had a growing international reputation, and his work was reported in missionary and Unitarian periodicals in England and the USA, and in France by the revolutionary cleric Henri Grégoire (1819). From 1815, if not before, Rammohun led a circle called the Ātmīya Sabhā (meaning either “friendly society” or “Society of God,” since he often understood the Vedāntic term ātman as “God”). In 1828 he gave it a more formal shape as the Brahmo Sabhā or Brahmo Samāj (Collet 1962, pp. 239–​40). Even before then, Rammohun’s group had been referred to as the “Brahmyu or Unitarian Hindoo community” (letter to India Gazette, March 27, 1819; reprinted in Calcutta Journal, April 11, 1819, reprinted in Das 1963, p. 110). “Brahmo” is an anglicization of Sanskrit brāhma or brāhmya—​both forms occur in Rammohun’s Bengali publications—​ meaning “belonging to Brahman.” (Brahman is a word used especially in the Upaniṣads and Vedānta, and Rammohun regularly translated it as “God.”) Accordingly, in English the Brahmo Samaj was sometimes called the Theistic Society. Europeans as well as Indians attended its inauguration, but it was essentially a Bengali society and conducted its meetings in Bengali. In 1830 it acquired its own place of worship. A Trust Deed (Collet 1962, pp. 468–​77) provided for its use as a place of public meeting of all sorts…for the worship and adoration of the Eternal Unsearchable and Immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe but not under or by any other name designation or title peculiarly used for and applied to any particular Being or Beings by any man or set of men whatsoever and that no graven image statue or sculpture carving painting picture portrait or the likeness of anything shall be admitted…and that no sacrifice offering or oblation of any kind or thing shall ever be permitted therein and that no animal or living creature shall…be deprived of life either for religious purposes or for food. (Ibid., p. 471) 299

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The legal language of this document makes several theological points that are typical of Rammohun. It refers to God in the rational terms acceptable to Deists and Unitarians, without reference to any scriptural revelation, and it rejects all names by which God is known in particular traditions. (This prohibition would have been difficult to carry out, and it was transgressed by the name of the society itself, since Brahman is a distinctively Hindu term.) It also rejects visual representations of God, and its use of the biblical phrase “graven image” (Exodus 20:4 and many other occurrences elsewhere in the Bible) indicates how influential the King James Bible had become among the bhadralok. Having thus prohibited the worship of the persons and objects held sacred by particular traditions, the Trust Deed continues by protecting them from disrespect, in the following words: “[I]‌n conducting the said worship and adoration no object animate or inanimate that… is…recognized as an object of worship by any man or set of men shall be reviled…” (Collet 1962, p. 471). The justification for this protection may be found in a tract that Rammohun published in the previous year, 1829, called The Universal Religion: Religious Instructions Founded on Sacred Authorities. After enjoining the worship of the “Author and Governor of the universe,” it argues, To this worship no one can be opposed on sufficient grounds; for, as we all worship the Supreme Being, adoring him as the Author and Governor of the universe, it is impossible for any one to object to such worship; because each person considers the object whom he worships as the Author and Governor of the universe; therefore, in accordance with his own faith, he must acknowledge that this worship is his own. (Roy 1906, pp. 136–​37) Thus, even those who worship images or mythical figures are worshipping the Supreme Being, and those who worship him without such aids should not revile them. Despite his assertion that true worship could not be “opposed on sufficient grounds,” Rammohun and his fellow theists were in fact opposed, both by Hindus who upheld the worship of images, and by Christians who insisted on the uniqueness of Jesus. As early as 1815 (Le Bas 1831, p.  I.179), Rammohun had expressed a wish to travel to England, though he did not do so until 1830. By 1822, he was also considering visiting the United States (Zastoupil 2010, p. 143). He may have been detained in Calcutta by his literary, political, and religious activities and some legal disputes in which he was involved. Eventually, he sailed on November 19, 1830. By that time, he had accumulated many more contacts than when he first expressed his wish to travel, and he received invitations and visits from leading intellectuals both in Liverpool, where he landed on April 8, 1831, and in London, where he arrived a week or two later. Even the reclusive Jeremy Bentham sought him out soon after his arrival (Collet 1962, p. 213). In early September, 1833, he traveled to Bristol to stay at Stapleton Grove, “an agreeable residence in the immediate vicinity” of the city (Carpenter 1866, p. 113). Stapleton Grove was the home of a wealthy lady and her niece, friends of the Unitarian minister Lant Carpenter. There, Rammohun fell ill with a fever and inflammation of the brain and died on September 27. Some writers have objected that the circumstances of his death gave the Unitarians an unwarranted claim on his memory, though in fact his relations with them had been close for many years. Carpenter and his Bristol circle made no attempt to suppress evidence of his Hindu affiliation, noting that he uttered the sacred syllable oṃ on his deathbed (Collet 1962, p. 361). The sacred thread which he wore was not removed (Ibid., p. 363). The Brahmin servant who

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had accompanied him to England was encouraged to say a prayer as he died, and his body was buried in silence without any Christian observance (Carpenter 1866, pp.  145–​51). Had he lived, he might well have traveled on to the US, to meet some of his American Unitarian correspondents (Zastoupil 2010, p. 144).

Rational theism Rammohun’s first published work, in 1803–​1804, was the Tuḥfat al-​Muwaḥḥidīn (Roy 1906, pp. 941–​58). Though the book was written in Persian, it had an Arabic title and preface. The title means “a gift to monotheists,” that is, those who believe in the unity (waḥīd) of God. In it, he presents himself as a Brahmin who has learned Sanskrit and absorbed Brahminical teachings (Ibid., p. 954), but has rejected them and become a rational monotheist. Though it uses Islamic terminology, it shows no particular respect for Islam (Killingley 2013, pp.  32–​33), placing it under the same condemnation as all other religions. The preface, which sums up the argument of this little book, concludes that all religions conflict with each other, and there is no criterion by which we can call one true and the rest false (Roy 1906, p. 943). The charge of falsehood, however, applies only to those points on which religions differ. They agree, Rammohun asserts, in their belief in an eternal creator, which he considers natural and valid; the differences among religions result merely from habit and training. Rammohun elaborates on this argument in the rest of the work. Belief in God results from observation of the design of the universe (Ibid., p. 948). The argument from design appears also in Rammohun’s later works; for instance, “The wonderful structure and growth of even so trifling an object as a leaf of a tree affords proof of an almighty Superintendent of the universe” (Ibid., p. 122; cf. p. 483). Elsewhere, he identifies God as the Author and Governor of the universe, which is incomprehensibly formed, and filled with an endless variety of men and things; in which, as shown by the zodiac, in a manner far more wonderful than the machinery of a watch, the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars perform their rapid courses; and which is fraught with animate and inanimate matter of various kinds, locomotive and immoveable, of which there is not one particle but has its functions to perform. (Ibid., p. 135) By 1829, when he wrote this, Rammohun may well have read the famous analogy of a watch in William Paley’s Natural Theology of 1802, or its antecedents in Newton, Rousseau, and others. When he wrote the Tuḥfat, however, he was only beginning to find his way into Western culture, so it is not clear how far he was indebted to European arguments from design. He never sets out such an argument in detail, nor does he ever seem aware that it had been refuted by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion of 1779. The Tuḥfat also argues that all religions agree on the existence of the soul, which is rewarded and punished in the next world, and that while this cannot be known with certainty, it can at least be justified on pragmatic grounds as a motive for moral behavior.Where religions disagree, in this regard, it is because they have added arbitrary and pernicious rules of purity to socially beneficial morality (Roy 1906, p. 947). The Tuḥfat distinguishes general revelation (which in Rammohun’s view is beneficial, universal, and natural) from special revelation, which causes misery and strife, varies between traditions, and is promoted by individuals for their own advantage (Ibid., p. 945). In his writings

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from 1815 onwards, Rammohun repeats many of these same arguments in different forms (Killingley 2013, pp. 23–​31).The main difference from his position in the Tuḥfat is that he shows respect for all religious traditions, something strikingly absent from the earlier work. Rammohun even finds a place, though an inferior one, for Hindu polytheism and idolatry. He says that worship of the sun and fire, for instance, was taught in the Veda “for the sake of those whose limited understandings rendered them incapable of comprehending and adoring the Supreme Being, so that such persons might not remain in a brutified state, destitute of all religious principle” (Roy 1906, p. 36). However, while the Vedas “tolerate idolatry as the last provision for those who are totally incapable of raising their minds to the contemplation of the invisible God of nature,” they “urge the relinquishment of the rites of idol-​worship, and the adoption of a purer system of religion, on the express ground that the observance of idolatrous rites can never be productive of eternal beatitude” (Ibid., p. 21). The Christian convert, Krishna Mohana Banerjea, found such tolerance unacceptable: “If falsehood is ‘tolerated’, who will strictly observe the truth?” (Banerjea 1833, p. 3). Rammohun posited a hierarchy of ways of worship, suitable for different people of different abilities. He thus accepted a version of the Hindu notion of differences of adhikāra, “entitlement,” while rejecting the idea that such entitlement is determined by birth. Banerjea had no place for such difference; he quotes the second commandment (against graven images) and the prediction that idolaters “shall have their portion in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8), adding: “This is the language of certainty and decision” (Banerjea 1833, p. 4). As we shall see, Rammohun met similar rigidity from other Christians. In his later works, Rammohun is less confident of the power of reason than in the Tuḥfat: When we look to the traditions of ancient nations, we often find them at variance with each other; and when, discouraged by this circumstance, we appeal to reason as a surer guide, we soon find how incompetent it is, alone, to conduct us to the object of our pursuit…it only serves to generate a universal doubt, incompatible with principles on which our comfort and happiness mainly depend.The best method perhaps is, neither to give ourselves up exclusively to the guidance of the one or the other; but by a proper use of the lights furnished by both, endeavour to improve our intellectual and moral faculties, relying on the goodness of the Almighty Power, which alone enables us to attain that which we earnestly and diligently seek for. (Roy 1906, p. 37) This distrust of reason, respect for religious traditions, and reliance on divine guidance, should caution us against calling Rammohun a deist, as he was called by some Christian contemporaries.

Rammohun and Hinduism Rammohun expresses his view of Hindu belief and practice in a number of works in Bengali, Sanskrit, and English that appeared from 1815 to 1830. The first is an edition of the Vedānta Sūtras, with a Bengali commentary partly following Śaṅkara (Killingley 1981). There followed an Abridgement of the Vedant, four Upaniṣads in Bengali and English, a fifth (the Māṇḍūkya) in Bengali only, and two texts attributed to Śaṅkara, the Ātmānātmaviveka and Vajrasucī, in Bengali only. As he wrote in his English introduction to the Kena Upaniṣad in 1816, the Bengali versions had the aim of “explaining to my countrymen the real spirit of the Hindoo Scriptures,” while the English versions were for “European gentlemen, especially those who interest themselves in the improvement of their fellow-​creatures,” to demonstrate that Indians in ancient times were 302

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“not unacquainted with metaphysical subjects” (Roy 1906, p.  36). His use of Sanskrit texts, both in presenting the “pure spirit” of Hinduism to Europeans (Ibid., p. 4), and in arguing with Hindu opponents, represents an appeal to textual authority akin to Protestant reliance on the Bible. Accordingly, he followed the King James Bible’s custom of using of italics for words which do not correspond to words in the original. Several of these works included prefaces and introductions, in which Rammohun set out his own view of true religion and contrasted it with prevailing Hindu practice. He did the same in published answers to critiques or attacks from Hindu opponents. He takes his stand on the Advaita Vedānta system of Śaṅkara, while adapting it to his own rational theism. Unlike Śaṅkara, he holds that salvation is possible without renouncing the world; his ideal is the godly householder (brahmaniṣṭha gṛhastha). Many of his works, especially those in Bengali or Sanskrit, were published anonymously, or in the names of associates, or in that of the Ātmīya Sabhā.With these we can include the Dialogue between a Theist and an Idolater (Hay 1963), one of the longer works issued by his circle. From 1818 to 1830, he published tracts against what he called “concremation.” These were outstanding for the urgency of their subject, the strength of their arguments, and the attention they drew from Christians and others abroad. (Concremation, the burning of wives, in principle voluntarily, on their husbands’ funeral pyres, was better known as sati, which properly refers to the person, not the practice.) This issue was prominent in missionary literature in the same period (Zastoupil 2010, pp. 59–​71), and the Baptist missionaries Joshua Marshman and James Peggs helped to publicize Rammohun’s arguments in Britain, establishing his reputation in Christian circles as “the Hindu reformer.” Part of his argument rested on textual authority: that while the authoritative texts (śāstras) describe the act as voluntary, women are often forced onto the pyre (Roy 1906, p. 329); and that while the śāstras hold out karmic rewards for it, they also say that action motivated by rewards is far inferior to a life of asceticism, which is the alternative destiny for a widow (Ibid., pp. 327–​28). This textual argument had already been used by the pandit Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṃkār in 1817 (Ahmed 1976, pp. 112–​13). In his second tract, published in 1820, Rammohun follows his textual arguments with a peroration defending the character of Hindu women, and denouncing the oppression they suffer (Roy 1906, pp. 360–​63). He dedicated this tract to the Governor-​General’s wife, turning his approach from an argument over textual authority to an appeal to humanity. While the missionaries campaigned as Christians intervening against Hindu cruelty, Rammohun appealed as a Hindu to a Christian political power and the Christian public. He was opposed by conservative Hindus, and when the practice was made illegal in 1829, his critics formed an association, the Dharma Sabhā, to appeal against the ban as an unjust interference in religion. The matter reached the Privy Council in London, and Rammohun was present when the prohibition was confirmed on July 11, 1833.

Rammohun’s relations with Christians Rammohun demonstrated his respect for others’ religious traditions by using the Upaniṣads and later Sanskrit texts in his controversies with Hindu opponents. He did so similarly by using the Bible against Christian opponents. In his controversies with both groups, he refuted his opponents by means of authorities that he knew the opponents accepted, even if he did not accept them himself. For him, scripture supported reason in the fight against error. Rammohun’s first recorded encounter with a Christian was in 1812:  the wife of an American missionary wrote that she had met a “native Christian” called “Ram-​Mo-​Hund” in the Baptist missionary William Carey’s house in Serampore, near Calcutta (Ray 1976, p. 47n). 303

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She may have thought him a Christian from his admiration of Jesus, or his respect for the moral influence of Christians, both of which are well attested. In 1814, Thomas Middleton, recently arrived as the first Bishop of Calcutta, wrote of a Hindu, most probably Rammohun, who “has quitted the faith of his fathers as untenable, and is committed to the wide ocean of Deism” (Le Bas 1831, p. I.420). In 1820 or 1821, Rammohun indignantly rejected Middleton’s suggestion that he could gain distinction by becoming a Christian (Collet 1962, pp. 124–​26). In 1816, the Baptist mission reported that he was “at present a simple theist, admires Jesus Christ, but knows not his need of the Atonement” (Ibid., p. 114). His closest affinities were with Unitarians, who at that time were beginning to form a distinct body. (In the prior century, Unitarianism had been a tendency within the dissenting churches, rather than a distinct sect.) In 1821, William Adam, of the Calcutta Baptist mission, became a Unitarian under Rammohun’s influence, and collaborated with him for a time (Ibid., pp. 121–​24; Killingley 1993, pp. 143–​ 47). Rammohun attended the Scots Presbyterian church in Calcutta, though he admitted to reservations about the Westminster Confession, the Calvinist document accepted by the Church of Scotland. A particular Scots friend was the entrepreneur, George James Gordon, who shared Rammohun’s Unitarian views (Zastoupil 2010, p. 30). Rammohun supported the move to start a Scottish mission (Collet 1962, p. 150), and when Alexander Duff arrived as its first missionary, Rammohun facilitated his establishment of a school (Laird 1972, pp. 203–​205). Over the course of his life, his relations with Christians became more cordial, and more appreciative of different forms of Christian belief and observance. In London, he attended not only several Unitarian chapels, but also an Anglican church. His interest in traditions in which he did not share is attested by a conversation in which he expressed respect for Lenten fasting, prayer to the Virgin, and even the doctrine of total depravity (Killingley 2013, pp. 38–​39). Like the Unitarians of his day, Rammohun took the Bible, and in particular the sayings of Jesus, to be the basis of Christian belief and practice. His controversies with Christians centered on the Atonement, the divinity of Jesus, and above all the Trinity, which he rejected as akin to Hindu polytheism. In 1820, he challenged Christians with The Precepts of Jesus, a selection of moral sayings from the Gospels. The text was published anonymously, but his authorship was an open secret. Compilations on similar lines had been made by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 and 1820 (Zastoupil 2010, p.  34), but they were unpublished, and Rammohun would not have known of them. In his introduction, Rammohun argued that the “essential characteristic” of Christianity, its moral message, was obscured by its doctrines (Roy 1906, p. 483). The moral teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, would be of benefit to Hindus, he argued, while the Trinity and other doctrines would not (Ibid., p. 484). He also distinguished three different senses of the term Christian: 1) as indicating acceptance of the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit as well as the Father; 2) acceptance of the Bible as revelation; or 3) acceptance of the doctrines of Christ (Ibid., pp. 483–​84). The Baptist missionary, Joshua Marshman—​who not long before had helped to make Rammohun’s arguments against sati known to the Christian public—​took up the challenge, arguing that the Bible must be taken as a whole, and that salvation is won not by morals but by the blood of Christ. He refers to the anonymous compiler of the Precepts as an “intelligent Heathen” (Marshman 1822, p. 1). Rammohun, writing as “A Friend to Truth”—​a second anonymous persona—​objected that this was an “unchristianlike” insult, since the compiler was not a heathen but “a believer in the true and living God” (Roy 1906, p. 547). For Marshman (1822, pp. 5–​6), the word heathen simply denoted an Indian who was neither Christian nor Muslim; for Rammohun, it was inapplicable to the compiler, who was evidently a Christian in the third sense summarized above. The exchange continued in a series of longer and longer publications, going deeper into biblical, patristic, and rabbinic sources (Collet 1962, pp. 119–​38; 304

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Thomas 1969, pp. 1–29; Killingley 1993, pp. 138–​43). Neither disputant had worked in these fields before, and their arguments drew on the controversies over the Trinity that had been current for the past century. Both sides of the exchange were reprinted in London (Marshman 1822; Roy 1824), for the information of their respective supporters. Later, using the name of an associate, Chundru-​Shekhur Dev, Rammohun wrote as a Hindu who had rejected polytheism and the “doctrine of ‘Man-​God,’ [that is, avatāra]” but worshipped with Unitarians rather than Anglicans, not wishing to hear the same doctrine “preached by another body of priests better dressed, better provided for and eminently elevated by virtue of conquest.” Accepting the Unitarian view of a benevolent God, he rejected the doctrine that God “refused mercy and salvation to mankind until innocent blood was offered him to appease his wrath” (Roy 1906, p. 201). In 1823, he wrote in the name not of a real supporter, but of a fictitious opponent. This, his boldest use of pseudonymity, was prompted by a published letter from Robert Tytler, a Calcutta surgeon, attacking Rammohun and his Unitarianism. Rammohun, writing as a fictitious Hindu, Ram Doss, proposed that “all Believers in the Manifestation of God in the flesh, whether Hindoo or Christian, might unite” against “the Unitarian heresy” (Ibid., p. 890). In a further letter, he argued that “the same omnipotence, which can make th re e ONE and one T H RE E ” can reconcile the unity of God with the oft-​quoted Hindu figure of 330 million gods (Ibid., p. 893). Tytler suspected “Ram Doss” to be “some Unitarian under a pseudonymous signature” (Ibid., p. 897), but the exchange continued. A third writer intervened, signing himself “A Christian.” He alluded to Rammohun, suggesting that he would have accepted Christianity if he had not been put off by “the intemperate zeal of the Baptists” (Ibid., p. 905). He also made a passing reference to “Asiatic effeminacy,” which prompted “Ram Doss” to point out that Jesus was an Asiatic (Ibid., pp. 904, 906). This was more than a debating point; Rammohun wished to challenge the role of Europeans as interpreters of Jesus to India. In London, he objected to a “pale European” painting of Jesus, pointing out that “Jesus Christ was an oriental” (Zastoupil 2010, p. 142). This theme was taken up by Keshub Chandra Sen and others, who claimed that Indians, being Asiatics, were better placed than Europeans to understand Jesus.

Rammohun’s legacy Through the Brahmo Samaj and his correspondence, Rammohun helped to establish links between religious thinkers in the West, especially Unitarians, and Hindu thinkers. His correspondence with Western intellectuals, and his visit to England, contributed to the British anti-​ slavery and feminist movements (Zastoupil 2010, pp. 57–96), and opened a channel which led to the lecture tours of Keshub Chandra Sen in England in 1870, and of Vivekananda in the US and England in 1893–​1896 and 1899–​1900. Though the Brahmo Samaj became more oriented toward Hindu sources when it was reorganized by Debendranath Tagore in 1843, it remained in contact with British and American Unitarians (Kopf 1979; Lavan 1977). Though Rammohun’s Upaniṣad translations were superseded by those of E. Röer in 1853, and though it was Anquetil Duperron’s very defective Latin version of 1801–​1802 that excited Schopenhauer and other German romantics, Rammohun introduced these texts to the English-​speaking world, and to some extent in France. Many Hindus since Rammohun’s time have sought to distinguish “true” from “false” Hinduism, as he did, though their distinctions were not the same as his. Rammohun also distinguished “true” from “false” Christianity, rejecting Trinitarian doctrine and pointing out its relationship to colonial power. By promoting a rational theism that was shared by many in the West, and was also attractive to Hindus, he changed relations between Hinduism and 305

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Christianity from a simple opposition to a triangle, of which rational theism, or either of the other positions, could be seen as the apex. Some Christians, however, continued to envisage a linear progression from idolatry to the gospel, with Brahmoism as a deceptive half-​way house (Banerjea 1833; Anon. 1845). Rammohun questioned the claim that Trinitarian Christianity was both reasonable and scriptural, and he took the person of Jesus out of the hands of missionaries, claiming him as a fellow “Asiatic,” and making him part of the Hindu tradition (Thomas 1969). This development was facilitated by the role of Christian institutions and individuals in education in India, and the ubiquity of the King James Bible. But Rammohun was its human agent. He also demonstrated that a Hindu quest for salvation was compatible with bourgeois and cosmopolitan life; and, while condemning much of Hindu belief and practice, he gave Hindus a voice in international and interreligious debate.

Bibliography Ahmed, A.F.S. 1976. Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal 1818–1835. Calcutta: Ṛddhi. Anon. 1845. “Vedantism: What Is It?” Calcutta Review 6: 43–​61. Banerjea, K.M. 1833. A Review of the Moonduck Oopunishad. Roy, R. (trans.). Calcutta: Enquirer Press. Carpenter, M. 1866. The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohun Roy. London: Trübner. Collet, S.D. 1962. The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy. Biswas, D.K. and Ganguly, P.C. (eds.). Kolkata: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. First published 1900. The edition cited contains much additional material by the editors. Das, S. 1963. Selections from the Indian Journals,Vol. 1. Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyay. Grégoire, H.J-​B. 1819.“Notice sur la vie et les écrits de Rammohon-​Roe.” Chronique Religieuse 3: 388–​403. Hay, S.N. 1963. Dialogue between a Theist and an Idolater: Brāhma Pauttalika Saṃvāda: An 1820 Tract Probably by Rammohun Roy. Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyay. Jones, W. 1799. The Works of Sir William Jones: In Six Volumes.Vol. 1. London: G.G. and J. Robinson. Killingley, D. 1981. “Rammohun Roy on the Vedānta Sūtras.” Religion 11: 151–​69. —​—​—​. 1993. Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition. Newcastle upon Tyne: Grevatt & Grevatt. —​—​—​. 2013. Polemic and Dialogue in Rammohun Roy.Vienna: De Nobili Research Library. Kopf, D. 1979. The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Laird, M.A. 1972 Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–​1837. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavan, S. 1977. Unitarians and India: A Study in Encounter and Response. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Le Bas, C.W. 1831. The Life of the Right Reverend Thomas Fanshawe Middleton: Late Lord Bishop of Calcutta. 2 vols. London: C.J.G. & F. Rivington. Marshman, J. 1822. A Defence of the Deity and Atonement of Jesus Christ, in Reply to Ram Mohun Roy of Calcutta. London: Publisher Unknown. Pennington, B.K. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Ray, A.K. 1976. The Religious Ideas of Rammohun Roy: A Survey of His Writings on Religion, Particularly in Persian, Sanskrit and Bengali. Delhi: Kanak. Roy, R. 1906. The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of “Tuḥfatul Muwahhidin”. Ghose, J.C. and Eshan Chunder Bose, E.C. (eds.). Allahabad: Panini Office. —​—​—​. 1824. The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness, Extracted from the Books of the New Testament Ascribed to the Four Evangelists. To Which Are Added, the First, Second, and Final Appeal to the Christian Public, in Reply to the Observations of Dr. Marshman, of Serampore. By Rammohun Roy. Embellished with a Portrait of the Author. London: Unitarian Society. —​—​—​. 1952. Rāmamohana Granthābalī [Rammohun’s Bengali and Sanskrit works]. Banerji, B. and Das, S. (eds.). 7 parts separately paginated and bound in one. Calcutta: Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣat. Thomas, M.M. 1969. The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance. London: SCM Press. Williams, M. 1883. Religious Thought and Life in India. London: John Murray. Zastoupil, L. 2010. Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Swami Vivekananda (1863–​1902) is recalled as one of the foremost disciples of the mystic teacher Ramakrishna (1836–​1886) and noted for his unapologetic explication and celebration of Hinduism at the 1893 Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions. Founder of both the Ramakrishna Mission and Vedanta Society, organizations that are still active in India and the West, he is also seen by many as an early champion of Hindu nationalism. As a religious leader who taught in India, the United States, and Europe, Swami Vivekananda often addressed audiences about his views on how to understand and reconcile the fact that there are different religions with varying texts, practices, and beliefs about the nature of existence. Born in a nation under British colonial rule where Christian missionaries often criticized Indian religions and social practices as part of their bid to win converts, Swami Vivekananda paid particular attention to understanding and explicating Christianity within his overall presentation of an approach to life he termed “Practical Vedanta.” In late nineteenth-​century India, colonial rulers often asserted the superiority of Western culture and religion.At the same time, increased access to education (often in schools established and run by Christian missionaries) and the increased use of communications technologies such as print media allowed for wider discussion of social, political, and cultural matters. Christian missionaries were especially active in Bengal and found some converts among prominent Bengali leaders. In this environment, some religious leaders believed their longstanding traditions were under threat and advocated for revitalized approaches to Hinduism, Islam, and other traditions active in India. Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), capital of British India until 1911, was the birthplace of many social, cultural, and religious movements, so much so that the period from roughly the mid-​nineteenth to the early twentieth century is known as the Bengal Renaissance. One strategy that the leaders of new social and religious movements adopted was to identify and advocate for a specific tradition or text as the core of the tradition. Within the broad context of Hinduism, for example, the Brahmo Samaj, founded in Calcutta by Rammohun Roy in 1828 (on which, see Killingley’s chapter in this volume), focused on the Upanishads as the heart of Hinduism, and later the Arya Samaj, founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in 1875, promoted the Vedas as the defining textual tradition. While such movements engaged in spirited debate with one another, they also frequently responded to Protestant Christian missionaries who rejected any religious tradition other than Christianity, and who saw Indian 307

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religious practices and beliefs as the root of social problems. By defining a particular strand of Hindu tradition as its essential core, religious leaders could both assert a particular theological stance, and establish a criterion against which to judge whether particular practices were authentic (that is, whether they were consonant with that essential core). Movements such as the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj took stands on practices that came in for criticism both from Indians and Westerners, such as child marriage, and the use of images, or “idols,” in worship.They also responded to the missionary assertion that Christianity provided a more solid foundation for ethical decisions around daily life and social practices. At the same time, many nineteenth-​century religious movements adapted strategies from the work of Christian critics, particularly in the area of social reform (Beckerlegge 2006, pp.  144–​45). Both the Brahmo Samaj and Christian missionary leaders had criticized the Hindu practice of world renunciation as detrimental to social progress, because a renouncer was not likely to take an active leadership role in social matters. They also believed that if they suggested that spiritual progress (and with it, reverence from others) could come from renunciation of worldly life, they would tacitly (and problematically) send the message that addressing everyday social ills was not important. Western critics often particularly targeted the many varieties of classical Vedanta philosophy, which asserted that the ultimate goal of Vedanta was to move beyond this world and seek union with the absolute, because of the way that goal encouraged detachment from everyday social and family life. The Brahmo Samaj, in its interpretation of Advaita philosophy based on the Upanishads, also advocated working to alleviate worldly ills. In developing Practical Vedanta, Swami Vivekananda responded to those who criticized classical Vedanta philosophy as indifferent to earthly social problems. Swami Vivekananda creatively addressed this critique by crafting an approach to Vedanta focused very much on how one lives practically, actively engaged in the world rather than withdrawing from it. Drawing from Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna counsels the warrior Arjuna it is his duty to fight in a just battle, Vivekananda argued that followers of Practical Vedanta could live and be very socially proactive in this world as long as they did not become attached to the results of their actions. Beckerlegge has argued that this approach, which serves as the foundation for the Ramakrishna Mission’s later focus on social service, evolved gradually as Swami Vivekananda explored his role as a religious leader in both India and the West (Beckerlegge 2000, pp. 98–​108). Swami Vivekananda’s explication of Practical Vedanta was not, however, simply a defense of Hinduism in the face of its critics. He confidently asserted the supremacy of Practical Vedanta relative not only to other interpretations of Hinduism, but also to all other religions, including Christianity. His model for understanding all the world’s religions finds value in each but ultimately asserts that Practical Vedanta is the purest form of religious expression and experience, encompassing all others, including the many varieties of Hinduism. While other reform groups typically defined one strand of Hinduism as the best, Swami Vivekananda took this approach one step further by asserting that Practical Vedanta was the best of not just Hinduism, but all religions. He often would use this strategy in his discussion of other religions as well, arguing, for example, that this or that component of Christianity or Buddhism constituted its true core. Swami Vivekananda presented philosophical, theological, and historical evidence to support his claim for the primacy of Practical Vedanta. Just as he identified Practical Vedanta as the core and essence of Hinduism, he also highlighted particular events in the life of Jesus and Christian teaching as constituting the core of Christianity. He was critical not only of the work of Christian missionaries, but of what he saw as shortcomings in the practice of Christianity overall, especially in the Western world. He often pointed out these shortcomings when speaking with Western audiences. 308

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Swami Vivekananda has remained an important symbol of pride in Indian and Hindu heritage on the global stage, and he is often heralded and cited as an influence by leaders with a wide range of political perspectives.Visiting India in 2015, US President Barack Obama praised Swami Vivekananda (though he struggled with the pronunciation of his name) for propounding the divinity of every human soul and bringing Hinduism and yoga to the United States (ABP Ananda 2015). Social reformer Anna Hazare (1937–​), who advocates for rural development and has protested against corruption in Indian political life, credits the Swami with inspiring him to become a leader. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a September 2018 address commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Swami’s lectures at the World’s Parliament of Religions, proclaimed that Swami Vivekananda “changed the way the west saw India” and helped Indian thought and philosophy gain high stature (Modi 2018).

Swami Vivekananda’s life While the range of writings on Swami Vivekananda’s life and teachings, from the glowingly hagiographic to the more skeptical and critical (particularly with respect to the nature of his relationship with Ramakrishna) has at times generated intense controversy, the focus here will be on widely agreed upon details in his life, particularly as they relate to his knowledge of and commentary on Christian teachings and practices. Narendranath (or Narendra) Datta, the man who would become famous as Swami Vivekananda, was born to a distinguished Kolkata family in 1883. His father was an attorney with far-​ranging interests in Indian culture as well as English and Persian literature. His mother is generally recalled as a “devout housewife” and Swami Vivekananda praised her for her role in furthering his education. Narendranath was well-​educated, though both health and family challenges at times interrupted his studies (Beckerlegge 2006, pp. 136–​38). He studied both Indian and Western languages and thought. While pursuing his studies, he also explored a variety of religious movements active in Kolkata, including the Brahmo Samaj. In that same period, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa had already built a reputation as an accomplished mystic who mastered prayers and meditative techniques from not only different strands of Hinduism but also Christianity and Islam. Ramakrishna’s experimentation with multiple spiritual disciplines led him to the conclusion that all religions seek the same goal. One of Narendra’s teachers,William Hastie, mentioned Ramakrishna in a lecture on a Wordsworth poem, explaining that Ramakrishna could help students understand what Wordsworth meant when he wrote of trance in his poetry. Narendra also had a relative who was a disciple of Ramakrishna. When Ramakrishna and Narendra first met in 1881, Ramakrishna invited Narendra to visit him at the temple dedicated to the goddess Kali in Dakshineswar, outside Kolkata, where he served as a priest. Unlike Narendra, Ramakrishna came from a rural background, and had a more limited, traditional education. Despite the differences in their backgrounds and educations, Ramakrishna and Narendranath forged a powerful connection and developed a deep teacher–​disciple relationship. Later, after he himself became a leader and teacher, Swami Vivekananda always spoke of Ramakrishna with great reverence, inspired by the mystic’s deep spiritual experiences and his exploration of multiple religious faiths. In one teaching, the Swami explained that because it is difficult for humans to grasp an abstract ideal, they need a personal ideal, and that Ramakrishna is perfectly suited for that rule, whether one sees him as a “chosen deity” (ishta devata) in the Hindu sense, or as a guardian angel in a Christian sense (Vivekananda 1964–​1968 [hereafter CWSV], 1964, vol. 7, p. 413). Narendra and some of Ramakrishna’s other disciples cared for him throughout the illness that claimed his life in 1886. Biographer Swami Nikhilananda (1895–​1973), a later leader in 309

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the Ramakrishna movement, reported that in the early days after Ramakrishna’s death, these young men would gather in the evenings to meditate, and one evening Narendra told them the story of the life of Jesus Christ, inspiring them to become renouncers or monks (Nikhilananda 1987, pp. 72–​73) and take on the title of “swami” as an indication of their renouncer status. Narendra later himself took the title of Swami Vivekananda. This group of young men became the earliest leaders of the Ramakrishna Mission and Ramakrishna order of monks, and yet they continued to venerate Jesus because of the role that his life played in inspiring them to establish the order (Ibid., p. 73). After becoming a renouncer, Swami Vivekananda traveled throughout India, and in Madurai met the prince Bhaskara Sethupati (1868–​1903), who suggested that the Swami represent India at the World’s Parliament of Religions (Ibid., p. 96). With Sethupati’s support, Swami Vivekananda set sail for the United States in 1893, visiting other Asian nations along the way. He hoped to be able to raise funds for social work, especially famine relief, in India. In addition to his renowned addresses at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda traveled throughout the United States, often lecturing at various Protestant churches, both presenting his own ideas and learning more about the nature of Christian practice and belief in the United States, including the then-​young practice of Christian Science and popular movements such as Spiritualism. He founded the Vedanta Society in New York in 1894. When he returned to India in 1897, he established the Ramakrishna Mission in Kolkata. Swami Vivekananda traveled in the United States and Europe again from 1899 to 1900. He struggled with health problems, such as diabetes, throughout much of his adult life. From the end of his second western sojourn until his untimely death in 1902, he worked and taught in India.

Swami Vivekananda’s teachings Swami Vivekananda put forth his views in lectures, letters, and journal articles in both English and his native Bengali; his followers subsequently compiled these in multiple volumes as The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (CWSV). For both Indian and Western audiences, Swami Vivekananda explored a range of religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. He gave some of his most famous teachings at the World’s Parliament of Religions, an event held in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. The Parliament gave American audiences an opportunity to hear directly from Asian religious teachers representing Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions. The Parliament’s organizers’ agenda was in part to demonstrate the superiority of Protestant Christianity, but speakers such as Swami Vivekananda and other representatives of Hinduism and Buddhism attracted sympathetic audiences and garnered print media attention. The first volume of the Swami’s collected works opens with his addresses at the Parliament, suggesting their importance to his followers’ conception of his role as a religious leader on a global stage. After giving his talks there, Swami Vivekananda traveled and taught throughout the United States, and developed a following among Americans who found his Practical Vedanta teaching, including its take on Christianity, more compelling than the traditions within which they had been raised. Some of those Western disciples would later spend time in India and help establish new branches of the Vedanta Society within the United States.

Swami Vivekananda on Christianity Swami Vivekananda commented frequently on Christianity and his interpretation of its meaning and significance, focusing in particular on how to understand the role of God and Jesus, how 310

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to understand Christianity within the context of other religions and his own Practical Vedanta thought, and how to address the challenge of Christian missionaries in India.

The nature of God In discussing Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions, Swami Vivekananda commented on theology, the relationship between various religions and science, the history of different religions, and their roles in social and political matters. In many of his talks, especially in the West, he presented a framework for seeing unity in all religious expression. He argued for one, ultimate conception of divinity and attributed the reality of diverse understandings of God to humans being at different stages of spiritual evolution. In his view, for example, the uneducated see a judgmental God sitting in heaven on a throne, while those who are more advanced see God as immanent and omnipresent, and the most advanced actually see and experience God directly (CWSV, vol. 4, p. 147). In a conversation with his American disciples (who frequently took notes when he taught them), he explained that “the great abstraction of ideas in the world is what we call God” (CWSV, vol. 7, p. 21). Swami Vivekananda also argued that the Christian doctrine of trinity asserts that the one divine presence is manifest in multiple forms. He compared this doctrine to the Upanishadic conception of the divine as existence, knowledge, and bliss (saccidananda; often also translated as truth, consciousness, and bliss), aligning the Father with existence and the source of all, the Son Jesus with knowledge and the means through which humans become conscious of god, and Holy Spirit with the bliss that one attains through knowledge of the divine nature within (CWSV, vol. 8, pp. 190–​91). Illustrating his knowledge of a range of Christian movements, he also distinguished between the “Trinitarian Christ” as a being elevated above humans, and the “Unitarian Christ” as “merely a moral man.” In language echoing the Bhagavad Gita’s explanation of divine incarnations, he said that neither the Trinitarian nor the Unitarian Christ was quite the same as the Christ who is an incarnation (avatar) of God, one who assumed human form and human limitations (CWSV, vol. 7, p. 4).

Prophets, avatars, and other religious leaders One powerful aspect of Swami Vivekananda’s rhetorical strategy in addressing both Western and Indian audiences was his assertive use of Hindu terms and concepts to discuss other religions, rather than the defensive posture some other Hindu leaders adopted, whereby they would attempt to explain aspects of Hinduism in the light of Christianity. When Swami Vivekananda talked about Jesus, he often used the Hindu language of avatar, or divine descent or incarnation. Thus, Jesus-​as-​avatar was but one example of many instances of God manifesting himself in human form (CWSV, vol. 8, p.  190). He explained that because humans cannot worship god in an absolute form, they therefore need human manifestations of divinity. This explanation echoes the famous verses in the fourth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna explains to Arjuna that whenever dharma (in its broadest sense of righteousness, duty, the way things should be) is in decline, he creates or manifests a version of himself to rectify the problem. Jesus thus is placed on a broader framework of incarnations and prophets throughout different religions. Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad—​these were not actual humans, but figures through whom humans could conceptualize and thereby worship a supreme God (Ibid.), each suited to the needs of a particular time, place, and circumstance. In a 1900 Los Angeles lecture called “Christ, the Messenger,” the Swami opined that Jesus came during an era when the Jews had become overly conservative and focused more on 311

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specific details of religious practice than on the more substantive questions about life and its ultimate purpose. He made the case that there is a particular ebb and flow or developmental pattern to religious traditions. Thus, while critical of what he saw as the conservatism of Jewish practice in the time of Jesus, Swami Vivekananda nonetheless saw it as a means of building strength by conserving energy, and thus creating the conditions that made it possible for a new prophet to succeed as that conserved energy was released (CWSV, vol. 4, pp. 140–​41). In one of his Chicago addresses, he compared the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism to that between Judaism and Christianity, arguing that the Buddha, like Jesus, came “to fulfill and not to destroy.” The difference, as he saw it, was that while the Jews did not recognize Jesus, it was Buddhists who could not see that Buddhism was a fulfillment of Hinduism (CWSV, vol. 1, p. 21). In another 1900 lecture, this one delivered in San Francisco, California, he argued that although the Hindu god, Krishna, preceded the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, his message nonetheless synthesized the teachings of all three (Ibid., p. 481). In another lecture, he similarly argued that while the Buddha and Jesus Christ were the greatest characters the world had known, nonetheless Krishna’s teachings in the Bhagavad Gita were the grandest (CWSV, vol. 7, p. 22). Interestingly, although Swami Vivekananda often offered his own analysis of the historical development of religions, he was sharply critical of critical historical studies of religious texts such as the Bible, characterizing such scholarship as “text-​torturing” (CWSV, vol. 4, p. 144). He also critically questioned the many different accounts of the life of Jesus, as well as scholarly efforts to recover a “historical Jesus,” because he thought it was most important to agree upon the essential core of his person and teaching (Ibid., pp. 146–​47). In other lectures, however, he made historical claims regarding the origin of Christian practices, describing baptism as being of Buddhist origin, and the Eucharist as a survival of an ancient tribal custom in which “savage tribes” killed their leader and ate his flesh so that they could ingest the leader’s powers. He further argued that the idea of human sacrifice was found in Judaism, and that this laid the groundwork for seeing Jesus as a human sacrifice: “This cruel idea made Christianity depart from the teachings of Jesus himself and develop a spirit of persecution and bloodshed…” (CWSV, vol. 7, pp. 71–​72). Swami Vivekananda also challenged the Western world’s common portrayal of Jesus as a man with “blue eyes and yellow hair,” when in fact he was, as the Swami termed him, an Oriental (CWSV, vol 4, 142). (While that term is no longer considered appropriate, it was acceptable in Swami Vivekananda’s day to refer to someone from a land east of Europe.) This was part of his larger overall argument that Christianity, especially Christianity in the West, employed the teachings of Jesus as part of a wider project asserting not only religious but also political and cultural superiority, and that in so doing Christians effectively overlooked what the Swami saw to be the core of Christian teaching and failed to understand its true place among the world’s many religions. While Swami Vivekananda frequently asserted that being the follower of an avatar or prophet such as Jesus, the Buddha, or Muhammad could be highly beneficial to people, he bemoaned what he saw as a human tendency for religious disciples to focus more on the saint or prophet than on the principle or greater divinity that the saint embodied (CWSV, vol. 8, p. 190). He asserted that if someone were to have asked Jesus if it was necessary to believe in him as the only son of God, Jesus would have asked only that such a person continue to seek God as truth, and would not have cared whether he was considered the only savior. God, Vivekananda believed, could be found in all prophets, and he further explained that everyone is in a sense a prophet (CWSV, vol. 4, p. 152). Priests and other religious officials came in for sharp derision as “an evil 312

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in every country” (CWSV, vol. 7, p. 22). Again and again he drew a contrast between the clarity and efficacy of the teachings of and examples set by avatars and prophets, and the tendency for religious leaders and the institutions they led to dilute the true message of the prophet and focus on ritual.This tendency in turn led, in his view, to the appearance of substantial differences among religions, which obscured their fundamental unity.

The evolution and development of religions To understand and account for the range of different religions around the world, Swami Vivekananda developed a Practical Vedanta framework that places all religious practices and beliefs on an evolutionary scale. It is not that one is true above all others, necessarily, but rather that they share common ideas, and are suited to particular times, places, and peoples. One source of conflict among religions is the tendency to place undue emphasis on what Swami Vivekananda considered relatively superficial differences, such as different founding leaders or central texts. For the Swami, “All religions are, at the bottom, alike” (CWSV, vol. 5, p. 293). The missionary impulse is thus misguided, because there is no need to impose one’s own religion on others. In many different contexts, Swami Vivekananda spoke of different religions, and different practices within individual religions, as a manifestation of lesser or greater levels of spiritual understanding. In discussing Jesus and Christianity with American audiences, he suggested that there was no harm in worshipping Jesus as God because it was simply practical to do so given the difficulty of worshipping God as an abstraction (CWSV, vol. 4, p. 140). Still, he frequently warned against the danger of putting too much emphasis on religious figures, marking it as a persistent problem in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. As in Christianity and Buddhism, “the religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual” (CWSV, vol. 1, p. 21), with the perennial human mistake being to see the ceremonial as the most important, or to confuse the two, and to elevate religious practice over the principles they reinforced. Both the Buddha and Jesus became “idols,” in the Swami’s view, and their followers lost sight of the principles they had tried to propagate (Ibid.). Even so, however, he saw value in the human attachment to the “everyday details of religion, and to rituals” (CWSV, vol. 4, p. 141). Swami Vivekananda spoke of religion as progressing in waves, with periods of quiet followed by the periodic appearance of great religious leaders such as Jesus (Vivekananda 1900). He attributed the origin and persistence of faith in God to the facts of death and human weakness (CWSV, vol. 1, p.  22). In his closing remarks at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda expressed the hope that unity would come about not through one religion triumphing and others being destroyed, but rather by people figuring out how to assimilate the spirit of other religions while preserving their own individuality. This hope highlights the tension in his thought between asserting the ultimate unity of all religions and proclaiming that Practical Vedanta is the true core of Hinduism and all religions. Despite this tension, however, his consistent assertion of Practical Vedanta’s superiority, regardless of the existence of truth in other religions such as Christianity, was yet another means of discrediting the missionary impulse in general (Ibid., p. 24).

Critique of Christian missionary efforts Swami Vivekananda’s insistence upon the fundamental unity of all religion could have formed the basis for a universal rejection of missionary work on the grounds that the introduction 313

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of new religion was less likely to meet the spiritual needs of a people than a reinterpretation of their existing indigenous traditions. However, at times he spoke approvingly of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka’s support for efforts to spread Buddhism beyond his kingdom.While Vivekananda was not fully consistent in his anti-​missionary critique, therefore, he was a regular and consistent critic of Christian missionary activity in India. His criticism of Christian missionaries in India centered on the shortcomings of Christianity in practice (as contrasted with what he saw as the true essence of Christianity) and the shortcomings of missionaries themselves. A newspaper account of an 1894 lecture in Detroit entitled “Christianity in India” demonstrates how Swami Vivekananda spoke to Americans about Christian missionary work in India, especially that of Protestant Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth century (CWSV, vol. 8, p. 214–​19). The newspaper reported that the Swami gave a synopsis of missionary efforts in South Asia, asserting that the Spanish and the Portuguese had compelled Indians to convert to Roman Catholicism by the sword. He had praise for some of the earliest Christian missionaries in India but sharp criticism for those of his own time. Indeed, he called them incompetent because they made little or no effort to learn about Indian culture or learn Indian languages. He explained that Indians were willing to accept the money missionaries brought and take advantage of education in their schools. However, he contrasted the Christianity of Christ and that of the missionary: “The Hindus would welcome the life of Christ of the Christians gladly, because his life was holy and beautiful; but they cannot and will not receive the same narrow utterances of the ignorant, hypocritical, or self-​deceiving men” (Ibid., p. 217). The Swami also noted with regret that, while Hindus would readily revere Jesus as an admirable religious teacher, Christians would not similarly take the time to learn about Hindu holy men (Ibid.). Swami Vivekananda also argued that Christian missionaries did not take the time to understand adequately many of the aspects of Hinduism they derided. For example, Christian missionaries often sharply criticized the Hindu use of images, or “idols,” in daily worship, whether at home or in temples. They portrayed the use of images as indicative of a primitive, childlike approach to religion, suggesting that Hindus believed quite literally that a god was in those images, disregarding the far more complex and varying understandings of image worship to be found in the Hindu tradition. In the face of such harsh criticisms, one response from some nineteenth-​century Hindu movements was to downplay image worship or reject it entirely. The Arya Samaj, for example, taught that the earliest Hindus scriptures, the Vedas, contained no mention of image worship and that it was, therefore, a later accretion that could be discarded. In contrast, Swami Vivekananda understood image worship as but one phase in the evolution of religion. He did not reject image worship outright, but relegated it to a lower, less sophisticated stage of spiritual progress. He went even further in pointing out that Christians themselves used images, despite their sharp condemnation of image or idol worship. In one of his lectures at the World’s Parliament of Religions, for example, he noted that images are quite evident in Roman Catholic churches, and argued that even Protestants use mental images when they pray, because such images are necessary in order to be able to think about or focus on anything (CWSV, vol. 1, p. 5) He thus perceived misunderstanding and at times hypocrisy in Christian critiques of Hindu practice. In his biography of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Nikhilananda reports that when the Swami was sailing back to India in 1897, he got into a heated discussion with two Christian missionaries who were harshly criticizing Hinduism and finally grabbed one by the collar and told him he would throw him overboard if he continued to criticize his religion (Swami Nikhilananda 1987, p. 219). This story has been widely shared on internet and social media sites, suggesting that this forceful defense of Hinduism continues to resonate powerfully with many Hindus. 314

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Although Swami Vivekananda did not speak or write much about political matters, his assertive presentation of Practical Vedanta along with his analysis of Christianity using a Hindu framework has continued to strike a chord with a range of political leaders in India.

Bibliography ABP Ananda. 2015. “Obama on Mahatma Gandhi & Swami Vivekananda.” YouTube.com. January 27. Available at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=MjWTJXvsZC4. Accessed December 24, 2019. Beckerlegge, G. 2000. The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement. Delhi: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2006. Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Modi, N. 2018.“PM Modi Address Event to Mark 125th Anniversary of SwamiVivekananda’s Chicago Speech.” Narendramodi. September 11. Available at www.narendramodi.in/​pm-​modi-​addresses-​a-​programme-​to-​ mark-​125th-​anniversary-​of-​swami-​vivekanand-​s-​chicago-​address-​541420. Accessed December 24, 2019. Nikhilananda. 1987. Vivekananda: A Biography. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Sen, A. 2000. Swami Vivekananda. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Vivekananda. 1900. “Christ’s Message to the World.” Ramakrishnavivekananda. March 11. Available at http://​ramakrishnavivekananda.info/​vivekananda/​volume_​9/​notes_​of_​lectures_​and_​classes/​christs_​ message_​to_​the_​world.htm. Accessed December 24, 2019. —​—​—​. 1964–​1968. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda [CWSV]. 8 vols. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Also available widely online, e.g., https://​en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​The_​Complete_​Works_​of_​Swami_​ Vivekananda.

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The following examination of the place of Mohandas K. (“Mahatma”) Gandhi (1869–​1948) in the history of Hindu–​Christian relations is divided into three sections: “Gandhi’s encounters with and assimilations of Christianity,” “Gandhi’s thought on the prospects of Hindu–​Christian relations,” and “Christian responses to Gandhi and his work.”

Gandhi’s encounters with and assimilations of Christianity Gandhi was raised by his Vishnu-​worshipping (Vaishnava) parents in an atmosphere of religious pluralism and tolerance of other religions, with the exception of Christianity. While exposed to Islam and Zoroastrianism through friends, and Jainism through monastic teachers, all welcomed into the home, young Gandhi came to view Christianity with a revulsion that stemmed from witnessing its proselytizers’ strident public denunciations of Hinduism (Jordens 1998, p. 8). As a vegetarian and teetotaler, Gandhi was also put off by the meat-​eating and alcohol-​drinking of most Christians, as he was by missionaries’ tendency to insist that Indian converts abandon traditional customs, such as dress, in favor of Western ones. Though Gandhi, as we’ll see, developed a much fuller understanding of Christianity over time, the association of Christianity with Western lifestyles was a matter of concern that remained with him. The years spent in legal training in London (1888–​1891) constitute the next significant phase of Gandhi’s spiritual development. Three groups of associates there had great influence upon him: Theosophists, Vegetarian Society members, and Christians. The positive influence of Theosophists led Gandhi into substantive study of a text that would become paramount for him—​the Bhagavad Gita (BG)—​and exposed him to the life and teachings of the Buddha (Gandhi 1983, p. 59). At the same time, meetings with and reading the works of Theosophist leaders Madame Blavatsky (Key to Theosophy) and Annie Besant (Why I Became a Theosophist) engendered in Gandhi further antipathy toward Christianity, as these Theosophists’ defenses of Hindu ideas involved trenchant critiques of Christian theology (Jordens 1998, pp.  10–​ 11). However, Gandhi’s Christian vegetarian friends likely gave him a better impression of Christianity, as they seemingly never endeavored to proselytize him and demonstrated that not all Christians indulged in meat and alcohol. One such friend went even further, expressing dismay when Gandhi recollected the aggressive conversion tactics he had observed missionaries employing, and assuring him that neither consumption of flesh nor drinking of alcohol 316

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were enjoined in the Bible, which he encouraged Gandhi to read.  As will become clear, a key element of Gandhi’s approach to interreligious relations was his consistent desire to read others’ scriptures, and here in the Bible he found what would become a profound touchstone for him: the Sermon on the Mount (SOTM), which he said “went straight to my heart” (Gandhi 1983, p. 60). Reflecting upon his impressions of these religious works, Gandhi connected the SOTM with the BG and the Buddha’s teachings through what he saw as their common exhortation to self-​renunciation or self-​abnegation in personal conduct toward others (Ibid.). In these particular scriptures and others from the world’s religions, Gandhi would also find, over time, the shared values of compassion and nonviolence that became so essential for him. Throughout his sojourn in South Africa (1893–​1914), Gandhi had much contact in his work and social relations with Christians, especially Evangelicals of the South Africa General Mission. Their demonstrated gentleness, like that of the London vegetarians, did much to disabuse him of some of the opinions he had, in his youth, developed with regard to Christianity, and their zeal to convert inspired him to conduct intensive study, from 1893 to 1895, of Christian works. The specific texts appear mostly to have been recommended to him by one Mr. Coates, a Quaker friend (Ibid., p. 106–​107). While Gandhi ended up rejecting Christian beliefs that the Bible was an infallible source of literal truth, he came to deeply appreciate the aforementioned ethical dimensions of compassion and nonviolence that he perceived being emphasized in the Gospels. (More on this below.) Furthermore, he did not consider Christ’s crucifixion a unique historical act of universal redemption, but rather, from this point on, regarded it as a profoundly resonant symbolic act. When questioned about the efficacy of fasting during an Indian campaign to quell Hindu–​ Muslim violence, Gandhi said that Jesus taught eternal truth, for his story of self-​sacrifice exemplified how a morally pure being could ethically redeem the whole world (Rao 1963, pp. 224–​25). Gandhi also parted from Christian soteriology in seeking freedom from sinful action through ethical self-​purification (which is possible because all are “sons of God” in the sense of possessing cultivatable divine qualities), rather than salvation from the consequences of sin through faith in a God external to oneself. Gandhi was bothered by Christians who seemed untroubled by the commission of sin, confident as they were that while it was in their God-​g iven natures to sin, they would be saved in the end by their faith in God’s redemptive grace. By contrast, Gandhi was impressed by Christians such as Mr. Coates and his Society of Friends fellows, who apparently pursued a life of good works born from a developed inner moral purity, which to Gandhi epitomized the message of the Gospels (Gandhi 1983, pp. 107–​108; Andrews 2003, p. 36). Despite Gandhi’s opposition to certain forms of the mainstream Christian doctrine and conduct embodied by his white South African Protestant friends, he found among them several kindred spirits. Among them was his great Baptist friend and mentor in the mission of selfless service to others, the Rev. J.J. Doke, who openly acknowledged the widespread failure, by white South Africans, to treat Indians in a Christian way (in the sense of seeing and loving them in their suffering). He therefore joined, along with many South African Indian converts to Christianity, in Gandhi’s South African campaigns for greater Indian rights (Andrews 2003, pp. 33–​36, 58). Other influential Christians there included the Trappists, whose equal treatment and vocational training of South African Blacks modeled for him the combination of religious piety and a commitment to work on behalf of the oppressed that Gandhi aspired to apply to institutions for untouchables back in India. Similarly influential was the Anglican minister, Lancelot Booth, who intensively schooled Gandhi in the arts of nursing (Gandhi 2009, p. xlvii). But next to Doke, Gandhi’s closest ally was another Anglican priest and missionary, Charles F.  Andrews, whose writings did much to champion Gandhi, his Indian friend, among Christians worldwide. Documenting Gandhi’s involvement with Christianity, Andrews noted that beyond mere 317

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study of Christianity, Gandhi regularly took at least silent part in worship at various churches and conventions (Andrews 2003, p. 33). Andrews also pointed out that Gandhi continued to fulfill his vow to fully explore Christianity even during his periodic returns to India. Even after conversations in India, in 1901, with his friend, K.C. Banerjee, led Gandhi to declare an end to his practical efforts to realize Christian faith, he never stopped considering it in light of his comparative readings of scriptures from all traditions (Ibid., p. 39). Several Christian hymns also traveled with Gandhi throughout his career, with “Pillar of the Cloud,” “Lead Kindly Light,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” being staples of the interreligious prayer services in Gandhi’s ashrams or intentional-​living communities from South Africa to India (Ibid., p. 48). Gandhi’s openness in these respects is remarkable, given that his harsh treatment at Christian hands never fully ceased. For example, on the occasion of Andrews’s first sermon in South Africa, Gandhi was rebuffed at the church door, despite bearing an invitation from a Christian friend (Ibid., p. 59). Perhaps this happened despite his fame, though it was more likely because of it, given Gandhi’s reputation as an agitator among white Christian British authorities there. Gandhi’s South African Christian associates’ claims about the supreme religion of Christianity also spurred him periodically to doubt his own preferred Hinduism. In moments of doubt, he frequently looked back to India for spiritual guidance. This tendency eventually led him, between 1894 and 1896, to have extensive discussions with the most influential spiritual advisor of his life, the Jain teacher Raychandbhai (Rajchandra Ravjibhai Mehta). While Gandhi rejected certain elements of orthodox Christian theology, he still felt challenged by some Christian claims. On the possibility of scriptures being divinely revealed, for example, Gandhi inquired with Raychandbhai about both the Vedas and the Bible, and he had both Hinduism and Christianity in mind when asking him about subjects like God as creator of the universe, humans as incarnations of God, and the final condition of the world. Raychandbhai’s responses likely gave form to Gandhi’s final dismissal of orthodox Christian positions on such matters. Raychandbhai found Christianity lacking in several ways. From its unwillingness to see all scriptures as imperfect human products requiring elucidation by future spiritually realized beings, to its teachings that the ultimate was a personal God who created and judged, to the belief that the soul was always subject to this God, Christianity failed to approach what Raychandbhai considered the basic truths of “essential religion” found in Indian traditions: the eternal and independent nature of the soul, the law of karma, and practical methods to put an end to karma (Gandhi 1958–​1994 [CWMG], vol. 32, pp. 593–​602). In the same period, Gandhi had another close encounter with at least nominal Christianity in his correspondences with one Edward Maitland, an author associated with the Esoteric Christian Union (an offshoot of the Theosophical Society), which Gandhi briefly joined (Jordens 1998, p. 60). Gandhi’s main reason for becoming a member indicates the place that Christianity would come to occupy in his life: the Union espoused a kind of universalism in which the teachings from all major religions complemented those of Jesus (Iyer 1991, pp. 83–​ 85). In other areas as well, the Union’s positions—​that “God” was not a personal creator but rather a universal life-​force underlying all existence, and that salvation was therefore a matter of each individual “becoming a Christ,” by freeing one’s own inherently good spirit from entrapment in inherently evil matter through a process of ascetic self-​purification—​actually quite closely resembled those articulated within Raychandbhai’s Jainism, and, more broadly, even those of Advaita Vedanta that Gandhi was also investigating at this time (Jordens 1998, p. 61). In this same period Gandhi was also exposed to a newly translated work by the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (TKOGIWY), which “overwhelmed” and “left an abiding impression on” him, to the extent that previous Christian readings “seemed to pale into insignificance” (Gandhi 1983, p. 120). To the extent that Tolstoy spoke theologically, 318

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he was almost as unorthodox as the Esoteric Christian Union: For Tolstoy, Christ (or the Son of God) referred to the divine nature in all people, a nature which strives to be free from the bestial nature that humans also possess. This liberation is achieved primarily through ethical behavior, what Tolstoy called “the divine law of love,” with nonviolence being the primary virtue. According to Tolstoy, Christ’s mission, articulated primarily in the SOTM, was to teach humanity that this divine love inheres in each of us. This idea led Tolstoy to reject the idea of God as a judge and punisher who cursed humanity to sin and allowed his son to be a suffering victim. God could not be like this, Tolstoy reasoned, since Christ in the SOTM so clearly taught us not to judge, but rather to forgive and love our enemies. Because of this, redemption could not be given by God in response to faith expressed in the empty rituals of prayer and the sacraments of an institutional Church (whose main interest had always been in preserving its own authority), but was rather to be won through personal effort and self-​sacrifice in the care for and service of others (Jordens 1998, p. 63). Reviewing Gandhi’s previously discussed conclusions about salvation, we can now see how strongly influenced they were by Tolstoy. In terms of Gandhi’s activism, TKOGIWY sparked his enduring belief in the transformative efficacy of demonstrating love and appealing to truth through non-​violent means. In 1909, he declared that Tolstoy understood the potency of nonviolence better than anyone else in the world (Brown 1989, p. 78), and he would eventually name the communal farm he cofounded with Hermann Kallenbach after the Russian writer. Given the place of nonviolence not only in his own Hindu tradition, but in the even more radically philosophized and applied Indic Buddhist and Jain forms, it is remarkable that Gandhi would assert that Tolstoy, a Christian, understood the potency of nonviolence better than anyone in the world. The Christian impact upon Gandhi in this regard is further substantiated by close associate, K.G. Mashruwala, who maintained that Jesus’s coupling of active nonviolence and human service impressed Gandhi far more than what he perceived to be the Buddhist and Jain tendency toward ascetic withdrawal (Mashruwala 1983, pp. 126–​27; Gandhi 2009, p. 10). Gandhi was also moved by Tolstoy’s belief in the futility of fighting temporal power with force, or by seeking political rights through participation in the state, as opposed to what Tolstoy considered the much more efficacious route of effecting change by pursuing one’s moral duties to God and appealing to God’s Kingdom, as it was truly found in individual hearts (Brown 1989, pp. 78–​79). Later, after reading Tolstoy’s First Step and The Gospel in Brief, among other writings, Gandhi concluded that Tolstoy stood second only to Raychandbhai among the individuals who had touched him most profoundly, for Tolstoy best conveyed that the purpose of life is to establish the Kingdom of God through selfless service to others (Jordens 1998, pp. 14, 34). Gandhi’s main technique for combating oppression, i.e., demonstrating “passive resistance” or the “power of truth” (satyagraha) before political authorities that enforced injustices, had many sources:  the BG, Shamal Bhatt’s poem “For a Bowl of Water,” the Passive Resistance Movement and Suffragettes’ agitations in England, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Still, two Christian writings, TKOGIWY and the SOTM (with the former work greatly elucidating the latter, in Gandhi’s view), occupied as vital a place as any. Gandhi himself said as much in confessing to Doke that the idea at the heart of his method—​that true beauty and power are in loving your enemies and responding to their evil with good—​was derived primarily from the SOTM. When Doke expressed surprise that Gandhi’s initial source wasn’t the BG, Gandhi replied that it was later reflection upon the BG that deepened these lessons learned originally from the SOTM, and later given permanent form through TKOGIWY (Doke 1909, pp. 131–​ 32). Likewise, his Christian comrade, Andrews, asserted that these very same three works also led to Gandhi’s insistence that all affairs be conducted with complete love of and identification with the poorest of people in mind (Andrews 2003, p. 95). 319

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The SOTM remained central to Gandhi after he returned to South Asia. He tellingly confessed before a large audience of both Hindu co-​religionists and young Christian converts in 1927 that if matters simply came down to the SOTM and his personal interpretation of it, “I should not hesitate to say, ‘Oh yes, I am a Christian,’ ” adding that it was only the likely misinterpretations that would follow that prevented him from declaring as much (Andrews 2003, pp.  55–​56). Nevertheless, Gandhi specified here that his allegiance was limited to the SOTM’s “unadulterated core,” for in contemporary Christian theology he found nothing but a contradiction of that core (Iyer 1991, p. 145). However, there were a few other gospel lessons of which he occasionally expressed approval. On the subject of voluntary poverty, he called the linked teachings found in Mark—​on, for example, the difficulty of the rich entering the Kingdom of God and the necessity of selling possessions and giving all to the poor—​“the eternal rule of life.” However, it is important to note the typically universalist contextualization that immediately followed, for Gandhi: all great spiritual masters have emphasized these very same measures (Iyer 1991, pp. 96–​97).

Gandhi’s thought on the prospects of Hindu–​Christian relations By examining Gandhi’s reflections on Indian Christian history and his advocacy for studying the religions of the world broadly and comparatively, we can discern Gandhi’s vision for improving Hindu–​Christian relations. Gandhi’s most frequent criticism of Christianity—​one that likely developed, at least in part, out of Tolstoy’s analyses of the violently aggressive nature of government—​was that Christian missionary work overlapped with British civil rule. His objection to backing religious activity with the force of political authority was consistent; Gandhi also spoke against Hindus who wished to prevent Indian converts to Christianity from participating in political processes (Andrews 2003, p.  49). Gandhi considered the mutual imbrication of Christianity and British rule the main source of confusion among Hindus and Muslims about the intent of Christians, and of their consequent disapproval of it. Early on, Gandhi made clear that he considered the “vain and purposeless” excesses of modern Western civilization—​materialism, greed, and the mentalities of “might is right” and “survival of the fittest”—​antithetical to the spirit of Christianity (Iyer 1991, pp.  138–​42; Gandhi 2009, p.  133). But when pressed in later years to distinguish between Christ’s teachings and Christians’ actions, he insisted that after 150  years of British rule, Indians cannot be expected to separate Christianity in any sense from materialistic civilization and imperialistic exploitation (Iyer 1991, p. 153). Addressing young Ceylonese converts, he identified as harmful byproducts of Christian conversion the rejection of traditional South Asian cultural mores and the embrace of Western materialism. He then suggested that Jesus would condemn the judgmental and intolerant attitude of converts regarding traditional South Asian culture (citing the gospel maxim, “judge not that ye be judged”). He also seconded the Buddha’s exhortation to, in Gandhi’s phrasing, avoid being “bedazzled by the passing show” of wealth and materialism, since the pursuit of material wealth did not raise the ethical standards of a community. “By all means,” he encouraged, “drink deep of the SOTM.” But the message of Christ to be found there (of self-​sacrifice and renunciation of mammon), he concluded, was the very same one taught by the Buddhas and Muhammads of history (Ibid., pp. 148–​49). For Hindu–​Christian relations to improve, therefore, Christianity would need to be disentangled from materialistic Western culture and Western imperialism, while South Asian Christian converts would need to retain some degree of respect and tolerance for their own traditional cultures. Considering Gandhi’s irritation at the judgmental attitudes Christian converts displayed toward South Asian culture, it is interesting to note how regularly he praised Christian 320

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missionaries not only for their emphasis on high quality education for all, but also for their willingness to note and critique oppressive elements of Hinduism. Their willingness to do so contributed to what Gandhi considered a positive development in Indian history: the emergence of Christian-​inspired Hindu reformers like Rammohun Roy (on whom, see Killingley’s chapter in this volume), Devandranath Tagore, K.C. Sen, Dayananda Saraswati, and leaders within the Arya and Brahmo Samajs (Ibid., p. 141). In addition to disentangling Christianity from Western culture and imperialism, Hindu–​ Christian relations could also be improved, according to Gandhi, by Christians rejecting their typically condescending attitudes toward Hindus as heathen idolaters ignorant of God. Speaking before an audience of missionaries in Calcutta in 1925, Gandhi referred to his Indian Christian friends’ complaints about missionaries oppressively monitoring their behavior and insisting upon the complete rejection of traditional native customs and even contemporary nationalist sentiments. Occasionally, Gandhi would add that Indian converts were also made cowards by the browbeating tactics of missionaries (Iyer 1991, p. 153). Conversion, he argued, should be a matter of a moral self-​ purification involving the rejection of evil ways and the adoption of new virtues, not a denationalizing abandonment of ancestral customs, which does violence not only to those traditions themselves, but also to the moral integrity of the converters’ own religion (Andrews 2003, p. 53). In another important speech to missionaries, Gandhi asserted that a more open-​hearted survey of India would reveal that the “outwardly vile” untouchables at one end of the social spectrum actually demonstrated the noblest kind of personal devotion to Truth and God, while many high-​caste Brahmins showed profound courage and love, courting excommunication as they did in humble and selfless service among pariahs. Even without knowing Jesus, Gandhi contended, such Indians exemplify Christ’s way better than most missionaries. Continuing in this spirit, he admonished missionaries to forego their usual mode of relentless preaching and adopt the humble approach of silence and listening he had witnessed among the aforementioned South African Trappists. As if teaching lessons learned from TKOGIWY about political authority and from the Gospels about identifying with the poor, Gandhi returned to the topic of religion backed by government and further advised members of his audience that they never missionize under the protection of temporal power, for doing so isolated them from those they sought to serve. Closing powerfully, he encouraged missionaries to enter untouchables’ hovels not with the intent of giving Indians something they lacked, but rather with the desire to receive something they as missionaries themselves lacked, namely humility and receptivity (CWMG vol. 27, pp. 434–​41). Proselytization was itself, for Gandhi, an impediment to harmonious Hindu–​ Christian relations. Force, fraud, or material inducement must, in particular, never be involved in evangelistic efforts, and the targets of conversion must be free agents of mature understanding. (For more on Gandhi’s views on proselytization and conversion, see Bauman’s chapter in this volume.) This insistence on mature understanding recommended what Gandhi considered a superior manner of interreligious engagement: “the liberal study of religions of the world” in comparative light. Whereas proselytization focuses on an external, formal transference of allegiance from one group to another, necessitating a decrying of perceived rivals that engenders mutual hatred, unbiased consideration of other traditions invites true conversion (in the sense of a substantial inner moral transformation) and mutual trust. Such an approach constitutes true fellowship between religions, which to Gandhi entailed not praying that others join one’s own religion, but rather that one become a better practitioner of one’s own religion by learning from others (Rao 1963, p. 57). Gandhi was consistent on this front, often asserting, among fellow Hindus, that the kind of reverential study of the gospel teachings that had so influenced him was essential to a full life. 321

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Gandhi’s most pointed advice for improved Hindu–​Christian relations came in the form of a fourfold response to a missionary’s question about how Christianity could become a genuinely naturalized contributor to real spiritual advance in India:

1)  2)  3)  4) 

Practice Christianity without adulteration, which means: Act more like Christ, which means: Make love central in life. Study other religions sympathetically (Jones 1950, pp. 69–​70).

The open-​ minded study of other religions as a key to mutual religious harmony and understanding was based, for Gandhi, in the universalist conviction that all religions were true, even if their scriptures were imperfect repositories of eternal truths, filtered as they were through morally underdeveloped human minds and hearts. It was also rooted in Gandhi’s confidence in the enriching qualities of religious tolerance and inclusivity. With respect to Christian associates in his life, Gandhi tellingly reserved highest praise for the theological inclusivists, for whom damnation did not necessarily await those not accepting Christ as savior, and whose concern for the integrity of their own faith compelled them to be tolerant of those of others (Andrews 2003, p. 59). Other recollections by C.F. Andrews offer even further insight into Gandhi’s thought on religious relations. He recalled Gandhi submitting that Indians would much better appreciate Christians living in their midst if Christians preached less and simply lived the life advocated in the SOTM more. Faith, for Gandhi, was not a matter of “telling” with a view to conversion, but rather something visibly demonstrated. Only then, in Gandhi’s view, would it become self-​propagating. While Gandhi applied this same standard to himself (insisting that his Hindu faith be demonstrated rather than confessed only in words), he did at the same time profess allegiance to it in part because he considered it the most tolerant of other religions, possessed of an inclusive spirit that allowed not only respect for, but also enabled the assimilation of, whatever good could be found in others’ traditions (Andrews 2003, pp.  273–​74). In these comments, one discerns Gandhi’s fully integrated vision, bringing together his convictions about studying religions broadly and practically embodying the best of what one finds commonly shared among them. Gandhi’s vision was perhaps best embodied by his multi-​religious ashram services. In his introduction to a translation of the prayer book used in those services, Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi calls the services “truly interfaith,” because they emphasized an inclusive searching for truth over any particular tradition’s exclusive claims to primacy. T   he key to interreligious respect and acceptance was understanding that religion was a pursuit rather than a possession of truth. It was this understanding, Arun Gandhi asserts, that his grandfather consistently promoted (Gandhi 1999, pp. 9–​10).

Christian responses to Gandhi and his work Gandhi has made a significant impression upon Christians worldwide for two related reasons. First, his non-​violent tactics have enabled Christian pacifists to praise him as an embodiment of Jesus’ virtuous pacifism. Second, that same nonviolence was adopted by prominent Christian activists in the fight against injustice. The British were the first to note Gandhi’s Christlike qualities. Lord Ampthill’s introduction to J.J. Doke’s influential 1909 biography of Gandhi sang his praises in this way, as did several important Quakers. But C.F. Andrews was the most prominent figure regularly to compare the 322

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Mahatma to Jesus (Dalton 1993, p. 227 n. 156). Andrews said knowing Gandhi “was tantamount to knowing Christ,” and after witnessing him “bear the sins and sorrow of his people” in a 1924 protest fast, he concluded that he “knew more deeply the meaning of the Cross” (Chatfield 1976, p.  652). Andrews’s American Protestant pacifist allies amplified this praise yet further. Paramount among them was Reverend John Haynes Holmes, whose introduction to Andrews’s annotation of Gandhi’s Autobiography proclaimed that India’s successful Salt Satyagraha proved that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” and that by extension Gandhi’s inner sanctity and outward mission in the world were no different than Christ’s (Dalton 1993, p.  227). Holmes’s famous 1921 sermon, “Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?”—​which went beyond the image of Gandhi as suffering servant to conclude that he shared Christ’s destiny to “nobly die for his kingdom upon the earth” (Chatfield 1976, p.  620)—​is regarded as the seminal moment in American Christianity’s embrace of Gandhi (Juergensmeyer 1987, p. 191). In his important analysis of Gandhi’s appeal to liberal American Christians, Juergensmeyer discusses how the rise of liberal American Christians’ hopeful theology in the late nineteenth century, based as it was on the promise of establishing a “kingdom of God on earth” through love and social service, was checked by pessimism in the wake of World War I (Ibid., p. 192). However, World War I also had the effect of coalescing Christian proponents of nonviolence into major antiwar organizations like the American Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR; Kosek 2009, p. 2). In the post-​war environment, Christian pacifists found in Gandhi their perfect model of  “this-​worldly saintliness,” an ideal Christlike combination of potency over external social and political realities and control over internal psychological and emotional forces (Juergensmeyer 1987, p. 201). Juergensmeyer demonstrates that while Gandhi did possess such strengths, much of the liberal Protestant image of him—​of a poor, frail figure effectively commanding restless mobs and challenging imperial power in a manner fit for their Messiah—​was a projection based more in faith than on historical evidence. Looking past Gandhi’s Hindu identity and criticisms of them, these Christians saw in his admiration of Jesus and embodiment of Christ’s attributes a fitting inspiration and vessel for their contemporary “fulfillment theologies,” according to which other religions, Hinduism especially, would either evolve into Christianity or complement it in a true universal faith that was humanity’s last hope of defeating a vicious rise in secularism (on which, see Wacker 1989 and Studdert-​Kennedy 1991, both of which are discussed in Kosek 2009, pp. 82–​84). More realistic than these early admirers of Gandhi were those who appeared in the next wave of his FOR champions in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these later figures had actually met Gandhi. Among them, men like Clarence Marsh Case, Kirby Page, and Richard Gregg focused on adopting a spiritual satyagraha as the best practical method for effecting radical social change. Gregg’s books were the most important in terms of working out the implications of Gandhi’s non-​violent strategy. His The Power of Non-​Violence was hailed worldwide across the spectrum of Christian pacifist activism for elevating the discourse beyond the vague, mystical praise for Gandhi as a transcendent modern saint that had characterized the works of his predecessors, and for translating Gandhi’s ideas rigorously and precisely into strategically applicable Western conceptual terms. For its creation of an efficacious, autonomous method that maintained the moral and spiritual imperatives at the heart of both Gandhi’s work and the Christian Social Gospel, Gregg’s book came to be regarded as a kind of “Bible of non-​violence” (Kosek 2009, pp. 92–​100). There were counter-​voices, however, most notably former FOR member and prominent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who criticized Gandhians’ “finessing the question of coercion,” pointing to contradictions between Gandhi’s moralistic rhetoric and self-​portrayal as a suffering saint, on the one hand, and, on the other, his use of the tools of power politics, like physical resistance, civil 323

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disobedience, boycotts, and strikes.Along another contrapuntal line, some FOR leaders, like Howard Kester, found Gandhi’s model irrelevant to gun-​toting, industrial America (Ibid., pp. 137, 143). However, Gregg and other FOR luminaries—​ including their most prominent African American member, Howard Thurman—​saw Gandhi’s type of mass non-​violent resistance as key to overcoming many global problems, including racial discrimination (Ibid., p. 108). Other top Black Christian leaders like Bayard Rustin and James Farmer agreed, though they advocated satyagraha on utilitarian over moral–​spiritual grounds (Ibid., pp.  178–​81). Gandhi himself expressed hope that the African American struggle might bring the cause of nonviolence to the world stage (CWMG, vol. 62, p. 202), and these important figures’ acceptance led to him receiving tremendous exposure in Black churches from the 1940s onward (Kapur 1992). Given the resonant voices of these Black ministers and others, such as Benjamin Mays and Mordecai Johnson, and the activism modeled by white clerics like Methodists Jay Holmes Smith and Glenn Smiley (Kosek 2009, pp. 185–​87, 212), it is no surprise that the most important Black American civil rights leader, Reverend Dr.  Martin Luther King Jr., came to adopt Gandhi’s non-​violent approach, which he called “the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (King 1958, pp. 78–​79). After employing non-​violent resistance successfully in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, King listed three works written or inspired by Gandhi among those most influential in his own thinking: Gregg’s The Power of Non-​Violence (recommended to him by Smiley), Gandhi’s Autobiography, and Louis Fischer’s biography. Citing popular King maxims about Christ furnishing the spirit and Gandhi supplying the method, scholars typically maintain that King applied Gandhi’s teachings in Rustin and Farmer’s strictly utilitarian mode. However, Dalton reports that Indian Gandhians, whom he knew, held King’s grasp of their philosophy in the highest regard (Dalton 1993, p. 243 n. 68). Likewise, Rieder argues that while King found Hinduism alien, he investigated Gandhi fully and openly. Sermonizing to the many colleagues who bristled at crediting Gandhi for approaches they saw as fundamentally Christian, King cited Jesus’s words about “other sheep who are not of this fold,” to justify inclusion of non-​Christian ways of acting that he saw embracing the spirit of Christ’s message, such as Gandhi’s life of suffering and sacrifice (Rieder 2008, pp.  263–​65), and his movement’s demonstrations of courageous resistance and love toward adversaries, which to King exemplified the agape or “disinterested love” of his own tradition (Dalton 1993, p. 183). To bring home the point, King referenced Gandhi’s own tolerant inclusion of Tolstoy, the SOTM, and Thoreau, and concluded that in turning the other cheek and walking in the way of love, Gandhi presented a strange irony: “the greatest Christian of the twentieth century was not a member of the Christian Church” (Rieder 2008, pp. 259–​63).

Bibliography Andrews, C.F.  2003. Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Ideals.  Woodstock,VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing. Brown, J. 1989. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Chatfield, C. (ed.). 1976. The Americanization of Gandhi:  Images of the Mahatma. New  York and London: Garland Publishing. Dalton, D. 1993. Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. New York: Columbia University Press. Doke, J.J. 1909. M.K. Gandhi: Indian Patriot in South Africa. London: The London Chronicle. Gandhi, A. 1999. “Foreword.” In Gandhi, Mohandas K. Book of Prayers. Strohmeier, J (ed.). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hill Books, pp. 9–​10. Gandhi, M.K. 1958–​1994. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 100 vols. New Delhi:  Publication Division, Government of India. —​—​—​. 1983. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. New York: Dover Publications. —​—​—​. 2009. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Parel, A.J. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iyer, Raghavan (ed.). 1991. The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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27 RAIMON PANIKKAR Erik J. Ranstrom

The Hindu-​Christian odyssey of Raimon Panikkar (1918–​2010) may best be understood by attending to the hyphen between “Hindu” and “Christian.” Born to a Catalan Catholic mother, and an Indian Hindu father, Panikkar spent the length and breadth of his life integrating the two religious traditions in his very person, intriguingly as a Roman Catholic priest and at the same time one of the originating figures of so-​called hybridized religious identity, identifying also with Buddhism and secularism. It is a matter of revisionist historical speculation to decide whether Panikkar’s spirit would have been inclined to such an integration if he had lived in another era.The dynamics of colonialism and an emerging postcolonialism, which in a real way produced his existence, were shifting the plates between cultures and religions as Panikkar was creatively reconstituting the fabric of Hindu–​Christian relations. Panikkar was aware that the newly shifting religious landscape in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries was reshaping the “Christian West” toward pluralism in a civilizational context, due to a confluence of factors including accelerating immigration patterns from Asia and Africa, the resurgent confidence of non-​Western nations in a postcolonial era, and the rise of scientific materialism and rationalism. Yet Panikkar’s distinctive contribution to the phenomenon of religious pluralism, and the Hindu–​Christian dialogue, is transcendent to history and resides at the mystical level. For Panikkar, religious pluralism represents a value beyond the levels of sociological fact, multicultural ideology, political liberalism, or international affairs. In the mystical vision of Panikkar’s ocula fidei (“eye of faith”), religious pluralism is no less than the revelation of reality, the experience of God in the superabundance of expressions to be found in the religions and cultures of the world. Panikkar insists throughout his writings that since religious pluralism is at bottom a religious reality, it must be engaged in a religious way. The integration of spirituality and dialogue is perhaps his most enduring contribution to the Hindu–​Christian dialogue. For Panikkar, the dialogue between religions is a sui generis discourse whose method is interior purification, receptivity to grace, and agapeic love. Dialogue is dia-​logos, or a piercing through the words of religious language to the paradoxical “hearing” of the unfathomable silence at their core, which Panikkar locates in the bosom of the “Father” (Panikkar 1973). Panikkar’s approach is reminiscent of the apophatic and contemplative approach to dialogue pioneered by Thomas Merton. For Panikkar, the religious language that the Christian encounters in other religious traditions, and in Hinduism, is more than a concept or a term, is 326

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the real symbol of the Word, born of Silence. Once the Word has been “heard” in the religious words of the other traditions, there is entry for the Christian into the Trinitarian interplay of Silence and Word, Father and Son, in the spontaneous flashing forth of the Holy Spirit in and through these encounters with other religions (Williams 1990, pp. 3–​15). Panikkar’s apophatic spirituality does not prevent him from expressing himself fully and at length, as evidenced by his vast oeuvre, for Silence and Word are for him generative, rather than destructive, polarities. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the paradoxical perceptibility of the invisible mystery in the depths of life, which at its deepest level, is love. The Silence that is non-​dualistic with Word is for Panikkar both a Hindu and Christian insight: the sabdabrahman of the Hindu tradition finds resonance with the Christian grammar of creation, annunciation, and incarnation, cosmologically reenacted as creatio continua. The commonplace rhetoric, fashionable in our culture, of merely understanding other religions is not sufficient for Panikkar as passionate religious mystic. The meeting between Hinduism and Christianity, as religious traditions dialoguing about the Divine reality mediated through their traditions, is instead the Hindu–​Christian experience, a mediated communication of Divine reality in its own right through that very dialogue. It was no longer possible for Panikkar to distinguish between Hinduism and Christianity dualistically, as if they were separate religions (as opposed to “inter-independent” and fluid realities). Interreligious dialogue, or the meeting between religions, which often produces congresses, joint statements, and the exchange of information about the “other,” becomes for Panikkar the far riskier venture of the intrareligious dialogue, or the interior conversion to the “other” that is the fruit of prayerful engagement with religiously plural forms. It is broadly the case that the intensity of the spiritual life is often kept at a safe distance from religious pluralism, even as attempts are made to establish polite and amicable relationships among and between churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Panikkar is a radical figure within this context, who brings the interreligious encounter into the very sanctum of the act of surrender, thereby making every interreligious encounter an intrareligious adventure with the depths of the Divine that is the ground and origin of all religious mystery. The method and rhythms of dialogue for Panikkar will therefore naturally follow the method and rhythms of the spiritual life in general. For example, Panikkar stresses the importance for the intrareligious dialogue of what the Christian spiritual tradition has called spiritual poverty, or the “new innocence.” What this means is that in dialogue one’s interior stance is open and free, not fortifying the self against rationalistic defenses through apologetics, but attending in an unselfconscious way to the mystery of what is being revealed in the encounter. Panikkar’s short reflections, such as the “Sermon on the Mount of Intrareligious Dialogue” (Panikkar 1999, pp. 1–​2), are less about the vexing theological question of Christianity and other religions, and more about a method of prayer. As we have seen, Panikkar does not presuppose that the universal and final truth-​claims of Christianity render it hostile to dialogue with other religions, as Panikkar transforms such claims into tautological affirmations that can be extended everywhere. His Trinitarian and Christological universalism lead to the corollary that there are faces of Christ unknown to Christians. Panikkar is firmly opposed to the parochialism that limits the mystery to one specific religious language, even the Christian language, and criticizes such a narrow and tribal reading of the Catholic experience as “microdoxy.” The full meaning of Catholicism, whole and complete, is underscored instead as the integral cosmic and human experience, the locus for the presence of God in the earth, in the body, and in the languages of diverse cultures and religions, many of whom do not use the word “God.” Furthermore, Panikkar’s multireligious identity, the fruit of his many intrareligious dialogues, was a kind of incarnation into these diverse religious languages and the experiences embedded there. It is for this reason at times difficult to 327

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surmise that Panikkar himself is even a Christian. Panikkar would not interpret this perceptual impression as a symptom of religious infidelity, but as a fruit of his faith in the universality of the “Ultimate Experience” and his fidelity to the dynamism of intrareligious dialogue, even if it goes beyond the sanctified words of a single tradition. Here the Panikkar reader is made aware of the difference between “microdoxy” and another coined expression, “ecumenical ecumenism,” or the recovery of an authentic and liberating catholicity (Ibid., p. 43). How does Panikkar explain the dearth of references to this aspect of Christian faith throughout the history of its many traditions, and worse, its periodic violent opposition to religious difference with respect to Hinduism and other religious traditions? Theologically, he does so by combining, in a novel way, the cosmic Christology of John and the deutero-​Pauline letters such as Ephesians and Colossians with the messianic secret texts of Mark’s Gospel. In other words, the cosmic Christ, who is the very person of Jesus of Nazareth, is often enigmatically unknown even to those who profess to know him.The disciples and crowds who acclaimed Christ with enthusiasm consistently misunderstood who he was in the Gospel traditions—​ mainly because of fear—​and their descendants are no different. This is Panikkar’s thesis in the Unknown Christ of Hinduism (Panikkar 1964; Panikkar 1981). Panikkar’s spirituality of religious pluralism is rooted in his conviction, like Luther, that the gospel is for the freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:21), a freedom that comes from the awareness that the Christian is born not of flesh, or of blood, but of God (John 1:13). For him, it is the prerogative of the carnal and intellectual dimensions, disconnected from faith, to insulate the tradition against others and guard against it in fear, while it is the Spirit that effects harmony between the religions. Panikkar laments a pseudo-​Christian prudence of the flesh, or the conservatism of clinging to a narrow understanding of the tradition, but only because it is born of the timidity of an imagination which has not been liberated into the vast expanse of that mystery that Christians know as Christ, but which diverse religious traditions call by different names. Panikkar claims a dual Hindu-​Christian identity; his spiritual experience is creating and bursting the bounds of religious language, rather than suppressing religious language to confine identity upon a procrustean bed of rationality. One is struck by the utter lack of fear and caution around Panikkar’s rather bold adventures with Hinduism, and his nearly evangelical joy in plumbing the depths of its tradition in a work like The Vedic Experience (2016b [1977]). Panikkar’s boldness as a Hindu-​Christian was more gospel parrhesia, or evangelical boldness, than progressive ecclesial politicization. The mutual gifting of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit is an unrepeatable event in each tradition, with each “name” revealing the mystery of Christ, or the “Supername” (Revelation 2:17) in a unique way (Panikkar 2015, pp. 223–​80). As with many of Panikkar’s intuitions, this may lead to nearly intractable theological dilemmas, although as mentioned above, the exigencies of reason are subordinated to religious experience. The likes of theologians such as Karl Rahner and Rowan Williams comment on the need for the prayer life of the Church to become a Trinitarian experience, and the latter, for his part, commends Panikkar’s Trinitarian spirituality as moving in that direction within the context of Christianity and other religions (Rahner 2001, p. 42; Williams 1990, pp. 3–​15). The entire cosmos and all of its diversity, including the religions of the world, is for Panikkar an explosion of Trinitarian and Christic grace. At each moment, our beings, and indeed the entire cosmos, are being generated in novelty and freshness by the Father in Christ. The experience of Christianity must be the experience of constant newness, for otherwise, the meaning of the word evangelion (good news) is made barren. Spontaneity, surprise, and gift are ongoing themes in Panikkar’s spiritual meditations on the Christian mysteries. While Panikkar distances himself from certain forms of Catholic piety, it is apparent to the careful reader that he deems aspects 328

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of Christian spirituality far too dualistic to worthily account for the gift it had been given in Christ. In Panikkar’s vision, the Christian who limits the reality of Christ to a single religion, cultural tradition, or even historical person, has not yet encountered the living cosmic Christ, who is discerned especially as the Risen and Eucharistic Christ. How does Panikkar describe the process of the intrareligious dialogue? Panikkar emphasizes that dialogue is personal, interior, and relational. It is not a matter of theory or ideology, and especially not of universalistic systems of thought. Panikkar rejects all such systems because of their penchant for reducing diversity to a single, intellectualized abstract formula and for their isolation from lived, embodied encounter. It may be argued that Panikkar contradicts himself here, as the cumulative effects of his texts may perhaps represent an integralist system of thought in its own right.Tensions notwithstanding, Panikkar is distinctively premodern in this sense, and his preference for life in the small hamlet of Tavertet during the last quarter century of his life bears eloquent witness. The interiority of the intrareligious dialogue is also not to be confused with a solipsistic, egocentric voluntarism or consumerist syncretism that chooses various elements from religions to suits its individual taste. Dialogue begins with the meeting of persons in intimate communication to such a degree that at a certain point one may not easily distinguish the agency of “me” and “you,” and be uncertain whether, in fact, “we” are speaking “about” God or whether God is speaking in and between “us.” He is confident that this act of trust is ultimately an act of trust in God, which is at one and the same time trust in one’s neighbor and in the cosmos itself.This is the meaning of the cosmotheandric experience, a central dimension of Panikkar’s thought that, at the same time may be said to be neither central (there is no center between God, world, and the human) nor thought (since it is primarily an experience, and subsequently a myth; Panikkar 1993). There is a profound advaita (non-​dualism) in this view of dialogue. Panikkar’s contribution to the Hindu–​Christian dialogue may be the problematizing of language used to describe the meeting between Hinduism and Christianity as inadequately dualistic. He develops his distinctive Hindu-​Christian understanding of advaita alongside the ashram tradition in twentieth-​ century Indian Christianity, with a special relationship to his co-​pilgrims, Henri LeSaux and Bede Griffiths. Advaita within the Panikkarian vision represents a novel gloss on the gospel injunction to “love one’s neighbor as oneself,” and is Christ loving Christ’s-​self. The communion which issues forth is the Body of Christ in the deepest sense, and indeed, Panikkar would often write of a communio in sacris between the religions. One may argue that this overlooks the doctrinal differences of Hinduism and Christianity and becomes ensnared with the inevitable difficulty of minimizing difference or asserting equivalence between them, but for Panikkar this is to fail to distinguish faith and belief. Belief is necessary, but it is ultimately subordinate to faith, which for Panikkar is the primordial act of openness to reality. This is the basis of Panikkar’s pluralism, for beliefs, even if they differ, spring forth from the interior movements of faith. One can intuit the spiritual director in Panikkar, who offered a pastoral presence and gave spiritual exercises to many students and aspirants attracted to his teachings: beware of getting stuck at the level of concepts and doctrines, but push further, and reach the inexhaustible and incomprehensible origin from which they arise and which they reflect only imperfectly. Faith, and not belief, is primary. Panikkar’s approach to religion is a thoroughly experiential one. Belief and doctrine are not inconsequential. Together they shape human existence within mythos, incarnating and embodying the Trinitarian relations uniquely:  not in stark, dialectical opposition to their originary groundlessness, nor to other expressions arising from that same groundlessness. The procession from groundlessness to Word and back again is the work of the Holy Spirit in religious experience and the intrareligious dialogue. The Holy Spirit may be an 329

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underrepresented factor in Panikkar studies, for its value is not as foregrounded in christocentric appraisals of his work.The Spirit for Panikkar is alive in the manifestation of novel religious experiences and accompanying innovative theological reflection. He employs metaphors of “mutual fecundation” and “cross-​fertilization” to suggest this dynamic, relational field between religions and within each person. In this context, Panikkar prefers the aesthetic metaphor of harmony to the intellectual metaphor of truth, and when the latter is occasionally invoked, the Panikkarian vision accentuates its resonance as participation in reality, rather than propositional rectitude. Faith is a loving, primordial trust in the mystery at the root of all religious forms that overcomes the principle of non-​contradiction and embraces religious difference, including the insurmountable antitheses at the level of doctrine. His faith is a cosmic trust that religions are different, irreconcilably so, and yet in some way are intimately connected to each other at the heart of life itself. There is no Cartesian certainty that the world operates this way, but only a hope that brings Hindus and Christians deeper into the dialogue, and into themselves, the mystery at the root of self and other, the non-​dual Self which Christians call Christ and which Hindus call by other names. Here we also return to the rhythm between Silence andWord, apophasis and kataphasis. Panikkar enlists the Hindu myth of the Word losing its primacy to Silence in the Satapathabrahmana to articulate his rejection of logocentrism. The Word began, “I am by far greater because, you, Spirit, you, Mind, are powerless to manifest yourself.You are poor and powerless and impotent unless I reveal you, unless I, Logos, I, Vac, express what you are thinking inside of yourself.”…Spirit answered, “No, it is actually you who are the tool. If I do not breathe into you and tell you what to say, you babble meaninglessly. From within I fill you with speech.”…It is one of the Orient’s crucial moments when Prajapati, Father of Gods, decides in favor of Spirit. All the greatness of the West aligned itself in favor of the word, Logos. The pre-​eminence of Spirit over Word is perhaps the cornerstone of traditional India. (Panikkar 1985, pp. 275–​76) According to Panikkar’s Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man, the Holy Spirit is also the “person” of the Trinity most reflected in the wisdom of Eastern religious traditions, precisely because of the Spirit’s immanence and non-​duality in religious experience (Panikkar 1973). The Holy Spirit is the means of prayer; and therefore, strictly speaking, one cannot have an external relationship with the Spirit, for in that very instance, one has severed the very condition of prayer, or is unaware of what is occurring as the very condition of prayer. Panikkar is here following the ancient master of Christian prayer, Paul of Tarsus, who believed that the Spirit prays in us, rather than the community praying in the Spirit. Human life is in quest of a realization of what it already has been given. For Panikkar the goal is the way, and the way is the goal, unveiling for his readers the non-​duality of the Christian mystical experience. When Panikkar refers to the “experience of God” he is referring not to an experience that human beings have of God, implying a separation and a dualism, but the subjective genitive meaning of that phrase, or God’s own experience (Panikkar 2006). Panikkar here appeals to the Taittiriya Upanisad’s injunction to become the Knower, rather than knowing the Knower. This bold, Upanisadic claim is for Panikkar at the same time the essence of the ancient Christian doctrine of theosis, or divinization. Much ink has been spilled over how to articulate properly the redemptive work of Christ in its doctrinal formulations, but what Panikkar wishes to communicate is the new life that appears in all of its radiance when one loses oneself in Christ. God is simply Life—​specifically, the life of paschal joy. The experience of Jesus the Christ is the 330

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Trinitarian experience of being generated by the Father in the Spirit, in non-​dual unity. The self that is en Christoi transcends the ego-​self, and yet the Christ one encounters is immanent as compared to the objectified “Christ” that is projected outside of the self. Ultimately, the self that is discovered as one moves deeper into interiority is the christic self, which moves and has its being in the infinitely spacious field of the Trinitarian relations, free of the limitations of the ego-​self, and also free of predictability and control. The Council of Chalcedon articulated the distinction and unity of divine and human in Christ with four adverbs—​“without confusion and without change, without separation and without division.” As Jesus the Christ is in his very person the revelation of the advaitic mystery, Panikkar extends these adverbs to religious anthropology in order draw forth their experiential implications. Panikkar was not opposed or inimical to classical theology and its dogma, as liberal theology was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed he would cite freely papal teaching and the definitions of official doctrines in his works. Rather than being opposed to dogma and doctrine as such, he saw it as a discursive reference point for an inner experience and stressed that the proper end of dogma was not the conceptual formulation but the “thing itself,” or God. Panikkar rejected the project of christo-​logy, or a rational analysis of Christ, but rather shared a christo-​phany, or a meditative participation in the experience of Jesus’ own filiation (Panikkar 2004). It is apparent from Panikkar’s writings on christophany that his meditations are evocative of a place of intimacy in sharing Jesus’ experience of life, a dwelling-​in the christic mystery, to invoke the Johannine metaphor. Panikkar reiterates that the mysticism of the Christian tradition must begin with the mysticism of Jesus the Christ, for otherwise, Christians are forfeiting their dignity as partakers of the divine nature that is communicated primarily in the sacrificial act of the Eucharist. The inadequacy of much of Christian theology, Panikkar argues, is because it has externalized Jesus as an historical person or objectified him as a remote deity. Christ is the organic nexus that mediates the cosmotheandric experience. As a general rule, Panikkar tends to interpret particularity against the backdrop of the cosmic and universal. The outline provided above of his meditations on the mystical experience of religious pluralism, of Jesus as the Christ, and Hindu–​Christian dialogue specifically, is unabashedly Christian in terminology and language. Panikkar’s ekklesia was Christian, and his ministry was at the service of the Christian community; yet his use of Christian language is a vehicle for expressing the eternal mystery in time. Panikkar preferred the Mimamsaka concept of apauruseya, or the “authorlessness of the Vedas,” to an author-​based understanding of divine revelation for precisely this reason (Panikkar 2016a). Hinduism for Panikkar was the key to a proper understanding of Christian particularity, as well as to an authentic Catholicity, for in his understanding, the essence of Hinduism is ahistorical, mythic, and universal, complementary to the historicity of Christianity. Panikkar’s theological anthropology is Hindu in nature, and an intelligible schema of Panikkar’s hermeneutic of religious experience would trace inwards from Christianity to Hinduism as the mystery of the person. It is instructive that Panikkar’s The Vedic Experience was dedicated to “Modern Man” and offered as a gift fitting for the secular experience. The Hindu–​Christian dialogue is therefore revelatory of the meaning of existence itself with vast implications for a contemporary “secular” spirituality (Panikkar 1972). Hindu–​Christian spirituality is none other than “sacred secularity,” or a cosmic experience of the sacredness of all things. The Roman Catholic priesthood belongs to the cosmic priesthood of Melchizedek, the enigmatic Canaanite priest of the Hebrew Scriptures mentioned in Genesis and the Psalms, and the universal and cosmic dimension of priesthood evident in the religions of the world. So too, the consecrated monk in the Catholic tradition is a living witness to the wider anthropological invariant of monkhood, which Panikkar recognizes and affirms in Hinduism, among other religious traditions. In parallel with the distinction Panikkar makes between faith and belief, 331

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Panikkar distinguishes monkhood from monasticism, while affirming their relatedness. The former is an indispensable and vital archetype, while the latter is an institutionalized expression of that archetype in Hinduism and Christianity (Panikkar 1982). Monkhood is the aspiration for the fullness of life. The human person who lives monkhood is not concerned with production or any other barometer of utility, but only with the ongoing, collaborative creation of the self with the depth dimension of reality. Religious traditions are a privileged site for the actualization of monkhood, though Panikkar warns of the tendency, observable at different points in the history of religions, for the institution of monasticism to replace and supplant the existential priority of monkhood. The “monkhood of all humans” may represent a peculiarly Panikkarian and Catholic echo of Luther’s “priesthood of all believers,” and like Luther, Panikkar believes that much is at stake. Panikkar’s reflections here must be read in light of his wider canon on the social implications of advaita mysticism and the urgent character of its tone, aware as he was of the dire straits and duress that the world is under and its need of spiritual renewal. It is clear that for him the summons to discover the monastic archetype is not a luxury of “First-​World” spiritual tourism, but a necessity of survival and harmonious living in a global ethos. This is especially the case in the so-​called “developed” world, where the contemporary temptation to be aware only of the surface of time and existence produces a mode of being that is profoundly impoverished. This has grave consequences for all peoples of the world, given the proliferation of death-​dealing military weaponry and technology and the influence of the West globally. Panikkar cannot be blithely termed an apocalyptic or eschatologically oriented figure, and yet there is an element of anxiety in his ruminations on the necessity of the mystical experience for the contemporary person, inextricably tied to the West’s need to listen deeply to Hinduism. Panikkar’s prescription for this malady of the human condition, as it is in almost all areas of his soteriology, is mystical in this broad sense, rather than ideological. For Panikkar, the West’s encounter with the wisdom of India and Hinduism takes on a prophetic tone. The contemporary world, especially in the West, has constructed a system of living that is deeply at odds with the rhythms of being. Panikkar’s enduring contributions to Hindu–​Christian relations are notable and familiar to many in the dialogue. His mystical approach to interreligious relations, personal integrity in living these traditions and writing from an existential space of Hindu-​Christian spirituality, and above all his writings on Christ in a Hindu-​Christian context, represented above, may be a lodestar for the future of the dialogue. He has been lauded as a trailblazing and pioneer figure by many, although it appears that much of Indian Christian theology and Hindu interlocutors in the dialogue tend to admire Panikkar from a distance, ignore him, or move in different directions altogether. Part of the reason for this may be that Panikkar’s personal uniqueness, which was often the catalyst for his prominence in the field of Hindu–​Christian relations, also makes his legacy difficult to replicate for most practitioners and scholars who cannot claim for themselves, as Panikkar did, a so-called hypostatic union of Hindu and Christian ancestry. Furthermore, Panikkar’s tertium quid Hindu-​Christian hybridity results in scholars invested in Hindu–​Christian relations having to triangulate awkwardly between Hinduism, Christianity, and “Panikkarianism.” For example, the American Academy of Religion and Catholic Theological Society of America rarely feature papers about Panikkar within panels dedicated to Catholic/​ Christian theological inquiries, and Panikkarian sessions rarely engage Panikkar as being derivative of the actual traditions themselves, but rather as the founder of an intercultural spirituality and philosophy, oriented around his charisma. The Hindu–​Christian dialogue, arguably, may be best served in discerning aspects of his thought and spirituality and re-​appropriating them in the more traditional and normative contexts that have been estranged from Panikkar’s, and his followers, profound but idiosyncratic instincts. Panikkar at one and the same time offered 332

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resources for both Christian and Hindu renewal, although often without respect for the boundaries and precedents within those traditions that would render such innovations intelligible. Christian and Hindu scholars of Panikkar and the Hindu–​Christian dialogue will discern these contributions according to their reading of his vast works and their tradition. Panikkar’s work may need to be re-​traditioned into the Hindu and Christian contexts, before its interreligious implications are fully appreciated. As Panikkar was fond of citing from gospel traditions, “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (John 12:24).

Bibliography Panikkar, R. 1964. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd. —​—​—​. 1972. Worship and Secular Man. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 1973. The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon, Person, Mystery. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 1981. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism: Towards an Ecumenical Christophany. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 1982. Blessed Simplicity: The Monk as Universal Archetype. New York: Seabury. —​—​—​. 1985. “The Message of Yesterday’s India to Today’s World.” In Thundy, Z.P., Pathil, K., Podgorski, F.R. (eds.). Religions in Dialogue: East and West Meet. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. —​—​—​. 1993. The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. —​—​—​. 1999. The Intrareligious Dialogue: Revised and Expanded. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist. —​—​—​. 2004. Christophany: The Fullness of Man. diLascia, A. (trans.). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 2006. The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg. —​—​—​. 2015. Christianity: The Christian Tradition (1961–​1967). Carrara, M. (ed.).Vol. III. Part I. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 2016a. Hinduism: The Dharma of India. Carrara, M. (ed.).Vol. IV. Part II. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 2016b, 1977. The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari: An Anthology of the Vedas for Contemporary Man and Modern Celebration. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Rahner, Karl. 2001. The Trinity. London: Continuum. Williams, Rowan. 1990. “Trinity and Pluralism.” In D’Costa, G. (ed.). The Myth of Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

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28 ABHISHIKTANANDA Catherine Cornille

Among the pioneers of Hindu–​Christian dialogue, few have had as wide and lasting an impact as the French Benedictine monk Henri Le Saux, who came to be known in India as Swami Abhishiktananda. He was a major source of inspiration for other giants such as Raimon Panikkar, Sara Grant, Murray Rogers, James Stuart, and Bettina Bäumer, and his books continue to be translated, republished, and devoured. Hardly an issue of the journal of intermonastic dialogue, Dilitato Corde, passes without a mention of him in an article or book review.  The October 2018 issue had a review by Bettina Bäumer of the publication of the collected poems of Le Saux (Abhishiktananda 2018), and the November issue mentions the publication of letters to his sister (LeSaux 2018). Fabrice Blée has produced a moving and inspiring documentary about the life and experience of Le Saux, Dawn of the Abyss: The Spiritual Birth of Swamiji, and numerous books and doctoral dissertations have focused on various aspects of his life and thought. There is a center for interreligious dialogue in Delhi named after Abhishiktananda, which houses his archives and seeks to promote his vision. The fascination with this figure may be explained in various ways: not only was he one of the first Christians fully to immerse himself in Hindu spirituality, but few, both then and now, have gone as far into another tradition while remaining grounded in their own religious tradition and have struggled as mightily to reconcile the two traditions. While he published several books that reflect his attempt to foster an integration between Christian theology and Hindu thought, it is his journal that has left the most revealing account of his desperate attempts to come to terms with his Christian and Hindu identities, and that contains, as Shirley du Boulay puts it, “some of the most remarkable pieces of spiritual autobiography ever written” (du Boulay 2006, p. 32).

Life Henri Le Saux was born in 1910 in the village of Saint-​Briac in Brittany, France. He entered the major seminary in Rennes at the age of 15, and the Benedictine Abbey of Sainte Anne at Kergonan at the age of 19. He received solemn vows and ordination as priest in 1935. During his years in the monastery, he worked as librarian, as teacher of Patristics, and eventually as novice master.The library afforded him the opportunity to read not only the Desert Fathers and Christian mystical texts, but also sacred texts and mystical writers from other religious traditions. He had access to general studies of Hinduism, translations of Hindu texts (fragments of the 334

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Mahabharata, The Bhagavata Purana, the Gita Govinda), as well as articles on various aspects of Hindu religious life and practice, published in the journal Xaveriana (Hackbarth-​Johnson 2003, pp. 645–​46). His desire to go to India arose already in 1934, prior to his final vows, driven by an intense sense of spiritual longing and the example of his uncle, Henri Sonnefraüd, who himself was a missionary in China. In 1948, he was finally allowed to travel to India, following correspondence with the bishop of Tiruchirapalli and with the French Father Jules Monchanin, who had arrived in India in 1939 hoping to establish a form of Christianity which would resonate with Indian culture and spirituality. Le Saux was drawn to the eremitical life and believed that India would allow for a renewal of monastic life according to the example of the Desert Fathers. Together, Monchanin and Le Saux founded Saccidananda ashram on the banks of the Kaveri river in Tannirpali, Tamil Nadu. Life in the ashram was based on the Benedictine rule but infused with Hindu spiritual practices. Monchanin and Le Saux dressed as Hindu monks or sannyāsis and adopted Indian religious names. Le Saux’s name, Abhishikteshvarananda (he whose joy is the anointment of the Lord) soon became Abhishiktananda and remained with him for the rest of his life. In 1949, Abhishiktananda traveled to the sacred mountain Arunachala to meet one of the most famous gurus of the twentieth century, Ramana Maharshi. This meeting had a profound impact on him and led to an experience of awakening which he describes in the following terms: Before my mind could even grasp or express it, the intimate aura of this Sage had been perceived by something in the depth of my Self. Unknown harmonies awakened in my heart…it was the very soul of India which penetrated into the depth of my own soul and entered into a mysterious communion with her. It was a call which shattered everything, which dissolved everything, which opened wide an abyss. (Abhishiktananda 1978, p. 27) While Ramana Maharshi died shortly after this encounter, Abhishiktananda continued to be drawn to the mountain Arunachala, and he eventually became the disciple of other Hindu gurus such Harilal, Swami Gnanananda, and Dr. Mehta. With the death of Monchanin in 1957, the dream of establishing a Hindu–​Christian ashram or monastic foundation dissolved, and Abhishiktananda traveled to the North of India, where he spent his time between his hermitage in Gyansu in the Himalayas and visiting friends in Varanasi and Delhi. He faithfully kept a journal, in which he expressed his experiences as well as his struggles moving back and forth between Hindu and Christian spiritual worlds and identities. He also wrote more systematic books and essays, some of which were published only after his death. Though Abhishiktananda had many friends and admirers, he only had one true disciple, Marc Chaduc. The young Frenchman joined him in India in 1971 and in 1973 was initiated by Abhishiktananda and Swami Chidananda of the Divine Life Society into the order of sannyāsa, receiving the name Ajatananda. In that same year, Abhishiktananda had a series of intense spiritual experiences, culminating in a heart attack, which he regarded as the culmination of his spiritual life and a final synthesis of his Hindu and Christian experiences. He passed away on December 7, 1973. In his forward to The Further Shore, Ajatananda states that “nothing that Swamiji wrote had not been lived by him, realized in himself. This is the beauty of his written work, which was the fruit of his silence” (Abhishiktananda 1975, p. xii). And in his last letter to Abhishiktananda, Raimon Panikkar writes that “the internal contradictions and rending conflicts (déchirements you called them) that beset you for decades helped us to see and to discern far more than any cheap synthesis or stubborn refusal could possibly have done…Our gratitude 335

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is for your life, more than anything else” (Panikkar 1982, p. 430; for more on Panikkar, see the preceding chapter by Ranstrom).

Thought Though the importance of Abhishiktananda is often said to lie mainly in the example of his life, his theological insights and experiments have also been a source of inspiration for others who have explored the possibilities and limits of advanced engagement between Christian faith and Hindu thought. Abhishiktananda’s interest in Hinduism focused almost exclusively on the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. His Hindu textual references were predominantly to the Upanishads, with occasional mention of the Bhagavad Gita. He wrote primarily for a Christian audience, and his overarching goal was to integrate the experience of non-​duality within Christianity, believing that “the pleroma of Christ will never be the fullness that it is intended to be, either in the individual believer or in the church at large, so long as that experience has not been integrated by Christianity” (Abhishiktananda 1974, p. 70). Abhishiktananda thus moved back and forth between Hindu and Christian religious frameworks, at times stretching Hindu categories to fit Christian meanings and at times interpreting Christian categories in Hindu terms. At the heart of Abhishiktananda’s theological endeavor was the attempt to render the Christian understanding of the Trinity in terms of the Advaita category of saccidānanda (Being–​ Consciousness–​Bliss). He believed that the experience of saccidānanda was “one of the loftiest peaks of spirituality to which man can aspire” (Ibid., p. 174), and that it opened up the mystery of the three divine persons: “in sat, the father, the absolute Beginning and Source of being; in cit, the Son, the divine Word, the Father’s Self-​knowledge; in ānanda, the Spirit of love, Fullness and Bliss without end” (Ibid., p. 178). He sought not so much to develop abstract and speculative theological views of the trinity through Hindu categories, but rather to express the Christian experience of God in terms that might light up new dimensions of that experience. The category of saccidānanda was primarily a way to “penetrate the mystery of the Spirit” or the personal experience of the divine reality.“At the very heart of Being,”Abhishiktananda states, “the Christian discovers the Spirit as the ultimate inwardness of God and his perfect consummation, for the spirit is infinite Fullness, total Peace and supreme Bliss” (Ibid., p. 184). He believed that the understanding of God as sat, or Being, would purify the traditional understanding of God as person.While Christians often refer to God as “you” and as other than the self, as Being, or “one without a second,” he insisted that God cannot be understood as “other” since “if a man could be ‘other’ to God, in the same sense that men are ‘other’ with regard to their fellows, then God would not be God.” At the same time, “God’s otherness from man is such that it surpasses and transcends every kind of otherness found between creatures” (Ibid., p. 86). In identifying cit with the Son, Abhishiktananda focused on the divine sonship of every believer who awakens to the presence of the Father within their soul. The Christian experience of advaita involves being “plunged by the Spirit—​deep within this experience of sonship, the very experience of the only Son, the eternal and unique Word” (Ibid., p. 111). The experience of sonship is here thus not only reserved for the historical Jesus but is a dimension of spiritual awakening that is available to all. It is not entirely clear whether Abhishiktananda understood the unity and the uniqueness of this experience as a participation in the unique experience of the Son, or rather as reflecting the unity of the experience which dissolves all differences between self and other. He identified the fruit of this experience of sonship and oneness with the Father as absolute bliss (ānanda) which for him represented an experience of the Spirit.

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Abhishiktananda went back and forth between Christian and Hindu conceptions of the Spirit. Approaching the Spirit from a Christian perspective as an external power and reality, he states that “the mission of the Spirit is to release the fountain of love which is latent in every human heart, to bring about that communion which manifests and pours forth on all the love of the father and the grace of the Lord (2 Cor. 13:13)” (Ibid., p. 99). The Spirit manifests itself in the form of agape, love, and “only if I share with others the gift of the Spirit in agape and koinonia is it possible for me to receive it myself ” (Ibid., p.  188). On the other hand, Abhishiktananda at times also leaned toward identifying the Spirit simply with self-​realization, which manifests itself in inner tranquility and peace, rather than communion and joy: When indeed pure self-​awareness has been sufficiently realized, it is as if the whole being were flooded with an inexpressible sense of completion, peace, joy and fullness, the ānanda of Hindu tradition. Every desire and every need find their satisfaction—​ indeed they are both fulfilled and transcended. At that point a man forgets his existential anguish, his terror of not-​being, the source of all his anxiety and fears. All inner disharmony is quieted in the transcendent unity of being and of being aware of being. (Ibid., p. 170) While attempting to hold on to Christian revelation and doctrine, the encounter with Hinduism and in particular with the experience of non-​duality also shook Abhishiktananda’s faith and raised doubts in him about its truth claims. With characteristic honesty, he expressed those questions and thoughts directly: Within this blinding intuition of Being, how can the Christian be sure that what he believes he has discovered about himself and the world in God through the biblical revelation of the Trinity is true? It seems rather that all this is merely a last-​minute attempt to salvage what he cannot bear to abandon when he comes to make the final plunge into the abyss that attracts him so powerfully. (Ibid., pp. 195–​96) These doubts may be regarded as a natural reaction to the fact of being exposed to a new world of thought and experience and thus coming to realize the particularity of one’s traditional beliefs.They may also be seen from the perspective of having attained an experience that transcends all form and expression. They are particularly poignant when coming from a person who has spent his entire life attempting to hold on to his Christian faith and reconcile it with Hindu teachings and experiences. While Abhishiktananda’s understanding of the Trinity tended toward the internalization of the reality of the Son, he also continued to reflect on the meaning of Jesus Christ and his uniqueness. Early on in his time in India, he considered Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of all other religions, and as having attained a unique level of intimacy with the Father superior to that of any Hindu gurus or sages. In a journal entry of 1954, he states that “Beyond the sages of advaita, Jesus has penetrated beyond his ‘I’ to the mystery of the I  of the Father, to the origin of his own I” (Le Saux 1986, p. 127). As such, Jesus is also the norm against which the teachings and practices of other religions are to be measured: “As Christians we believe that the revelation of God in Jesus is the plenitude of all revelations, and the rod with which are judged and measured all awareness of God and of the divine mystery” (Abhishiktananda 1982, p. 273).While acknowledging the presence of truth in Hinduism and in other religions, he thus

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emphasized that this truth can only be discerned and affirmed through the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. As time went on, however, he gradually moved away from this inclusivist understanding of Jesus Christ and Christianity toward a more personal, relational, and symbolic understanding of the uniqueness of Jesus (Cornille 1991, pp. 94–​118). He came to see the uniqueness of Jesus in terms of the uniqueness of every person in the eyes of God (Abhishiktananda 1982, pp. 299, 303), or in terms of the uniqueness of every guru in the eyes of their disciple: The only thing important: that Christ be Everything for me. That there be nothing held back in me with regard to him. That every human being be unique, my everything to whom I give myself wholly. In this I shall have the experience of the Unique. (Le Saux 1986, p. 455) The uniqueness of the guru is here thus understood in functional terms as bringing about a complete surrender of the disciple. In other journal entries, he approaches the uniqueness of Christ as the symbolic expression of the unity and unicity of the absolute. This circumvents the question of the historical uniqueness of Jesus Christ, since as truly as the unicity of God, the unicity of the symbol of Christ is of a transcendental order and cannot be compared or opposed to any other symbol, equally transcendent in so far as it also attempts to express the totality of Being. (Abhishiktananda 1982, p. 202) It was Abhishiktananda’s encounter with Ramana Maharshi that led him to rethink the traditional Christian understanding of the uniqueness of Christ and that led him to distinguish the historical Jesus from the transcendent reality of Christ: The Christ whom I have first known and loved in his historical life in Jesus and later in his epiphany in the Church, has appeared to me at the end of time (of my time) in Bhagavan Sri Ramana. (Le Saux 1986 [1955], p. 164) Why would I oppose Christ and my guru? Isn’t my guru the very form through which Christ becomes present to my senses, my sight, my hearing, my prostrating, so as to allow me to attain to him in the depth of my soul, where he is and who he is in reality. The Christ is more really close to me in my guru than in the memory which I may have of his apparition on earth. (Le Saux 1986 [1956], p. 177) Abhishiktananda even came to regard the fixation on the historical Jesus as idolatry, as the objectification of the mystery of Christ which is in essence a transcendent and internal reality. As he moved deeper into the framework of Advaita Vedanta, he thus lost any basis for claiming the ontological uniqueness and superiority of Jesus Christ. This is where the difficulty of reconciling Christian orthodoxy with the tradition of Advaita Vedanta manifests itself most clearly, and where Abhishiktananda experienced the greatest theological discomfort. While he was never able to bring about a synthesis and reconciliation on the level of theological reflection, Abhishiktananda felt entirely comfortable and justified integrating elements of Hindu spiritual discipline in Christian religious practice. In his book Prayer (originally Eveil 338

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a Dieu—​Eveil a Soi), he offers an understanding of Christian prayer, enriched and deepened through his engagement with Hinduism. Rather than as a set of formulas or a prescribed and regulated practice, he understood prayer as realizing “God’s presence in the depth of our being, in the depth of every being, and at the same time beyond all beings, beyond all that is within and all that is without” (Abhishiktananda 1989, p. 5). He sought to deepen the life of prayer and to give contemplation “once more its place of primacy in the Church, not merely by the religious Orders and by those who are dedicated to the acosmic life, but in the heart of everyone who seeks to make progress in the ways of the Spirit (Abhishiktananda 1974, p. 71). He engaged Hindu practices in various ways, at times as a means to attain to a level of silence, and at other times as catalyst to rediscover ancient Christian practices. He approached yoga, for example, as a means to prepare the soul to be “at full disposal of the Spirit” (Abhishiktananda 1975, p.  118). Rejecting the notion of “Christian yoga,” as “misuse of language” he argued that “genuine yoga aims at stopping the formation of concepts and immobilizing the mental flux, so that every image or thought may disappear, whether Hindu, Buddhist or Christian” (Abhishiktananda 1989, p. 72). Abhishiktananda encouraged the practice of yoga as a means for attaining inner quiet: Christian spirituality should at least take one point from yoga—​its seeking by one means or another to establish that silence of mind and thought which is the essential prerequisite for a full inner awakening. Only such silence in fact allows the Holy Spirit to act freely in the soul. (Ibid., p. 76) The use of mantras in Hindu practice led Abhishiktananda to a recovery of the ancient Christian Jesus prayer, so prominent in the Christian Hesychast tradition:  “Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Though the Christian mantra may seem more self-​deprecating than Hindu mantras, he suggests that “to pray for forgiveness unites us with the deepest level of the divine mystery” (Ibid., p. 97), and that it is ultimately “aimed at fixing the mind on the Lord and making an uninterrupted offering of love and adoration” (Ibid., p. 98). Abhishiktananda thus believed that Hindu practices may deepen and enrich the Christian life of prayer without compromising its basic meaning or goal. Abhishiktananda’s engagement with Advaita Vedanta inevitably led him to adopt a certain critical distance from all institutional forms, including the Church. He never renounced his monastic vows or his allegiance to the Church, and he encouraged his disciple Marc Chaduc not to change religious affiliation because “it is under the sign of Jesus Christ that we have awakened to Brahman (God) even if it needed the Veda to make us fully aware of Him” (Stuart 1995 [1972], p. 273). He also continued to celebrate mass until the end of his life, although it became less frequent toward the end. The advaita approach to all religious expression in doctrines, rituals, and institutions as mere “names and forms” (nāmarūpa) inevitably generates a certain detachment from the Church. Already in 1956, Abhishiktananda realized that advaita “blows up the institutional Church of the Vatican” (Le Saux 1986, p. 183). Toward the end of his life, he came to reproach the Church for not cultivating the advaitic experience, and for keeping believers “at the level of the nāmarūpa [name and form]” (Le Saux 1986 [1972], p. 419). He also occasionally questioned the efficacy of the sacraments, arguing that “salvation does not come from the outside, through sacraments, but from the inside” (Ibid., p. 428). With Raimon Panikkar, he came to emphasize the provisional nature of the Church as being “only for the not-​risen ones, for those who do not have the experience of the asmi, I am” (Le Saux 1986 [1966], p. 347). 339

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Because of his deep identification with both Christianity and Hinduism, Abhishiktananda has often come to be regarded as a model and pioneer of multiple religious belonging or religious hybridity. Like many advocates of multiple religious belonging, he grounded its possibility in a faith in the unity of mystical experiences. However, Abhishiktananda often experienced this sense of divided loyalty as a painful struggle, as poignantly reflected in a letter to Raimon Panikkar: You cannot be torn apart in the depth of your soul, as we are by this double summons (from advaitin India on one side and from Revelation on the other) and by this double opposition (from India and the church, in their ritualism, their formalism, and their intellectualism) without being lacerated even physically. (Stuart 1995 [1966], p. 182) While he seems to have come to a sense of peace and personal reconciliation with his dual identification at the very end of his life, this does represent a reminder of the difficulties or challenges of multiple belonging, at least on the conceptual, theological, and institutional level.

Importance Abhishiktananda may be regarded as one of the spiritual giants of the twentieth century. Like Thomas Merton, his restless spiritual thirst led him to fearlessly explore new spiritual horizons and to experiment with teachings and practices that could deepen monastic life and Christian spiritual practice more generally. In his Asian Journal, Merton in fact states that if he were to be a hermit in India, it would have to be “something like what Dom Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) is doing” (Merton 1968, p. 149). Though his journey was highly personal, he sought to share his experiences and insights through his writings. Abhishiktananda immersed himself more deeply into the Hindu tradition than any Christian before him, and maybe even since, and his writings are a very direct, authentic, and raw reflection of the possibilities and difficulties of journeying into the depths of another religion. As a wandering ascetic, he did not have the luxury or the inclination to develop his theological insights in a systematic way. His ideas are at times difficult to nail down. They may be regarded as thought experiments, rather than as carefully considered and systematically developed theological positions. This, however, does not render them any less valuable or inspiring. They raise important questions about the implications of interpreting Christianity through the framework of Advaita Vedanta and about the possibility and limits of multiple religious belonging or religious hybridity. One of the most prominent theologians whose work was profoundly influenced by Abhishiktananda was Raimon Panikkar. They became very close friends in the late 1950s, and it is thus often difficult to determine who first developed certain ideas and categories and who borrowed from whom. Erik Ranstrom (author of the previous chapter in this volume) argues that while Panikkar was originally suspicious of advaita, his “later prominent use of advaita in relation to the Trinity and mysticism was clearly shaped by his deepening solidarity with Abhishiktananda” (Ranstrom 2014, p. 164). The distinction between the historical Jesus and the cosmic Christ, which became one of the pillars of Panikkar’s theology, may also have been inspired by Abhishiktananda’s early attempts to reconcile his commitment to Jesus Christ and to Ramana Maharshi by viewing the latter as a manifestation of Christ. Similarly, the term “Christophany,” which becomes the title of one of Panikkar’s books (2004), appears in Abhishiktananda’s writings in the 1960s. To be sure, Panikkar worked out his theological insights more systematically and in much greater scholarly detail. But it is probably fair to say 340

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that Panikkar may have not developed some of his more original and daring theological ideas without having encountered Abhishiktananda. Though Abhishiktananda was and is an important source of inspiration for scholars engaged in the dialogue with Hinduism, his journey also sheds light on the challenges of reconciling different religious and hermeneutical frameworks. Martin Ganeri judges that, though Abhishiktananda attempted to maintain a balance between Christian orthodox Trinitarian teachings and Advaita Vedanta, [U]‌nfortunately, later in life, Le Saux failed to maintain the balance needed in such encounter. Instead, he allowed his Christian faith in the Trinity to be sublimated by the advaitic experience of the unity of all in Brahman. For Le Saux, Christian faith about the incarnation of Christ had to be transformed into advaitic categories, so that Christ is no longer the unique union of God and Man, but an exemplar of the relationship that all human beings have with Brahman. (Ganeri 2011, p. 132) The understanding of Jesus Christ through the framework of advaita indeed inevitably dissolves the traditional Christian conception of the uniqueness of Christ. It is Abhishiktananda’s struggle with this question, rather than any final solution, that remains theologically instructive for Hindu–​Christian comparative theology. More broadly, Abhishiktananda’s relevance for Hindu–​Christian dialogue lies in his intent to deepen Christian spirituality through the integration of Hindu spiritual practices. Long before yoga and meditation became fashionable in the West, he experimented with those practices. His book on prayer has become a spiritual classic because he was able to render them accessible to Christian readers in search of a deeper prayer life. Beyond the dialogue with Hinduism, Abhishiktananda’s life and teachings have become a source of inspiration for individuals who identify with more than one religious tradition, or with no particular religion. The independence and courage of his spiritual journey may appeal to those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” and who do not feel confined to the doctrinal and institutional strictures of any particular religion. Though Abhishiktananda remained attached to his Christian identity, he also emphasized the provisional nature of religious traditions and institutions, and the need to let go of such attachments in order to attain the ultimate reality. His journey may thus be regarded as a legitimation for pursuing a purely personal spiritual path, drawing freely from the teachings and practices of different religions. However, Abhishiktananda’s comments on the ultimate experience as transcending names and forms arose at the end of his journey in and through those forms and should not be construed as a rejection of their value and importance on the spiritual path. Though tormented by doubt and uncertainty about his religious views, and fearful that his religious life would be inconsequential, Abhishiktananda continues to speak to spiritual seekers across and beyond religious traditions. This appeal derives largely from the authenticity of his spiritual journey and from the intensity of his spiritual desire, which continues to speak to a mystical longing across space and time.

Bibliography Abhishiktananda. 1974. Saccidananda London: ISPCK. —​—​—​. 1975. The Further Shore: Three Essays by Abhishiktananda. London: ISPCK. —​—​—​. 1978. Souvenirs d’Arunachala. Paris: Epi.

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Catherine Cornille —​—​—​. 1982. Interiorité et revelation: Essais théologiques. Sisteron: Présence. —​—​—​. 1989. Prayer. (Original French title: Eveil a soi –​Eveil a Dieu.) Delhi: ISPCK. —​—​—​. 2018. In the Bosom of the Father: The Collected Poems of a Benedictine Mystic. Riyeff, J. (trans. and ed.). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Boulay, S.d. (ed.). 2006. Swami Abhishiktananda: Essential Writings. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Cornille, C. 1991. The Guru in Indian Catholicism:  Ambiguity or Opportunity of Inculturation? Leuven: Peeters Press. Ganeri, M. 2011. “Catholicism and Hinduism.” In D’Costa, G. (ed.). The Catholic Church and the World Religions. London: T&T Clark. Hackbarth-​Johnson, C. 2003. Interreligiöse Existenz:  Spirituelle Erfahrung und Identität bei Henri Le Saux (O.S.B.)/​Swami Abhishiktānanda (1910–​1973). Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publ. Le Saux, H. 1986. La montee au fond du Coeur: Le journal intime du moine chretien-​sannyasi Hindou 1948–​1973. Paris: O.E.I.L. —​—​—​. 2018. Vers l’experience intérieure: lettres à sa soeur, Thérèse Le Saux (1952–​1973). Dutruc, A. (ed.). Paris: Le Procure. Merton, T. 1968. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: A New Directions Book. Panikkar, R. 1982. “Letter to Abhishiktananda:  On Eastern-​Western Monasticism.” Studies in Formative Spirituality 3(3): 429–​51. Ranstrom, E. 2014.“The Unknown Body of Christ: Towards a Retrieval of the Early Panikkar’s Christology of Religions.” Doctoral dissertation, Boston College. Stuart, J. 1995. Swami Abhishiktananda: His Life Told Through His Letters. Delhi: ISPCK.

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Comparative theologies

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29 A THEOLOGY OF HINDU–​ CHRISTIAN RELATIONS Michelle Voss Roberts

Truth is one.The wise call it by many names. –​ Rg  Veda The Word became flesh and lived among us. –​Gospel of John The galleries and façade of St. Mary’s Orthodox Syrian Church in Kottayam, Kerala, tell stories. Each pillar and pediment refers to Hindu and Christian religious narratives. In this context, the image of the fish recalls the saving act of Vishnu’s Matsya avatar as well as the parallel story of Noah and every species of animal surviving the world. The other avatars—​Parashurama the just, Krishna the beloved, Buddha the compassionate, Narasimha the mystery of the both-​and and the neither-​nor—​signal divine attributes in the flesh. Each embodies the divine will and power to save. Emblazoned on the exterior of the church building, the pictures and carvings present the narratives to the senses yet again—​memories made in plaster, signals of God set in stone. They indicate a divinity both transcendent and embodied, beyond full knowing and yet palpable. First built in 1579, St. Mary’s Church, also known as Kottayam Cheriyapally (small church), represents an earlier strand of Indian Christianity that explored the synergies between Hindu and Christian faith. Its enduring façade teaches the central Orthodox Christian emphases on the incarnation, the intercession of the saints, and the capacity of matter to mediate salvation. As an artifact of one particular Christian creed and community, the architecture of this “small church” cannot represent every Hindu–​Christian encounter or the many degrees of openness or resistance to dialogue therein. Little textual evidence remains from the encounters between the two traditions in India before 1500. Many of the Syriac writings from the ancient St. Thomas Christian community were destroyed by an edict of the Synod of Diamper in 1599, signaling a period of a more oppositional approach than what had come before. Through the centuries, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant theologians have debated Christian continuity with, and the adequacy of, Hindu apprehensions of divine revelation. Though this building’s incorporation of Hindu narratives and symbols within a Christian self-​understanding is not representative of all Christian approaches, it does point to some of the prominent theological possibilities that emerge in Hindu–​Christian encounter, which have manifested over time in distinct thematic relationships between the traditions. I  suggest that these possibilities are created by similar dialectics—​between the apophatic and kataphatic, or 345

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between the universal and particular, for example—​as well as certain common narrative sensibilities, and a shared sense of the divine presence in the world.

The in/​adequacy of speech The reader will observe that many of this Handbook’s authors opine that the “mystical” strands of Christianity and Hinduism are most conducive to agreement, while doctrines and institutions erect barriers to harmony between communities. This commonplace idea, which often appears in contemporary interfaith dialogue, has theological roots in both traditions. To what extent does human speech (phasis) apply to God? Christian theologians acknowledge an interplay between attempts to speak rightly about God (kataphatic theology) and the inadequacy of words to describe the Ultimate (apophatic theology). Kataphatic theology is indispensable: scriptures and theological treatises are filled with words. People of faith affirm that their God is like this or that, has certain attributes, and does certain things. The discipline of theology is born from their efforts to understand the one in which they put their faith. Some words apply more appropriately than others to the divine reality; other statements are unworthy of the divine. At the same time, Christians also acknowledge God’s transcendence of all human categories. Apophatic, or negative, theology teaches that while God accommodates human knowing through modes of revelation suited to our capacities, such as words, none properly describe or contain the divine reality. The language of worship often expresses awe in the face of holy mystery, who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim 6:16, NRSV). Extending this language of praise (which, it must be noted, is still human language), theologians sometimes formalize divine transcendence of categories by ascribing to God attributes that are simply the negation of creaturely qualities. For example, creatures experience change, but God is immutable. Similarly, the theological concepts of omnipotence and omniscience signify God’s lack of the kinds of limits to power and knowledge that human beings experience. Various contemplative modes of theology reinforce the apophatic dimension. For instance, a tradition rooted in the fifth-​or sixth-​century Mystical Theology of Pseudo-​Dionysius emphasizes an intellectual ascent beyond human categories into a mode of “unknowing.” Other contemplative figures in the medieval and early modern period expand Pseudo-​Dionysius’s metaphor of divine eros (overflowing love) into an affective strand of mysticism, which approaches divine transcendence through experiences of rapture or ecstasy. While both the intellectual and affective strands have much to say in the kataphatic realm, their prayer ascends beyond it and relativizes their speech about God. As Anantanand Rambachan discusses in this volume, the Upanisads also emphasize the inadequacy of language for the ultimate reality, describing Brahman as “That from which all words return” (Taittiriya Upanisad 2.9.1).They, too, make ample use of negative qualities: “That which is wordless, untouched, formless, without taste, eternal, without scent, without beginning, without end, undecaying and greater than the great” (Katha Upanisad 1.3.15). Their narratives often feature teachers who teach the nature of Brahman through the method of neti, neti—​“not this, not this.” The Upanisads teach that liberating knowledge comes not through intellectual assent to such teachings, but through experiential realization of these teachings in meditation. Yoga and contemplation can prepare the practitioner for the dawning of liberating insight. Monastic practitioners from the two communities have, therefore, been leaders in apophatic theological encounter between the Hindu and Christian traditions: “The monk…relates such contemplative experience not by actions or teachings but by dwelling in the fields of the Absolute which 346

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in their absolute negation of reason and understanding provide the means for the encounter” (Aguilar 2016, p. 154). Here, the emphasis on experience relativizes doctrinal differences. The apophatic and kataphatic modalities apply, as well, to theologies of the human being. If humans are created “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26), then some part of the divine mystery dwells in them. Similarly, the non-​dual (advaita) or qualified non-​dual (vishishta-​ advaita) relationship that many Hindu theologians affirm between the individual self (atman) and the Ultimate (Brahman) points to a dimension of anthropological ineffability. Humans cannot grasp in language the deepest reality of who we are but can apprehend it through the experience of silent meditation. “Mysticism,” writes Raimon Panikkar, “should not be seen as a special province of the few but rather as one essential dimension of humankind” (Panikkar 2014, p. 114; for more on Panikkar, see Ranstrom’s chapter in this volume). Kataphatic theology is the realm of particular names and forms. Apologetic and missionary exchanges rely on it to distinguish crucial differences between Hindu and Christian traditions. However, kataphatic theology is also the space for Hindus and Christians to choose and refine their theological language in the company of one another, exploring how far doctrinal language can stretch, attempting understanding, searching for equivalencies and translations, and finding the boundaries of affirmation. Below, I will suggest theological reasons why exercises in kataphatic reasoning remain important in Hindu–​Christian encounters, even as the great thinkers of recent generations have de-​emphasized it. The apophatic strand of theology, including its experiential dimensions, has provided fertile ground for theologies of Hindu–​Christian encounter. If—​as both traditions affirm—​the ultimate reality is beyond human grasp, and if all of our words ultimately fail, then there is a place of silence, beyond doctrines, where the traditions meet. And if—​moving toward our next topic—​a somewhat smaller subset of these traditions affirm that the salvific experiences of contemplation that bring us beyond ourselves into union with God are phenomenologically similar, then perhaps both Hindus and Christians end up in the same place (Griffiths 1990).

One and many This unitive thrust of the apophatic impulse, explored particularly in the Christian ashram movement and by certain Hindu yogis, propels the theology of Hindu–​Christian encounter toward another dialectic: that between the one and the many. The question of the relation of the one and the many is central to both traditions. For trinitarian Christians, the mystery of the three-​in-​one God provides fertile ground for theological debates about divine activity, the two natures of Christ, and the ontological relation of God to the created world. Similar questions arise in Hindu traditions, which debate the incomprehensible mystery of distinction-​in-​non-​distinction (acintyabhedabheda) or the extent to which the Absolute’s relation to the world is a-​dvaita (“not two,” but also not necessarily “one”). The theological polarity between the one and the many, combined with the recognition of the importance of both apophatic and kataphatic modes of discourse in each tradition, creates the conditions for the ongoing theological encounter between Hindus and Christians. If the divine mystery contains both unity and multiplicity, then there are theological reasons to affirm that encounter with the multiplicity of the world’s religions is religiously fruitful. In this vein, Abhishiktananda, the founder of the Shantivanam Ashram, espoused a fulfillment theology in which Christianity grows to fullness through encounter with other traditions. He also embodied these possibilities through meditation on the Upanisads and contemplative experience of non-​duality as a Christian jnani (Abhishiktananda 1974; also see Cornille’s chapter in this volume). As Rajkumar explores in his essay in this volume, however, other Christians 347

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construe the relation between the particular religions and God’s universal will to save differently, and Hindu thinkers similarly rank or level the field of religious difference through particular configurations of the one and the many. Within the spaces opened by appreciation for the manyness of religious expression, numerous theological discussions have flourished. The very question of the relation of the one and the many has generated debates on the relation of the world to the Ultimate. Is non-​ dualism, qualified non-​dualism, or dualism (in the sense of strong creator–​creation distinction) the most adequate understanding, and how do terms such as pantheism or panentheism relate to these options (Voss Roberts 2010a)? How do these traditions illuminate categories such as divine transcendence and immanence (Carman 1994; Thatamanil 2006)? Is ultimate reality best construed as fullness or as a void (Bäumer and Dupuche 2005)? How do experiential convergences in advaitic meditation comport with a Trinitarian structure of reality (Panikkar 1973 and 2010)? Furthermore, how optimistic can human beings be about the prospect of overcoming their experiences of estrangement from the divine (Thatamanil 2006)? Scriptural and historical sources from a variety of Hindu and Christian perspectives have informed such encounters. What criteria do participants use to discern the relative merits of each tradition’s proposals? Each participant is informed by some combination of scriptural or ritual norms, the authority of wise teachers, and experience. Christian theologians frequently turn to ethics as the testing ground for truth claims. Rudolph Otto’s early study comparing Sankara and Meister Eckhart is a good example. Though both give language to union with God, Otto identifies Sankara with the quest for inward union and Eckhart with an outward vision of totality. This distinction leads him to argue that Eckhart’s Christian treatment of the external world rightly spurs attention to social and ethical considerations (Otto 1962 [1932]). More recently, theologians have expressed similar worries that a focus on the unity of reality and the relative unimportance of the external world can lead to neglect of ecological concerns (cf. Scheid’s survey in this volume). Rambachan’s interventions in Advaita Vedanta interpretation offer a corrective to Christians who might be too quick to mischaracterize Sankara’s school of thought as world-​ negating (Rambachan 2006 and 2015; also his chapter in this volume). The one and the many can be related in many ways.

Narrative and presence If the one–​many dialectic provides potential theological rationales for including the Hindu material depicted on the surfaces of St. Mary’s Church in Kottayam, it cannot account for the specific content of their images. For that, we must turn to an additional dynamic: the fact that, among other means, both traditions express their understanding of divine presence through narrative. Hindus and Christians affirm the divine presence in the world. Elsewhere in this volume, Daniel Scheid has outlined Hindu and Christian theological frameworks for affirming the “immanent presence of the divine” that persists and is evidence of the divine creator. The beauty and order of creation (dharma, natural law) proclaim something of the nature of the divine, and every created being bears an intimate relationship to its source, whether through a notion of participation or of non-​dual identity. Jon Paul Sydnor’s essay similarly highlights teachings in both traditions that the world is God’s body. Each tradition holds these affirmations of the divine relation to the world in tension with divine transcendence (Carman 1994). Scriptural narratives of divine saving activity in the world give additional texture to the affirmation of divine presence in creation. The two testaments of the Christian Bible relate 348

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God’s relationship to the people of Israel and the early Christian community.The Puranas relate cosmogony, cosmology, genealogy of divinities and rulers, history, and legends. Both sets of scripture tell of the creation as well as the end of the world, affirming a divine role in historical processes. The Bible’s linear timeline spans the creation of the world to a new creation at the end of time. Key moments include the introduction of sin into the world; the fortunes of a particular people (the descendants of Abraham) as the locus of divine saving activity; the singular divine incarnation in Jesus Christ, including his birth, teachings, death, resurrection, and ascension; and an anticipated end of history, with a divine judgment of the world and a new creation. By contrast, the cosmic narrative of the Puranas is distinctly cyclical, positing vast cycles of four eras (yugas), which decline in quality until the present Kali Age, in which observance of dharma reaches a low point before the Golden Age again returns. Along the way, the Earth and its inhabitants reach various points of crisis, and divinity takes the appropriate form to rescue them. In both sets of literature, narratives of divinity’s saving deeds inspire devotion. This corpus, rather than the body of salvific knowledge (jnana) obtained through philosophical and theological argumentation, is the primary referent for the artists of St. Mary’s Church in Kottayam. Their pictorial allusions to narratives of creation and descent announce the divine presence in the idiom of popular devotion (bhakti) to God, who is accessible through particular names and forms. Devotees easily remember and retell their tales for a variety of moral, educative, and contemplative purposes. In the porticos of St. Mary’s Church, a boat recalls the flood narratives in both traditions. The symbol of the fish bespeaks the Matsya avatar as well as Jonah’s rescue by the whale. Baby Krishna and the Madonna and Child inspire adoration.Visitors think of the coming end of this age when they see Kalki riding his white horse and Christ presiding over the last judgment. Through these reminders that God is present and has the will and power to save, the porticos invite worshippers to call upon God for help. Hindus and Christians engage one another theologically around their narratives of divine intervention and embodiment, particularly in relation to the intensification of divine presence that occurs when God takes form. In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Similarly, theistic Hindu texts make reference to a series of avatars or “descents” (cf. Sydnor 2011; Sheth 2002): “Whenever there is a decline in righteousness and an increase in unrighteousness, at that time I  manifest myself on earth” (Bhagavad Gita 4.7). Of course, the fact the traditions both feature narratives of divine embodiment does not dictate what Hindu and Christian theologians make of these narratives. As scholars of narrative theology have explored, The category of narrative has been used, among other purposes, to explain human action, to articulate the structures of human consciousness, to depict the identity of agents (whether human or divine), to explain strategies of reading (whether specifically for biblical texts or as a more general hermeneutic), to justify a view of the importance of “story-​telling” (often in religious studies through the language of “fables” and “myths”), to account for the historical development of traditions, to provide an alternative to foundationalist and/​or other scientific epistemologies, and to develop a means for imposing order on what is otherwise chaos. (Hauerwas and Jones 1989, p. 2) For some interpreters, the two frameworks exclude one another, so that only one story can be salvific or true. For example, some contemporary Christian groups in India view the Kottayam artists’ fluid movement between Christian and Hindu narratives as fundamentally misguided. 349

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Hindu imagery would have no proper place in a Christian place of worship, because it belongs to an entirely other, and incommensurable, set of formative stories. For others, the stories of divine intervention in Hindu and Christian scriptures belong to similar genres, reflect similar human religious impulses, and function in comparable ways in religious life. The expectation that divinity manifests on earth whenever righteousness declines creates the conditions for Hindus to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity and saving work—​ though as one among other such saviors. Alternatively, modern figures such as M.K. Gandhi or Rammohun Roy have emphasized their appreciation of his moral teachings rather than his divinity (Malkovsky 2010; Thomas 1970; see also the chapters by Bradley Clough and Dermot Killingley in this volume). These generally pluralistic perspectives take the narratives as symbols that point to larger, universal truths. Christian theologians have tended to impute varying degrees of uniqueness to Christ. Geoffrey Parrinder’s inclusivist position, for instance, affirms the theological impulse in Hindu teachings but subjects them to correction by and fulfillment in Christian doctrine. Parrinder views Christ as the source of the truth of Hindu teachings about the avatars of Vishnu, while asserting that the latter fall short in several ways. Moreover, while it is essential to the salvific work of Christ that his incarnation took place in history, Parrinder places the avatars of Hinduism in the realm of mythology, denying them the historicity necessary for salvific efficacy. Likewise, insofar as Krishna or Rama never truly suffered, but only appeared to do so in the spirit of divine play (lila), as many Hindu theologians contend, they then also fall short of the truth and impact of Christ’s passion (Parrinder 1997 [1970]). A variation on Hindu teachings on the divine presence within history appears in the figure of the yogi or guru. Hindus sometimes view gurus as divine avatars, or as people who have realized union with Brahman through their yogic practice. Paramahamsa Yogananda, for example, presents Christ as an avatar and a yogi, who teaches human beings how, through love, to develop the same divine consciousness that the Hindu sages have realized (Yogananda 2007). A  number of Christian theologians have explored the role of such spiritual masters in relation to Christology, as well as in relation to the implication of this kind of divine presence or mediation for the authority of religious institutions (Cornille 1991; also Thangaraj 1994 and Schouten 2008). The central place of narratives in the two traditions has created distinct theological possibilities for their encounter. It has also provided an accessible and humane entry point for dialogue. While denominational commissions can debate propositions and doctrines, the narratives that form the identities of persons and communities often elicit a different approach. It is hard to argue with someone else’s story (cf. Patel 2016, pp. 151–​52). “The value of narrative…is that it opens the space for us to see, examine, and value the complexities, intricacies, contradictions, and individuality of each person’s experiences in a way that more linear and systematic theologies do not” (Kim and Shaw 2018, p. 19). Storytelling plays an important part in building the relationships that form through interreligious encounter, creating connections, and contextualizing differences within the texture of formative narratives.

The particularity of encounter Encounter can occur for its own sake, without a predetermined outcome or meaning. Any sub-​tradition of Hinduism or Christianity, any thinker or teacher or ritual, from any historical period or philosophical perspective, can enter into an encounter with a similarly focused dimension of the other tradition. However, focusing on such particulars can make proponents 350

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of interreligious dialogue uncomfortable. Taking a close look at how neighbors live their faith in particular contexts disrupts a priori assumptions about them. Uncovering the internal diversity of traditions can complicate any easy claims of agreement and interreligious harmony. In particular, attending to the incommensurable or exclusivistic wings of a tradition can bring dialogue partners into conflict. While it can be common for dialogue partners to denounce these factions in their own tradition, the fact remains that they exist as viable interpretations of divine revelation. This discomfort with particulars exposes modern assumptions about what Marianne Moyaert calls “good religion, understood as liberal, privatized, and interiorized religion, which is distinguished from bad religion, understood as dogmatic, ritualistic, and materialistic religion” (Moyaert 2018, p. 2). When religion is treated as an individual matter, then the larger socio-​ political dimensions of interreligious encounter can go unexamined, resulting in “structural inequalities and unequal power relations between people with different worldviews” at the point at which encounters occur (Ibid.). Moyaert observes how Muslims, in particular, experience marginalization in Western higher educational contexts that are predicated on tolerance and dialogue. We may apply these dynamics to Hindu–​Christian encounter as well. To the extent that Western norms formed the category of “religion,” Hindus have often been put in the position of justifying their traditions with reference to Christian (often liberal Protestant) assumptions. A certain type of pluralistic Hinduism becomes “good” Hinduism: interior, private, and tolerant of others. The effect is that Hindus—​and Christians—​whose religion is perceived as too visible, dogmatic, or conflictual are silenced. Paying attention to religious differences does not doom the enterprise of deep encounter between Hindus and Christians. Comparative theologians demonstrate that deep learning can occur from the refusal to gloss over particularities. Francis X.  Clooney’s Theology after Vedanta (1993) demonstrates a method that became a point of departure for many comparative theologians in the next generation. He first engages in disciplined and prolonged reading of a particular Hindu text or thinker. Then, he follows his learnings back to a Christian text or thinker, tracing an intuitive back and forth pattern between the two for mutual illumination. The results of such a method can be surprising. Recall the assumption that Hinduism in general and Advaita Vedanta in particular teach the oneness of all reality and religious truth. Rather than importing this truism, Clooney’s reading of Badarayana’s Uttara-​Mimamsa-​Sutras approaches Advaita Vedanta not as a systematization of such knowledge but as a set of ritual, meditative, and literary practices. This insight, in itself, pushes against the stereotype and presents theology as a process of formation within a tradition. With this insight, Clooney takes a new look at how the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas plays a similar pedagogical and formative role, rather than primarily providing metaphysical answers (Clooney 1993). This project is an excellent example of how comparative theologians can bracket settled conclusions in order to delve into the interesting and immediate questions of the particular. For several decades now, this kind of attentiveness to the particularity of the thinkers, texts, religious schools, or practices of another tradition has given new life to the scholarly discipline of comparative theology. Some Christian theologians undertake the practice of reading and commenting on Hindu sacred texts (Cornille 2006; Clooney 2009; Locklin 2011), and some Hindus have also done the reverse (Yogananda 2007). For example, Daniel Sheridan’s exposition of the Narada Sutras frames the Vaishnava theme of the love of God as homologous with that in Catholicism: though these loves are directed toward differently imagined divine persons, Christians can intensify their love of God by reflecting on them (Sheridan 2007). Others frame comparisons between two texts or thinkers, or thematic projects that take a narrow focus as their point of departure. Journals such as the Journal for Hindu-​Christian Studies and 351

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Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection testify to the theological energy that continues to circulate between the two traditions. From this well-​established foundation of theological exchange, scholars now pursue some of the less-​obvious sites for comparison, extending to voices that have been marginalized as theologians (Samuel 2020;Voss Roberts 2010b) and Hindu texts and practices that seem to have no clear parallel in Christianity (Clooney 2017). The three shared theological dynamics I have emphasized—​the inadequacy and necessity of language, the one and the many, and narrative and presence—​set the conditions for the theological possibilities that arise in particular encounters. Within each of these dynamics, we have noted a range of possible approaches. By no means do Hindus and Christians speak with a single voice, whether in dialogue with one another or in debate with their co-​religionists. Because human language is limited, our grasping for the truth is an ongoing process with one another. In the world of multiplicity, any attempt to apprehend ultimate reality will necessarily encounter other such attempts. The narrative predilection for recalling particular instantiations of divine presence lends value to particular encounters and comparisons. The particulars matter, and they are worthy of focused attention in the encounter between Hindus and Christians.

Conclusion: on the “mystical” A well-​intended emphasis on “mystical” teachings in Hindu–​Christian encounter is insufficient for a theology of Hindu–​Christian encounter. This emphasis may contribute to religious harmony in the face of intractable religious divisions and conflicts, but it can also provide an intellectual shortcut insofar as it obscures significant particularities and neglects fruitful discussion of them. The kataphatic and narrative dimensions of both Hindu and Christian theologies drive the dialogue beyond affirmations of ineffability and oneness. A  theology of Hindu–​ Christian encounter must affirm both sides of the dialectic. A dialectic is not a dichotomy, not an either-​or choice, but a conversation that keeps more than one thing in mind. All sides of the dialectic must remain: the universal and the particular, the one and the many, divine ineffability and the proliferation of theological discourse. The term “mystical” has a particular genealogy in Christian theology. Among other definitions, it has signified, in the early Christian centuries, an allegorical method of reading scripture and, in the medieval period, intellectualized methods of contemplation. In modernity, following Kant, the intellect was no longer believed to be the point of access for the mystical, or noumenal, dimensions of experience. William James construed “mysticism” as an ineffable, non-​rational, subjective, and private psychological state. Of particular note for Christian–​Hindu encounters, at each stage, the changing definition functioned to exclude certain groups (such as women) from religious authority (Jantzen 1995). During the nineteenth century, the “mystic East” functioned similarly as the shadow side of modern Western constructions of rationality and an Orientalist fantasy that functioned to justify colonial authority in India (King 1999, p. 114). By the time Indian thinkers such as Vivekananda reclaimed this stereotype in order to assert the superiority of Indian spirituality, the “mystical” was safely out of the public sphere. “Mysticism,” then, is a category that deserves to be interrogated—​a point of comparison rather than a point of departure. This genealogy of “mysticism” as a term that appears often in Hindu–​Christian encounters raises further questions about power.Whose voices count in these encounters? Which traditions are prominent, and which are considered non-​representative? The representation of voices has been uneven, with European missionaries, church officials, and university scholars, rather than Hindus, presenting Hinduism to the West. The production of the earliest texts served colonial 352

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strategies to understand and govern the Indian subcontinent. For a long time, the texts available in translation, such as F. Max Müller’s “The Sacred Books of the East” series in the nineteenth century, also showed a strong Brahmin and advaitic bias (cf. Nicholson’s chapter in this volume) that made other religious expressions invisible. The Hindu authors who began to respond in the colonial period were shaped by the colonial education system. Their accounts of Hindu traditions are framed as responses to Christian questions. Even today, there is a large imbalance between scholars trained in the West—​both Hindu and Christian—​and representatives of different Hindu modes of formation and religious authority (Patil 2001). Furthermore, “the mystical” as the primary locus of encounter cannot capture or explain the diverse, local, and ancient negotiations of religious themes that have taken place as Indian Christianities have emerged as indigenous religious expressions (Frykenberg 2010, pp. 454–​61). As more Hindu and Christian perspectives encounter one another across the globe, attention must be paid to the role of power in the ways that the various dialectics are resolved. Are the spaces of encounter really neutral? Which groups enjoy cultural hegemony, and in what contexts? Whose particularity is taken as norm? How do voices at the margins question the answers that earlier dialogue partners have reached? How does attention to particularities keep the wisdom of these dialectics in circulation? And how, in a postcolonial (neocolonial?) moment, will the possibilities created by these dialectics be used? As a point of contact for conversion efforts, whether through contrast or fulfillment? As a proving ground for the sophistication of one thought system or another? As an opportunity for mutual learning? Somewhat tongue-​in-​cheek, Francis X. Clooney calls himself an “inclusivist” because his work proceeds by including other voices (Clooney 2010, p. 16). Though this statement allows him to dodge definitive judgment on the overall truth of other religious traditions, it remains the case that theologians who commit to comparative theological study likely possess some degree of confidence that more than one tradition can access divine wisdom. Within the theology of religions, the technical sense of the term “inclusivist,” that the truth and salvation proffered by other traditions can be accounted for by tenets of one’s own, suggests a rationale for seeking encounter. I would suggest that, for Hindu and Christian traditions, an inclusivist rationale emerges from the distinctive themes named above—​from the lack of finality of any human word about God, from attention to the relation between the one and the many, and from various stories about the divine presence in the world and God’s saving intent. These dynamics invite inclusion, even as they stoke a healthy curiosity about particularity that can resist the colonization of difference.

Bibliography Abhishiktananda. 1974. Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience. Delhi: ISPCK. Aguilar, M.I. 2016. Christian Ashrams, Hindu Caves and Sacred Rivers: Christian-​Hindu Monastic Dialogue in India 1950–​1993. London and Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley. Bäumer, B. and Dupuche, J. (eds.). 2005. Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions: Sunya, Purna, Pleroma. Delhi: D.K. Printworld. Carman, J.B. 1994. Majesty and Meekness: A Comparative Study of Contrast and Harmony in the Concept of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Clooney, F.X. 1993. Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology. Albany: SUNY Press. —​—​—​. 2009. The Truth,The Way,The Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Śrivaiṣṇava Hindus. Christian Commentaries on Non-​Christian Sacred Texts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. —​—​—​. 2010. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. “Difficult Remainders:  Seeking Comparative Theology’s Really Difficult Other.” In Clooney, F.X. and Stosch, K.v. (eds.). How to Do Comparative Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 206–​28.

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Michelle Voss Roberts Cornille, C. 1991. The Guru in Indian Catholicism:  Ambiguity or Opportunity of Inculturation? Louvain: Peeters Press. —​—​—​. (ed.). 2006. Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. Christian Commentaries on Non-​Christian Texts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Frykenberg, R. 2010. Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, Bede. 1990. A New Vision of Reality:  Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith. Springfield, IL: Templegate. Hauerwas, S. and Jones, L.G. 1997. “Introduction: Why Narrative?” In Hauerwas, S. and Jones, L.G. (eds.). Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Jantzen, G. 1995. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, G.J. and Shaw, S.M. 2018. Intersectional Theologies: An Introductory Guide. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion:  Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East”. London and New York: Routledge. Locklin, R. 2011. Liturgy of Liberation:  A Christian Commentary on Shankara’s Upadeśasāhasrī. Christian Commentaries on Non-​Christian Sacred Texts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Malkovsky, B. 2010. “Some Recent Developments in Hindu Understandings of Jesus.” Journal of Hindu-​ Christian Studies 23(5): 3–​8. Moyaert, M. 2018. “Inter-​Worldview Education and the Re-​Production of Good Religion.” Education Science 8(4): 156–​71. Otto, R. 1962, 1932. Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism. Bracey, B.L. and Payne, R.C. (trans.). New York: Collier. Panikkar, R. 1973. The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon-​Person-​Mystery. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 1981. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism: Towards an Ecumenical Christophany. Rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 2010. The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 2014. Mysticism and Spirituality, Part One: Spirituality, the Way of Life, Opera Omnia Vol. 1.2. Carrara Pavan, M. (ed.). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Parrinder, G. 1997, 1970. Avatar and Incarnation:  The Divine in Human Form in the World’s Religions. Oxford: Oneworld. Patel, E. 2016. Interfaith Leadership: A Primer. Boston, MA: Beacon. Patil, P.G. 2001. “A Hindu Theologian’s Response: A Prolegomenon to ‘Christian God, Hindu God’.” In Clooney, F.X. Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 185–​96. Pseudo-​Dionysius. 1987. The Complete Works. Luibheid, C. (trans.). New York: Paulist Press. Rambachan, A. 2006. The Advaita Worldview: God,World, and Humanity. Albany: SUNY Press. —​—​—​. 2015. A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not-​Two Is Not One. Albany: SUNY Press. Samuel, J. 2020. Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation: A Comparative Theology of Divine Possessions. Leiden: Brill. Schouten, J.P. 2008. Jesus as Guru: The Image of Christ among Hindus and Christians in India. Jansen, H. and Jansen L. Amsterdam (trans.). New York: Rodopi. Sheridan, D.P. 2007. Loving God: Kṛṣṇa and Christ: a Christian Commentary on the Nārada Sūtras. Christian Commentaries on Non-​Christian Texts. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Sheth, N. 2002. “Hindu Avatara and Christian Incarnation:  A Comparison.” Philosophy East and West 52(1): 98–​125. Sydnor, J.P. 2011. Ramanuja and Schleiermacher:  Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Thangaraj, M.T. 1994. The Crucified Guru:  An Experiment in Cross-​Cultural Christology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Thatamanil, J.J. 2006. The Immanent Divine:  God, Creation, and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Thomas, M.M. 1970. The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance. Bangalore, India: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Voss Roberts, M. 2010a. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. —​—​—​. 2010b. “Power, Gender, and the Construction of a Kashmir Śaiva Mystic.” Journal of Hindu Studies 3(3): 279–​97. Yogananda, P. 2007. The Yoga of Jesus: Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels. Los Angeles: Self-​ Realization Fellowship.

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30 RETHINKING THE ONE AND THE MANY IN ADVAITA Anantanand Rambachan

Introduction: the tradition of Advaita Vedānta In this essay, I focus in a special way on the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta. The Vedānta traditions are distinguished by the fact that they look to the four Vedas (Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva) as sources of valid knowledge (pramāṇa). Specifically, they derive their teachings from the last section (anta) of the Vedas, referred to as the Upaniṣads. The Upaniṣads are dialogues between teachers and students, discussing the fundamental questions of human existence such as the nature of ultimate reality (Brahman), the relationship between Brahman, the human self (ātmā) and the universe, the causes of suffering, and liberation from suffering. Among the most prominent traditions of Vedānta are those associated with three illustrious commentators: Śaṅkara (c. eighth century CE), Rāmānuja (c. eleventh century CE) and Madhva (c. thirteenth century CE). They are exponents, respectively, of the traditions of Nonduality (Advaita), Qualified Nonduality (Viśiṣṭādvaita) and Dualism (Dvaita). Advaita (lit., not-​two) is indebted to a lineage of distinguished teachers for the interpretation, defense, and transmission of its teachings. One of the earliest among these is Bādarāyaṇa, the author of the Brahmasūtra, a collection of aphorisms clarifying and defending the teachings of the Upaniṣads. After Bādarāyaṇa, comes Guaḍapāda, author of a commentary in verse (kārikā) on the Māṇḍukya Upaniṣad. There is no question, however, that the principal exponent and defender of Advaita is Śaṅkara. Śaṅkara’s legacy within the tradition is his commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, the Brahmasūtra, and on ten of the Upaniṣads (Īśa, Kena, Kaṭha, Praśna, Māṇḍūkya and Kārikā, Muṇḍaka, Aitareya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, and Taittirīya. He is also credited with the authorship of many independent works, but the authenticity of these is in question, with the exception of the Upadeśasāhasrī. The relationship between the One and the many continues to be a matter of debate among Hindu traditions and a defining difference among some of the major ones. It is also a significant theme in Hindu–​Christian dialogue. The reasons for the re-​examination that I undertake in this essay are many. The traditional reader of texts in the non-​dual tradition is the renouncer, with little or no interest in life in the world. I am a householder reader (gṛhastha), looking for a teaching on liberation, but engaged in the world and concerned about the flourishing of all beings in communities. I am looking to the tradition for meaning in my roles as husband, father, grandfather, college teacher, and activist. 355

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Many of the questions that I ask in this essay are prompted also by my engagement with Christian liberation theology and by its focus on liberation from poverty and injustice in this world, its attentiveness to suffering as a social phenomenon, and the inseparability of religion and justice. These concerns have not been at the forefront of Advaita’s theological concerns. Clooney defines comparative theology as acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more faith traditions. That learning is sought for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/​s as well as the home tradition. (Clooney 2010, p. 10) Asking questions that are inspired by my encounter with liberation theology, as I  do here, does not mean that my constructive theology lacks authenticity or is the product of another’s influence. In agreement with Clooney, I ask and attempt to answer these questions from my rootedness in the tradition of Advaita. Ultimately, constructive theology must find justification in the core claims of a tradition and in fidelity to its authoritative sources. Liberation theology challenges me with questions that I explore here. My hope is that my answers enrich Advaita.

The problem of the One and the many The Upaniṣad accounts of the origin of the many generally begin with the affirmation of the existence of the One. In these texts, the emphasis is on the singleness of the infinite Brahman/​ ātmā before the emergence of the many. Here are two important examples. The first is Aitareya Upaniṣad 1.1.1: Om. In the beginning this was but the one self alone. There was nothing else whatsoever that winked. It thought “Let me create the worlds.” (om ātmā va idameka evāgra āsīt nānyat kiṁcana miṣat sa īkṣatahata lokannu srijā iti.) In the text, we see the concern to emphasize that the uncreated One (eka) alone existed prior to the many. The text underlines this beautifully by stating that nothing else existed to wink (nānyat kiṁcana miṣat) or, in other words, to cause even the most minute movement. The text also identifies the will of the One to create (sa īkṣatahata lokannu srijā iti). The second example comes from Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.2.1: In the beginning, dear boy, this was Being alone, one only, without a second. (sad eva, somyedamagra āsidekamevādvitīyam.) Here also we see the focus on the reality of being alone (sad eva), its oneness (ekam eva) and its non-​duality (advitīyam) before the many. Advaita understands this oneness of Brahman before creation to mean freedom from at least three types of differences and distinctions. First, there are the distinctions obtaining among objects belonging to different species (vijātīya bheda) such as plants and animals. Brahman is free from distinctions of this kind since there is no object existing alongside Brahman before creation and no object that enjoys a separate ontological nature and existence from Brahman. Second, there are the distinctions existing among different objects belonging to the same species

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(svajātīya bheda). Brahman, however, is not the name of a species, and there are no objects similar to but different from Brahman. Distinctions of this kind, therefore, do not apply. Third, there are the distinctions obtaining within a single object (svagata bheda) comprised of different parts and possessing different characteristics. A cow, for example, has legs, a tail, ears, and a head. It also has color, shape, and size. It is, in other words, internally differentiated. Brahman, on the other hand, has no internal distinctions. It is not a compound of diverse parts and natures and transcends distinctions such as those obtaining between substance and attributes or whole and parts. Brahman is indivisible, without parts, and beyond all definitions that are based on distinctions. Brahman is not a numerical one but a simple whole, the totality of all that exists before creation. There is no ontological diversity within the one Brahman and nothing but the One before creation. Advaita understands the oneness of Brahman to mean that the One alone is the source of the many. Śaṅkara, interpreting texts like those cited above, is uncompromising in his view that the universe has its origin in Brahman and in no other source. He does this most clearly when he is refuting the Sāṁkhya argument that the creation has its origin in insentient matter (prakṛti). Sāṁkhya is a system of dualistic realism. It proposes the existence of two distinct and different realities, prakṛti (matter) and puruṣa (self). Both of these are equally real. The self in Sāṁkhya, unlike Advaita, is not one, but many. The creation emerges from a modification in the primal matter (for a concise discussion, see Puligandla 1996, chapt. 5). In his commentary on Brahmasūtra 1.1.2, Śaṅkara writes, The universe cannot possibly be thought of as having its origin etc., from any other factor, e.g. pradhāna (primordial nature) which is insentient, or from atoms, or non-​ existence, or some soul under worldly conditions (viz., hiraṇyagarbha). Nor can it originate spontaneously; for in this universe people (desirous of products) have to depend on specific, space, time and causation. This argument, from Śaṅkara, is also an argument for Brahman as a sentient being. Unlike prakṛti, Brahman is neither unintelligent nor inanimate. What we have in the Upaniṣads, as interpreted by Advaita, is the existence of the unoriginated Brahman as the single reality before the emergence of the many. Just as important is the fact that there is no differentiation or division in the nature of Brahman. The intrinsic nature of Brahman, according to Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, is satyaṁ jñānam anantam (being, awareness, limitlessness). The next step in the Upaniṣads, relevant for our consideration of the One and the many, is the emergence of the many from the One. There are several important Upaniṣad texts speaking to this process. He wished, “Let me be many, let me be born.” He undertook a deliberation. Having deliberated, he created all this that exists.That (Brahman) having created (that), entered into that very thing. (Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.6.1) That Being willed, “May I become many, may I grow forth.” It created fire. That fire willed, “May I become many, may I grow forth.” It created water.Therefore, whenever a man grieves or perspires, then is from fire that water issues. (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.2.3–​6.2.4) 357

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Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.1.7 uses a series of analogies to describe the emergence of the many from the One. As a spider spins out threads, then draws them into itself; As plants sprout out from the earth; As head and body hair grows from a living man; So from the imperishable all things here spring. What is clear in these texts and analogies is that the One is the sole source of the many—​ there is no other cause, intelligent or material. The proposition of a cause other than Brahman would constitute a form of dualism and imply a limit on the One. The Upaniṣads and their commentators do not employ the language of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. (For Śaṅkara’s argument against the emergence of the world from nothingness, see his commentary on Brahmasūtra 2.2.26–​27.) In fact, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.6.2 explicitly rejects this possibility. “ ‘But how could it be so, my dear,’ said he. ‘How could Being be born from Non-​Being?’ In fact, this was Being only, in the beginning, one, without a second” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.6.2). Advaita also rejects any pantheistic understanding of the relationship between the One and the many which implies that Brahman transforms itself into the universe in a manner that results in the loss of its original nature and that equates completely Brahman with the universe. A literal transformation of the One into the many implies the loss of the One and, for Advaita, the impossibility of liberation (mokṣa). Śaṅkara does not equate the world simplistically with Brahman. Brahman is, in significant ways, different from creation and transcends the finite universe. The fact, according to Śaṅkara in his commentary on the Brahmasūtra 2.2.44, that Brahman is described as cause and the world as effect implies difference. If there are no differences, the distinction would be meaningless. In addition, the relationship between Brahman and the world is asymmetrical. The world, as an effect of Brahman, shares in the nature of Brahman, but the features of the world do not constitute the essential nature of Brahman. “The effect,” as Śaṅkara puts it in his commentary on Brahmasūtra 3.2.21, “has the nature of the cause and not vice-​versa.”The One is the ground and source of the many; it is not reducible or limited to the many. If Advaita rejects a dualistic and pantheistic relationship between the One and the many, what explanation does it offer?

The many as illusion The most popular explanation is the one that likens the world to a sense-​illusion, which we conjure, and experience because of our ignorance. The most famous of these analogies equates the world with a snake that is mistakenly perceived in place of a rope. “The world,” as T.M.P. Mahadevan puts it, “is but an illusory appearance in Brahman, even as the snake is in the rope” (Mahadevan 1977, p. 28). The implication here is that when the rope is properly known, the illusory snake will no longer exist. In addition, the disappearance of the snake is a condition for truly knowing the rope. Similarly, when Brahman is known the world ceases to be, and Brahman cannot be known as long as the world is experienced. In his well-​known work on Indian philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta attributes this view of the world as illusion to Śaṅkara.

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The Upaniṣads held that reality or truth was one, and there was “no many” anywhere, and Śaṅkara explained it by adding that the “many” was merely illusion, and hence did not exist in reality and was bound to disappear when the truth was known. (Dasgupta 1975, pp. 1, 442) In a similar vein, Swami Nirvedananda, a monk in the Ramakrishna order, writes: Just as things and events seen in a dream vanish altogether and become meaningless when one wakes up, so does the universe with all its contents disappear when one finds the Real Self. One then becomes perfectly awakened to what really exists, the Absolute. Compared with That, the universe is no more than a dream. So long as one sees in a dream, the dream objects are intensely real. So also is the universe with all its contents to one under the spell of avidyā (ignorance). One awakening to Absolute Reality, however, all these have no value, no meaning, no existence. (Nirvedananda 1979, p. 172) The many, in this interpretation, exists only as a subjective and false projection of the individual. When correct knowledge of reality is gained, the many disappear. Though I contest Dasgupta’s reading of Śaṅkara on the relationship between the One and the many, I admit the dominance and popularity of this interpretation. (For my arguments against this interpretation see Rambachan 2006, chapt. 5.) For interpreters like Dasgupta and Mahadevan, the interpretation of the many as illusion follows logically from the claim that if Brahman is indeed infinite, the many cannot truly exist since such existence will compromise the limitless nature of the One. To preserve the infinite nature of the One, the reality of the many is explained away as illusory. There is no many. When the reality of the world is denied in this manner, renunciation and detachment are the commended responses. To engage the world is to grant reality to the world; it is to treat as real that which does not, in reality, exist. The many as illusion interpretation justifies world-​ renunciation and has been most strongly and clearly articulated in the monastic and ascetic strands of Hinduism. Liberation (mokṣa) is equated with freedom from the illusory many and ultimately from the cycles of birth, death and rebirth (saṁsāra). The many do not have any intrinsic worth.

Rethinking the One and the many Before offering a different interpretation of the relationship between the One and the many that is neither dualistic nor pantheistic, let me briefly offer evidence to challenge the view that Śaṅkara described the world as an illusory projection of the human mind. I confine myself to three of his arguments. First, Śaṅkara argues (Brahmasūtra 2.2.28) for the objective nature of the world and challenges the claim that what appears to be outside the mind is an illusion. For external things are perceived as a matter of fact. It is wrong to say that external things do not exist merely on the ground that cognition is seen to have the likeness of an object, because the very likeness of an object is not possible unless the object be there, and also because the object is cognized outside. For Śaṅkara, the reality of the many is established through valid sources of knowledge such as perception and inference. 359

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Second, Śaṅkara objects to any equation between the waking and dream experiences. Those who interpret the many as illusory, often equate it with having a dream-​like reality. The objects in a dream, he contends, are negated in the waking state. In a similar way, we negate illusions. But the objects seen in the waking state, “a pillar for instance, is not thus sublated under any condition” (Brahmasūtra 2.2.29). Dreams are a phenomenon of memory, whereas objects in the waking state are experienced through valid forms of knowledge such as perception. These objects cannot be made to disappear by any human agency. Third, Śaṅkara denies that the many disappear with the attainment of liberation. Let us recall Dasgupta’s argument above that the world vanishes when the truth is known. Śaṅkara clearly argues that the world exists both for the liberated and the unliberated. These two may be differentiated, however, on the basis of their different ways of perceiving the relationship between the One and the many. The unliberated person attributes an independent, dualistic reality to the world, while the liberated sees the world as owing its existence and being to the One. The world, as he puts in his commentary on Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.5.1, is indeed a fact for those who do not believe in things as different from Brahman as well as for those who do believe. But the believers of the highest truth, while discussing in accordance with the śrutis, the actual existence or non-​existence of things apart from Brahman, conclude that Brahman alone is one without a second, beyond all finite relations. If liberation resulted in the annihilation of the many, says Śaṅkara, this would have occurred after the first person attained liberation (Brahmasūtra 3.2.21). The Upaniṣad passages explaining the origin of the many never describe it as an illusory projection of the human mind or as a consequence of ignorance of the One. In the texts cited above and similar others, the source of the many is the One and, more specifically, in the wish of the One to become many. Both the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.6.1) and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (6.2.3) use almost identical expressions, “I shall be many; I shall be born (bahu syāṃ prajāyeyeti).” The many exist not because we see the many, but through the intentional self-​multiplication of the One. Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.1.1, succinctly describes the One as “That from which all beings originate, by which they are sustained and to which they return.” We may interpret the sustenance of the world to be the consequence of the will of the One and not our own subjective wills.

The not-​two (Advaita) relationship of the One and the many The One alone is the source of the many and the many exist independently of our perception. In any description of the relationship between the One and the many, Advaita wants assiduously to avoid the following positions. The first is dualism, by which I mean the origin of the many in a cause other than the One, or the existence of the many separate from and ontologically independent of the One. The One and the many do not exist side by side as separate and equal realities.The second is any description suggesting that the fullness or limitless nature of the One is compromised or that it literally transforms into the many, losing its original character. This is the point of the famous text of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.1.1. That is fullness. This is fullness. From fullness comes fullness. When fullness is taken from fullness, Fullness remains. 360

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The full One is always full. The third position to avoid is the one that I have emphasized above. I am referring to the characterization of the many as illusions that disappear when the truth is known. Since this interpretation is advocated by many Advaitins, it is not commonly presented an interpretation to be avoided. Advaita literally means not (a) two (dvaita). I understand the term to describe a relationship between the one and the many that is not one (pantheism/​monism) or two (dualism) or illusionism. Advaita is not a version of subjective idealism that understands the world to be a projection of the human mind. To develop the meaning of Advaita, and the relationship between the One and the many as not-​two I turn, once again, to the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad and to the conversation between Śvetaketu and his father and teacher, Āruṇi. Āruṇi provides analogies to explain the relationship between the One and the many. Although the analogies are very helpful, we need always to read these keeping in mind the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) caution that Brahman is a reality from which all words, along with the mind, turn back, having failed to reach (yato vāco nivartante a prāpya manasā saha). The One is unique and so is relationship between the One and the many. By knowing a single lump of clay, all objects made of clay are known. Changes are words, in name only. Clay is the reality. (yathā somyaikena mṛtpiṇḍena sarvaṃ mṛnmayaṃ vijñātaṃ syādvācārambhaṇaṃ vikāro nāmadheyaṃ mṛttiketyeva satyam; 6.1.4.) The analogy of clay and clay objects is followed by similar ones substituting gold and iron for clay. These three analogies assert that a change (vikāraḥ), with all the finite resonances of the word, takes place with the coming into being of the many; something new comes into existence. The text does not describe these changes as illusory or subjective. What all three analogies are concerned with primarily is to emphasize that the many emerge from the One without subtracting from or adding to its infinite being.The One is not depleted by the many; the many do not add to the ontological plenitude of the One. In a recent essay, Bradley Malkovsky cites a medieval Christian teaching that the result of creation was “more beings but not more Being,” as well as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who spoke of the Divine as “He who is His own being as the being of all” (Malkovsky 2019, p. 260). It is this ontological singleness that the texts wish to communicate by describing the many as owing their existence to words alone (vācārambhaṇaṃ) and affirming clay, gold, or iron as the ontological reality (satyam). These analogies also make the important point that the many do not exist independently or separately from the one. In the case of the analogy of clay and clay objects, the objects never exist apart from the clay. Clay objects do not subsist without clay; clay is always present with clay objects. The relationship between clay and clay objects or gold and gold ornaments may be designated as not-​two (advaita). To speak of the relationship as one denies the reality of the ornaments; to speak of the relationship as two denies the fact of gold as the ontological reality of the gold ornament. Not-​two expresses the unique relationship between the gold and gold ornaments—​ neither denying its existence or separateness from its cause. Moving from the Chāndogya analogies to Brahman and the world, the One and the many, it is important to note that the relationship is not properly described as panentheism. Even as it is not entirely accurate to describe a gold ornament as existing in gold, it is not entirely accurate to characterize the many as existing in the One. Panentheism, as emphasizing inseparability of the many from the One, is not incompatible with the not-​two vision, but Advaita makes claims 361

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that go beyond the dualism that is still consistent with panentheism. Moment to moment the many radically depends on the One for existence; in the absence of the One, the many are not. What Advaita adds to panentheism is a single, undivided reality that is the ontological truth and nature of everything. Advaita is also more than a description of an interrelated many. Again, it is not opposed to the interrelatedness of all things, but interrelatedness is compatible with dualism. Advaita is a claim about the single ontological nature of all the interrelated parts. For a similar reason, the unity of Advaita is not like the organic unity of a single entity (the human body or a tree) with various parts and limbs. It is appropriate in Advaita to conceive of the entire universe as the body of the One, but Advaita is distinguished by its non-​dual ontology. In interpreting the analogies of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, cited above, it is very easy for commentators to go to the extreme of devaluing and rendering the many insignificant. Of course, one can understand this exegetical move in light of the emphasis, in the text, of clay, gold, and iron as reality (satyam) and the molded objects as word-​dependent for their existence. I believe, however, that this reading of the text, though understandable, must be contested. The purpose of describing the many as word-​dependent is not to undermine their value or existence, but to teach that, in the bringing forth of the many, nothing ontological is added to the being of the One. Where would anything to be added come from? The truth is that the many are not dependent on words for existence but on the one reality. In the absence of a name, an object continues to exist, but nothing exists without the One. It is in this sense that the Chāndogya text speaks of clay as satyam. It points to the dependence of the effect on the cause for its existence and sustenance. Vācārambhaṇaṁ is not a denial of the existence of the gold ornament, but a description of its mode of existence. Later in the sixth chapter (6.12.1–​3), Āruṇi continues the instruction to his son, Śvetaketu, with a practical task. He asks his son to bring him the fruit of a tall and spreading banyan tree. Śvetaketu obeys and brings it before his father. He is instructed to keep breaking the seed into smaller pieces until he sees nothing. “My dear son,” responded Āruṇi, “that finest essence which you do not see, from that essence this great banyan tree arises, Have faith, my son. That which is the finest essence, this whole world has for its self. That is the Truth. That is the Self. That Thou Art, Śvetaketu.” This powerful example ends with one of the great sentences of the Advaita tradition (Tat Tvam Asi, i.e., That Thou Art), affirming the ontological identity of the self with Brahman. The point here is that if we inquire into the fundamental nature of the many, we arrive at the One from whom the beautiful banyan tree and everything else emerges. The many emerge from, are sustained by, and return to the One. Having the nature of the One, the many, unlike illusions, never vanish into a condition of non-​existence. The purpose of Āruṇi’s task to his son is not to diminish the value or significance of the tiny banyan seed but, in fact, to pronounce its worth by teaching that at its core, it is the unbroken and indivisible One. This is the truth of everything that exists.

Intentionality and deliberation in self-​multiplication The Taittirīya Upaniṣad text (2.6.1) cited above describes the many as coming forth from the desire (sokāmayata) of the One to be many (bahu syām), to be born (prajāyeyeti). These lines are followed by the words sa tapotapyata, sa tapastaptvā. Tapas suggests intense effort or practice that may even be heat-​generating. (Both Olivelle and Roebuck, in their translations, preserve the 362

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sense of heat in the meaning of tapas.) The term is used often in connection with ascetic practice to describe disciplined austerity and renunciation of comforts. Brahman, however, does not have a physical body as the locus for ascetic practice. In commenting on the meaning of tapas in relation to the infinite One, Śaṅkara specifies that it should be understood as referring to the practice of knowledge through which all things came into being. Tapas here signifies a form of focused visualization, through knowledge, of the nature of each created being and object. Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (1.1.8) describes Brahman as expanding through tapas. Śaṅkara, in his commentary, equates this again with knowledge. Tapasā, through knowledge, by virtue of possessing the knowledge of the process of creation; brahma, Brahman, the imperishable, the source of creation; when desirous of creating this world, cīyate, increases in size—​like a seed sending a sprout, or as a father procreating a son does so out of elation. [Śaṅkara’s patriarchal bias is evident here.] Although we must be careful not to interpret the tapas of Brahman in anthropomorphic terms, Śaṅkara, in his commentary on Taittirīya 2.6.1, emphasizes that we should not think of Brahman as insentient and incapable of desiring. Certainly, it is not a matter of experience that one who can desire can be insentient. We have said that brahman is indeed omniscient; and so it is but reasonable that It should be capable of desiring. Everything is created through the knowledge of the One; no one and no thing is redundant. As the Taittirīya Upaniṣad puts it, “idam sarvam asṛjata” (“He created all this”), “yadidaṁ kim ca tat sṛṣṭvā” (“All that is here, He created”). The repetition here is for the purpose of emphasis and inclusivity—​the One alone is the source of everything that exists; nothing is excluded or redundant. In a series of verses, Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (2.1.3–​2.1.9) takes care to enumerate and specify the many that come from the One. These include breath, mind, space, air, fire, earth, divine beings, human beings, animals, birds, rice, barley, oceans, mountains, rivers, and corn! The exuberance of the multiplication of the One is celebrated by this detailed naming of the many. Why is this discussion about deliberation and intentionality important? It reinforces our contention that the Upaniṣads do not understand the many to be a subjective illusion that is spontaneously projected as a consequence of a misunderstanding about the nature of the One. As we see in this Taittirīya 2.6.1 passage, the many are intentionally brought into existence by the One through a unique process of self-​multiplication. Intentionality in creation, unlike chance or an insentient source, also suggests value and worth. Each one of the many is a purposeful outcome of the wisdom effort (jñāna tapas) of the One. The One willed the many into existence, with all of its rich and astonishing diversity and uniqueness. Each being and object expresses the wisdom and intentionality of the One and the value of the One for the many. Illusionistic understandings of the many do not usually celebrate uniqueness and diversity or suggest value.

Ontological singularity and uniqueness I have argued that Advaita is not identical with dualism, illusionism, pantheism, monism, or panentheism, and that none of these terms describe the relationship between the One and the many. At the heart of Advaita teaching is the claim that everything shares a single, fundamental ontological nature. There is no ontological dualism or pluralism. This is the point of the famous Chāndogya Upaniṣad (3.14.1) text, “All this, no doubt, is brahman” (sarvaṁ khalvidam brahma). 363

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This teaching has been and is summoned by Advaita interpreters to minimize, underemphasize, and even trivialize the significance of difference and the many. This is especially true of interpreters who subscribe to the view of the many as illusions of the mind. The essential question is whether ontological non-​dualism intrinsically devalues the many. Or conversely, whether ontological pluralism is a requirement for a positive appraisal of the many. Does knowing the ultimate nature of beings and objects to be not-​two deter us from celebrating and treasuring their differences? If we employ analogies from common human experiences, this does not seem to be the case.Take for example, an artist like Michelangelo, working with marble. Out of this material, he creates exquisite and enduring works of art like the figures of David, Bacchus, and Apollo, to name a few.When we stand before his works, the fact that the material is the same does not impede the value of each piece and our ability to appreciate his genius. In fact, our estimation for his work may even increase as we contemplate the fact that out of the same material he chisels such distinctive pieces. In a similar way, we appreciate the radiant beauty and complex patterns in a garden of flowers nourished by the same soil and we savor the delicious varieties of edibles emerging from the one earth. Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (1.1.7), in fact, uses the analogy of plants sprouting from the earth to speak of the many emerging from the One (“As plants sprout out from the earth,” it says, and in Sanskrit, “yathā pṛthivyāmoṣadhyayaḥ”). Nature seems to replicate the pattern of the many arising from the One and the Upaniṣad, therefore, draws from the world of nature for analogies. In all of these examples, our knowledge is of the One and the many. The many as emerging from and sharing the nature of the One does not diminish our value for the many and the uniqueness of each one. The One expresses itself through diversity. When we look out at the world of the many what do we see? An illusion that levels and dismisses the many and which is uninterested in the unique beauty of every being and object? Or a world of unimaginable diversity and beauty, and individual uniqueness, formed from the One, expressing its abundance and creativity and existing in ontological non-​duality with the One? How we see the world in its relation to the One makes a significant difference in our orientation to life. Illusionism is historically associated with a disposition of renunciation, lack of engagement with, and sometimes disgust toward, the world. Alternatively, we can embrace the world with love and reverence as a celebrative expression of the One, delighting in the mystery of ourselves and in every being and object that comes from the will of the one to be many. The nature of the One is joy (ānandam) and from that joy, as Taittirīya (3.6.1) teaches, the many emerge. “Joy is brahman. From joy beings are born; by joy, being born they live; into joy they enter when they pass on.” If the many express the joy of the One, we are invited to delight in all.

Advaita: dual mode of seeing Advaita, in fact, is properly described as a mode of dual seeing. Unlike commentators who describe the culmination of the Advaita as the disappearance of the many, this is not the view of Śaṅkara or authoritative sources like the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads. There is no suggestion, in these texts, that the world vanishes in the knowledge of Brahman. The Bhagavad Gītā, one of the three pillars (prasthānathrayī) of Advaita, consistently describes liberation as knowledge of the One and the many. One who sees me everywhere and sees everything in me is not lost to me, or will I be lost to him. (6:30) 364

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One who sees the great Lord existing equally in all beings, the imperishable in the perishable, truly sees. (13:28) That knowledge by which one sees one imperishable being in all beings, indivisible in the divisible is the highest. (18:20) Īśa Upaniṣad 1 opens with the famous line, “This entire universe, moving and unmoving, is enfolded in God. Renounce and enjoy. Do not covet the wealth of others.” We are invited here to see the universe as existing within and interpenetrated by the One. What then do we make of those Upaniṣad texts that seem to contradict the fact of multiplicity? Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.19, for example, associates rebirth with the seeing of difference and Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.7.1 associates difference with fear. The well-​known text of Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.14 seems to suggest that in non-​duality there is no other: “But when everything has become the Self, then what should one smell and through what, what should one see and through what, what should one hear and through what?” These texts, and others like these, are read to support “the many as illusion” viewpoint. The assumption seems to be that if there is One, there cannot be many, unless the many are projections of ignorance similar to a rope that is mistaken for a snake. This argument that the One and the many mutually exclude each other is flawed. Advaita stands fundamentally on a claim about ontological non-​duality and not on the non-​existence or illusory existence of the many.The problem for Advaita is not the existence of many but attributing separate ontological natures to the many. To affirm the One we need not deny or dismiss the many. In a very important section of his commentary on Brahmasūtra 3.2.21, an opponent argues that the many must be sublated before the One can be known. Śaṅkara responds by questioning what is meant by the sublation of the many. The response is worth quoting in full. What is meant by the sublation of this universe of manifestations? Is the world to be annihilated like the destruction of the solidity of ghee by contact with fire? Or is it that the world of name and form, created in Brahman by nescience like many moons created in the moon by the eye-​disease called timira, has to be destroyed through knowledge? Now if it be said that this existing universe of manifestations, consisting of the body etc., on the corporeal plane and externally of the earth etc., is to be annihilated, that is a task impossible for any man, and hence the instruction on extirpation is meaningless. The problem in Advaita is not the world as world, but ignorance (avidyā) about the non-​dual relationship between the One and the many. This ignorance is overcome by right knowledge. Knowledge destroys ignorance; not the many. The many cannot be made to disappear by an act of human will since it emerges from, is sustained by and returns to the One (Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.6). How then do we read verses like those cited above? There are at least three important insights to be emphasized. First, there are no divisions within the One. Bhagavad Gītā (13:16 and 18:20) speaks of the One as indivisible (avibhaktam). Second, as Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.14 asks, “Through what should One know That owing to which all this is known—​through what, my dear, should one know the Knower?” The point here is that the One is not an object among other objects. It is ground and cause of all sense experience; the subject that never becomes an 365

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object. Kena Upaniṣad describes the One as the “eye of the eye,” and the “ear of the ear.” Third, the point of such texts is not to deny the very possibility or existence of the many but to refute distinct ontological objects. In the Advaita tradition, it is appropriate to regard, in the words of Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.14, the entire universe as one’s own self (sarvamātmaivabhuta), but it does not follow from this that the world is illusory. The world has the One as its self and so does Śvetaketu. The teacher does not conclude this teaching describing the massive banyan tree as an illusion or by saying that the existence of the tree and the One are somehow incompatible. His point is that the visible many emerge from and share the fundamental nature of the invisible One.

“That from which all words return” Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1), speaks of the One as “That from which all words return.” The Upaniṣads reiterate this caution about the limits of language in relation the One in numerous texts, and often take recourse in apophatic characterizations. One becomes freed from the jaws of death by knowing That which is wordless, untouched, formless, without taste, eternal, without scent, without beginning, without end, undecaying and greater than the great. (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.3.15) The limits of language, however, apply not only to the nature of the One but also to any descriptions of the relationship between the One and the many. In Upadeśasāhasrī (Prose 18), Śaṅkara uses the term anirvacanīya (indefinable) to describe the potency of the One to bring forth the many. By extension, the term also describes the relationship between the One and the many. I have argued above against dualism, pantheism, monism, panentheism, and illusionism as appropriate descriptions of the relationship between the One and the many. The apophatic term advaita (not-​two) is more helpful since it denies both dualism and monism (Rambachan 2015). Ultimately, even advaita, like all words, must return in failure since it only tells us what the relationship is not:  not one or two. The relationship between the One and the many is nonpareil and defies definition. We can use language and symbols, even our favorite ones, only with humility. Descriptions, however, matter deeply. Unlike illusionism, which represents the many as an ignorance-​generated mental projection that contradicts the truth of the One, like a rope mistaken for a snake, advaita (not-​two) enables us to celebrate and embrace the many as an indefinable overflow of the One. Indefinability is the truth of the One, the One and the many and every unique expression of the One.Through the tapas of knowledge, the One brings forth and enters into everything created, uniting and giving inestimable value to everyone. The diversity of the many is a gift of the One, not an illusion. Seeing the many as illusion does not invite seeing beauty, especially when the many is identified with ignorance and when the emphasis is on the dismissal of the many. There is the mystery and reverence of beauty, however, when we see the many as the self-​expression of the One who creatively births and sustains each unique one, while remaining the inexhaustible One.The indefinability (anirvacanīyatvam) of the One is beautifully expressed in the Bhagavad Gītā (2:29) where the One is contemplated, spoken of, and heard with wonder (āścaryavat), transcending all descriptions: “One contemplates with wonder, speaks with wonder, and hears with wonder;

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even after hearing, no one understands” (my translation). The Bhagavad Gītā (15:12) asks us to see and delight the radiance (tejaḥ) of the One in the light of the sun, moon and fire, in the taste of water (7:8), in the fragrance of the earth (7:9), and in the gift of reason (7:10). The ontological unity that is at the heart of non-​duality awakens love, care, and compassion for each unique one as an expression of the One. Describing the many as illusory does not awaken love and care or provide a compelling reason for taking the suffering of others seriously. This is the reason why a text like the Bhagavad Gītā, on two occasions (5:25 and 12:4), describes the person attuned to the One as delighting in the flourishing of all beings. This person is also described (6:32) as owning the joy and suffering of others as her own. This love is the reason why we cannot be indifferent to or give our assent to any social system that is based on human indignity and injustice. Our institutions and our relationships ought to reflect the deepest truths of our unity (Rambachan 2015, pp. 187–​96).

Some comparative thoughts The Catholic theologian, Bradley Malkovsky, has identified several important Christian concerns about the theology of Advaita.These include the denial of the reality of the world, the understanding of the One to be impersonal, and the orientation of its spirituality “to knowledge and identity rather than to love and to a communion of persons” (Malkovsky 2015, pp. 256–​57). Malkovsky also mentions the concern of Dalit Christians for Advaita’s indifference to poverty and injustice.The issues raised by Malkovsky are significant.Though my rethinking of Advaita is not a response to Christian criticism, it is, in part, informed by my dialogue with the Christian tradition and my engagement with liberation theology. In this essay, I  argue strongly against illusionism as an interpretation of the relationship between the One and the many. I  have highlighted texts and interpretations that refute the understanding of the One as an insentient reality. I emphasize the will and intentionality of the One to self-​multiply as many and I  see no reason why the ontological non-​dualism of Advaita is incompatible with loving relationships between human beings and between the many and the One (Rambachan 2006, pp. 83–​97). Most importantly, I argue that the ontology of Advaita grounds and justifies relationships of compassion and love and concern for injustice and suffering. The equal presence of the One in all is the source of the inherent dignity of every human being. It is the antidote to ideologies and structures that deny the personhood of others. After commenting on the divine activity that is intimately present in every human being, Rowan Williams makes an inference with which I heartily concur: “And if that doesn’t make us approach the world with reverence and amazement, I don’t know what will” (Williams 2010, p. 35). I hope that the interpretation of the relationship between the One and the many in Advaita Vedānta, that I offer here, opens up possibilities for deeper and mutually enriching comparative conversations with Christian traditions. We are challenged to articulate the meaning of liberation in ways that enable all beings to flourish. As I have shown in this essay, there are interpretations of the meaning of liberation in Advaita that negate and devalue the world and advocate for detachment and indifference. Similarly, there are Christian interpretations that are future oriented and emphasize the afterlife and not life in this world. In both traditions, however, there are alternative understandings of liberation that value the world and our lives here and now. Deep comparative study and conversations around these urgent subjects are a necessity of our time and context.

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Bibliography Primary sources in English translation Gambhirananda. (trans.). 1965–​1966. Eight Upaniṣads with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya. 2 vols. Īśa, Kena, Kaṭha, and Taittirīya in Vol. I; Aitaraya, Muṇḍaka, Māṇḍūkya and Kārika, and Praśna in Vol. II. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. —​—​—​. 1977. Brahmasūtra Bhaṣya of Śaṅkarācārya. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. —​—​—​. 1986. Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Jagadananda. (trans.). 1949. Upadeśasāhasri. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Jha, G. (trans.). 1942. Chāndogya Upaniṣad with the Commentary of Śaṅkara. Poona: Oriental Book Agency. Madhavananda. (trans.). 1975. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Nikhilananda. (trans.) 1956. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.Vol. 3. New York: Harper and Row. Olivelle, P. (trans.). 1996. Upanishads. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prasad, R.C. (trans.). 1984. Śrī Rāmacaritamānasa. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Roebuck,V.J. (trans. and ed.). 2003. The Upaniṣads. London: Penguin Books. Saraswati, D. Swami. (trans.). 2007. Bhagavad Gītā. Chennai: Arsha Vidya Centre. Sargeant, W. (trans.). 1993. Bhagavad Gītā. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sastry, A.M. (trans.). 1977. Bhagavad Gītā with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya. Madras: Samata Books. Shastri, H.P. (trans.). 1957–​1962. Ramayana of Valmiki. 3 vols. London: Shanti Sadan. Swahananda. (trans.). 1975. Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math.

Secondary sources Clooney, F.X. 2010. ComparativeTheology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders.West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell. Dasgupta, S. 1975. A History of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Mahadevan, T.M.P. 1977. Outlines of Hinduism. Bombay: Chetana Limited. Malkovsky, B. 2019. “The Mystery of the Infinite in Hindu Spirituality and Theology of Non-​Duality.” In Casarella, P. and Sirry, M. (eds.). Finding Beauty in the Other. New York: Crossroad, pp. 245–​70. Nirvedananda. 1979. Hinduism at a Glance. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission. Puligandla, Ramakrishna. 1996. Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company. Rambachan, A. 2006. The Advaita Worldview:  God, World and Humanity. Albany:  State University of New York Press. —​—​—​. 2015. A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not-​Two is Not One. Albany: State University of New York Press. Williams, R. 2010. Tokens of Trust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

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Hindu and Christian traditions have long explored the various relationships that human beings have with nature, the cosmos, and the divine. Through scriptural texts, theological commentaries, stories, and religious rituals, Hindus and Christians have forged bonds between human beings and the living Earth around them, linking human identity and purpose to the rhythms of nature and the seasons, to oceans and rivers, to forests and mountains, and to plants, animals, and the land. In addition, narratives and symbols in both traditions express a sense of belonging and connection to the cosmos and to all created existence, positing a unified web of reality that many Christians and Hindus would understand not simply as the universe but also as the Lord’s creation. Only relatively recently have religious traditions begun to explore their theological inheritances with an expressly “ecological” lens, namely with an express attention to and concern for the health and well-​being of the planet and the future viability of its ecosystems. Contemporary Hindus and Christians are recovering dimensions of their traditions in order to develop theological principles that foster a healthier and sustainable relationship between humanity and the Earth. It should be noted at the outset, however, that both Hindu and Christian theological traditions are ambivalent and ambiguous about how they might contribute to an ecological movement and to developing a more sustainable culture and world. Prominent strands in both traditions pose major hindrances to supporting contemporary sustainability, such as a primary focus on human salvation and human liberation from this physical world of suffering; the utter transcendence of the divine, which can connote that the destruction of nonhumans or planetary ecosystems is ultimately irrelevant; or a dualistic and oppressive anthropocentrism, either theoretical or practical, which results in a sense of the radical superiority of humans over nonhumans. In articulating religious themes that support an ecological worldview and the pursuit of sustainability, contemporary Hindus and Christians are engaging in a vital form of theological retrieval and reinterpretation. This essay will focus on contemporary voices in Hindu and Christian traditions that are reworking their theologies of creation. They consider how the divine inhabits the cosmos, infusing it with a sacred quality, which then provides an ethical framework for a healthier human approach to engaging with and even protecting the Earth for generations to come.

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Despite vastly different scriptural, philosophical, and theological moorings, many contemporary Hindus and Christians display a remarkable consensus on their affirmations of: 1) the immanent presence of the divine within creation; 2) the inherent goodness of nature and therefore the intrinsic value of nonhuman beings; and 3) the goodness of cosmic and planetary order, with the clear ethical implication that humans ought to preserve Earth’s well-​being and honor Earth’s intrinsic limits. What follows presumes neither to speak for all Hindus and all Christians throughout the ages, nor to exhaust how these traditions understand creation and the cosmos. Instead, this essay focuses on the contemporary voices in each tradition that want to retrieve ecofriendly dimensions, and so I will trace out intriguing points of overlap and intersection between recent Hindu and Christian eco-​theologies on these three themes.

Immanent presence of the divine A central aspect of many contemporary Hindu and Christian theologies of creation is the radical, immanent presence of the divine. In both traditions, the creative source of the universe is transcendent, beyond this limited, finite, and material world. The Creator exceeds rational comprehension, and the power and energy of the Lord cannot be contained or exhausted by the cosmos. Indeed, the action of creating the universe, maintaining and preserving its existence and activity, and drawing the universe to its conclusion, whether this process occurs once or an infinite number of times, is effortless to the Creator. In all these ways, the divine essentially transcends all of creation. Yet at the same time, the divine is radically immanent in creation, present throughout the entirety of the universe in all places and in all times. Indeed, both Hindus and Christians aver that the Creator is in fact the innermost reality of the cosmos and of all existing beings. Whatever an individual being might be, and whatever its role in wider natural systems or in history might be, its existence is immediately due to the presence of the Creator, and its deepest identity is a site for the sacred source of the universe. Thus, we encounter the divine through our contact and daily interactions with the natural world. Contemporary Hindu and Christian thinkers offer ecologically inflected visions of these general narratives by appealing to specific dimensions of their inherited traditions. Contemporary Hindus ground a sense of divine immanence in various ways, from ancient texts to classical theologians. O.P.  Dwivedi, as part of his argument for a Hindu “dharmic ecology,” calls this the primary principle of vasudeva sarvam:  the Supreme Being resides in all beings. Classical Vedic texts “speak extensively about the sanctity of the earth, the rivers, and the mountains” (Narayanan 2001, p. 182–​83), as well as elements like fire and water and living beings like plants and animals. Similarly, the Bhagavata Purana (2.2.41) affirms the central premise that the divine is everywhere, declaring, for example, “Ether, air, fire, water, earth, planets, all creatures, directions, trees and plants, rivers, and seas, they all are organs of God’s body; remembering this, a devotee respects all species” (quoted in Dwivedi 2000, p. 5). Other Hindus look to philosophically oriented texts that discuss the relationship of the transcendent source of the universe to the universe itself. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is proclaimed that whatever is, is Vasudeva (7.19) and that Krishna resides everywhere (13.13). There is no place and no time in which the Supreme Being is not fully and completely present. Rita Sherma argues that the Vedic insight into the underlying unity of all being comes to full fruition in the Upanisads and offers the basis for a teaching of “radical divine immanence.” Many of the early Upanisads, though diverse in their authorship and perspectives, underscore the foundational concept of a non-​dualistic Brahman, the pervasive unity of the universe that is beyond all form and limitation. In these Upanisads the emphasis is on moksa, a liberation from the world of flux 370

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and forms, which consists of the self-​realization of atman and its relationship to Brahman.While the predominant focus is on the eternal, beyond the temporal world of nature, there is also a deep respect for all beings because of the immanent presence of Brahman (on this point, and divergent opinions regarding it, see the preceding chapter by Rambachan). Sherma calls this a “theology of identification,” where Brahman and atman are linked in a continuum with the sacred presence in all beings and all things. Sherma cites the Isa Upanisad as representative of this Upanisadic focus: And he who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings, does not feel any aversion by reason of such a view. When, to one who knows, all beings have become one with his own self, then what delusion and what sorrow can [come] to such a one who has seen Unity? (Cited in Sherma 2015, p. 364) Some Western observers have hailed this teaching, particularly in its Advaita Vedanta forms, as an excellent foundation for eco-​philosophy. Others have expressed some concern that the unity of a non-​dual Brahman can override and erase all individual distinctions (Nelson 1998). Sherma counters this latter view, insisting that the Upanisadic vision of Brahman is not only the source of all cosmic being but also a basis for its multiplicity and indeed supports that multiplicity: “The Supreme is both Being, and Becoming—​both the One essence and the Manifold phenomena of the universe” (Ibid., emphasis in original). A general sense of the sacredness of nature permeates Hindu consciousness and sensibilities, even for those who are not as familiar with the sophisticated philosophical and theological traditions that extol a non-​dualistic Brahman. Throughout a Hindu’s life, from birth rituals to funeral rites, nature plays an indispensable role, and so “Hindus have long had a palpable, organic connection with nature” (Narayanan 2001, p.  179). The Laws of Manu describe the land of India as a sacred place and the only proper setting for sacred rituals. Indeed, the Earth is personified as a compassionate mother-​goddess, filled with sacredness that ought not to be violated. While nature generally has this quality of sacredness, Narayanan notes that Hindus tend to focus this on their local temple, and by extension the water, forest, and animals that surround it: While India is personified as a mother and considered holy, most Hindus localize the sanctity and go regularly to the regional temple or a sacred place that has been important to their families for generations. The whole town surrounding any temple is said to be sacred. Every tree, every stream near the precincts of the temple exudes this sense of sacredness. (Cited in Ibid., p. 185) Here the vision of the ancient texts in terms of divine immanence comes alive in the regular worship of the local temple. In addition to classical texts, contemporary Hindus also turn to established theological traditions to explore this spiritual connection to nature. Central to the Bhagavad Gita is the vision of the universe as the body of Krishna, who is the incarnation/​avatar of Visnu. The Srivaisnava theologians Ramanuja and Vedanta Desika elaborate on this principle as the cornerstone of how to understand the relationship between the Supreme Being and creation. For Ramanuja and Vedanta Desika, the universe is made up of nonsentient matter (achit), sentient beings (chit), and together these form the body (sarira) of Visnu. “Just as a human soul (chit) pervades a nonsentient body (achit), so, too, does Visnu pervade all souls, the material universe, 371

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and time” (Ibid., p. 185). Visnu, together with Sri/​Laksmi, constitutes the Creator of the universe, and the universe is the body of the Creator. Visnu and Sri, whom Srivaisnavas view as identical with the Upanisadic teaching of Brahman, both pervade the universe and transcend it. Through the teaching of the universe as the body of God, Srivaisnavas offer a way to balance the transcendence and immanence of the divine.The Creator is the source, the support, and the inner controller of every being that exists, nonsentient and sentient alike. No matter what word or linguistic handle we use to call a being, in fact, its innermost identity is Visnu. Therefore all terms like gods, men, yaksa [a celestial being], demon, beast, bird, tree, creeper, wood, stone, grass, jar and cloth, which have denotative power, formed of roots and suffixes, signify the objects which they name in ordinary parlance and through them they signify the individual selves embodied in them and through this second signification, their significance develops further till it culminates in Brahman, the highest Self dwelling as the inner controller of all individual selves. (Cited by Ibid., p. 186) A term such as “tree” first signifies the ordinary meaning of a tree; second, it refers to the individual self, the atman that is embodied through the tree; and third, it indicates Brahman, who is the innermost dwelling within the tree. Ramanuja’s theological understanding of the universe as God’s body is one theoretical way to address the general sacredness of nature that imbues Hindu thought and practice (cf. Sydnor’s essay in this volume). Like their Hindu counterparts, various contemporary Christians articulate a similar presence of the divine within all creation. Some contemporary Christians have begun to describe the principle of divine immanence through the philosophical category of panentheism. Christians have long affirmed that the Creator of the universe is present and active in human history. Also coursing through the Christian tradition is the perception that God dwells and vivifies the entirety of creation. Christians distinguish this from “pantheism,” in which the universe simply is God, by describing it as “panentheism,” which contends that God is immanent in creation just as God also transcends it. All things are in God, and God is in all things, without a simple identification of the two. God is the essence of being and becoming, the force of life itself. Yet this reality is at the same time more fully immanent than we can know. The transcendent Energy of the cosmos is also immanent, incarnate in the material world. (Moe-​Lobeda 2013, p. 144) The divine creator cannot be limited to the material world or to human understanding, but at the same time (and because of this transcendence) God is also fully immanent and present in all creatures. Panentheism can be traced through scriptural sources, classical thinkers, and modern theologians. For example, the first chapters of the scriptures, Genesis 1–​3, describe the waters and the Earth as “tov,” “good.”  This word carries not only an aesthetic sense of beauty but also a “moral goodness of a life-​generating nature,” in which God moves the development of life forward through creatures themselves (Ibid., p. 145). There is a Christian panentheistic sense of the divine in creatures in traditional theological figures such as Martin Luther, who declares that “the power of God…must be essentially present in all places even in the tiniest leaf ” (cited in Ibid., p. 143). Finally, panentheism appears prominently in modern theologians like Sallie McFague (1993), who argues that the world is God’s body, and in Leonardo Boff ’s proposal of 372

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divine cosmogenesis, in which God is the sacred energy that drives the evolutionary development of the cosmos (Boff 1997, p. 28). While all may not use the term panentheism, the heritage of recognizing divine immanence in the Christian tradition has roots in scripture and core theological doctrines that are being recovered in this time of ecological crises and continue to be expanded in various ways. Pope Francis, in his landmark encyclical (papal teaching) “Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home,” affirms that the doctrine of creation posits an intimate and indissoluble link between God and creation. Francis explores this theme in a variety of ways. For example, he describes a trinitarian understanding of creation. In the Christian tradition God is one but also a Trinity, one God in three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.The Father, Francis explains, is the source of all that exists, the foundation of love from which all creatures come. The Son unites himself not just to humanity, but to all creatures, all flesh, when he enters the womb of Mary. And the Spirit dwells in the heart of the universe and of all creatures and brings forth new life for all. Francis remarks that the Trinity is a divine communion of persons, a model of relationship. “The divine Persons are subsistent relations, and the world, created according to the divine model, is a web of relationships” (Francis 2015, p. 240). Just as the three persons of the Trinity exist in permanent and perfect relationship with each other, so too is creation filled with interlocking relationships. It is not simply that God created the world such that creatures are meant to live in relationship with each other. Rather, because the Trinity and trinitarian love dwell in the heart of all creation, every creature’s natural tendency to live in relationship with others reflects this presence. In this way, all of creation is a channel or conduit of God’s presence: “Nature as a whole not only manifests God but is also a locus of his presence. The Spirit of life dwells in every living creature and calls us to enter into relationship with him” (Ibid., p. 88). Other Christian theologians expound a Christian theology of creation centered in prominent classical and medieval thinkers to support a new ecological consciousness. Many have turned to the philosophically sophisticated doctrine of creation in Thomas Aquinas, which has proven fertile for articulating divine immanence and expounding the biblical vision of the interconnected community of creation. For Aquinas, “All beings are in fact creatures, sustained in life by the Creator of all that is…In this profoundly theocentric view, human beings participate with others in an interdependent world fundamentally oriented to God” (Johnson 2014, p. 268). Aquinas describes God as the “plenitude of being, sheer being itself, while all else participates in being which is given as a gift” (cited in Ibid., p. 144). God not only brings creatures into existence and empowers them to be, but God is being itself, the possibility of existence coming into being in each creature. In Aquinas’s Latin terminology, anything that exists is an ens, a being, a noun.Yet God is esse, the verb “to be,” being itself: “esse concentrates attention on God as the Verb…which evokes not a substance but infinite divine aliveness. God is to-​be. Think fire” (Ibid., p. 144). Aquinas uses the language of “participation” to describe the relationship between God as the source of being and finite creatures who owe their existence to God. Creatures exist because they participate in God. While God is being itself, all creatures have their being through their sharing in divine life. The language of creaturely participation in the Creator, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, allows contemporary Christians to speak of a deep and intimate relationship between the cosmos and the Creator. Participation affirms the quality of divine aliveness in all creatures yet also preserves the holy otherness, the transcendence of the Creator, as well. Similar to Sherma’s claim for a theology of identification between Brahman and atman, Christians turn to images of the Trinity or creaturely participation to balance divine immanence and transcendence. For both Hindus and Christians, the divine is a support not only for 373

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the unity of the universe but also for the multiplicity of creatures who inhabit it. In this way, the immanence of the Creator in creation, rightly understood, can become the basis for an ecological worldview.

Inherent goodness of nature and of nonhumans Both Hindu and Christian traditions feature a teaching of the divine entering into the world and becoming fully incarnate, which is another form of divine presence in the world. What is more, this divine presence instills an ontological or metaphysical property of intrinsic goodness and value in nonhuman creatures. Not only is the divine deeply immanent in creation, but this presence means that all beings, and not just humans, have a value that transcends their utility for other creatures. A prominent site for Hindu eco-​theology is the doctrine of the various incarnations or avataras of Visnu as an example of Hindu reverence for nonhuman life.Visnu remains the transcendent Creator, beyond the material world, and the “Supersoul” who exists within each creature. At the same time, he enters into the world to restore balance when dharma is threatened (see Bhagavad Gita 4:8). The classical list of ten incarnations, celebrated in Javadeya’s Gita Govinda, are representative of Visnu’s myriad, limitless incarnational forms throughout time. There are “more incarnations of Godhead than there are waves in the ocean,” so it is understood that Visnu incarnates into all species across all time (Prime 2002, p. 54). The traditional list of ten avataras, however, gives a sense of the progression of development in different lifeforms:  a fish, a turtle, a boar, and a half-​man/​half-​lion, as well as the widely celebrated instantiations where Visnu takes human forms, such as Rama in the Ramayana epic, or Krishna as described in the Bhagavad Gita. Together, they demonstrate “the close identification of Visnu with every aspect of the plurality of life on earth” (Ibid., p. 68). For Sherma, this sequence represents a progression of consciousness, but not an evolution that privileges human consciousness at the expense of plant and animal consciousness. Nonhumans are not soulless creatures who exist simply as part of human dominion, but instead are “ensouled beings on a journey of consciousness all their own” (Sherma 2015, p. 365). Within Visnu’s human incarnations, there also remains a human connection to nonhumans in this web of conscious life. For example, Rama is constantly attended by Hanuman, a monkey god who is the moral and religious exemplar of perfect devotion to the Lord; and Krishna plays with and is entertained by the cows of Vrindavana. Such examples lessen and transgress the customary sharp divide between human beings and nonhumans that we see in contemporary modern life.Visnu’s incarnations as nonhumans, and the close connection between nonhumans and his human avataras, elevate plants and animals. They are worthy of respect, which other scriptures enjoin, because of the presence of the divine in them. Sherma comments that “other forms of life are seen as part of a holarchical, not hierarchical chain of consciousness” (Ibid., p. 365; italics in the original). Rather than a hierarchical model, in which “lower” lifeforms exist to serve “higher” beings, a holarchical model posits every being as simultaneously both a part and a whole. Everything is a whole, distinct to itself and possessing worth simply for being what it is, yet at the same time is a part of a larger whole. Human consciousness may indeed surpass that of animals and plants, but these beings still have value due their own unique qualities. In addition to affirming a close connection between humans and nonhumans, the tradition of the avataras also discloses a warning of human hubris in presuming to elevate ourselves above nature. The story of Hiranyaksha recounts a powerful demon whom the demigods feared and who stalked the Earth in anger looking for someone to fight. This demon loved and craved gold. He mined the Earth in constant search for it—​so much so that the Earth lost her balance 374

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and plummeted to the bottom of the cosmic waters. Visnu saw the Earth’s distress and took the form of a boar, Varaha, to raise the Earth with his tusks. When Varaha battled and finally defeated Hiranyaksha, he was then able to save and restore the Earth to her proper position. Prime extrapolates from this story a comparison between the demon’s lust for gold and modern industrialists, who extract fossil fuels and minerals from the Earth with no attention to the Earth’s balance (Prime 2002, p. 58–​59). Vedic wisdom, which underscores the divine presence in creation and identifies the profound value of nonhuman life, may provide a counterweight to this modern obsession. Similarly, Christians have taken their tradition’s assertion of the general goodness of creation and extrapolated a principle of the goodness of nonhuman creatures. Historically the Catholic tradition has had a favorable view of “natural theology” and of discerning theological truths in the order of creation, while Protestant and Reformed traditions have been more skeptical. However, natural theology has seen a broad renewed contemporary interest (see Re Manning 2013). Pope Francis describes the depths of the Creator’s love for every creature, and in this way emphasizes the goodness and value of nonhumans beyond how they might serve human needs. For the Christian, God is Love, and so naturally, creation is steeped in the love of God. Creation “is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things” (Francis 2015, #77). Describing creation as the order of love offers the broadest possible view of the depth of God’s love. Every creature is thus the object of the Father’s tenderness, who gives it its place in the world. Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection. (Ibid., #77) The God who is revealed and manifested through creation is revealed to be the inexhaustible fountain of Love, a Creator who loves all that exists. Like the Hindu avatara traditions, Christians also describe the Creator becoming incarnate within creation, though now in the singular form of Jesus Christ. As the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is the Word through whom all things are made, and many Christians have appealed to a “deep incarnation,” in which the incarnation represents not only God becoming human but becoming Earthly, creaturely. In becoming human, God became a “complex Earth unit of minerals and fluids,” interconnected with the whole universe (Edwards 2006, p. 59). In his earthly life Jesus manifested a close relationship to nature, often drawing his disciples’ attention to the beauty of nature, to view it with the parental love and affection that the Father does. Following the death and resurrection of Jesus, the incarnation has a different role beyond Jesus’ personal attentiveness to beauty. Now, the incarnation attests to the theological presence of the resurrected Christ that pervades all creatures. The Scriptures describe Jesus as “risen and glorious, present throughout creation by his universal Lordship,” offering a transformative vision and understanding of nonhuman beings: “The creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end” (Francis 2015, #100). Indeed, the resurrection is a celebration of the whole of creation transformed in the light of the risen Christ (Edwards 2006, p. 57). In his human sojourn, Jesus called attention to the beauty and goodness of nonhuman creatures, and now in his eternal and resurrected state Christ fills nonhuman beings with his presence. The love of the Creator, the incarnation, and the resurrection all provide Christian theological grounds for respecting and reverencing nonhuman creation in itself, due to its profound connection to the divine. 375

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Cosmic and planetary order For both Hindus and Christians, the doctrine of divine presence in the world, and therefore the intrinsic goodness and value of nature and of nonhumans, is deepened by an understanding of the kind of order that the divine seeks in the cosmos. The creator does not merely dwell in creatures or in the cosmos as a whole. The sacred also infuses the cosmos with an established order of proper and healthy relationships: of creatures to the Creator, of creatures to each other, and of creatures to the cosmos as a whole. For Hindus this is dharma, that which supports and sustains the universe, while Christians speak in terms of natural law and divine providence. This underlying order grants a sacred identity to creatures in the particular creaturely way in which they exist and live. By being what they are, they are valuable, and they assist the orderly functioning of the universe. Humans beings, in turn, are meant to contribute to this order through their religious, social, and personal responsibilities. In turn, a well-​functioning planetary order protects humanity as well. Many Hindus appeal to the doctrine of dharma for a theological correlate to ecological order. While philosophical concepts like Brahman and moksa receive much of the attention from the learned, the principles of dharma communicated through epic stories, devotional songs, and daily practices are accessible to most people (Narayanan 2001, p. 181). In the Puranas and the epics, there are close connections between dharma and cycles of destruction. The failure to uphold dharma leads to cyclical and cosmic breakdowns, while fulfilling dharmic obligations leads to flourishing (Ibid., p. 180). The Mahabharata epic confirms the centrality of dharma: “Dharma exists for the general welfare (abhyudaya) of all living beings; hence, that by which the welfare of all living creatures IS sustained, that for sure is Dharma” (Dwivedi 2000, p.  13, emphasis in original). Dharma exists for the well-​being of all, and whatever actions, whether personal or collective, uphold the welfare of all creatures, can be considered dharma. Dharma encompasses both cosmic and moral order. Dharma entails a sense of cosmic order, that which binds and sustains the universe, but it also includes a person’s particular place in the cosmos and the moral and religious duties incumbent on that person. A dharmic approach to ecology connects the sacred presence of the divine undergirding the universe to an individual’s personal responsibilities, according to their age, gender, social class, and personal capacities. Divine immanence connotes an ethical imperative for humans to live in accordance with dharma and to work for the welfare of all beings. “Veneration, respect, and acceptance of the presence of God in nature is required of Hindus in order to maintain and protect the natural harmonious relationship between human beings and nature” (Ibid., p. 5). The order of nature conveys an ethical injunction to honor the ecosystemic order of the planet. One classical image of dharmic ecology is the Earth as our Mother, and all creatures as part of one family.The famous Prithvi Sukta of the Atharva Veda contains scores of hymns that praise Mother Earth for her beauty, loveliness, generosity, and utility, and they beseech her for kindness and gentleness.Verse 11 extols: O Mother Earth! Sacred are thy hills, snowy mountains, and deep forests. Be kind to us and bestow upon us happiness. May you be fertile, arable, and nourisher of all. May you continue supporting people of all races and nations. May you protect us from your anger (natural disasters). And may no one exploit and subjugate your children. (Cited in Ibid., p. 10) This verse combines a dimension of the sacred in all creatures and in all places, such as hills and forests, with a sacred order of nature. Mother Earth provides for what creatures need 376

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through her fertility and thus supports (dharma) all nations. Together with other verses, the Prithvi Sukta recognizes that the order that sustains all beings is not immutable, and that humans must live within its boundaries. Dharma affirms the underlying unity of all life and the cosmic body that forms the foundation for human society. The Earth is a goddess who bestows wealth but who also deserves our respect, and there is an inherent duty to care for her (Sherma 2015, p. 362). Dharma means performing the duties that are common to all and those that are particular to each, all with a view to the common good of the whole over a merely private and individual good. All creatures who belong to the family of Mother Earth will long to be a dharmic member of this family, and so contribute to the common good of the family: “A dharmic citizen should act for sarva-​hita: enhancing the common good of all together” (Dwivedi 2000, p. 12). A temple at Tirumala-​Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh has made this connection between dharma and ecological restoration clear. For centuries trees were cut extensively throughout India, but temples and other religious centers are now at the forefront of reforestation. The temple at Tirumala-​Tirupati established a nursery and “encourages pilgrims to take home tree saplings as prasada [blessed religious offering]” (Narayanan 2001, p. 189). The temple also runs a program whereby people donate money to plant trees, and in turn they are honored by being allowed a special viewing of the deity in the inner shrine.The temple communicates the religious importance of these efforts by reinterpreting a central passage from the Laws of Manu, which states, “Dharma, when protected, protects us.” Instead, a sign at the temple proclaims, “Trees, when protected, protect us” (Ibid., p. 190). The temple thus communicates the intimate relationship between the dharmic order of religious obligations and the dharmic order of ecosystemic health and sustainable well-​being. Many Hindu theologians point to the significance of ahimsa (nonviolence) as a distinctively Hindu contribution to humanity’s vocation to support cosmic and planetary order. Ahimsa was considered an essential moral virtue for living in accordance with dharma in the various Hindu spiritual traditions that focused on renunciation and liberation. Today, ahimsa best demonstrates respect for nonhuman species (Sherma 2015, p. 365–​66). Others turn to Mohandas Gandhi for his spiritual–​political understanding of the Hindu tradition and of ahimsa as the guiding moral philosophy of his life. Gandhi took particular pride in Hinduism’s protection of the cow: The cow to me means the entire subhuman world. Man [sic] through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives…Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God…Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. (Cited by Prime 2002, p. 89) Ahimsa to cows and to all nonhuman creatures, for Gandhi, represents one of Hinduism’s greatest moral examples of respecting ecological order. The Christian tradition, through its scriptures and doctrines of creation, also insists on the moral order of creation. Pope Francis underscores the interconnected nature of creation and the human duty to protect it: “It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected… Just as the different aspects of the planet—​physical, chemical, and biological—​are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand” (Francis 2015, #138). Similar to the image of Mother Earth in the Prithvi Sukta, Francis offers the metaphor of a family as a way to conceive of these various interrelated and interdependent networks: “As part of the universe, called into being by one Father, all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family, a sublime communion” (Ibid., #89). As we 377

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saw earlier, the Creator dwells deeply in creation. For Christians a trinitarian creator is the perfect expression of the interconnectedness that flows through creation. A critical component of Pope Francis’s understanding of the communion of creation and of the unseen bonds that tie the universe together is the intimate connection between the suffering of the Earth and the suffering of the poor. One way he addresses this is through the concept of “integral ecology.” We cannot underestimate the degree to which all things are interconnected, and thus we must link nonhumans, who are customarily excluded from our moral vision, with the millions of human beings who have been systematically marginalized from power and progress: We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (Ibid., #49, italics in original) Just as human actions have disturbed the planetary order of the climate and of biodiversity, human choices are at the root of much human economic suffering. Like Hindu ahimsa, the Christian moral response to the interconnectedness of nature must therefore aim not only at ecosystemic sustainability but also at the relief of the suffering of the poor. In my own work, I  have proposed an ecological expansion of the principles of Catholic social thought based on the theological doctrine of creation and of the divine immanence of the Creator within the cosmos. Catholic social thought is rooted in scripture and tradition and outlines a series of ethical principles designed to promote justice, cultivate virtues, and to adjudicate conflicts that arise in the life of societies. For example, the core principles of Catholic social thought are human dignity and the common good: each person has an intrinsic dignity and value in herself, but she also is meant to belong to a broader community, which has its own intrinsic dignity and value. There is an intrinsic goodness to each person and a common good of the community to which she belongs. Once expanded ecologically, these core principles become creaturely dignity, the intrinsic value of every creature for being what it is, and the cosmic common good, namely the well-​being of the entire community of creation.The cosmic common good affirms not only creaturely dignity, but the dignity of the various wholes to which creatures belong. For humans this will include all the various levels of human society, but it also includes those biophysical wholes of which we are a part:  ecosystems, bioregions, Earth, and cosmos. [The cosmic common good] calls for the inclusion of the Earth as a whole, its multifarious ecosystems, and the myriad plants, animals, and creatures that live in them within the circle of moral consideration. (Scheid 2016, p. 41) Catholic social thought outlines not only a moral vision of the cosmic common good, but also the kinds of virtues that ought to accompany this vision. For example, an ecologically oriented cosmic common good would encourage cultivating the virtue of Earth solidarity. Solidarity represents a personal commitment to the common good, a determination to act not just for oneself but for the broader community. Earth solidarity then would focus its attention on “(1) all human beings, and in a particular way those most affected by environmental degradation; (2) all plant and animal species; and (3) the ecosystems themselves that sustain and support a diversity of creatures” (Ibid., p. 91). Earth solidarity “encourages us to see ourselves as parts of 378

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a greater whole and therefore to affirm our essential belonging to a cosmic common good, and to enact those relationships with justice” (Ibid., p. 95). Similar to Hindu ahimsa and Pope Francis’s articulation of an integral ecology, these principles of Catholic social thought insist on a preferential option for the poor, incorporating concerns of justice for humanity and for nonhumans as well. Christians also continue to root their commitments to the health and well-​being of the land in sacred texts. The Hebrew scriptures reflect a deeply agricultural worldview that depicts humanity in radical continuity with the land and confers onto human beings a clear vocation and mandate to protect nonhuman creation. In the very first couple of chapters of Genesis, there is a salient kinship between human beings and the land: “And YHWH God formed the human being [‘adam], dust from the fertile soil [‘adamah]” (Genesis 2:7, translated by Davis 2009, p. 29). The human person is not merely formed in this place, but derived from the soil, reminding the community that the land comes first in God’s relationship to human beings. A similar connection between humanity and the land arises in the second creation account in the second chapter of Genesis. The Lord places the human person in the garden, in the common translation, “to till and to care for it.” Yet the Hebrew words offer a more distinctive and emphatic sense of humanity’s responsibility to the land because they are much broader than agricultural terms. The second term, “to care for,” in Hebrew is s-​m-​r, which connotes keeping and abiding by moral guidelines. The first word, translated as “to till,” is ‘-​b-​d, and it “normally means to work for someone, divine or human, as a servant, slave, or worshiper” (Davis 2009, p. 29). Thus, human beings are meant to work and to cultivate the land, but also to serve its needs, as a servant aims to please a master. This Hebrew term connotes worship of the Lord; noting of course that the Hebrew texts never propose the land itself to be worshipped, Davis does allow a parallel, that humans respect and humbly serve the land. Given the vast similarities between Hindu and Christian traditions in affirming the immanence of the divine in creation and of the goodness of planetary order, Christians may perhaps consider the Hindu approaches of speaking of Earth as Mother and seeing mountains as sacred. Human beings are called to keep the garden, to learn from it, and to respect its limits: “The land instantiates limits that God has set; we encounter it as a fellow creature to be respected and even revered” (Ibid., p. 30–​31). The Hebrew scriptures enjoin a humility about human wisdom and the need to learn from the land, as well as a healthy materiality that celebrates humanity’s dependence on and service to the land. The Creator has inscribed an order into creation, and in particular into the land, that humanity must learn to observe, respect, and serve.

Conclusion As Hindus and Christians continue to examine their traditions and critically reevaluate them in light of global ecological crises, dialogue between them can stimulate further reflection (see, for example, Scheid 2016; Voss Roberts 2017). In some ways, their near unanimity on certain theological themes provides a foundation for a shared moral vision, and perhaps even for joint social action on particular projects. Both Hindus and Christians generally affirm the radical presence of the Creator in creation, and they approach this theme in complementary ways that invite mutual exploration. Hindus can investigate the philosophical categories of panentheism or of creaturely participation in the divine, as Anantanand Rambachan does in this volume and elsewhere, while Christians such as Sallie McFague and others may be intrigued by the prospect of considering the Earth or the universe as God’s body (McFague 1993). Similarly, both traditions articulate forms of divine incarnation and reverence for nonhumans, and they both attribute a religious significance to pursuing and maintaining planetary order. 379

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At the same time, the differences between these traditions are also worth exploring. For Christians, the radical continuity of life expressed through Brahman, atman, and related ideas poses a challenge to the traditional emphasis on human distinctiveness. Many Christians have lamented the legacy of anthropocentrism, and the Hindu tradition’s minimization of human difference extends this critique further. Perhaps Christians will be drawn to challenge anthropocentrism by moving closer to a Hindu atmanocentrism that affirms the radical goodness of all creatures, human and nonhuman alike. For Hindus, the Christian tradition makes a stronger link between ecological crises and the scourge of global poverty, connecting the moral call to protect the Earth with the call to work for justice for the poor. This leads to a stronger critique of modern economic systems and the rampant consumerism and pollution that come with them. In India, the gravitational pull of economic development is powerful, and religious voices may not be able to reshape it effectively. Yet perhaps Christian principles of social justice, which call for reform on behalf of the Earth and the human poor, might ally with Hindu advocacy for dharmic balance as the forces of economic growth march onwards. Hindu–​Christian dialogue on the sacred presence in creation and the goodness of nature will only grow in importance as humanity draws on its religious traditions to face the planetary challenges of the future.

Bibliography Boff, L. 1997. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Davis, E.F. 2009. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dwivedi, O.P. 2000.“Dharmic Ecology.” In Chapple, C.K. and Tucker, M.E. (eds.), Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 3–​22. Edwards, D. 2006. Ecology at the Heart of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Francis. 2015. Laudato Si’:  On Care for Our Common Home. Available at http://​w2.vatican.va/​content/​ francesco/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​papa-​francesco_​20150524_​enciclica-​laudato-​si.html. Accessed April 20, 2020. Johnson, E.A. 2014. Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. McFague, S. 1993. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Moe-​Lobeda, C. 2013. Resisting Structural Evil:  Love as Ecological-​Economic Vocation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Narayanan, V. 2001. “Water, Wood, and Wisdom:  Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Traditions.” Daedalus 130(4): 179–​206. Nelson, L. 1998. “The Dualism of Nondualism: Advaita Vedanta and the Irrelevance of Nature.” In Nelson, L. (ed.). Purifying the Earthly Body of God. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 61–​88. Prime, R. 2002. Vedic Ecology:  Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century. Novato, CA:  Mandala Publishing. Re Manning, R. (ed.). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheid, D.P. 2016. The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Sherma, R. 2015.“A Hindu Response to Laudato Si’.” In Cobb, J.B. and Castuera, I. (eds.). For Our Common Home: Process-​Relational Responses to Laudato Si’. Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, pp. 358–​68. Voss Roberts, M. 2017. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

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32 COMPETING PHILOSOPHIES AND THEOLOGIES OF THE HUMAN PERSON Ankur Barua

The clusters of concepts, experiences, and practices subsumed under the categories of “Hinduism” and “Christianity” are shaped by distinctive understandings of individuals as pilgrims who work their way toward transcendental completion from within their socio-​ historical locations in an imperfect world. While the notion that human existence is to be viewed in terms of a temporal journey toward the eternal goal of perfection recurs across various Hindu and Christian systems, it is articulated through specific concepts relating to the nature of the human person, which are drawn from scriptural materials such as the Upaniṣads or the Bible. If the essential core of the human person is transcendentally perfect, the spiritual goal would involve a recovery of this primordial purity by excising worldly accretions, whereas for an account in which the entire human person is significantly, if not utterly, damaged or distorted, spiritual fulfillment would require a process of reformation in and through worldly existence. There is, then, a deep correlation in Hindu and Christian styles of “theological anthropology” between, on the one hand, techniques of spiritual emancipation and, on the other hand, conceptions of the human person. The question, “How may I be liberated or saved or redeemed?” is logically intertwined with the question, “Who or what am I?”

The creaturely dependence of the human person The pivotal doctrine which holds together diverse aspects of Christian belief, living, and practice is that the human person is part of a creaturely order, where “creaturely” is to be understood in the technically precise sense of being produced out of sheer nothingness (ex nihilo). God did not produce the human person out of the being of God or out of any pre-​existing recalcitrant material that God had to work with—​there is no substantival continuity between God and the human person who is called into being from nothing (Oliver 2017, p. 35). On this understanding, human beings remain existentially dependent at all times on their transcendental source of being, and if the divine preservation were to be withdrawn at any moment they would lapse back into nothingness. While all mainstream Christian traditions affirm creation ex nihilo, there is historically a sharp divergence between theologians who view the soul as the center of spiritual gravity in the human person and theologians who claim that the mind–​body–​spirit complex holistically

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constitutes the human person (Farris 2017). The former, whom we label as the “Augustinians,” read the biblical materials through (modified) Platonist lenses and regard the soul (anima, mens) as substantivally distinct from the mutable body. While the soul, as part of the created realm, is not “eternal” sensu stricto, it enjoys, unlike the body, an immortality which is dependent on God’s continuous existential support.The latter, whom we label as the “Thomists,” because they derive their understanding of human personhood from the theological writings of Thomas Aquinas, argue from Aristotelian perspectives for a “hylomorphic” understanding of the psychophysiological complex of the human individual, which is to say that it is a compound of the body (as material structure) and the soul (as formal constitution). The soul is the seat of certain powers, ranging from vegetative to sensitive to appetitive to rational, and through its rational faculties—​intellect and will—​individuals respond to God. The “Augustinians” and the “Thomists” have to grapple with two sets of problems which are logical obverses of each other. The “Augustinians” can point to the substantival soul as the bearer of personal identity between this life and the hereafter, and also make sense of biblical texts (for ­example 2 Corinthians 5:6–​8), which suggest that something continues to exist in the so-​called intermediate state between death and the final resurrection (Badham 1976, p. 88). However, the crucial challenge for the “Augustinians”—​as for the Cartesians centuries later—​is to provide a coherent account of soul–​body interaction, given that these two substantival entities are radically distinct. The “Thomists,” in contrast, regard the soul as the substantial form enlivening the body, and thus they have a clearer explanation of how human psychosomatic unity is established, and they can speak more readily in terms of the resurrection of the whole human person. However, the “Thomists” too emphasize that the soul is not constituted of physical stuff and does not perish at the dissolution of the body. Therefore, the difference between the “Augustinians” and the “Thomists” on this point should not be overemphasized; for Aquinas, the soul remains separated from the body in the interim and becomes united with its body at the final resurrection when it again becomes a full human person. Conversely, the “Augustinian” distinction should not be viewed as a sort of radical dualism where the human person is exhaustively identified with the spiritual principle to the exclusion of its material accompaniment. Thus, Augustine writes in a letter that the “sweet partnership” between the soul and the body is so intimate that even though the saints know that they shall receive their bodies in a glorified state at the resurrection, they do not wish to suffer the separation of the soul from its body (Augustine 2003, letter 140, 6). Much turns in these theological debates on the exegetical-​conceptual readings of key terms such as nephesh, basar, and ruah (Hebrew), and psyche and pneuma (Greek), whether as a distinct spiritual entity which is re-​embodied at the resurrection or as simply the principle of life. Equally crucial is the phrase “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon), with which Paul says human beings will be raised. On the one hand, “flesh and blood” will not enter the resurrected world, and, on the other hand, the resurrected individuals are not disincarnate entities but “bodily” spirits (1 Corinthians 15:35–​51). From broadly “Thomist” perspectives, in biblical texts such as the letters of Paul, the vocabulary of “body,” “soul,” and “spirit” refers not to ontological distinctions but to modal variations of how human beings respond to God. Thus, to the extent that the whole human person lives away from God, it is in a “fleshly” (sarkikos) state; and to the extent that it is infused with the Spirit of God, it lives “spiritually” (Ziesler 1991, pp. 77–​80). Various strands of contemporary Christian theology too have markedly physicalist motifs, and they reject the concept of a substantial soul partly on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the conclusions of scientific and philosophical fields such as neuroanatomy, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and so on. Theologians who seek to respond to the charge that appeals to the soul are ontologically extravagant often argue that human consciousness, moral capacities, 382

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and spiritual responsivity should be seen not as located in a substantially distinct soul but as higher-​order “emergent” properties of a human body, with its complex organization and multiple levels, where this emergence takes place through the operation of natural laws under God’s providential care (Corrington 1996). Even if Christian theologians thus remain divided on the question of “who is the human person?” there is a greater degree of consensus on the theme that the human person is in a state of spiritual corruption. In this matter, they have sought to tread a fine line by, on the one hand, rejecting the Manichaean claim that the material world is intrinsically evil and the human body is an infernal prison within which the spiritual principle is incarcerated, and, on the other hand, affirming that the human person is in a state of estrangement from God and in need of reconciliation. According to Genesis, human beings have undergone a rupture, through the fall of Adam, from their divine source of being, goodness, and value. Nevertheless, God also steadfastly seeks the reconciliation of the world, and by turning human beings away from their sinful immersion into themselves graciously draws them to God through the atoning death of Christ. In writing about how Christ has brought about a decisive transformation in the lives of those who have become incorporated into the church, Paul invokes the metaphor (Romans 6:15–​18) of a transfer from one owner (servility to sin) to another (the new life under the grace of Christ). A crucial theme in this process of reformation is that human beings were created “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26–​27), which has often been interpreted in terms of the human moral and spiritual capacities for relationality, both with fellow human beings and with the supremely personal reality of God. For much of Christian doctrinal history, the Genesis narrative has generated three ponderous problems over which rivers of ink—​and occasionally blood—​have been spilled. Firstly, those who locate the capacities for relationality primarily in the “soul” tend toward the mystical-​contemplative dimensions of Christian lifeforms, whereas those who highlight the social expressions of this relationality emphasize the activist-​liberationist impetus of the gospel. On some Christian theological readings of Genesis, the scriptural claim that the human individual images the triune God is to be understood in terms of our capacity for cultivating rich patterns of relationality, both “vertically” toward the divine creator and “horizontally” with human persons and other dimensions of the created world. While these spatial metaphors do not point to real distinctions in the wider milieus of Christian living, which are shaped by the commandment to love God and the neighbor (Mark 12: 30–​31), the doctrinal, experiential, and institutional histories of Christianity indicate distinctive stylistic variations on the cultivations of relationalities. Thus, the vocabularies of “sin,” “love,” and “redemption” are more likely to be situated in the meditative contexts of the vita contemplativa for the former group, and in the socio-​historical struggles of the vita activa for the second group. Secondly, for the greater part of the last two millennia, the narrative has been taken as a literally true account involving the first parents of humankind, who bequeathed to posterity the debilitating taint of original sin. Some contemporary theologians, however, read them as allegorical accounts of how human beings are socialized into sinful structures, and how they replicate their patterns in and through their own existence. Thirdly, one of the most acrimonious debates in Christian doctrine relates to the extent or the degree to which the image of God in humanity has been vitiated, as highlighted, for instance, by the famous Barth–​Brunner debate (Brunner 1946). Barth had argued that the image of God in the human person is completely effaced, and there is no “point of contact” where the divine Word can touch humanity in redemptive action. In reply, Brunner distinguished between the formal and the material aspect of the image:  through the first, which human beings still retain, they are responsible subjects capable of entering into 383

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relationships with God, while the second, which has been completely lost, refers to the justitia originalis which Adam initially possessed. This somewhat neo-​scholastic distinction between form and matter reflects the emphasis, shared broadly across Reformed and Catholic doctrinal worlds, that the human person does not have an ontological “base” that is already divinized and thus not in need of redemption. Therefore, if the language of “deification” or “divinization” is used with respect to human beings, such terminology must be carefully understood in the strict sense that it is Christ who, through his sanctifying grace, adopts them and gives them participation of his divinity. Employed thus to speak of humanity participating in God or attaining a mode of spiritual likeness to God, such vocabularies are found in Greek theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa (Russell 2004). The human person, then, remains a “natural” being who is reformed through “supernatural” aid. Precisely this nature–​supernature distinction is the site of intense theological disputes. The doctrinal stress on the corruption suffered by humanity is traceable to the anti-​Pelagian texts of the later Augustine (411–​430 CE) who argued that the human will (voluntas) is so gravely wounded that it cannot, on its own, even seek divine help until it has first been healed by the grace of Christ who “prepares” the will. The notion of “preparation,” inherited by various configurations of Reformed doctrine, raises the specter of theological determinism where human beings seem to be reduced to the status of mere puppets in a divine play. Augustine continued to insist throughout his theological career that he defended the free choice of the will, and in particular, he firmly opposed the notion of the “compulsion of the will” (cogi velle). Thus he says, developing a form of “theological compatibilism,” that the saints who have been timelessly “predestined” to receive divine grace are not coerced but are inclined to come to Christ, for their wills have already been oriented toward Christ. By and large, the Protestant traditions, on the basis of the Reformed doctrine of sola gratia, tend toward the Augustinian–​Calvinist–​Barthian notion that the human heart does not possess any “natural” resources through which to move toward Christ, and they share a theological suspicion of “mystical” forms of spirituality. In contrast, some Roman Catholic theologians have argued that the realm of nature, though it contains varying degrees of error because of original sin, encompasses certain grace-​filled elements. For instance, some of the writings of Karl Rahner are shaped by the dual affirmation that the “natural” human person can be regenerated solely through the unmerited grace of the transcendent God, and that the God of “supernatural” grace remains immanently present in a fundamentally good world (Rahner 1961).

The ontological divinity of the human person As we move into Hindu worldviews, we begin by highlighting some of their axiomatic presuppositions, which are derived from scriptural texts such as the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. The earliest forms of religious imagination regarding world-​production are related to the Vedic sacrificial ritual, which is often regarded as the cosmogonic instrument which regenerates the universe and preserves the deep interlinkages (bandhu) across the human and the divine orders. A key theme underlying the dynamics of Vedic sacrifice is that between the divine realm and the human world there is no sharp ontological rift or gulf; rather, the two domains are interrelated through various forms of ritual exchange. The Upaniṣads view the universe as an intricately woven web of crisscrossing threads which run through the human person and the cosmic realms, and the key to attaining immortality and bliss is to intuitively apprehend the esoteric homologies. A key text is the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (6.2.1–​3), which is effectively an affirmation of the Parmenidean metaphysical principle “nothing comes from nothing” (ex nihilo nihil fit): “[M]‌y 384

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dear, in the beginning this was being alone, one only, without a second.” By recapitulating the conceptual steps from the Vedic bandhu to the Upaniṣadic affirmation of the priority or primacy of being over non-​being, we can understand why some of the Vedāntic commentators who sought to elaborate the production (sṛṣṭi) of the world out of the divine reality, Brahman, worked with a causal theory called the “pre-​existence of the effect in the cause” (satkāryavāda). According to this conception, which is a denial of the possibility that being—​and thus, the human person—​can emerge from utter nothingness, the “effect” is not substantivally different from the “cause” but is ontologically continuous with its causal substrate. A leitmotif of certain strands of Hindu religious literature and symbolic art is the utter instability, vanity, and transience of human existence that is constantly being pushed toward death. The Yogavāsiṣṭha, for instance, is a veritable compendium of somber images analogous to the ones that recur through the medieval Christian tradition of memento mori: human life is as fragile (bhaṅgura) as a drop of water dangling on the tip of a leaflet, and as evanescent as the rolling waves in the sea, the fleeting clouds of autumn, and the light of an oil-​less lamp (I.14.1; I.14.6). Another crucial theme which underpins the Hindu theological traditions is that as individuals progress toward liberation (mokṣa), they move in and out of temporary residences in heavens and hells which are structured by karmic order, in contradistinction to mainstream Christian doctrine which sees human existence as lived out in a single lifetime in this world. The Bhāgavata-​Purāṇa (VI.1.45) notes that the same individual enjoys the fruits of the same meritorious (dharma) or demeritorious (adharma) act in the next world in the same manner and to the same extent according to the manner and the extent to which that act has been performed in this world. The theistic Hindu traditions would read the Bhagavad Gītā’s description (at 2.22) of the “mechanism” of reincarnation as indicating metaphysically real processes; just as a person casts off worn-​out garments and puts on new ones, likewise the embodied self casts away worn-​out bodies and takes on new ones. However, two influential strands of Hindu thought, experience, and practice—​Sāṃkhya-​ Yoga and Advaita Vedānta—​make the somewhat startling declaration that, in truth, the human person is intrinsically liberated and has never fallen into the round of worldly reincarnation (saṃsāra). According to the metaphysical-​soteriological scheme which the texts of the Sāṁkhya and the Yoga traditions broadly share, worldly phenomena are a product of the association between, on the one hand, the insentient principle of prakṛti and, on the other hand, the pure spirit (puruṣa). The dynamic evolutions of prakṛti into the objects of the everyday world are composed of three “qualities” (guṇas) and are finite, temporal, and mutable, while the puruṣa is inactive, disengaged, and immutable. An analysis of the Sāṁkhyakārikā (henceforth SK) reveals a conceptual tension between its declaration, at the beginning of the text, that human beings desire to know the means to the removal of the threefold suffering that they undergo, and the affirmation that the pure spirit, which is non-​active, eternal, and disengaged, is always already liberated. Strictly speaking, the pure spirit is neither bound to saṁsāra nor does it engage in any process of acquiring liberation from its afflictions.Therefore, human beings who are trying to be liberated should gain the insight that they are essentially the immutable pure spirit and, metaphysically speaking, they are never immersed in empirical suffering (Burley 2007). Thus SK 62 unequivocally declares that there is, in fact, no one who is bound, or released, or wanders; rather, it is prakṛti that wanders, is bound, and moves toward liberation. The text therefore elaborates various analogies to explain the “appearance” (iva) of bondage and liberation, a crucial exegetical device that also structures, as we will note, Advaita Vedānta’s attempts to explain how the embodied individual seems to be bound to the world. A defining feature of the Advaita Vedānta universe too is the seemingly counter-​intuitive claim that the human person who progresses toward the goal of liberation begins to comprehend, 385

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along the way, its own metaphysical unreality as well as the unreality of this process. This conceptual universe is shaped by two axiomatic equivalences between impermanence and dependence, on the one hand, and metaphysical unreality, on the other hand: Axiom of Impermanence (AOI): If x is transient, x is substantivally unreal. Axiom of Dependence (AOD): If x is metaphysically dependent, x is substantivally unreal. Empirical personhood is structured by transience and is also, according to the Upaniṣadic exegesis of Advaita, seen to be metaphysically dependent on Brahman, which is pure consciousness, and thus is to be regarded as metaphysically unreal. Therefore, somewhat paradoxically, the true “person” transcends all personalist categories.Thus, the Gauḍapādīya-​kārikā, a central text in the Advaita traditions, states (at 2.32) that, from the transcendental standpoint (paramārthatā), there is no destruction or origination, nobody is bound to the world and nobody strives for liberation, and neither is there anyone who is an aspirant after liberation or anyone who is liberated. The Sāṁkhya problem of affirming the reality of the prākṛtic realm’s movements toward liberation alongside the transcendental perfection of the immutable puruṣa is re-​formulated in traditional Advaita through the device of the two standpoints of the empirical (vyāvahārika) and the transcendental (pāramārthika).We find Śaṃkara, the classical systematizer of Advaita, moving between these two registers when he responds, in his commentary on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad II.1.20, to the argument that if Brahman is the only reality, there would be no culture of teaching and learning about the unity of Brahman. He replies that if the objector means to suggest that when the transcendent Brahman is realized as the only reality, there will be no more instruction or learning, this is his position as well. However, if the objector claims that instruction is useless even before the realization of Brahman, this assertion should be rejected because it contradicts the assumption of aspirants to liberation that instruction in Brahman guides them to the final end. While SK 18 affirms a plurality of finite spirits, Advaita’s central thesis is that all multiplicities are merely conceptual fictions (māyā), which lead the embodied self away from the realization of its essential non-​duality with the impartite Brahman beyond all descriptions (Ramachandran 1969). Their divergent metaphysical views notwithstanding, both Advaita and Sāṁkhya-​Yoga, affirm that the prākṛtic mind, since it is not substantivally real and is ever subject to transformations, has the peculiar ability to dissolve itself toward the attainment of liberation. The Advaita traditions allow the possibility of an individual overcoming death through an intuitive realization of one’s non-​duality (advaita) with Brahman, and of becoming liberated even while embodied (jīvanmukta) in the here and now, and such enlightened sages live out their embodiment till their corporeal form passes away at physical death (Fort 1998). According to the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi (434–​35), an Advaitic text, such a jīvanmukta remains unperturbed and maintains an attitude of equanimity throughout pleasant or painful experiences and has no ideas of interior or exterior because the mind is engrossed in tasting the bliss of Brahman. Somewhere in the metaphysical proximity of the Advaita and the Sāṃkhya-​Yoga traditions lie the complex Tantric traditions, where the world is viewed as a unified system which pulsates between outflowing and reabsorption of the supreme consciousness, and the body of the practitioner is the “site” for the return of the absolute which has descended into the phenomenal world. However, for human beings who are caught up in this dynamic flow, this return is an arduous path which involves “a forceful (haṭha) reversal (ulaṭā) of what are, in mortal creatures, irreversible tendencies (entropy, aging, disease, death)” (White 1996, p. 263). Tantric practices usually rejected AOI and AOD, and they shared a common goal of perfect autonomy, omniscience, superhuman powers, and bodily immortality in a world that they viewed as the locale 386

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of human self-​realization. Thus, the Nāth-​yogins, who emerged in the thirteenth century CE, trace their lineage to eighty-​four immortal demigods (siddhas), and their teachings are a combination of Tantric beliefs and yogic practices.They seek to purify their bodies, and through this perfection overcome the cycles of rebirth and attain immortality within the world.

The dependent reality of the human person Rāmānuja’s theological worldview, which is constructed partly as a response to Śaṃkara’s Advaita, is centered on the Lord Viṣṇu-​Nārāyaṇa, the supreme person (puruṣottama), who is superior to both the finite conscious self (cit) and the mutable physical objects (acit) (Lipner 1986). The conceptual pivot of this theological system, which does not accept AOI and AOD, is the term “body” (śarīra) which Rāmānuja defines as any substance that a conscious being is capable of completely controlling and supporting for its own purposes, and whose essential form (svarūpa) is to be the accessory of that being by standing in a subordinate position to it (Thibaut 1904, pp.  422–​24). On the basis of a hierarchical symbolism of the Lord’s embodiment in the world, Rāmānuja affirms that the transcendentally perfect Lord, who is the supreme self and the abode of illimitable qualities, is at the same time the immanent ruler or inner controller (antaryāmī) of conscious and non-​conscious reality, which is the divine body. However, not all embodied selves are actually able to see the world as such; the self ’s current state of bondage to the cycle of rebirths (saṃsāra) is a consequence of its failure, in its previous lives, to understand its true nature as non-​prākṛtic, and when it is closely bound to a prākṛtic body in this birth it begins to confuse, all over again, its essential form with what is not itself (anātman). By withdrawing itself from the impermanence of the mutable prākṛtic world, including that of its own body, the self gradually becomes more concentrated in itself; and by realizing its essential nature as the body of the Lord, it begins to see the whole world as an unbroken reality pervaded by the Lord. Assisted by the Lord’s gracious assistance (prasāda), it begins to be stabilized by developing devotional love (bhakti) of the Lord; and by acquiring the capacity to regulate its own prākṛtic body, it also comes to see the whole world as the glorious body of the Lord (Sampatkumaran 1985, p. 3). For Rāmānuja, the pilgrim self which has finally arrived in the hereafter at the abode of Viṣṇu-​Nārāyaṇa may be with or without a body, according to its wish. When it chooses to be with a body, the released self produces it through its own will and freely moves throughout the various worlds that are included in the sphere of the Lord’s sport (līlā). A development of this theme of the perfected body can be found in the theological aesthetics of medieval Bengali Vaiṣṇavism, which speaks of the meditative body (siddha-​rūpa) that the practitioners inhabit while imaginatively participating in the cosmic sport of Kṛṣṇa as the same eternal body that that they will possess in the hereafter.The tradition claims that each of us has a “double” in the heavenly world of which we are often unaware, and the aim of bhakti is to shift our empirical selves to the siddha-​rūpa which is our true identity. These spiritual practices are geared toward the cultivation of a selflessly pure love (prīti) for Kṛṣṇa, by mentally situating oneself in the dramatic roles either of one of the celestial companions of Kṛṣṇa who are eternally perfected, or of a servant of these intimate companions.Therefore, eternal reality has a dramatic structure and religious life is an ongoing immersion in its dramatic narratives. Some present-​day Vaiṣṇavas believe that the siddha-​rūpa is a supernatural (aprākṛta) body for the purified self, which consists of a particle of light (jyotir-​aṃśa) from Kṛṣṇa and is characterized by consciousness and bliss.This siddha-​ rūpa will conform to one’s emotional role (bhāva) in the cosmic drama: for instance, devotees (bhaktas) who assume on earth the role of a friend of Kṛṣṇa will receive in the afterlife the form of a cowherd (gopa) and the dress suitable to that form. The visualized enactment of one’s role 387

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in the divine sport of Kṛṣṇa can, on occasion, have dramatic consequences for the devotees. For instance, a certain renunciant from the early eighteenth century, Kṛṣṇadāsa Bābā, had the siddha-​ rūpa of a young cowgirl (gopī) serving Rādhā, the eternal consort of Kṛṣṇa. Once, he became so absorbed in the service of placing bangles on Rādhā’s arm that it seemed to bystanders that he had become unconscious for around three hours. However, when he “awoke,” he claimed that from the perspective of his “līlā-​time” only a few moments had passed (Haberman 1988, pp. 91–​ 92). The notion that the human person should thus become completely suffused with the love of God is repeated across several other Vaiṣṇava traditions such as Vallabha Vedānta, which views the emotional life, transformed by the grace of Kṛṣṇa, as the medium through which Kṛṣṇa is expressed in the lives of the devotees. When the human dispositions are directed toward Kṛṣṇa as their ultimate object, and the human senses are purified through service to Kṛṣṇa, deep levels of intimacy develop between the devotee and the Lord (Timm 1991).

Hindu–​Christian engagements with the category of the “human person” As our discussion in previous sections has indicated, certain dimensions of Hindu worldviews do not have straightforward analogues in Christian universes; for instance, mainstream Christian theologians would not usually affirm an Advaita-​like standpoint that the empirical world of diversity is ontologically unreal. Again, as we have noted, Christian theologians are wary of the language of “divinization” if it implies that the human individual is intrinsically or naturally God-​filled prior to spiritual reformation through divine grace. In the Hindu system of Śaiva Siddhānta, the human self is “divine” in an ontological sense, though as it is encased in the threefold impurity of action (karma), immersion in material bonds (māyai) and egoism (āṇava), it is not aware of its deep communion. Thus, M. Dhavamony (1971, p. 378) writes that [I]‌t is in this way that the Śaiva Siddhānta religious experience…is different from the Christian religious experience, for in Christian theology the human being is not ontologically divinized before the advent of sanctifying grace, which is supernature distinct from human nature, gratuitously given without any exigency for it on the part of human nature. While Dhavamony reflects here a Roman Catholic understanding of the distinction between human nature and divine grace, somewhat more aligned with Hindu spiritual standpoints are the forms of Eastern Orthodox Christianity which speak of the process of becoming like God as the divinization (theosis) to which human beings are called. Some other distinctively Hindu vocabularies, imageries, and affectivities are found to resonate strongly, according to writers who work in the in-​between spaces of Hindu and Christian universes, with aspects of Christian doctrinal systems. Thus, Vedāntic themes relating to self-​ enquiry and divine omnipresence have often been reworked from Christian horizons as spiritual instruments that can meditatively direct Christians to the presence of God within the transcendental depths of the human self. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual exercises, Bede Griffiths (1984) and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) (1969; cf. Cornille’s chapter in this volume), elaborated and practiced these themes during the second half of the last century. As they wrestled with these Hindu–​Christian standpoints, they left behind records of their spiritual anguish as well as ecstasy as they sought in the traditions of Advaita Vedānta certain insights that they alternately viewed as preparatory to, complementary with, or even seemingly identical with Christian Trinitarian intuitions.

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In a more recent contribution, Chakravarthi Ram-​Prasad (2013) moves between two levels, which are interwoven together:  a constructive theological reading of the notions of divine self and human self in the commentaries of Śaṃkara and Rāmānuja on the Bhagavad Gītā, and a comparative theological engagement with ongoing debates in the Christian traditions about referring to the divine reality with modes of human speech. He argues that Śaṃkara and Rāmānuja offer two alternative, and at certain points sharply opposed, visions of liberation: the former a unitive mysticism in which the finite human self, freed from its entanglement with unreal materiality, renounces all action, and the latter an ecstatic love in which the devotee has surrendered all sense of finite agency to the Lord, who is the supreme agent. In the course of developing these readings, Ram-​Prasad also indicates how these internal distinctions can illuminate Christian debates over the doctrine of God. To take an instance from Rāmānuja, the divine reality is depicted as being helpless with tender affection for the devotees and is said to dwell in them as if they were his superiors. Christian theologians would recognize here, from within their contextual boundaries, the dialectical relation between the meekness of the “accessible” Christ and the ineffable mystery of the “sovereign” second person of the Trinity. A similar interweaving of Hindu and Christian motifs is found in the work of Michelle Voss Roberts (2017) who addresses the classical doctrine of imago Dei and argues that its traditional location within the human soul, understood as a rational substance, has been concurrent with exclusionary practices directed at various groups. Instead, her project in theological anthropology moves across the doctrinal systems of various Christian theologians and the non-​dual Śaivism of teachers such as Abhinavagupta, and develops a rich set of conversations around the vocabularies of mirroring, imaging, and reflecting. Through such engagements with classical Hindu anthropologies, Christian theologians could seek,Voss Roberts argues, to move beyond dichotomous mind-​body dualisms, and develop a deeper sense of the somatic dimensions of our lived experiences and also of the bodily presence of the incarnate Christ in eucharistic and ecclesial spaces.

Conclusion We may revisit the competing philosophies and theologies of the human person we have sketched in the preceding sections by noting that Christian theologians have often claimed that the notions of “sin,” and consequently that of “grace” as the forgiveness of sin by the “holy” God, are absent in the Hindu traditions (Kulandran 1964, pp. 244–​45). For Christian theologians from Augustine to Anselm to Aquinas and beyond, who accept the doctrine of creation out of sheer nothingness, there is an ontological distinction between God and human beings, so that grace is regarded as a “gratuitous” element which is freely given by God to what the world does not have in its “natural” constitution. As we have seen, for the Hindu theistic traditions, in contrast, the human person is—​in a deep ontological sense—​always incorporated into the divine reality, so that spiritual regeneration involves, in part, the development of a refined understanding of this inner union. In his study of the motifs of devotional love (bhakti) toward God and divine grace (aruḷ) in the canonical texts of the Śaiva Siddhānta, Dhavamony writes that they revolve around the conception of God as the unique supreme Person (Śiva) who is both the transcendent Lord and the immanent indweller of all beings. In the verses of the Śaiva poets from the first half of the seventh century CE, we encounter expressions of their sense of self-​abasement and their deep awareness of their vileness in the presence of Śiva before whom they are unworthy to sing his praises. Evoking the metaphor of conjugal union they speak of Śiva as the bridegroom and the soul (paśu) as his bride, and yet declare that the

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devotional love with which they seek communion with him is itself generated and brought to fruition by the grace of Śiva (Dhavamony 1971, pp. 354–​60). For Vedāntic theologians such as Rāmānuja, too, the Lord is the original cause and ultimate source out of which the various differentiated beings in the world emerge as an effect, which implies that when the Lord assists human beings to overcome their worldly bondage in the form of spiritual ignorance, this “gracious” help does not arrive from across an ontological fissure.The root meaning of “sin” as the lack of a veridical relationship with the divine underlies his claim that because the embodied self has since beginningless times moved away from the Lord and does not have the correct knowledge that it is an accessory (śeṣa) of the Lord, it is immersed in sinfulness (pāpa). The Lord has equipped human beings with the instruments necessary for performing action and remains within them as their transcendental support.When the finite self chooses to perform a certain act, the Lord aids it by consenting to its fulfillment, and without such permission (anumati) no action is possible (Thibaut 1904, p. 557). As in the case of Augustine, the divine reality is the ultimate cause behind every action, and yet human beings are moral agents capable of receiving praise or blame for their actions. Therefore, to return to the theme we highlighted toward the beginning of this chapter, theological anthropology and soteriology are densely intertwined with each other across Hindu and Christian religious worldviews. At the heart of their theo-​anthropological disputes lies the crucial question as to whether human beings have an inbuilt “capacity for” or “point of contact with” God—​the Hindu traditions veer toward an affirmative while the multiple forms of Christianity usually respond, albeit with numerous qualifications, in the negative. At one pole of the anthropological–​soteriological continuum lie the diverse Sāṃkhya-​Yoga, Advaitic, and Tantric viewpoints that the human person is intrinsically “liberated,” and has to undertake an arduous spiritual pilgrimage of overcoming the empirical self-​forgetfulness relating to this unfallen essence with which it is deeply connatural. Thus the jīvanmukta or the siddha live in modes of transcendental bliss, stability, and perfection even as they seemingly inhabit a world of finitude—​they are dramatic embodiments of the exhortation to live in the world without being of the world, and they are revered by millions of Hindus as possessors of vast reserves of spiritual power which can deliver them from worldly existence. At a diametrically opposite pole lies the network of mainstream Christian doctrines which state that the human person is created ex nihilo and in the image of God, owes its being at every moment to divine continual preservation, inhabits a domain which is (partly or completely) sinfully fallen, and lives in the hope that the spiritual regeneration initiated in and through the grace of Christ will reach its culmination in the hereafter. Thus, the virtues of the Roman Catholic saints—​whose narratives in medieval hagiographies can resemble those of some Hindu jīvanmuktas—​are not products solely of self-​agency but are ultimately the “fruits” of the Spirit who is operative in their hearts. Similarly, the Calvinist “predestined” do not earn their salvific state through their own efforts but receive it entirely through divine grace; if Christians in general may be said to have a “natural” desire for God, this longing itself is somehow encapsulated in the economy of grace. The Hindu theistic standpoints occupy a somewhat in-​between position on this continuum; the human person is not created out of utter nothingness and is metaphysically continuous (via satkāryavāda) with the divine reality, but it too dwells in a realm of saṃsāric imperfection and is being drawn through divine grace (prasāda) toward a transcendental perfection. Thus, in some strands of North Indian Vaiṣṇavism, the devotees, who are enfolded, encapsulated, and encompassed by the being of Kṛṣṇa, have yet to undergo an excruciating form of purification where they declare their own wretchedness, discern Kṛṣṇa in everything, beseech Kṛṣṇa to

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deliver them from their existential agony, and become utterly infused with a maddening love of Kṛṣṇa in act, thought, and speech. These competing philosophies and theologies are read out of—​ and also read into—​ competing sets of paradigmatic scriptures, thus producing dense meshes with the living threads of doctrine, experience, and worship.

Bibliography Abhishiktananda. 1969. Hindu–​Christian Meeting Point: Within the Cave of the Heart. Delhi: ISPCK. Augustine, Saint. 2003. Letter 140. Letters 100–​155. Epistulae II/​2. In Ramsey, B. (ed.). Teske, R. (trans.). The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. New York: New City Press. Badham, P. 1976. Christian Beliefs about Life after Death. London: Macmillan. Brunner, E. 1946. Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Karl Barth. London: G. Bles, The Centenary Press. Burley, M. 2007. Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience. Oxford: Routledge. Corrington, R. 1996. Nature’s Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Dhavamony, M. 1971. Love of God According to Śaiva Siddhānta: A Study in the Mysticism and Theology of Śaivism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farris, J.R. 2017. The Soul of Theological Anthropology: A Cartesian Exploration. London: Routledge. Fort, A. 1998. Jīvanmukti in Transformation:  Embodied Liberation in Advaita and Neo-​ Vedanta. Albany: SUNY Press. Griffiths, B. 1984. Christ in India: Essays Towards a Hindu-​Christian Dialogue. Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers. Haberman, D.L. 1988. Acting as Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana. New York: Oxford University Press. Kulandran, S. 1964. Grace in Christianity and Hinduism. London: Lutterworth Press. Lipner, J. 1986. The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning and Metaphysics in the Vedāntic Theology of Rāmānuja. London: Macmillan. Oliver, S. 2017. Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury. Olson, C. 2015. Indian Asceticism: Power,Violence, and Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahner, K. 1961. “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace.” In Theological Investigations Volume 1. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, pp. 297–​317. Ramachandran, T.P. 1969. The Concept of the Vyāvahārika in Advaita Vedānta. Madras: University of Madras. Ram-​ Prasad, C. 2013. Divine Self, Human Self:  The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries. London: Bloomsbury. Russell, N. 2004. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Sampatkumaran, M.R. (trans.). 1985. The Gītābhāṣya of Rāmānuja. Bombay:  Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute. Thibaut, G. (trans.). 1904. The Vedānta-​Sūtras with the Commentary by Rāmānuja. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Timm, J.R. 1991. “The Celebration of Emotion: Vallabha’s Ontology of Affective Experience.” Philosophy East and West 41: 59–​75. Voss Roberts, M. 2017. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. White, D.G. 1996. The Alchemical Body:  Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Ziesler, J. 1991. Pauline Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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33 DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN HINDUISM AND CHRISTIANITY Jon Paul Sydnor

Infinite absolute, finite particular Is it more blessed to be everything everywhere, utterly transcendent, the Infinite Absolute? Or is it more blessed to be a person who is somewhere, utterly immanent, the Finite Particular? Hinduism and Christianity have given different answers to these questions, differing both within themselves and between themselves. The answers given bear great importance, because they influence our own interpretation of human existence, which is originally finite, particular, and related. Is this status a blessing to be celebrated or a limitation to be overcome? Could it possibly characterize God? Or, more intriguingly, could God be both? This debate about particularity and transcendence articulates itself in thought about the good, the true, and the beautiful—​and what is most good, most true, and most beautiful. To celebrate embodiment is to celebrate particularity and relationality. To reject embodiment is to reject particularity and relationality, yet also to posit that there is a superior state of being available, a transcendent state beyond the limitations of individual particularity. We need not be a particular person who is conscious of particular things, struggling with all the anxiety that such particularity entails. Instead, we can be pure being and pure consciousness, blessed with the pure bliss that such perfection entails. Śrī Śaṅkarācārya writes, The stupid man thinks he is the body, the book-​learned man identifies himself with the mixture of body and soul, while the sage possessed of realization due to discrimination looks upon the eternal Ātman as his Self, and thinks, “I am Brahman.” (Śaṅkarācārya 2000, p. 61) Śaṅkara’s anthropology rejects life as it is but offers a resplendent vision of life as it can be. Versions of it can be found in Hinduism as orthodox, and in Christianity as heterodox. Hence, to declare yourself as Hindu or Christian does not reveal your celebration or lament of embodiment. To know that, we must dig deeper. Every essayist must strike a cruel compromise between depth and breadth. Were we to survey all permutations of divine embodiment in Hinduism and Christianity, then our space limitations would compel a very shallow engagement. Were we to go in depth into only one aspect of divine embodiment, then we would simply neglect too many facets of a multifaceted 392

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doctrine. Below, we will discuss divine personal embodiment (the possibility that God literally possesses a humanlike body), gender and divine embodiment, and the divine experience of embodiment. Alas, we will overlook much of value. Readers who are interested in conceptualizing the universe as the body of God, that is, the belief that matter, energy, space, and time are all derived from the divine person, may wish to explore Anne Hunt Overzee’s The Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja (Overzee 1992). Readers interested in a broad comparison of God’s personal, embodied presence on earth may examine Geoffrey Parrinder’s Avatar and Incarnation: A Comparison of Indian and Christian Beliefs (Parrinder 1982). For a fascinating comparison of devotees’ attitudes toward divinity embodied as child, see Kristen Johnston Largen’s Baby Krishna, Infant Christ:  A Comparative Theology of Salvation (Largen 2011). And readers interested in exploring devotion to the feminine divine can find stimulating material in Francis X. Clooney’s Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Clooney 2005). Although we cannot delve deeply into these subjects, the three themes below will provide us with comparative insight into divine embodiment, thereby granting us critical perspective and creative possibility.

God as person, God as body Celebrating personal embodiment as divine The highest celebration of human embodiment is the ascription of embodiment to God. The Hebrew tradition, which Christianity inherited and adapted, offers a few texts that suggest such embodiment: God walks in a garden (Genesis 3:8), speaks with Moses face to face (Exodus 33:11), and covers Moses’ eyes with his (God’s) hand, preventing Moses from seeing his face, but allowing Moses to see his back (Exodus 33:22–​23).Yet, even as the Hebrew tradition offers a few texts that suggest divine embodiment, it also denies any ability to image this God. The second commandment warns, You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents. (Exodus 20:4–​5a) Moreover, as the Hebrew tradition matures, it increasingly insists that God transcends the limitations of embodiment; even the heavens cannot hold God (1 Kings 8:27), who fills the heavens and the earth (Jeremiah 23:24), and stretches from the beginning to the end of time (Psalm 90:2). Later, the Christian tradition adopts the Hebraic suspicion of divine limitation, baldly insisting that “God is spirit” (John 4:24), cannot be seen, and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16). Even as Western theism came to reject divine embodiment, the idea achieved orthodoxy in certain strands of Hinduism, such as Vaiṣṇavism. The Śrīvaiṣṇava theologian, Rāmānuja, for example, asserts that God is fully embodied, located in Vaikuṇṭhā, yet omnipresent on earth. Rāmānuja even emphasizes the full particularity of the divine body by describing its magnificent physical appearance (Rāmānuja 1956, §220, pp.  172–​73). Indeed, Rāmānuja celebrates God’s particularity and relationality by lifting up Śrīvaiṣṇavism’s personal name for God, Nārāyaṇa. Nārāyaṇa is not a generic “God,” an Infinite Absolute, or undifferentiated consciousness. Nārāyaṇa is fully a person, with a personal appearance, personal name, and personality.The 393

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ground of all being and all beings is not being itself; it is personhood itself. And not only personhood, but personhood-​in-​relation (Sydnor 2011, p. 8). Moreover, for Rāmānuja and/​or his developing tradition, salvation is entirely physical and personal—​to see Nārāyaṇa, and to be seen by Nārāyaṇa, in the splendors of Vaikuṇṭha. Salvation is not a change in our underlying state of being. It is not freedom from limitation, finitude, or embodiment. Instead, salvation is the perfect placement of our God-​g iven bodies within the vision of God, where we dance in the joy of worship. For Rāmānuja and his Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, salvation is continuing finitude in relationship to the infinite Nārāyaṇa, whose transcendence is exceeded only by his accessibility. But how can Nārāyaṇa be somewhere and everywhere, in Vaikuṇṭha yet sustaining all reality, at the same time? Some Christian theologians reject any possibility of divine embodiment based on this tension. They reason that, if God has a body, then God has a location. And if God has a location, then God must be somewhere, not everywhere. Therefore, God would not be omnipresent, and there would be places that God would not be. In our deepest shame, we could hide from God. In our deepest grief, God could not rescue us. Rāmānuja elegantly resolves this conundrum. He dedicates his Vedārthasaṉgraha to Viṣṇu (Nārāyaṇa) reclining on Śeṣa, the cosmic serpent who floats on the primordial ocean. In this image,Viṣṇu dreams the universe into creation, which resides within the dream of Viṣṇu.Within Viṣṇu’s dream, we have a location, as can Viṣṇu. At the same time,Viṣṇu’s dream is pervaded by Viṣṇu’s mind, which sustains all the elements of the dream. Hence,Viṣṇu is somewhere, producing the dream, while Viṣṇu is everywhere, pervading the dream. And Viṣṇu can be somewhere again, within the dream.Viṣṇu is in three places at once. Hence, divine locatedness, much like human locatedness, cannot be reduced to simplistic either/​or binaries. If a daydreaming student can be in a classroom, yet mentally on a beach, and interacting with other mental persons on that beach, then surely Nārāyaṇa can be in Vaikuṇṭha, ever-​present within the universe, and personally present to us, as well. God can be embodied, and God can embody us, without contradiction. God’s body, unlike ours, is without limitation.

Could the Christian God be personally embodied? Remarkably, Rāmānuja’s theology anticipates and answers most orthodox Christian objections to divine personal embodiment, i.e., the belief that the ultimate God has a personal body. Some Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus, have suggested that the image of God is in the body, although the weight of the tradition has denied it (Voss Roberts 2017, pp.  102–​104). Feuerbach argues that all thought about God, especially thought of God as embodied, is necessarily anthropomorphic. Due to our epistemological limitations, we make God in our own image, projecting our being onto the Godhead (Feuerbach 1957 [1841], p.  111). Rāmānuja simply replies that God has graciously created us (or better, graciously sustains us) in the image of God—​we are theomorphic. Accusations of anthropomorphism read the situation in the wrong direction. Instead of worrying about anthropomorphism (making God in our own image), we should celebrate our theomorphism (being made in the image of God; Sydnor 2018, pp. 5–​6). Aquinas argues against embodiment, asserting that embodiment necessitates finitude. The infinite God could not be constrained by a finite body (Aquinas 1955–​1957, §43.17). Rāmānuja replies that an embodied Nārāyaṇa can indeed imagine the infinite universe, thereby sustaining, pervading, and controlling the infinite, even while located and embodied (Rāmānuja 1956, §95, 76). Aquinas rebuts that if God is embodied, then God would be something that we know sensibly rather than intellectually. But, since intellectual knowledge is higher, more universal,

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and more reliable than sensible knowledge, God must be something or someone we know intellectually. Hence, God must be disembodied (Aquinas 1955–​1957, §20, 6). But Rāmānuja is not working within Aquinas’s Platonic hierarchy of being. For Rāmānuja, all is of God—​spirit, intellect, and matter—​hence both material nature and intellectual truth are fully divine. One cannot be ranked over the other, as God cannot be ranked over God (Sydnor 2015, p. 46). St. John of Damascus taps in by arguing that, if God is embodied, then God’s body would displace all other bodies. Since two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and God is omnipresent, there wouldn’t be any room for anyone else in a universe sustained by an embodied God (Damascus 1958, p. 171). But, as we have seen above, Rāmānuja’s doctrine of dreaming creation addresses this objection. Nārāyaṇa dreams the universe into being. He is an embodied dreamer, pervading his dream, within which he participates. His dreaming embodiment is hospitable to other embodied beings (like the boy, daydreaming that he is on the beach with his friends); indeed, it invites them into being (Rāmānuja 1956, Dedication). Rāmānuja answers by anticipation most orthodox Christian objections to divine embodiment. His success re-​situates the question of divine embodiment for Christianity. The Christian tradition’s insistence on the disembodiment of God is no longer a rationally compelled conclusion. Instead, it is a theological choice, with theological and pastoral implications. If we relate as persons through our bodies, then how does God express personhood without a body? How can we celebrate our own embodiment, if the source of our being is disembodied? And perhaps most importantly, what is salvation for embodied beings? Rāmānuja’s answers to these questions cannot simply become the Christian answers, but they can help Christians to generate new questions, and perhaps, new answers as well.

Body of the Goddess, body of the woman To celebrate the female body Feminists, both Hindu and Christian, have long labored to celebrate embodiment. Rejecting any dualism of soul and body, which prefers the soul to the body, they have instead argued for the nondualism of soul and body. We are best conceptualized as embodied souls or ensouled bodies. The two are inseparable, interdependent, and compenetrating. Each flows into the other, supports, informs, and fulfills the other. Soul and body are conceptually distinguishable, but experientially inseparable. They are two—​soul and body—​as one person (Hilkert 1995, pp. 197–​98). In this section, we will compare (semi-​)divine embodiment in the person of the Virgin Mary according to the Roman Catholic tradition with divine embodiment in the goddess Devī according to the Śākta (Goddess-​worshipping) tradition. On the one hand, this comparison may seem unequal. The Virgin Mary is, after all, an historic human, whereas Devī is the eternal Goddess. But closer scrutiny reveals more parallels. According to the Devī Gītā, Devī is the mother of all gods and goddesses (Brown 1998, p. 79, 130). According to the Council of Ephesus, Mary is Theotokos, the Mother of God. Moreover, if we consider the role that Mary plays in Catholic practice, then her status draws closer to that of Devī. Like Devī, she hears prayer, appears to devotees, performs miracles, charges locations with her sacred power so that they become pilgrimage sites, and blesses followers through her image in icons and statues. According to Catholic dogma in Lumen Gentium, Mary is Mediatrix with, but adjutant to, Christ (Vatican Council 1965, III.62). And in the popular but nondogmatic imagination, she is designated Co-​Redemptrix with, but adjutant to, Christ (John Paul II 1985, p. 7). Thus, while

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there may appear to be a superficial imbalance between the two, in practice they provide a rich resource for comparison (Clooney 2005, pp. 16–​23). The Virgin Mary exceeds humanity through her status as both virgin (symbol of female purity) and mother (symbol of life-​giving nurture). As such, she expresses twin, though exclusive, blessings of femininity in one person. On the one hand, the capacity for a female body to birth God, and receive adoration, would seem to celebrate—​perhaps even divinize—​women’s embodiment, even in everyday life. For instance, artists regularly portrayed Mary nursing the infant Jesus, the Madonna Lactans, until Gutenberg’s printing press popularized pornography and sexualized breasts (Gripsrud 2008, pp. 34–​36). So, the Christian tradition, in the person of Mary, offers resources for the celebration of female embodiment as an expression of divinity. But, on the other hand, Mary also poses challenges. Indeed, one way to scorn sexual reproduction and women’s perseverance through labor is to affirm the perpetual virginity of Mary. To idealize her as simultaneously Virgin and Mother creates an unattainable ideal, an exemplar who sets an impossible example. Mary may rise to mystical heights of holiness, but all other women must fail. In this analysis, rather than affirming the inherent sanctity of female embodiment, the Virgin-​Mother concept of Mary threatens all women with felt inadequacy (Warner 1976, pp. 336–​38).

The menstruating Goddess What if female reproductive processes were fully divinized? What if both women and men could worship a goddess so thoroughly embodied that she explicitly menstruated? Hinduism offers such a goddess in its most authoritative Śākta (Goddess-​worshipping) text, the Devī Gītā. The Devī Gītā, or Song of the Goddess, is a philosophical treatise found within the much longer Devī Bhāgavatapurāṇa. It expresses devotion to the Goddess as identical with Brahman, or supreme reality. Hence, philosophically she is impersonal: ultimate truth, pure consciousness, and highest intelligence, pervading all beings even as she sustains them in their being (Devī Gītā, 2.2–​3, 3.16–​17). Yet, devotionally she is personal: the compassionate protector, nurturing mother, and gracious ruler who “is filled with the sentiment of passion and is ever distressed by the sorrows of her devotees; Disposed to kindness, she is the Mother bearing a crescent moon in her locks” (Ibid., 9.41). The Devī Gītā asserts that the Goddess is the fundamental source of all reality, including the gods themselves. Hence, the Goddess’s supremacy is absolute: she is within, beneath, and beyond the universe that she sustains, preceding and exceeding it both ontologically and chronologically (Ibid., 1.49–​50). Devī the Goddess is the supreme being and the ground of being, the soul of the Cosmos and the Cosmos itself, delusion and liberation, pure consciousness and maternal compassion, utter transcendence and utter immanence. Her supremacy is so absolute that the gods, even the greatest god,Viṣṇu, worship her, and she rewards their worship with boons and freedom from fear (Ibid., 1.20–​25, 55–​58). And she is embodied; indeed, she is so embodied that she menstruates (Ibid., 8.15–​18). At Kamakhya Temple in Assam, the Goddess’s menstruation is iconographically explicit, in accordance with its origin legend. Śiva’s first wife, Satī, immolated herself after her father insulted her husband. Overwrought by grief, Śiva began a dance of destruction with her charred body; this dance threatened to destroy the world. Viṣṇu intervened and stopped the dance by slowly cutting away Satī’s body until Śiva had no one left to dance with. Each body part fell to earth and became a śakti pīṭha, a seat of the divine feminine energy. Kamakhya lies where her

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genitalia fell (Dobia 2007, pp. 69–​70). Appropriately, the main shrine is a yoni, an iconic depiction of a vagina.This yoni is a naturally occurring rock fissure perpetually moistened by ground water (Shin 2010, p. 5). Devotees decorate the yoni with sindoor, a red-​orange powder, further indicating the mythological origin of the temple. Here, we have a confluence of gender, myth, theology, and practice stifled in Christianity: the Goddess Devī is the source of reality, including all gods and goddesses. She is also an embodied female deity, so embodied that she menstruates somewhere among us; specifically, she menstruates in Kamakhya Temple, which is concretely located in the metropolis of Guwahati, in the state of Assam, in the country of India (Dobia 2000, pp. 231–​33). Devotees honor the Goddess’s blood as life-​g iving: coordinated with the monsoon rains, essential to a successful harvest, emblematic of human reproduction, and supportive of social order (Urban 2008, p. 514). Paradoxically, as of this writing in 2019, women who are menstruating cannot enter Kamakhya Temple. And no one can enter Kamakhya Temple during Devī’s annual three-​day menstrual cycle, when the temple closes. Like most temples in India, Kamakhya deems menstruating women to be impure and polluting—​even the Goddess herself (Ibid., p. 501). In so doing, they join a general patriarchal tradition of stigmatizing female reproductive processes. The traditions frequently deem these processes not only contaminating, but contagious as well, since the menstruating woman’s uncleanness can be communicated to others in her household. For this reason, both the Bible (Leviticus 15:19–​24) and the Laws of Manu (4.41–​42) prescribe shunning menstruating women, at least partly, to protect men from impurity.

Is the Goddess a feminist? Many Christian feminists, both female and male, have advocated liberating female imagery for God. Harkening to Mary Daly’s admonition that “if God is male then the male is God,” they prefer gender-​balanced and gender-​neutral language for God, insisting that both genders image the divine. However, Kamakhya’s celebrations and prohibitions question this effort. The high status of the Goddess conflicts with the low status of women, but she does not raise that status. The Goddess is worshipped by men, even gods; women must worship their husband, no matter how vicious, as a god (Laws of Manu, 5.154). Devotees celebrate the life-​g iving power of menstrual blood but fear it as well. The (menstruating) Goddess liberates (Devī Gītā, 7.11–​27), but menstruating women contaminate. The menstruating Goddess resides in the temple; menstruating women are banned from the temple. The Goddess is free from social conventions of modesty; women must be modest. Nevertheless, the current failure of female divinity to produce feminist liberation does not warrant abandoning gender-​balanced imagery for God; it is one datum in a very large data set. While there is little sociological evidence for female empowerment through the feminine divine, we cannot know the deep psychological effect that Goddess-​worship provokes in women or men. Moreover, from the perspective of the Christian tradition, numerous other justifications for inclusive language proffer themselves: Christian biblical texts that suggest a feminine aspect of God; the panentheistic residency of God in all persons; a religious commitment to egalitarianism; a progressive commitment to universalism; basic ideals of fairness; the desire for young girls to become strong women; the desire for young boys to become feminist men. The feminization of the divine will not necessarily help, but it may help us achieve gender justice, if we allow it to. In other words, fault for the co-​existence of female divinity and male chauvinism may lie more with us than the Goddess (Pintchman 2000, pp. 197–​99).

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Embodiment as avatar, embodiment as incarnation Descent without modification Both Hinduism and Christianity assert that God acts in human form on earth, but the traditions flesh out this conviction by very different means, and both differ internally as well. Comparing them on this topic presents grave difficulties, as the settings of one theological register tend to distort reception of the other. For example, the term “divine embodiment” has more Christian than Hindu overtones, since the Christian tradition broadly agrees that God at least assumed a human body like our own. (Indeed, this was the minimalist assertion of the Alexandrian “Word–​ Flesh” Christology, whereas the Antiochene “Word–​Human” Christologies asserted that God assumed our entire humanity in the person of Jesus Christ; Schwarz 1998, pp. 152–​56). As we shall see, the Hindu tradition generally asserts that God may appear in human form, but in no way possesses or, more importantly, experiences a body like ours. Indeed, were any god to experience temporal, material existence as we do, then this experience would disqualify that god as God. For example, the polemical Śaivite text Śivajñāna Siddhiyār Parapakkam declares that Kṛṣṇa’s incarnations resulted from a curse, caused him sorrow and pain, and stained him. Therefore, he is unworthy of worship and his followers should turn to Śiva (Balasubramanian 2013, pp. 342–​44). Śrīvaiṣṇava theologian Vedānta Deśika (1268–​1369) notes the many avatars (descents) of Viṣṇu to earth and the apparent suffering of some of these avatars. Yet, he insists that this suffering is the play-​acting of Viṣṇu, not the real suffering of a human: in the stories of the avatars, the distress is only of the nature of play-​acting and that, too, has compassion as its cause. “It is of the nature of sport to the Omnipotent” (Deśika 1956, pp.  239–​40). According to Deśika, Viṣṇu cannot truly suffer. Human suffering is the result of sin, ignorance, and imprudence (aviveka). Karma, which is administered by Viṣṇu, binds individual souls (jīvas) to prakṛti, within which they suffer. This suffering is a blessing, since it chastises humans for their failures, impelling them to surrender to their true Lord (Ibid., pp. 43–​44). This is Viṣṇu’s scheme of salvation, which Viṣṇu creates, executes, and enjoys.Viṣṇu is the playwright; he may act in his play, but he is only acting, and he always controls the plot. Devotees recognize his gracious control and know that his suffering is only apparent; only the wicked think that his suffering is real, that he can be defeated, and that they can seize control of the plot (Ibid., pp. 239–​40). When Viṣṇu appears in human form, when he acts in his play, he is not composed of the same material that composes our human bodies.We are condemned by our karma to association with prakṛti (the profane psycho/​physical complex), and this association contracts our knowledge, thereby causing suffering. Since Viṣṇu is perfect knowledge, and prakṛti contracts knowledge,Viṣṇu cannot be associated with prakṛti.Viṣṇu must be composed of some other substance, which Deśika designates śuddha-​sattva. Ayyangar translates this term as “pure being,” but it could also be loosely translated as pure goodness, absolute knowledge, or perfect serenity. Indeed, all of Vaikuṇṭhā,Viṣṇu’s heaven, is composed of śuddha-​sattva, including Viṣṇu’s devotees. There is no suffering or ignorance in Vaikuṇṭhā and, when Viṣṇu descends to earth to restore the dharma, he retains his substrate of śuddha-​sattva. Hence, there can be no suffering or ignorance in Viṣṇu (Ibid., pp. 66–​67). Deśika paints Viṣṇu as the savior we need. As suffering humans, we can fall into the pit of despair. Unable to extricate ourselves, we need a God who can pull us out, not a God who jumps into the pit with us, denying us hope of rescue.When we are grief-​stricken, our assurance comes from the presence of the transcendent God, ever compassionate and ever reposed, who

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extends the right hand of deliverance.The infinite bliss of God promises to remove our suffering, not succumb to it. God’s love lifts us into God’s serenity; it does not sacrifice the divine serenity to our human desperation. Indeed, St. Augustine seems to agree with Deśika: “A man bends over and extends his hand to someone lying down, for he does not cast himself down so that they are both lying, but only bends down to raise up the one lying down” (Augustine 1981, p. 181, quoted in Eikrem 2018, p. 107).

Seeming to descend The early Christian tradition offered concepts of embodiment analogous to that of Vedānta Deśika, in which Christ only seems to assume a human body, the material reality of which is illusory. Utilizing the Greek verb dokeĩn, “to seem,” Christian theologians of embodiment derided these disembodied theologies of Christ as Docetism. They also deemed them heretical. The controversy over the reality of God’s enfleshment may extend to the earliest Christian communities, since the New Testament itself wavers on the nature of Jesus’ body. On the one hand, some biblical passages suggest that Christ is disembodied, or at least differently embodied from regular humans; he walks on water (Mark 6:45–​53), is able to fast from food for forty days (Luke 4:1–​2), and slips through angry mobs like a mist (Luke 4:30). Indeed, so attractive was this spiritualized Jesus that the second century Gnostic gospel Acts of John claimed that Jesus walked without leaving footprints (Acts of John, 93) and was never crucified; the true Jesus talked to John while the empty body of Jesus was crucified (Ibid., 97). Most of what we know about these early theologians of spirit comes from arguments against them made by the theologians of embodiment, who won the struggle for control of the church. Although the (later deemed) orthodox polemicists rarely record the motivations of the (pejoratively designated) Docetists, we may infer several possibilities, some of which resonate with Deśika’s own concerns. First, Gnostic sects in the classical world frequently asserted the superiority of spirit to matter and deemed salvation to be (at least in part) the release of spirit from matter. God’s appearance in Christ was to this end, not to sacramentalize matter through the divine presence (Pagels 1979, p. 144). Indeed, in the Valentinian (Gnostic) tradition, the secret sacrament of redemption was named apolytrosis, or “release,” a term that had political as well as religious overtones (Ibid., p. 37). Second, absolute monotheists believed that Jesus was the appearance of the one God on earth, rather than the appearance of a unique person within the tripersonal Godhead. Because the source of matter, space, and time cannot be limited by matter, space, and time, God’s appearance as a human must have been just that—​appearance (Greek: dókēsis).Third, many Greeks shared Deśika’s conviction that God is impassible, so utterly transcendent that our actions do not affect the Godhead. God acts but is not acted upon. The suffering of Jesus poses certain challenges to this view, which Docetists like Cerinthus (according to his detractors) addressed by asserting that the spirit of Christ only temporarily assumed Jesus’ body at his baptism, leaving it before his crucifixion. Thus, the divine did not suffer through the passion (Hall 2000, p. 173).

Descent as incarnation Concurrent with these celebrations of spirit over (and sometimes against) matter, other Christians were asserting the basic goodness of embodied, temporal, material life. These assertions extend all the way back into the New Testament, which repeatedly emphasizes the fleshly nature of Christ. Speaking of the incarnation, the Gospel of John begins: “In the

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beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh [sarx] and lived among us” (John 1:1, 14a). Speaking of the resurrection, the Gospel of Luke records Jesus’ fully embodied return to the disciples, his invitation to touch him, and even his request for and consumption of food in their presence (Luke 24:38–​43). Reflecting on these events and their implicit theological assertions, the biblical writer John emphasizes the centrality of divine embodiment by declaring, “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh [en sarki] is from God” (1 John 4:2b, italics added). These early Christian confessions of the embodiment of God in Christ raise perplexing theological questions. God is everywhere; Jesus was somewhere. God is infinite; Jesus was finite. God transcends time; Jesus was within time. God is omnipotent; Jesus died, powerless, on the cross. How then could Jesus be divine and human, reconciling these heretofore mutually exclusive opposites in one person? As theologians studied, debated, and spun their thoughtworlds, they eventually concluded that Christ could not be half human and half God, a curious admixture of earthly and heavenly elements. The Christ had to be fully human and fully God. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, if God saves humankind by taking part in our humanity, and God wants to save our entire humanity, then God must assume our full humanity—​memory, reason, will, soul—​the divine and human co-​existing, without confusion or separation, in one person, Jesus the Christ (Gregory of Nazianzus 1894 [c. 380], p. 440). Christologically, Gregory refuses to assemble a God–​Man, configuring divine and human natures like some sort of jigsaw puzzle. Instead, the two natures join without fusing, in the fullness of both. The Orthodox Church agreed with Gregory’s maxim, “That which was not assumed has not been redeemed.” Gregory’s insight became dogma at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which declared Jesus to be both fully human and fully divine, the Savior in whom the divine and human natures are united without confusion. But how absolute was the divine assumption of human vulnerability?

The God-​forsaken God According to the twentieth-​century theologian Jürgen Moltmann, this assumption was absolute. If Christ came to redeem suffering, then Christ had to suffer, unto the deepest form of suffering:  God-​forsakenness. Jesus cried from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). This cry harkens back to Psalm 22:1, from Jesus’ own scriptures, which reads, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1). In Jesus, God the Son has taken the God-​forsakenness of the psalmist onto himself (Moltmann 1995b, pp. 175–​77). God the Father must suffer his Son’s suffering and death. While Moltmann rejects any “death of God” language, he insists that God has taken even God-​forsakenness into the Godhead, thereby redeeming it. Moltmann’s theology of divine descent creates “a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God” (Moltmann 1993, p. 71). We try to rise to God, only to find that God is always already here. We seek to become God, only to find that God has become human. And, by assuming our humanity, God in Christ reveals our humanity to us.Yet we, in response, dehumanized the perfectly human. Our crucifixion of Christ reflects our continuing rejection of the divine potential within us. Confronted with God as human, we respond by dehumanizing God, because we cannot bear the truth of our own inhumanity. The crucifixion is an act of avoidance.

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Wounds that scar, scars that heal Moltmann’s theology of the cross would be dismal were it not for his faith in the resurrection. Suffering, rejection, and death do not have the last word; joy does. God raises Jesus from the dead as a symbol of divine perseverance, radical forgiveness, and the sacred promise of new life, made available in this life. Understood this way, resurrection is continually available. We experience resurrection in the healing of spiritual wounds, in the reconciliation of broken relationships, and in the liberation of the oppressed from bondage.Thus, faith in the resurrection does not dull us with patient expectation of heaven; rather, it energizes us with hope for the Kingdom of God and invites us to enact resurrection in history (Moltmann 1994, pp. 81–​82). Moltmann portrays Jesus as the savior we need. As suffering humans, we can fall into the pit of despair. Yet we can find the divine presence even here, for Christ himself so despaired. Moltmann may introduce the first truly omnipresent God, the true God who precedes us and accompanies us through every situation, including those situations in which God is absent. God the Son experiences the absence of God the Father, who anguishes over the abandonment of the Son. Through Jesus’ experience, the healing power of God is available to us, even when we cannot feel the presence of God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” cries Jesus from the cross, echoing Psalm 22, and assuring us that he too has known abandonment. But, in echoing Psalm 22, he also reminds us of that poem’s faith-​filled conclusion: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. (Psalm 22: 23–​24) For Christians, the arc of Psalm 22, from despair to trust, finds historical expression in the arc of Jesus’ life, through which the extremes of suffering and joy are expressed, with joy receiving the final word. According to the Christian faith, we too can trust joy, for God has promised life a final victory over death and joy a final victory over suffering.

The infinitely compassionate God No theologian speaks for the entirety of her or his tradition. Vedānta Deśika and Moltmann certainly do not speak for theirs. Still, in each we get a taste of the feeling for life that their sub-​ tradition offers. And, by comparing the two, we gain deeper critical insight into the choices that theologians must make. Moltmann proposes a suffering God that Deśika would find incomprehensible, or even degrading. For Deśika, a God stripped of majesty is no God. But according to Moltmann, Deśika’s God of glory turns a blind eye to the depth of our affliction. The divine splendor, recoiling from stain, abandons us to our abandonment. Moltmann criticizes the utter transcendence of Deśika’s God; Deśika criticizes the utter immanence of Moltmann’s God. Does divine embodiment extend into the hell of human bodily suffering? Or does divinity instead stand above, compassionate yet detached, offering a vision of bliss to those with tears in their eyes?

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Who is right, Deśika or Moltmann? Maybe both are, and God’s loving kindness exceeds the apparent exclusivity of our theologies. In this view, God appears to the suffering in the form that they most need. This God, whose compassion exceeds any limiting nature, would appear as spirit to the intellectual and body to the dancer, as menstruating Goddess to the female and as Virgin Mother to the orphan, as the face of serenity to the anxious and as weeping co-​sufferer to the bereaved. In other words, God may be infinite precisely so that God can be particular. And each form of God would be objectively real, not illusory, invested with the fullness of the divine. Out of love, the Infinite Absolute becomes the Finite Particular within infinite particular situations, so to heal all persons.

Bibliography Acts of John. In James, M.R. 1924. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford:  Clarendon Press. Available at http://​gnosis.org/​library/​actjohn.htm. Accessed November 12, 2018. Aquinas, T. 1955–​1957. Summa Contra Gentiles, or On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Pegis, A.C., Anderson, J.F., Bourke,V.J. and O’Neil, C.J. (trans.). New York: Hanover House. Available at http://​dhspriory.org. Accessed April 2, 2018. Augustine. 1981. Eighty-​ Three Different Questions. Mosher, D.I. (trans.). Washington, DC:  Catholic University Press. Balasubramanian, R. 2013. “Śaiva Siddhānta Polemics: A Translation and Analysis of the Civañāṉa Aittiyār-​ Parapakkam.” PhD Thesis, McGill University. Brown, C.M. 1998. The Devī Gītā. The Song of the Goddess:  A Translation, Annotation, and Commentary. Albany: State University of New York Press. Catechism of the Council of Trent or (The Catechism for Parish Priests). 1566. The Catholic Primer. Available atwww.saintsbooks.net. Accessed July 8, 2019. Clooney, F.X. 2005. Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary. New York: Oxford University Press. Daly, M. 1985. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Damascus, Saint John of. 1958. Writings. Chase, F. Jr. (trans.). Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Available at https://​books.google.com. Accessed March 12, 2018. Deśika, Vedānta. 1956. The Srimad Rahastrayasara of Sri Vedānta Deśika. Rajagopala Ayyangar, M.R (trans.). Kumbakonam: Agnihothram Rāmānuja Thathachariar. Dobia, B. 2000. “Seeking Ma, Seeking Me.” In Hiltebeitel, A. and Erndl, K.M. (eds.). Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: NYU Press, pp. 203–​38. —​—​—​. 2007. “Approaching the Hindu Goddess of Desire.” Feminist Theology 16(1): 61–​78. Duck, R.C. and Wilson-​ Kastner, P. 1999. Praising God:  The Trinity in Christian Worship. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Eikrem, A. 2018. God as Sacrificial Love:  A Systematic Exploration of a Controversial Notion. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Feuerbach, L. 1957, 1841. The Essence of Christianity. Elliot, G. (trans.). New York: Harper and Row. Greene-​McCreight, K. 2000. Feminist Reconstructions of Christian Doctrine: Narrative Analysis and Appraisal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gregory of Nazianzus. 1894, c.  380. “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius.” In Browne, C.G. and Swallow, J.E. (trans.). Letters on the Apollinarian Controversy. From Schaff, P. and Wallace, H. (eds.). Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 7. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Available at https://​books.google.com. Accessed December 5, 2018. Gripsrud, B.H. 2008. “The Cultural History of the Breast.” In Pitts-​Taylor,V. (ed.). A Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body.Vol.1. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, pp. 31–​44. Gross, R.M. 2000. “Is the Goddess a Feminist?” In Hiltebeitel, A. and Erndl, K.M. (eds.). Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: NYU Press, pp. 104–​12. Hall, S.G. 2000. “Docetism.” In Hastings, A., Mason, A. and Pyper, H. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 173. Hilkert, M.C. 1995. “Cry Beloved Image: Rethinking the Image of God.” In O’Hara Graff, A. (ed.). In The Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, pp. 190–​205.

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Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian John Paul II. 1985. “Allocution at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guayaquil.” Given on January 31, 1985, reported in L’Osservatore Romano supplement of February 2, 1985 and in English L’Osservatore Romano, March 11, 1985, p. 7. Available at www.ewtn.com/​catholicism/​teachings/​church-​teaching-​on-​marys-​ cooperation-​in-​the-​redemption-​of-​mankind-​827. Accessed January 21, 2019. Lacugna, C.M. 1993. “God in Communion with Us:  The Trinity.” In Lacugna, C.M. (ed.). Freeing Theology: Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, pp. 83–​114. Largen, K.J. 2011. Baby Krishna, Infant Christ:  A Comparative Theology of Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Laws of Manu. 1991. Doniger, W. and Smith, B.K. (trans.). New York: Penguin Books. Moltmann, J.1983. The Power of the Powerless:  The Word of Liberation for Today. San Francisco:  Harper and Row. —​—​—​. 1993. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as The Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Wilson, R.A. and Bowden, J. (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. —​—​—​. 1994. Jesus Christ for Today’s World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. —​—​—​. 1995a. Jesus Christ for Today’s World. Kohl, M. (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. —​—​—​. 1995b. The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions. Kohl, M. (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Overzee, A.H. 1992. The Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Rāmānuja. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pagels, E. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books. Parrinder, G. 1982. Avatar and Incarnation: A Comparison of Indian and Christian Beliefs. New York: Oxford University Press. Pintchman, T. 2000. “Is the Goddess Tradition a Good Resource for Feminism?” In Hiltebeitel, A. and Erndl, K.M. (eds.). Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: NYU Press, pp. 187–​202. Rāmānuja. 1956. Vedārthasaṉgraha. Raghavachar, S.S. (trans.). Mysore: Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama. Śaṅkarācārya, Śrī. 2000. Vivekacūḍāmaṇi of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya: Text, with English Translation, Notes, and Index. Madhavananda (trans.). Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Shin, J-​E. 2010. “Yoni, Yoginis and Mahavidyas: Feminine Divinities from Early Medieval Kamarupa to Medieval Koch Behar.” Studies in History 26(1): 1–​29. Schwarz, Hans. 1998. Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Sydnor, J.P. 2011. Rāmānuja and Schleiermacher:  Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. —​—​—​. 2015. “Seeing Nature, Sensing God: The Cosmology of Rāmānuja.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 24(1): 39–​61. —​—​—​. 2018. “Does God Have a Body? Rāmānuja’s Challenge to the Christian Tradition.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 31(19): 18–​36. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.7825/​2164–​6279.1696 Urban, H. 2008. “Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship, and Sacrifice in the Worship of Mother Goddess Kāmākhyā.” Journal of South Asian Studies 31(3):  500–​34. Available at:  https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 00856400802441946. Vatican Council. 1965. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium /​Solemnly Promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI on November 21, 1964. Available at www.vatican.va. Accessed December 12, 2018. Voss Roberts, M. 2017. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Warner, M. 1976. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books.

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34 TRUTH AND SALVATION IN HINDU–​C HRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar

Caught between Ganga and Galilee In an article entitled “Ganga and Galilee: Two Responses to Truth,” the late Stanley J. Samartha, the first director of what was then called the “Subunit on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies” of the World Council of Churches, outlined the importance of addressing a particular dilemma that marked Christian–​Hindu relations, namely the dilemma between truth received by a particular community of faith and that perceived in the life of its neighbors. Samartha argued that while the Christian anxiety to guard the “uniqueness” of the truth has led them to consider as “uncritical tolerance” the Vedic enunciation of truth in terms of ekam sat vipraha bahuda vadanti:  “Truth is one; sages call it by many names” (Rig Veda 1.164.46), Hindus have generally tended to understand the Christian understanding of truth, vis-​à-​vis the Johannine claim, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6), as a “breeding ground of intolerant exclusiveness” (Samartha 1981, p. 142). Samartha goes on to wonder whether it might be possible at all for those involved in Christian–​Hindu dialogue to “cross the desert that separates the Ganga and Galilee” (Ibid., p. 143). The dilemma that Samartha lifted up—​the question of “truth” or salvation/​liberation available in the other tradition—​has been a persistent concern in Hindu–​Christian dialogue and has inspired passionate and profound theological reflections. This essay offers a survey of such positions. But, being fully aware that any survey of this sort, however exhaustive, will fall short of capturing the entirety of the spectrum of theological thinking on this theme, this chapter will focus on a few representative figures who provide important signposts to mark the many approaches to the question of truth and salvation in the context of Hindu–​Christian relations. These figures represent some of the traditional approaches that Christians and Hindus have adopted to the question of salvation and the other. Therefore, it might be useful to begin with an overview of some of the most common approaches to the question of truth and salvation found within Christianity and Hinduism.

An overview of Hindu and Christian approaches to the question of truth or salvation For Christians, Alan Race’s threefold typology of exclusivism–​inclusivism–​pluralism has long provided a guiding framework for understanding “non-​Christians” vis-​à-​vis God’s plan of 404

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salvation. Exclusivism considers Jesus Christ to be the only means of salvation. Inclusivism opens the possibility for all to be saved, even through their own tradition, which finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Pluralism views each religion as a valid and authentic vehicle for salvation (Race 1983). Paul Knitter speaks of four models:  the replacement, fulfillment, mutuality, and acceptance models, extending Race’s threefold typology in light of the post-​ modern emphasis on distinctiveness and particularity (Knitter 1995, p. 25). In Hinduism, three well-​known paths (margas) to liberation/​salvation (moksha) are the paths of knowledge (jnana marga), duty/​actions (karma marga) and devotion (bhakti marga). Klaus Klostermaier explains that this classification “does not mean exclusiveness, but emphasis,” and often Hindu philosophers embraced a combination of these paths or their elements as valid for salvation (Klostermaier 1984, p. 258). Interestingly, one can see the jnana–​karma–​bhakti marga paradigm at work in Christian approaches to the question of salvation, and the exclusivism–​ inclusivism–​pluralism–​particularity paradigm at work in Hindu approaches to the question. In recent years, neo-​Hindu approaches to the question of pluralism have adopted the hermeneutical strategy of “hierarchical inclusivism,” which was present in classical and medieval Hinduism “to locate the internal others,” to frame different religions. Under this framework, numerous religious traditions in the world are marked with respect to the apex of Hindu wisdom, in many cases, neo-​Advaita, that is, the modern reformulations of the Advaita of Samkara offered by figures such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–​1902) and S. Radhakrishnan (1888–​1975). (Barua 2014, pp. 81, 83) Underpinned by the philosophical–​theological complex of karma and rebirth, this framework makes the “accommodation” of the other possible, not in the sense that they believe that their opponents are doctrinally correct…but in that their opponents can attain rebirth subsequently in their own doxastic community, and thus, properly qualified, the opponents can finally move towards the goal of liberation. (Ibid., p. 91) With this brief overview, let us frame how different Hindus and Christians approached the question of truth and salvation vis-​à-​vis the other religious tradition. For reasons of scope and focus, this essay will not delve into the exclusivist paradigm. Instead, it will explore the inclusivist and pluralist frameworks, which have engendered a wide range of theological reflection on the question of truth and salvation, and show how these approaches interacted with the jnana–​karma–​bhakti paradigm. Further, this essay will focus on the late modern period, beginning in the nineteenth century, when Christian–​Hindu dialogue on this theme was recurrent and pronounced. Most of the robust articulations of the question emerged in the context of pre-​independent colonial India, on the cusp of a resurgent nationalist spirit.  The interface with colonialism shaped these perspectives. While Indian Christians were concerned with reinterpreting their identity and faith along nationalistic lines, Hindus were concerned with countering the orientalist tendencies that considered Hinduism inferior to colonial Christianity.

Inclusivist–​fulfillment approaches Among the many approaches to reconciling the gap between Christianity and other faiths, the fulfillment approach has been an influential one. T   his approach sought to establish philosophical 405

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and theological continuity between Hinduism and Christianity, emphasizing the consummation of the highest yearnings of the former in the latter.Though primarily utilized for Christian apologetics, this approach also emerged in relation to Hindu self-​identity and the relevance of Hinduism in enlightenment-​influenced modernity. The works of K.C. Sen, K.M. Banerjea, and J.N. Farquhar fall under this approach.

Keshub Chandra Sen: confluence of the fulfillment and bhakti approaches The fulfillment approach gained currency beyond Christians. Keshub Chandra Sen, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a neo-​Hindu reform movement started by Raja Rammohun Roy, can be considered one of the earliest proponents of the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of Hinduism. Sen was influenced by the yogic mysticism and incarnational theology of Vaishnava bhakti, which he dexterously combined with a “devotion to Jesus dissociated from historical Christianity, and interpreted as the source of creative renewal of Hinduism and the concrete centre of a new universal religion of the Spirit” (Thomas 1970, p. 58). Seeking a home for Christ in the Hindu tradition, Sen applied Matthew 5:17, where Jesus says,“I am the way, the truth and the life,” to his own Hindu tradition to affirm that Jesus did not come to fulfill only the Mosaic dispensation, but also the Hindu dispensation in India. To make his appeal more persuasive to the indigenous people of India, Sen portrays Christ as an Asiatic ascetic, who comes as a Hindu in faith to his kindred to fulfill and perfect India’s longing for a religion of communion. Sen understands Christ in an expansive manner as the “spirit-​Christ,” who as the pre-​existent logos has a universal presence, grasped through mystic experience. Building on Vedic ideas of mystic union and pantheism, Sen declares that since Christ is the light that lights everyone who comes into the world, if Hindus have in them the “spirit of truth and filial devotion and self-​sacrifice,” that would constitute Christ’s presence, despite Hindus being unconscious of this presence and even denying it with their lips (Sen 1954, p. 375). The most popular expression of Sen’s fulfillment theory is a figurative, mathematical depiction of the Trinity, which embraces within it the “whole of the economy of creation and the philosophy of salvation”. The apex is the very God Jehovah, the supreme Brahma of the Vedas. Alone, in his own eternal glory he dwells. From him comes down the son, in a direct line, an emanation from Divinity.Thus, God descends and touches one end of the base of humanity; then running all along the base permeates the world and there by the power of the Holy Ghost drags up the degenerated humanity to Himself. Divinity coming down to Humanity is the Son; Divinity carrying up humanity to heaven is the Holy Ghost. This is the whole philosophy of salvation. (Ibid., p.16) Sen was the first to use the category of sat–​chit–​ananda (being, intelligence, bliss) to interpret the godhead, which was highly influential for a number of other Indian Christian theologians like Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, who also followed Sen in considering Christ as the perfect fulfillment of centuries of Hindu longings.

Krishna Mohun Banerjea: the preparatory value of Hinduism K.M. Banerjea, a Bengali Brahmin convert to Christianity, is a good example of a Christian theologian who followed the fulfillment approach. In his novel work, The Arian [sic] Witness: or 406

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the Testimony of Arian Scriptures in Collaboration of Biblical History and the Rudiments of Christian Doctrine, Including Dissertations on the Original Home and Early Adventures of Indo-​Aryans (1875), which is popularly known as The Arian Witness, Banerjea sought to interpret Christianity as the successor of Vedic Hinduism through an intertextual reading of biblical and Vedic texts. His primary intention for carrying out this exercise was to lift up the purest form of Hinduism as enunciated in the Vedas as being identical to Christianity and as having preparatory value for the Christian faith. Banerjea sought to articulate a new self-​understanding of Indian Christians as the spiritual heirs of the Aryan Hindus.  This implied that he recognized Hinduism as the bearer of rays of truth that find their culmination in Christianity. Seeking to demonstrate how the Vedas come close to the spirit of Christianity, Banerjea discerned parallelisms between the Bible and Vedic literature. He interpreted Jesus Christ as the true Prajapati, the Vedic “Lord of the Creatures,” whose self-​sacrifice makes possible deliverance, drawing correspondences with the biblical description of Christ as one who, by his sacrifice and death, vanquished death and brought life. Pointing out that the name Prajapati also means “supporter, feeder, and deliverer of his creatures,” Banerjea went on to establish correspondences with the Hebrew version of “Jesus,” which connotes help, deliverance, and salvation.The gospel of Matthew describes Jesus as the heigoumenos, the leader who shall feed his people, which is also the import of the Sanskrit term pati. Banerjea saw this approximation of the Prajapati to Christ as testimony to the “saving mysteries of Christianity” and argued that his invitation to Hindus to come to faith in Christ is neither his voice alone, nor the voice of the missionaries or Christian England only, but also the voice of their “primitive ancestors” calling upon them in the “words of the Vedas to embark on the good ferrying boat for passing safely over the waves of sin” (Banerjea 2009 [n.d.], pp. 155, 156).

John Nichol Farquhar: the inclusive Christ, the crown of Hinduism J.N. Farquhar, a Scottish missionary to India, is the most prominent proponent of the fulfillment approach. Though Farquhar fully outlines his fulfillment approach in his best-​known work, The Crown of Hinduism (1913), his earliest articulation appears in a lecture entitled “Lessons from Experience in India” that he presented at a conference of the World Student Christian Federation in 1909 in Oxford.Though he acknowledges that every aspect of Hinduism emerges from a real religious instinct with an intrinsic value of its own, and he accords credit for its moral and religious import, his method asserts the supremacy of Christ and proclaims him to be the “consummator of religion” (Farquhar 1909, p. 72). Farquhar argues that Christianity is the culmination of a rudimentary Hinduism, thereby assuring Hindus that conversion to Christianity would not take away from them anything that their old faith offered, but would rather make them enjoy afresh everything of value in their former faith (but at a more advanced stage). Farquhar works out his thesis that Hinduism finds its fulfillment in Christ through a critical review of some of the cardinal aspects of Hinduism (including, but not restricted to, the doctrine of karma, the caste system, idol worship, asceticism, Vedanta, and incarnation), which he compares with corresponding Christian ideas from a fulfillment perspective. Despite some element of truth underpinning these elements of Hinduism, according to Farquhar, their present weakness and inadequacy predicate their true fulfillment in Christ. In Christ, who came not to destroy but fulfill, “every line of light which is visible in the grossest parts of the religion reappears…set in healthy institutions and spiritual worship,” and in him is “focused every ray of light that shines in Hinduism” (Farquhar 1913, p. 458). Both Farquhar and Banerjea embody an approach that finds precedent for Christianity in the Vedic scriptures. Though they acknowledge rays of truth in Hinduism, they consider this truth 407

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imperfect, partial, and in dire need of finding its proper fulfillment in Christ and Christianity. One can understand that this strand of thinking was introduced to draw Christians nearer to Hindus and to reverse the prevailing tendency among Christians to discount the spiritual value of Hinduism altogether. However, the inclination to accord superior value to Christ and Christianity has been met with critical appraisal over the years. There have been other variations of such attempts to cross-​ fertilize Hinduism and Christianity using an inclusivist approach. Raimon Panikkar, a Roman Catholic theologian, argues for Christ as the meeting point of various religions and calls the living presence of Christ in Hinduism “the Unknown Christ” (Panikkar 1964; cf. Ranstrom’s chapter in this volume). This idea of meeting point differs from the idea of consummation or completion and reflects an epistemological premise that combines hospitality with humility.

Pluralistic–​Vedantic approaches The emergence of the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna movement shifted the conversations on truth and salvation in Hindu–​ Christian encounters away from the Christocentric Brahmotheism of the Brahmo Samaj to more traditional Vedantic Advaitism (see Nicholson’s chapter in this volume on how Advaita Vedanta gained primacy among the Vedantic schools). Hindu philosophers such as Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan dug deep into the Vedantic traditions to articulate a pluralistic vision for religions, which refuted the predominant Christian claim for the universality and finality of salvation through Jesus Christ. Emphasizing the Advaitic framework of mystic oneness with the ultimate, both Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan introduced new philosophical frameworks that emphasized multiple means of salvation, among which Jesus Christ found space as one, and not “The One,” means of salvation.

Swami Vivekananda: between pluralism and hierarchical inclusivism? Vivekananda, the disciple of Ramakrishna often remembered for his speech at the first World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, was one of the first Hindus to articulate a comprehensive vision for interreligious unity (see Rinehart’s chapter in this volume). Against the Christian claim that Christianity was the sole universal religion, Vivekananda claimed that the Vedanta, and the Vedanta alone, has the potential to become the universal religion of all, as it is based on eternal impersonal principles rather than on historically bound personalities. For Vivekananda, principles, not personalities, can bring humanity to common thinking in regard to religion. However, this does not mean that the Vedanta discounts the spiritual value of persons and the incarnation. On the contrary, it offers infinite scope for them through the theory of ishtam, which affirms the validity of a variety of spiritual disciplines and paths for the differing spiritual temperament of the devotees. What is crucial for Vivekananda is the affirmation of the pluralist principle, which acknowledges that what is good for one may not be good for the other. Therefore, he affirms that two views, though apparently contradictory, may yet be true. This means that it is not incumbent on a Christian to become Buddhist or Hindu, or vice versa. Rather, what is necessary is that each acknowledges the spirit of the other and yet perceives their own individuality and growth in accordance with their own ishtam—​their “specific law of growth” (Thomas 1970, p. 122). Vivekananda interprets Jesus Christ in line with the framework of the Vedanta as a principle and not a personality—​in other words, as a state to be attained. In working out an understanding of the salvation offered by Jesus Christ, he moves away from the ethical to the mystical. Christ for him is the manifestation of an eternal spiritual principle. Jesus Christ, as a yogi who realized 408

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his oneness with God in his spirit, showed others the path to spiritual realization. He recognizes in Jesus’ renunciation the idea of mukti (salvation), which realizes its oneness with the Brahman by putting to death the inner self. Following the teachings of Ramakrishna, he rejects the Christian idea of sin and posits avidya, or ignorance, as the biggest impediment to salvation. Christ, as a Vedantin, becomes a way to salvation as he teaches people of the essential unity of the atman (soul) and Brahman (God). Alongside his assertion of the sovereignty of Advaita, Vivekananda is often acknowledged to have introduced the doctrine that dvaita (dualism), vishistadvaita (qualified non-​dualism), and advaita (non-​dualism) constitute the various stages of development. He interweaves this understanding with his interpretation of the personal elements in Jesus’ sayings. Though Jesus taught the essential unity of the soul with God, Vivekananda claims that he presented his message to suit the contrasting spiritual levels of his hearers. For the uneducated masses, who might not have been able to conceive of anything higher than a personal God, he spoke of God as a common father in heaven. For higher circles with a more advanced perception, Christ said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” However, for his most advanced disciples, he proclaimed, “I and the father are one,” which for Vivekananda is the highest truth. Advaita, in which all is one, without a second—​is the goal (Vivekananda 1931, p. 144). Despite acknowledging the greatness of Christ’s incarnation and affirming that Jesus Christ shows humanity salvation by enabling us to realize the divine essence within, Vivekananda objects to and rejects Christian claims of Christ’s uniqueness. He finds it completely unreasonable that the infinite nature of God would be revealed fully and finally in a particular person and point in history. Considering this to be a rejection of God’s infinity, he makes a fervent plea for God to be recognized, not just in Jesus of Nazareth, but in all the great ones who preceded and succeeded him, as well as the ones yet to come, whom he affirmed were manifestations of the same infinite God (Vivekananda 1922, p. 50).

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: the intersection of pluralism with the bhakti and jnana margas? S. Radhakrishnan, a renowned statesman and scholar of Hinduism, also, like Vivekananda, refutes claims for the uniqueness of Jesus and declares any truth claim which declines to be recognized as “one among many” ruinous and dangerous both in its motive and consequences. For Radhakrishnan, the absoluteness of truth implies the relational nature of all formulations of the truth. He works out his arguments on the basis of the infinity of God, whose manifestations cannot be confined to a particular point and time in history, as well as the similarities between the different avatars, especially Buddha, Krishna, and Christ on multiple levels (including, but not limited to, their conception and teachings). For Radhakrishnan this coincidence in the “logic of religious experience” is predicated both by the historical context as well as the spiritual needs of humans. He writes, “The hopes and fears of humans as well as their desires and aspirations are the same on the banks of the Ganges as on the shores of the lake of Galilee” (Radhakrishnan 1938, p. 184). Within this pluralist position Radhakrishnan interprets Christian approaches to truth and salvation through the framework of the bhakti and jnana margas, with special reference to Christ’s incarnation and cross. He acknowledges Jesus Christ as an incarnation of God within the Hindu framework of the avatars. This idea combines the descent of God into human history to intervene decisively in the struggle between good and evil with the idea of the ascent of humans to a divine state, an ascent which is facilitated by the incarnated being’s demonstration of the latent divine potential in all human beings. 409

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For Radhakrishnan, the cross has value because it symbolizes action undertaken for the welfare of others, action which can contribute as well to one’s own spiritual progress.Therefore, the cross in his view is not a stumbling block to the Hindu, but a demonstration of God’s love rooted in self-​sacrifice and thereby a potent symbol of the redemptive activity of God. He understands the cross in terms of total surrender to God’s will and as abnegation of the ego, which amounts to a self-​identification with a fuller life and consciousness. In a fascinating manner, he ascribes a universality to Christ’s resurrection from a Vedantic perspective, understanding dying and rising with Christ as a spiritual rebirth, which holds value to the Hindu as well. According to Radhakrishnan, when one is united with the Christ-​principle, one realizes oneness with the father, the supreme godhead, and attains the status of perfection, which can be described in terms of growing into the full measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Radhakrishnan probably produced some of the most sophisticated neo-​Vedanta accounts of Christ as part of what many have considered a Hindu apologetic to the Christian West (also see Ganeri’s chapter in this volume). Following Vivekananda’s thinking, Radhakrishnan understands spiritual salvation as freedom from ignorance through knowledge (jnana) of Brahman, which is also a self-​realization of the supreme being as one’s true self. He identifies three attitudes of Christians to other religions. The first treats other religions as “untouchable.” The second discerns divine elements in other religions, yet treats them as mere preparations for Christianity, which, as the “crown and completion” of other religions, is the universal standard for judging the validity of the others. He writes of a third attitude, which he describes as a “Hindu one,” which he considers as being nascent among a number of Christians. This attitude anticipates a world society with a universal religion of which the historical faiths are branches, assisting others to find their own souls and grow to their full stature. For him, different religious traditions “clothe the one Reality in various images, and their visions could embrace and fertilize each other” to offer a many-​sided perfection for humanity (Radhakrishnan 1992, p. 76). Both Radhakrishnan and Vivekananda uphold an understanding of religion in which different religions express the one ultimate reality in distinct and diverse ways. Though they focus on an impersonal God, their working out of salvation has its locus in the interiority of the soul. From a Vedantic philosophical premise, they work out models of truth-​seeking that are simultaneously universal, pluralistic, and particular, while eschewing any tendency to ascribe singularity and finality to the Christian tradition.

Bhakti-​based experiential approaches to salvation among Indian Christians Bearing in mind their relationship with Hindus, some Christian theologians adopted a devotional, bhakti marga approach to reinterpret Christian ideas of salvation.This was done to counter Western Christianity’s theological triumphalism, which often considered Christian ideas of salvation better than those of other faiths. It is hard to place this approach within the threefold framework of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, because the central focus here is not the question of the salvific potential of the “other” religions. Rather, it explores an Indian Christian understanding of salvation, employing a Hindu soteriological framework (bhakti, or devotion to a personal God), which tacitly accords value to the various approaches to salvation/​liberation found within Hinduism. A.J. Appasamy presents Christianity as a bhakti religion with mystical elements. For him Christianity is a path of devotion through love. Affirming the tradition that bhakti (devotion) is a way to salvation, in contrast to the popular understandings that jnana (knowledge), karma 410

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(good deeds), and dhyana (reflection) are the only effective soteriological paths, Appasamy uses Ramanuja’s philosophical system, vishistadvaita, or modified non-​dualism, to develop his Christology. Focusing specifically on the Gospel of John, Appasamy understands Christ the Logos as the antaryamin (the indweller) whose immanence preceded the incarnation (Appasamy 1991, pp. 39–​43). For Appasamy selfless love is a nearer equivalent of the term “bhakti” than faith and devotion. It is only through a selfless love (bhakti) that one can attain liberation/​salvation (moksha) and know Christ. According to Appasamy, the union of Christ with God is moral or ethical, and this paradigm should dictate the attitude and relationship of the bhakta (believer) to the divine. Only through a unity of purpose with God can a believer be in union with God. A group of thinkers from Madras known as the Madras Rethinking Group also explored bhakti and anubhava (experience) as means of union with God from a Christocentric perspective. Pandipedi Chenchiah (1886–​1959) and Vengal Chakkarai (1880–​1958) were two well-​ known representatives of this group. Chenchiah’s theology revolves around a fulcrum that he calls “the raw fact of Christ,” which is for Chenchiah the historical Christ, who still lives today. The anubhava, or direct experience, of this living Christ—​the first fruits of a new creation, in whom God and humanity merge—​is central for the Christian life. He emphasizes the “permanent humanity of Christ” as the adi-​purusha or the cosmic Christ, who inaugurates the new creation and from whom a new race in creation emanates. Direct experience of the living Christ (anubhava) is pivotal for Christian faith in relating to God (Chenchiah 1938, p. 53). Chakkarai understands salvation or liberation in terms of one’s self-​identification with God. Christ holds the key for this self-​identification or “plunging into the atman of God” (Chakkarai 1927, p. 200). Since the foundation of knowledge of God for Chakkarai is the experience and consciousness of Jesus Christ, who gives color, light, and form to God, the mystical path of bhakti (devotion) is an important instrument of liberation. The saving power (kriya shakti) of God to restore world order is linked to the suffering of Christ; therefore, the cross is a central symbol of liberation, as well as a mysterious means of God’s salvific power (Ibid., p. 87). For this reason, liberation for Chakkarai is also identifying oneself with Christ’s suffering, which is possible through the path of devotion.

Karma marga approaches to the question of truth There are some approaches to the question of salvation and truth which can be broadly classified under the path of action (karma marga), given their links to practical questions of justice, peace, and nonviolence. M.K. Gandhi from the Hindu tradition and S.J. Samartha and M.M. Thomas from the Christian traditions offer good examples of this approach.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: a pragmatist approach to the truth of the other In the context of Hindu–​Christian encounters, M.K. Gandhi, a leader of the Indian independence movement, represents a pragmatist approach toward “ultimate truth” in religious traditions. Though Gandhi does not accept Christian claims of Christ’s divinity and does not consider Christ the source of ultimate truth, he embraces Christ’s spiritual vision to work out Hindu ideas of liberation relevant to socio-​political struggles. Gandhi derives inspiration from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ for his non-​violent ideal of ahimsa, which forms the foundation of satyagraha, a form of political resistance founded on the principle of insistence (agraha) on the truth (satya). Gandhi affirms ahimsa as the essence of being human and equates it with the utmost selflessness. 411

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A few examples may illustrate Gandhi’s pragmatic pluralism. Gandhi writes that when he read the Sermon on the Mount, especially such passages as “resist not evil,” he was simply overjoyed and discovered his own opinion being confirmed in a source that he least expected. Gandhi considers the Sermon on the Mount the quintessence of the message of Jesus Christ. He affirms that the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount “competes, almost on equal terms,” with the Bhagavad Gita for the domination of his heart, and it was this aspect of Jesus’ teaching that endeared Jesus to him (Gandhi 1956, p. 220). In an interview with British journalist Millie Polak in 1920, Gandhi said, “The gentle figure of Christ, so patient, so kind, so loving, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retaliate when abused or struck but to turn the other cheek” was “a beautiful example” of what he thought was the “perfect man” (Polak 1931, p. 40).

Stanley Jeddiah Samartha: the convergence of jnana marga, karma marga, and pluralism Stanley Samartha interlinks the concern of justice to the question of truth in the context of Hindu–​Christian dialogue. In his Courage for Dialogue, Samartha reiterates that purely academic discussions that take a comparative approach to ideas of truth in Hinduism and Christianity are insufficient in a context where both communities are caught in a worldwide struggle against injustice. However, Samartha does not frame this as an either/​or choice between the struggle for justice and the quest for truth. Rather, for him the quest for truth is about how one’s understanding of and obedience to the truth critically illumines and directs one’s struggles for justice. Thus, for Samartha there is an integral interrelationship between truth and justice. In light of the Hindu idea of avidya (ignorance) and the Christian idea of sin as bondage, both Hindu and Christian heritages stridently emphasize the “liberating power of the truth in human life and history” (Samartha 1981, p. 144). He therefore argues that the joint quest for the truth in the context of Hindu–​Christian dialogue has inextricable implications for ongoing struggles for justice as well. Samartha highlights how both advaita (which focuses on the re-​establishment of the self within the true being) and dvaita (which seeks communion with the divine through the paths of knowledge, devotion, and works, as well as the path of ultimate surrender) focus on the singularity of truth. He goes on to argue that the categories of “revelation” in Christianity and “realization” within Hinduism ought not to be “unnecessarily contrasted” (Ibid., p. 148). Given that both traditions recognize that the question of the truth depends upon an inner response to the ultimate truth, he focuses on obedience to, and acting upon, the truth. For him the truth that dispels ignorance cannot be differentiated from the truth that frees humans from sin. However, he goes on to point out that the crucial difference in Hindu and Christian understanding of the truth centers on the biblical understanding of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, the particularity of which Hindus find difficult to fathom and accept. In light of this divergence in understanding, and recognizing the integrity of the Hindu and Christian responses to the ultimate truth, Samartha advocates a “dialogue into truth” and highlights how an appreciation of the differences might pave the way for the discovery of hitherto undiscovered and ignored dimensions of received truth within one’s own tradition (Ibid., p. 151). Samartha argues that the implications of such a dialogue into truth for “Western-​Christians” (by which he also implies Christians in Asia and Africa who have a blinkered vision of Christ), would expand their views of truth by viewing it through “Hindu eyes” (Ibid., p. 155, 156). Looking at the

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truth through Hindu eyes might not just challenge and correct exclusiveness, and with it the implicit claim of uniqueness of the truth of Christianity, but also complement a parochial faith to make it more catholic. Samartha sincerely engages with the question of the salvific significance of Christ, which remains a persistent and perennial question within the modern ecumenical movement. Embracing the Hindu idea of mystery as an “ontological basis for tolerance,” Samartha argues for a “theocentric Christology” to emphasize the distinctiveness of Christian mission as well as to foster interreligious relationships (Samartha 1995, p. 82, 89). His revised Christology states the particularity and distinctiveness of Christ in a way that makes cooperation with neighbors of other faiths for common purposes in society the context for Christian witness to God’s saving work in Christ. Samartha’s distinctive contribution is the way in which he connects this quest for the truth with the practice of the truth. He points out that in the Hindu tradition dharma (duty) and satya (truth) are closely related, and that Christianity does not emphasize knowing the truth but doing the truth. He goes on to say that “unless the Hindu–​Christian quest for the truth is related to the ongoing life of the community and the life of the people who are struggling, suffering, and dying in the world today, it will remain isolated” (Samartha 1981, p. 156). In that sense for Samartha “the quest for the truth cannot be separated from the willingness to suffer” in struggles against “falsehood and injustice” (Ibid., p. 157). He affirms that love of the truth and love of the neighbor go hand in hand.

M.M. Thomas: karma marga of humanization and justice The idea of connecting truth and salvation to the struggles of the people also emerges in the thinking of M.M. Thomas. Thomas understands salvation as humanization. His understanding of Christianity can be categorized under karma marga, the way of action. Thomas identifies the struggles for humanization as a common ground for the Church to enter into dialogical partnerships with religions as well as with secular ideologies. He emphasizes that the interrelatedness of humanity lies in its points of striving and struggling for a fuller humanity (Thomas 1975, pp. xi–​xii). He emphasizes that the mission of the church in the contemporary context “is to be present within the creative liberation movements of our time, which the gospel of Christ has helped to take shape, and so participate in them as to be able to communicate the genuine gospel of liberation” (Thomas 1973, pp. 164, 165). What is distinctive about Thomas’s understanding of salvation is not only that he discerns in Jesus Christ points of convergence for dialogue with other religions, but also that he derives from this Christology a theological impetus for Christian involvement in justice.As Sathianathan Clarke points out, He theorizes that Christianity introduced into Indian religious and secular philosophy the idea that history is heading toward an ultimate destiny in which fuller humanity is an objective and that the Gestalt of this humanization seems also connected with Jesus. (Clarke 2007, p. 431) Thomas consistently discerns the presence of Christ in all struggles for justice, irrespective of whether they are Christian or not:  in every movement that aims for “the creation of a genuine community, whether it be religious or secular, theistic or atheistic, there is at least an implicit faith-​response to Christ as the bearer of new humanity” (England et al. 2003, p. 253).

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Like Panikkar, in the context of interreligious engagement, Thomas reintroduces Christ as a point of convergence and not as a polemical point of divergence as has often been the case. Thereby, though convinced of the finality of the salvation offered by Christ, Thomas moves the Christological debate away from the vexed question of salvation through Christ to the question of humanization. This reflects the primary orientation of his thinking, which is rooted in the affirmation that the validity of Christology does not lie in its doctrinal orthodoxy but rather in its contribution to the quest for human flourishing and social justice.

Truth and self-​identity: multiple religious belonging In the context of Hindu–​Christian encounters, one of the ways in which people have opened themselves to the spiritual resources of the other has been through a process of fluid and hybrid religious living. Several examples of the different levels of such hybridity can be cited. At the level of inculturation one ought to remember Roberto de Nobili, who started the Madurai Mission in 1606. Declaring themselves to be “new Brahmins,” de Nobili and his associates used Hindu customs and symbols like the sacred thread and sandal to appeal to the caste sentiments of potential Brahmin converts (see Clooney’s chapter in this volume). At the philosophical level, other examples may include the French Benedictine monk Dom Henri Le Saux, better known as Swami Abhishiktananda, who established a Christian monastery called Shantivanam (on whom, see Cornille’s chapter in this volume), and Raimon Panikkar the Jesuit priest, who wrote, “I left Europe as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian” (Panikkar 1978, p. 2; see also, Ranstrom’s chapter in this volume). At a more popular level, this openness to be nourished by the spiritual springs of multiple religious traditions manifests itself in day-​to-​day rituals associated with death and marriage, pilgrimages to religious sites of other religious traditions, and embracing practices usually associated with other religious traditions, including tonsuring, the offering of hair, and the use of arti (sacred fire) in Christian worship. It is not uncommon for many Hindus to visit Christian churches and light candles during festival days like Christmas in India, offer replicas of body parts in the shrine of Our Lady of Health in Velankanni in South India, or take out a chariot procession for Mary during the St. Mary’s feast (Raj and Dempsey 2012; for more, see Ponniah’s chapter in this volume). All of these examples attest to another way in which there is an implicit ritualistic acknowledgment of the value, if not the truth, of the other on an existentialist level. For many, seeking spiritual sustenance in more than one religious tradition is not a question of choice, especially for the marginalized communities. Dalit Christian communities often embrace religious multiplicity to cope with a discriminatory socio-​political reality mediated by the caste system, often moving between Hindu and Christian identities. Some Christians also embrace religious fluidity by according cultural rather than religious value to Hinduism. This was very much a case with early Indian Christian theologians, who affirmed that they would remain Hindus despite converting to Christianity and that Hindu perspectives opened their minds and hearts to the riches of Christianity. Such an understanding inspired Christian churches to experiment with inculturation and use Hindu frameworks in their architecture and worship (see Amaladoss’s contribution to this volume). The Christian ashrams in India, the folk Christian festivals, indigenous lyrics, and the architecture of several local churches in South India all attest to the diverse ways in which Christians have made space for Hindu elements in their (spi)ritual existence.

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Between Ganga and Galilee: the journey today The focus of Hindu–​Christian theological encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was shaped largely in the Indian pre-​independence context, both by an apologetic quest to establish the Christian truth against Brahminical Hinduism and the theorizing of neo-​Vedanta, and by the challenge for Christians to incarnate themselves as part of an emerging national consciousness. Accounts of salvation and liberation incorporated concepts and symbols from what has been termed as “upper-​caste” V   edantic tradition. Over the years with the emergence of Dalit theology, this tendency to equate Indianness with “Hinduness” (Hindutva) in general, and Brahminical Hinduism in particular, has come under critique. Today there are new challenges for the question of religious others. The growth of populist nationalism in India has conflated notions of Indianness and “Hinduness” in problematic ways and has shrouded many forms of Christian–​Hindu engagement. The influx of new forms of Christianity has led to a resurgence of what has been termed “prosperity gospel,” which, with its neo-​capitalist undergirding, has turned the discussion on truth and salvation away from interreligious engagement. An influx of neo-​Hindu gurus has successfully incorporated elements of Hinduism to cater to the wide spectrum of spiritual longings of the times. The general focus on enhancement of life through spiritual teachings and new meditative techniques coexists with age-​old pilgrimages, pujas, and local festivals. In this context the Hindus and Christians seeking to understand the quest for the truth in the other need to pay attention to the interstices between identity and nationalist politics, neo-​liberal economics, and new-​age and traditional spiritualities. This quest might involve paying attention to not just the shifting foundations of Christianity or Hinduism, but the rapidly changing nature of the religions themselves. In a globalized context marked by diasporic religion, increased spiritual fluidity, and increasing interreligious hostility, the challenge is all the more fragmented. The quest to understand the truth in the other today may not just entail traversing the distance between the Ganges and Galilee. It may also entail paying attention to how the Ganges and Galilee not only coalesce, but also collide in the socio-​spiritual lives of Hindus and Christians in fruitful as well as ferocious ways.

Bibliography Appasamy, A.J. 1991. Christianity as Bhakti Marga:  A Study of the Johannine Doctrine of Love. 3rd ed. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Banerjea, K.M. 2009, n.d. “The Relation between Christianity and Hinduism.” In Race, A. and Hedges, P.M. (eds.). Christian Approaches to Other Faiths: A Reader. London: SCM Press, pp. 150–​57. —​—​—​. 1875. The Arian [sic] Witness: or the Testimony of Arian Scriptures in Collaboration of Biblical History and the Rudiments of Christian Doctrine, Including Dissertations on the Original Home and Early Adventures of Indo-​Aryans. London: Thacker Spink & Co. Barua, A. 2014. “Hindu Responses to Religious Diversity and the Nature of Post-​Mortem Progress.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 27(8): 77–​94. Boyd, R. 1994. An Introduction to Indian Christian Theology. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Chakkarai,V. 1927. The Cross and Indian Thought. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Chenchiah, P. 1938.“Christian Message in a Non-​Christian World.” In Devasahayam, D.M. and Sudarisanam, A.N. (eds.). Rethinking Christianity. Madras: A.N. Sudarisanam, pp. 47–​56. Clarke, S. 2007. “M.M. Thomas.” In Kwok, P., Compier, D.H. and Rieger, J. (eds.). Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, pp. 423–​37. Devasahayam, D.M. and Sudarisanam, A.N. (eds.). 1938. Rethinking Christianity in India. Madras:  A.N. Sudarisanam.

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Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar England, J.C., Kuttianimattathil, J., Mansford, J., Quintos, L.A., Kwang-​Sun, S. and Wickeri, J. (eds.). 2003. Asian Christian Theologies: A Research Guide to Authors, Movements, Sources. Volume 1: Asia Region, South Asia, Austral Asia. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Farquhar, J.N. 1909. “Lessons from Experience in India.” In Report of the Conference of the World’s Student Christian Federation Held in Oxford, England. Oxford: World’s Student Christian Federation. —​—​—​. 1913. The Crown of Hinduism. New Delhi: Oriental. Gandhi, M.K. 1940. The Message of Jesus Christ. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. —​—​—​. 1956–​1994. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 25. New Delhi:  Publication Division, Ministry of Broadcasting, Government of India. Klostermaier, K. 1984. Mythologies and Philosophies of Salvation in the Theistic Traditions of India. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Knitter, P. 1995. One Earth, Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Panikkar, R. 1964. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd. —​—​—​. 1978. Interreligious Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press. Parekh, M.C. 1931. Brahmarshi Keshub Chunder Sen. Rajkot. Philip,T.V. (ed.). 1982. Krishna Mohan Banerjea: Christian Apologist. Confessing the Faith in India Series No. 15. Bangalore: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Polak, M.G. 1931. Mr. Gandhi: The Man. London: George Allen and Unwin. Race, A. 1983. Christians and Religious Pluralism:  Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. London: SCM Press. Race, A. and Hedges, P.M. (eds.). 2009. Christian Approaches to Other Faiths: A Reader. London: SCM Press. Radhakrishnan, S. 1938. Eastern Religions and Western Thought. London: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 1992. “The Religion of the Spirit and the World’s Needs: Fragments of a Confession.” In Schilpp, P.A. (ed.), The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp. 5–​82. Raj, S.J. and Dempsey, C.G. (eds.). 2012. Popular Christianity in India:  Riting between the Lines. New York: SUNY Press. Samartha, S.J. 1981. Courage for Dialogue:  Ecumenical Issues in Interreligious Relationships. Geneva:  World Council of Churches. —​—​—​. 1995. One Christ—​Many Religions: Toward a Revised Christology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Sen, K.C. 1954. “India Asks:  Who Is Christ?” In Sen, K.C. Lectures in India. Calcutta:  Navavidhan Publications, pp. 351–​76. Thomas, M.M. 1969. “The Pattern of Christian Spirituality.” Religion and Society 16(2). —​—​—​. 1970. The Acknowledged Christ of the Hindu Renaissance. Madras: Christian Literature Society. —​—​—​. 1973. “The Meaning of Salvation Today: A Personal Statement.” International Review of Mission 62(246): 158–​69. —​—​—​. 1975. Man and the Universe of Faiths. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Vivekananda. 1922. Speeches and Writings of Swami Vivekananda. Madras: G.A. Natesan. —​—​—​. 1931. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. 5th ed.Vol. 1. Almora: Advaita Ashram.

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35 INCULTURATION Michael Amaladoss, SJ

The term “inculturation” is patterned on the term “incarnation,” which refers to the Word of God taking on human flesh to become human in Jesus (John 1:14). Christians believe that the Word becomes human in Jesus in order to divinize them as children of God. This divinization of humans also involves the transformation of their cultures and ways of life. Christians believe that the Word cannot transform what It does not assume. When the Word became human, It did not become human as such, but a particular human being in Judea, a Jew in Palestine: Jesus. Jesus died when he was 33 years old. He proclaimed that his “good news,” that God has become human in order to make the humans divine, was meant for all humans. So he chose disciples whom he sent out into the world to proclaim this good news to the whole of humanity. His disciples believe that his good news must become an inner element in every human culture in view of its transformation. This process is described as in-​culturation. Since humans live in many cultures, as the good news of Jesus spreads across the world slowly, it needs to enter into and transform these many cultures. Christians became fully aware of this process only slowly. When Jesus Christ established the Church in Palestine and sent out his apostles to proclaim the good news (gospel), the language they used must have been Aramaic. Some Greek and Latin may have been known in urban areas, but the first apostles were fishermen who spoke Aramaic. The apostle Paul, having been born and brought up in Tarsus, also spoke fluent Greek. He felt specially called to preach the gospel to non-​Jews, and Greek was the dominant language and also the language of culture in the Mediterranean in that period. Though one Eastern Church continued to use Aramaic (which later became Syriac), Greek seems to have become the most used language in the (Western) Church in the early centuries, and the books of the New Testament of the Bible were written in Greek. Latin-​speaking Romans ruled this area of the Mediterranean, and the head of the Church, the Pope, also established himself in Rome. Rome became the dominant cultural force in Western Europe, and Latin became eventually the official language of the Roman Church. Latin remained the official language of the Western Church, used in its liturgy and theological reflection until the Second Vatican Council, celebrated in 1963–​1965. As the Church spread outside Europe in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the fifteenth century CE and later, it was simply transplanted, so to speak. In Latin American countries, the language and culture of the missionaries were imposed on indigenous groups. The missionaries

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sincerely thought that they were sharing the benefits of European civilization, including its religion, with the indigenous people. So Latin America became not only Christian, religiously, but also Spanish and Portuguese, culturally. In practice the situation was quite complex. While certain elite groups in society may have adopted the foreign religion and culture, the ordinary people retained many of their social and religious practices, giving rise to a double way of life, including in religion. Aloysius Pieris describes this as a metacosmic religion (and culture), superposing itself upon an indigenous (cosmic) religion and culture (Pieris 1988, p.72). In Asia, efforts at conversion did not encounter much success. A few groups, socially weak, marginal, and poor, became Christian and adopted Portuguese names and customs. To become Christian for them was to become culturally Portuguese. Conversion was also, in a certain sense, social promotion, especially when one joined the side of the ruling group of people.The situation changed, however, when the missionaries tried to reach out to the elite in society.1

Mateo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili In China, Mateo Ricci (1552–​1660) tried to reach out to the emperor and the nobles (Cronin 1955). One motive was that once the rich and the powerful were converted, the others would follow according to the principle cujus regio ejus religio—​the people will follow the religion of the sovereign. To reach out to the rich and the powerful, Ricci used his knowledge of mathematic and scientific advance in Europe. He presented himself as a scholar. He adopted the dress and the living habits of the local scholars, the Mandarins, and wrote a book titled The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Ricci 2016). The basic approach, from our point of view, was that Christianity was not merely a developed religion, but also belonged to an advanced civilization; and the Chinese, becoming Christians, could dialogue with and learn from an advanced culture and civilization. Not too many Chinese, however, seem to have been tempted. The strategy of dependence on political power (the emperor) was also limited, as political relations changed with time and circumstances. Roberto de Nobili (1577–​1656) came to India, possibly inspired by Mateo Ricci (for more on Jesuit missions in India, see Francis X. Clooney’s chapter in this volume). He found that the Portuguese had converted mostly fisher-​people along the coast, also offering them protection from Muslim pirates. They took Portuguese names and followed their eating habits. The people identified them with the foreigners or phirangees. No missionaries had approached the people in the interior of the country. India also had the hierarchical caste system. De Nobili wanted to convert the dominant castes, like the Brahmins, also known for their learning, hoping that others would then follow. He affirmed that Indians could become Christian with regard to their religion but remain Indian with regard to their socio-​cultural life. He himself became a sannyasi, or renouncer, according to the Indian (Hindu) tradition. With some difficulty he managed to get Rome to approve his policy (Rajamanickam 1972). Christianity got a foothold in this way in southeast India, where Christians number about 6% of the population today. One of the later missionaries, Joseph Constantine Beschi (1680–​1742), even became a well-​ known and accomplished poet in Tamil (Besse 1914). Christian literature written in Tamil by local authors flourished, as did popular religiosity expressed in the local languages. These early Indian Christians led a double existence. They remained Indian socio-​culturally, but as soon as they entered the Church, they became “Roman Catholics,” using Latin in their worship. Latin retained its official status; the priests learnt their philosophy and theology in Latin and celebrated the liturgy in Latin. The people had no knowledge of Latin, however. Only a simple catechism and some devotional literature, like prayers and lives of saints, were in Tamil.

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The Indian story From the late nineteenth century, foreign missionaries and some Indians began reflecting and writing in English and other languages.There was an attempt to reach out to the Hindus in dialogue in English and in the local languages. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay launched a journal and also tried to start an ashram, which was not permitted by the Pope’s representative in India at the time (Lipner 1999). A Belgian Jesuit missionary, Pierre Johanns, wrote a series of booklets in English, titled To Christ through the Vedanta, analyzing the philosophies of some Hindu scholars like Shankara, Ramanuja, Vallabha, and Chaitanya, and showing how their search manifested a certain knowledge of God that could find fulfillment in the Christian philosophy of St.Thomas Aquinas (Johanns 1944). Such an attempt at dialogue and the positive, though partial, appreciation of the Hindu spiritual and philosophical tradition led to the foundation of an Indian Benedictine ashram in the south of India in 1950 by two French priests, Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux (Monchanin and Le Saux 1964). They wore saffron clothes and lived in simple huts like Hindu sannyasis. They ate vegetarian food and adopted Indian cuisine. They read Hindu scriptural texts such as the Vedas and the Upanishads in the context of the Bible and felt nourished by them.They used yogic methods of concentration and bhajans (repetitive chants) in their prayer. They adopted Indian gestures such as prostration and waving of lamps and incense in their worship. They reached out to the local people, including Hindus, organizing prayer sessions for them (on Le Saux, also known as Abhishiktananda, see Cornille’s contribution to the volume). At the social level, the Christian community continued to practice the hierarchical and discriminatory caste system even in liturgical celebrations, assigning different roles and places to different castes. The liturgy remained in Latin. Socially the community remained Indian without adopting Portuguese customs. But, remaining Indian, it also retained the unjust hierarchical caste system. Whether the oppressed castes, the Dalits, really hoped to get out of the caste system by becoming Christian is questionable, because from the beginning, in most convert communities, social differences were maintained after conversion. However, they did profit by the educational and social activities of the missionaries and, later, of the government, to advance economically and politically.

The Second Vatican Council: a challenge to change This situation, in which an official Roman liturgy in Latin with its theology and spiritual ideals co-​existed with an Indian popular religiosity and social practice, lasted until the Second Vatican Council (1963–​1965). However, in India, already in 1957, there was a seminar in Madras (later, Chennai) on “Indian Culture and the Fullness of Christ” (Madras Cultural Academy 1957). In the decades before the Council, liturgical movements in Germany and France began promoting a more active participation in worship. One way they did this was to use translations of liturgical texts in local languages so that people could follow the priest privately when he was still using Latin in official worship. This liturgical movement, and the theologians involved in it, may have inspired the Bishops at the Council. In their very first document on worship, the Fathers of the Council spelled out the key principles for the reform. The liturgy is made up of unchangeable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These latter not only may be changed but ought to be changed with the passage of time, if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of

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harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become less suitable. In this restoration both texts and rites should be drawn up so as to express more clearly the holy things which they signify. The Christian people, as far as is possible, should be able to understand them with ease and take part in them fully, actively, and as a community. (Flannery 1983, p. 28) Two points can be noted in this passage. First of all, everything can be changed except the elements that are divinely instituted, though no criterion was given to discern this (Amaladoss 1979). Secondly, the only criterion for change is to facilitate the conscious, full, and active participation by the community (Flannery 1983, p. 28). The document then asks the Church to undertake the necessary reform: “Even in the liturgy the Church does not wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not involve the faith or the good of the whole community” (Ibid., p. 32). It urges a very open attitude to change: “Provided that the substantial unity of the Roman rite is preserved, provision shall be made, when revising the liturgical books, for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions and peoples, especially in mission countries” (Ibid., p. 32). Though the term “culture” is not used in this document, we can be sure that when it refers to “different groups, regions and peoples,” it has in mind different cultures and ways life. This is the way in which the different local churches in the world have understood these provisions. What, at that time, was described as adaptation, later came to be called inculturation. The document goes on to recognize that in some places and circumstances a more radical adaptation may be needed. The authority to initiate this, with the collaboration of the Apostolic See, belongs to the Bishops’ Conferences (Ibid., p. 33). Commentators have pointed out that, according to the mind of the Council, the scope of the reform could be far reaching. All were aware that the Church has various liturgical traditions, or Rites, like the Latin, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Syrian, and Maronite. The roots of these variations are in culture and language.The document says that “the sacred Council declares that Holy Mother Church holds all lawfully recognized rites to be of equal right and dignity” (Ibid., p. 22). The word “recognized” is crucial here. In the course of the discussion that preceded the final voting, the Latin word vigentes (existing) was changed to agnitos (recognized). According to experts this change indicates the readiness of the Church to recognize and accept in the future new Rites as, for instance, the Chinese, the Indian, and the African Rites (Gy 1967, p. 116). What has happened more than fifty years after the Council? The Roman reform was mostly a simplification and adaptation of the previous Rite. It has given some freedom to the local Bishops’ Conferences to adopt minor variations in gesture, like making the sign of the cross on the forehead of a child to be baptized. Very few Bishops’ Conferences seem to have made use of such permissions. The Church in Congo has introduced singing and some simple dancing movements during processions in the liturgy. The Church in India has been allowed to introduce the use of oil lamps, deep bows, and prostrations instead of genuflections, and the waving of light, flowers, and incense as gestures of honoring God and the liturgical ministers. More substantial changes have been blocked. All the official prayers have to be literally translated from their Latin originals and cannot be written creatively in local languages. The use of texts from other religious scriptures in the Liturgy has been forbidden, though collections were made (National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre [NBCLC] 1973–​74; Aikiya Alayam 1977, 1984–​85; and see Amalorpavadass n.d.). With regard to the unchangeable elements of rituals that have been divinely instituted, scholars suggest that the only such rituals are washing with water in Baptism and sharing a meal eating and drinking as a community in the Eucharist. Some studies suggest that bread made of wheat and wine made of grapes may be changeable elements (Jaouen 1995). In establishing 420

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Baptism and the Eucharist, Jesus invited two basic human activities into a sacred setting: washing as a sign of purification and new birth, and a common meal as a sign of fellowship in life and also fellowship with God.These activities have similar significance among Hindus and Muslims. Hindus bathe in the Ganges and other sacred rivers and eat the food offered to the deities in their puja (worship ritual). The Muslims wash at least their hands and feet before entering the mosque, and they celebrate Iftar banquets during Ramadan.

The Church in the modern world The Council speaks more explicitly about culture in its document, “On the Church in the Modern World” (Flannery 1983, pp.  811–​97). It describes culture as “the refining and developing of man’s [sic] diverse mental and physical endowments” by subduing the earth, humanizing social life, expressing “great spiritual experiences and aspirations,” and communicating and preserving them to inspire the progress of peoples. Cultures are many, “for different scales of values originate in different ways of using things, of working and self-​expression, of practicing religion and of behaviour, of establishing laws and juridical institutions, of developing science and the arts and of cultivating beauty” (Ibid., p. 53). It suggests that through the development of the sciences, industrialization and the media, “the unity of mankind [sic] is being fostered and expressed in the measure that the particular characteristics of each culture is preserved.”There is also a sense of autonomy and responsibility among humans for each other. The tensions between tradition and modernity, increasing specialized knowledge and wisdom, complexity and autonomy, and, finally, humanism and secularization have to be faced (Ibid., pp. 54–​56). The Church has been sent to all ages and nations and, therefore, is not tied exclusively and indissolubly to any customary practices, ancient or modern…It can then, enter into communion with different forms of culture, thereby enriching both itself and the cultures themselves. (Ibid., p. 58) The Council recognizes that the one truth of faith can be expressed in many ways, so the Church is called to be in constant touch with culture, interacting with it in creative ways. This is a call to what today we call “inculturation.”

Inculturation The term inculturation emerged among missiologists in the early seventies. The Asian bishops may have been among the first to use the word when they spoke about the local Church as “a Church incarnate in a people, a Church indigenous and inculturated” (Rosales and Arevalo 1997, p. 14). The term was widely welcomed. The phenomenon of gospel–​culture encounter has gone through many phases in the history of missions. The first phase was imposition and transplantation. People interested in the good news of the gospel were expected to receive it with the cultural package in which it came. People became not only Christian, but also Portuguese culturally and Roman religiously. This was followed by a process of translation, when the Catechism and later the Bible were translated. Around the Second Vatican Council, the liturgical texts too were translated, but the rituals and the ministerial structures themselves remained untouched. Now, as I indicated in the beginning, the term in-​culturation, patterned on the mystery of in-​carnation, suggests that, just as the Word of God became incarnate in 421

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humanity—​literally, human flesh—​that same Word must now become incarnate in every culture (Amalorpavadass 1978; Arbuckle 1990; Chupungco 1992). It is good to recall here that other terms have been proposed sometimes to indicate the same or a similar process.While the term “inculturation” is used by the Catholics, Protestants seem to prefer the term,“contextualization” (Hesselgrave and Rommen 1989).The gospel interacts not only with culture, but with the living context of the people, which will include other factors like social, economic, and political structures besides culture. Some also speak of “indigenization” (Costa 1988). These terms look at the same process, but from different points of view, with the recognition that people who speak of inculturation do not take the term “culture” in any narrow sense. Rather, it refers to the whole of life, the many dimensions of which are indicated by the use of other terms. Some would suggest the term “transculturation.” Since the Word of God becomes incarnate and transforms humanity in the light of the resurrection, inculturation should also be in view of the transformation of culture. Others suggest that the gospel comes already inculturated in Judaic, Greek, Roman, and other European cultures of which the missionary is the bearer, and the culture that the gospel encounters is already animated by other religions, so what happens is an interreligious and inter-​cultural encounter (Amaladoss 1998). Such a situation might better be indicated by a term like inter-​culturation (Anthony 1997). There are also cognate terms like “acculturation” and “enculturation.” When people move to another cultural area, they may adapt themselves to the situation by learning the local language and other elements of the new culture. This process is known as acculturation. When a child is born in a particular community it imbibes, almost with the mother’s milk, the language and other cultural elements of that community. This is known as enculturation.

Who? And what? In order to understand the implications of the process of inculturation, we have also to ask who inculturates and what they inculturate. Who are the agents of inculturation in a missionary context? When missionaries come into a new cultural situation, they must acculturate themselves and proclaim the gospel in the local language. It is the task of the people who listen to the gospel to inculturate and contextualize it, not only in terms of worship, but in terms of a transformation of their lives. This may involve a conversion of structures and practices that do not conform to the good news of the gospel, as well as the construction of new Christian communities in harmony with the good news promoting love, justice, and fellowship. If the missionaries are outsiders, they can have the role only of advisors; they may observe things the locals may be taking for granted, guided by their traditional cultural and social points of view. The second question is “What do they inculturate?” The obvious answer seems to be “the gospel,” but one cannot ignore the various ways the good news has been understood and lived over twenty centuries. Although we can learn from the adaptations, it becomes problematic to impose them, as when then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in a conference he gave at the University of Regensburg, Germany, said: In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not simply false, but it is coarse and lacking in precision. (Benedict 2006) 422

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As an Indian, I find the final words insulting. But, as Pope, talking about St. Ephrem of Syria, he said, on November 28, 2007: Common opinion today supposes Christianity to be a European religion which subsequently exported the culture of this Continent to other countries. But the reality is far more complex since the roots of the Christian religion are found in the Old Testament, hence, in Jerusalem and the Semitic world. Christianity is still nourished by these Old Testament roots. Furthermore, its expansion in the first centuries was both towards the West—​towards the Greco-​Latin world, where it later inspired European culture—​and in the direction of the East, as far as Persia and India. It thus contributed to creating a specific culture in Semitic languages with an identity of its own. (Benedict 2007) Pope John Paul II also spoke in similarly ambiguous terms. In his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), he said: Simply because the mission of preaching the Gospel came first upon Greek philosophy in its journey, this is not taken to mean that other approaches are excluded… When the Church deals for the first time with cultures of great importance, but previously unexamined, it must even so never place them before the Greek and Latin inculturation already acquired. Were this inheritance to be repudiated the providential plan of God would be opposed, who guides his Church down the paths of time and history. (John Paul 1998, no. 72) However, he exhorts Indians thusly: An immense spiritual impulse compels the Indian mind to an acquiring of that experience which would, with a spirit freed from the distractions of time and space, attain to the absolute good. This is the time, above all for Indian Christians, to unlock these treasures from their inheritance. (Ibid.) Earlier in the same document, he had written: The Church does not have a philosophy of her own, nor does she select a particular one to the detriment of others. Philosophy…must act in accordance with its own character and rules. (Ibid., no. 49) Both of these Popes are open to the contemporary challenges of inculturation. At the same time, they are very reluctant to abandon tradition. Pope Benedict XVI would consider the fact that the gospel was revealed in Judea and developed in Greece, not only as providential, but mandatory. Because the persons making these statements were the top leaders with authority in the Church, their assistants have tended to follow the restrictive rather than the more open perspectives. However, for many Asians in the twenty-​first century, openness to dialogue with the world’s cultures means that they do not consider any of them as normative. The Federation of the Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), in their first general assembly in Taipei, Taiwan in 1974, described evangelization in Asia as a threefold dialogue of the gospel 423

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with the many poor, the rich cultures, and the living religions in Asia. These three dialogues involve each other. One cannot liberate the poor without taking into account not only their economic situation, but also their social, cultural, and religious situation. The FABC’s focus is to build a local Church through the triple dialogue. The dialogue with culture gains a central place, because what is special to a local Church is precisely its culture.The Office of Theological Concerns of the FABC, in a set of theses, describes it in the following way: A local Church comes into existence and is built up through a deep and mutually enriching encounter between the Gospel and a people with its particular culture and tradition. In current theological and magisterial language, this is known as inculturation. Inculturation consists not only in the expression of the Gospel and the Christian faith through cultural medium, but includes, as well, experiencing, understanding, and appropriating them through the cultural resources of a people. As a result, the concrete shape of the local Church will be, on the one hand, conditioned by culture, and, on the other hand, the culture will be evangelized by the life and witness of the local Church. (Federation n.d.) Emphasizing that a culture continues to change in the course of history, the same document affirms: Today a local Church realizes itself by effectively responding to the challenges of new historical forces, which give birth to the process of modernization and which affect all areas and aspects of the life of the people. (Ibid.) In its popular religiosity, art, liberation theologies, and spirituality, the Catholic Church in India serves as an important instance of this process.

Contemporary Indian sites for inculturation Popular religiosity The term inculturation may be of recent origin, but the process has been happening from the beginning of Christianity in the form of popular religiosity (e.g., Bamat and Wiest 1999, pp. 272–​302). In India, for instance, the missionaries had their official worship in Latin with rituals “imported” from the West. This did not deter people, but rather provoked them to develop their own ways of worship and religious practice, such as sanctuaries for the Madonna and other popular saints like Antony of Padua, where people come in pilgrimage, sometimes walking over 200 kilometers. Adapting traditional Indian (Hindu) religious practices, they bring offerings of flowers and fruits and take back objects like blessed water, salt, and oil. They fast and perform physical penances such as going on their knees from one sacred spot to another. The priests are not officially involved in this, except to celebrate the Eucharist for them or maintain chapels at these sites. Members of other religions participate in or help with such pilgrimages and devotions. Miracles are often reported. A second form of popular religiosity includes the traditional cosmic rituals accompanying seasonal and life cycles like birth, death, puberty, spring, and harvest, which are christianized by the addition of the sign of the cross or a prayer. The clergy may not encourage these rituals,

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but they tolerate them because they cater to the people’s popular devotion, which they cannot satisfy with their own official rituals. In any case, even if the priest objects, the people do it on their own. A third form of popular religiosity is inspired by the new religious movements such as Pentecostalism. Groups of Christians meet together under an inspiring leader, who reads and explains the Bible and enables them to sing and pray spontaneously. Compact discs and videos of such sessions are available and widely used. As in Latin America, Africa, and India, some who find these modes of worship meaningful stop participating in the official liturgy and may join other denominations.

The quest for an Indian Christian spirituality Abbe Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda) recognized the spiritual riches of India and founded the first Indian Benedictine ashram in South India in 1950. At one time there were around sixty Christian ashrams. Though the movement seems to be losing steam now, many Indian Christians have adopted Indian methods of prayer like yoga and Indian forms of meditation, facilitated by popular spiritual leaders such as Anthony De Mello, Henri Le Saux, Bede Griffiths, Raimon Panikkar, Sara Grant, and Vandana, who conduct seminars on Indian Christian spirituality (Amalorpavadass 1982). Hindu scriptural and devotional texts are used for reflection and prayer thanks to available collections of such texts (NBCLC 1973–​74; Aikiya Alayam 1997, 1984, 1985). Some of these practices have become mainstream, not depending on the ashrams alone (Amalorpavadass 1982). A significant element of Indian Christian spirituality is Advaita or non-​duality. The Western view of reality tends to be dualistic. God is up in heaven as the Creator; creation, humans, and the universe are outside God. By contrast the Indian religious tradition affirms that God and the human are neither one nor two, but not-​two. This spiritual realization manifests in moments as when Jesus said, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30) and prayed on his last day in the world, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (John 17:21). Paul tells the Romans, “When we cry “Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and, if children, then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:16–​17). The Isa Upanishad says simply, “Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.” Raimon Panikkar calls such non-​ duality “cosmotheandric communion.” The term “cosmotheandric” combines three Greek words: cosmos (the universe), theos (God), and anthropos (the human). Panikkar suggests that God as Creator harmonizes everything in a communion of being. He writes: The three dimensions of reality are neither three modes of a monolithic undifferentiated reality, nor three elements of a pluralistic system. There is rather one, though intrinsically threefold, relation which manifests the ultimate constitution of reality… The cosmotheandric intuition is not a tripartite division among beings, but an insight into the threefold core of all that is, in so far as it is. (Panikkar 1993, p. 60–​61) To experience this non-​dual consciousness is the goal of Indian Christian spirituality (Grant 1991; Abhishiktananda 1998; for more on Panikkar’s concept of cosmotheandric communion, see the chapters by Locklin and Ranstrom in this volume).

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Indian Christian art The purpose of Indian art is neither information nor decoration alone, but also a form of contemplation that helps a person become one with God and the universe. This is true of music and dance, which are born in the temple and express prayer and worship. Their aim is not mere entertainment, as is the case with much of modern popular music. In the past, the liturgy was in Latin, and Indian songs could be heard only as part of popular devotion. Today songs in Indian languages and music are part of the liturgy, and Indian music is also used as a background for meditative concentration. Repetitive chants like bhajans and namjap (prayer of the name) are also used for prayerful concentration both in personal and communal settings. Dance during the liturgy is usually not encouraged. However, one sometimes sees dancing during processions, like the entrance and offertory, on festive occasions, or dancing to express the human response to a reading from the Bible. Indian painting and architecture, too, were temple-​based arts. They are not merely illustrative but help the observer to concentration which leads to silent absorption. Indian Christian artists like Jyoti Sahi continue the Indian tradition of art as prayer (Sahi 1986; Amaladass and Löwner 2012).

Indian praxis and theology of liberation When Western missionaries preached the gospel, the people who responded to their call to conversion were mostly impoverished. Today many Christians have benefited socially and economically from the schools set up by missionaries. The liberating power of the gospel is being explored through theologies of liberation by Dalits, Tribal/​Adivasi peoples, and women (Wilfred 2005). One of the characteristics of Indian society is the hierarchical caste system, which divides the people according to the work they do. Dalits, at the lowest end of the caste system, constitute 17% of the Indian population, which is more than 170 million people. Some leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi, have not been against the caste system, but against the stigma of untouchability and the consequent social inequality. Dr. Ambedkar, an educated Dalit leader and lawyer, who also drafted the Indian Constitution, saw to it that they had reservations in the membership in parliament, in educational institutions, and in government jobs. Some may have advanced economically and politically, but the social stigma remains. Some Dalits became Christians, hoping to escape the stigma of low-​caste status.This strategy generally did not succeed, even within the Church, and converts also lost their reservations because the government took the position that the caste system is Hindu and did not apply to other religious groups. So Christian Dalits feel doubly cheated: They have neither attained social equality nor maintained access to reservations. Out of this context, Dalit liberation theology affirms their dignity and rights as children of God. Prominent Dalit theologians identify Jesus himself as a Dalit, marginalized by the Jews and crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem (Nirmal and Devasahayam 1990). Dalit theology is one kind of inculturated theology of liberation. Tribal peoples, also called Adivasis, that is, India’s indigenous peoples, constitute 8% of the Indian population, or more than 80 million people. They, too, have reservations in public institutions, but in practice, they are still exploited by others and seek to assert their identity and rights (Longchar 2000). Indian Christian women, too, have produced theology that reflects their experiences of oppression and marginalization and their quest for liberation (Amirtham 2011). All of these theologies can be considered inculturated theologies of liberation. What is significant in Asia is that Dalits, Adivasis, and women are active as multi-​religious groups. They are, therefore, discovering that such liberation theologies can be multi-​religious (Amaladoss 1997). 426

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Conclusion: Indian Christian theologies Before the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican insisted that there was one universal Church, with a universal liturgy and theology. As the local Churches have slowly begun asserting themselves, the Church has begun to recognize theology as contextual and inculturated, so that one can speak of African, Asian, and Indian theologies (England et al. 2002–​2004). The methodology of these inculturated theologies follows the pastoral-​theological cycle. One starts from life in the world and the kind of questions it raises in the context of the faith. Sciences like sociology, anthropology, and psychology can help to analyze the situation of life and the questions that are raised in the context of faith. One then goes to the Bible to find out what it has to say to these questions. This dialogue between the Bible and the questions of life gives rise to reflection. The Bible is interpreted in living contexts, and past questions and answers from the Christian tradition serve to warn and guide. Then follows discernment to choose a particular course of action. Action leads to life experience, and the cycle starts again. This is not abstract or purely academic, but concrete, action-​oriented theologizing (Amaladoss 2013; Boyd 1969). A.K. Ramanujan has claimed that there is an Indian way of thinking that is context-​sensitive rather than context-​free (Ramanujan 1989; Amaladoss 2013, pp.  110–​35). Indian thinking prefers symbols that emerge out of life, rather than abstract concepts; and it interprets the meaning of symbols in context. As we have seen, this follows a sense of the divine that shares its own being with the world. God and the world are not-​two: advaita. The world is not a crowd of independent monads, but an assembly of related and interactive beings, among themselves and with God. The God of India is a relational Being. Raimon Panikkar writes of “sacred secularity” (Panikkar 1993, p. 121). Contemporary surveys report an increase of religiously unaffiliated persons (“nones”), who nevertheless believe in God. Does this situation indicate a lack of inculturated forms of religion? Perhaps the time has again come for new articulations of Indian theologies that are relevant to local contexts.

Note 1 I am reflecting on the theme of inculturation as an Indian/​Asian in a contextual manner. The basic principles will also be relevant and applicable to other cultural situations elsewhere in the world. An abstract or universal approach to inculturation is not possible, because it must be seen in the places where it is happening (Amaladoss 1992, 1998).

Bibliography Abhishiktananda. 1998. Ascent to the Depth of the Heart. Delhi: ISPCK. Aikiya Alayam. 1977, 1984, 1985. God of Our Fathers.Vols. 1 to 3. Chennai: Aikiya Alayam. Amaladass, A. and Clooney, F.X. (eds.). 2005. Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Roberto de Nobili. Chennai: Satya Nilayam Publications. Amaladass, A. and Löwner, G. 2012. Christian Themes in Indian Art. Delhi: Manohar. Amaladoss, M. 1979. Do Sacraments Change? Variable and Invariable Elements in Sacramental Rites. Bengaluru: Theological Publications in India. —​—​—​. 1992. Becoming Indian: The Process of Inculturation. Bengaluru: Dharmaram Publications. —​—​—​. 1997. Life in Freedom: Liberation Theologies from Asia. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. —​—​—​. 1998. Beyond Inculturation. Can the Many Be One? Delhi: VIEWS/​ISPCK. —​—​—​. 2013. Quest for God: Doing Theology in India. Anand: Gujarat Sahitay Prakash. Amalorpavadass, D.S. (ed.). n.d. Towards Indigenization in the Liturgy. Bengaluru:  National Biblical, Catechetical and Liturgical Centre.

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Michael Amaladoss, SJ —​—​—​. 1978. Gospel and Culture. Bengaluru: National Biblical, Catechetical and Liturgical Centre. —​—​—​. (ed.). 1982. Indian Christian Spirituality. Bengaluru: National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre. Amirtham, M. 2011. Negotiating Body, Reclaiming Agency. Delhi: ISPCK. Anthony, F.V. 1997. Ecclesial Praxis of Inculturation. Rome: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano. Arbuckle, G. 1990. Earthing the Gospel. Sydney: St. Paul’s Publications. Bamat, T. and Wiest, J.P. (eds.). 1999. Popular Catholicism in World Church: Seven Case Studies in Inculturation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Benedict XVI. 2006. “Faith, Reason, and the University:  Memories and Reflections.” The Holy See. Available at http://​w2.vatican.va/​content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​speeches/​2006/​september/​documents/​ hf_​ben-​xvi_​spe_​20060912_​university-​regensburg.html/​. Accessed May 17, 2019. —​—​—​. 2007. “General Audience: November 28, 2007.” The Holy See. Available at http://​w2.vatican.va/​ content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​audiences/​2007/​documents/​hf_​ben-​xvi_​aud_​20071128.html/​. Accessed May 17, 2019. Besse, L. 1914. La mission du Madure:  Historique de ses Pangous. Trichinopoly:  Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique. Boyd, R. 1969. An Introduction to Indian Christian Theology. Chennai: Christian Literature Society. Chupungco, A.J. 1992. Liturgical Inculturation:  Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Costa, R.O. 1988. “Introduction:  Inculturation, Indigenization and Contextualization.” In Costa, R.O. (ed.). One Faith, Many Cultures. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Cronin,V. 1955. The Wiseman from the West: Matteo Ricci and his Mission to China. New York: Dutton. England, J.C., Kuttianimattathil, J., Mansford, J., Quintos, L.A., Kwang-​Sun, S. and Wickeri, J. 2002–​ 2004. Asian Christian Theologies. A Research Guide to Authors, Movements, Sources.Vols. 1 to 3. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Federation of Asian Bishops. n.d. “Theses on the Local Church: A Theological Reflection in the Asian Context.” Federation of Asian Bishops Conference. Available atwww.fabc.org/​fabc%20papers/​fabc_​ paper_​60.pdf. Accessed December 12, 2019. Flannery, A. (ed). 1983. Vatican Council II. The Conciliar and Post-​Conciliar Documents. Mumbai:  St. Paul’s Publications. Grant, S. 1991. Towards an Alternative Theology:  Confessions of a Non-​dualist Christian. Bengaluru:  Asian Trading Corporation. Gy, P.M. 1967. “Situation historique de la Constitution.” In Jossua, J.P and Congar,Y. (eds.). La Liturgie après Vatican II. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Hesselgrave, D.J. and Rommen, E. 1989. Contextualization: Meanings, Methods, and Models. Michigan: Apollos. Jaouen, R. 1995. L’Eucharistie du mil: Langages d’un people, expressions de la foi. Paris: Karthala. Johanns, P. 1944. To Christ through the Vedanta. 3rd ed. Ranchi: Catholic Press. John Paul II. 1998. Fides et Ratio. The Holy See. Available at http://​w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​paul-​ii/​ en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​14091998_​fides-​et-​ratio.html/​. Accessed May 17, 2019. Kuttianimattathil, J. 1995. Practice and Theology of Interreligious Dialogue. Bengaluru: Kristu Jyoti College. Lipner, J. 1999. Brahmabandab Upadhyay:  The Life and Thought of a Revolutionary. New Delhi:  Oxford University Press. Longchar, A.W. 2000. An Emerging Theology: Tribal Theology: Issue, Method and Perspective. Jorhat: Eastern Theological College. Madras Cultural Academy. 1957. Indian Culture and the Fullness of Christ. Chennai: Madras Cultural Academy. Monchanin, J. and Le Saux, H. 1964. A Benedictine Ashram. Douglas: Isle of Man. National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre. 1973–​74. Proposed Texts for the Office of the Readings. Vols. 1–​3. Bengaluru: National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre. Nirmal, A.P. and Devasahayam,V. 1990. A Reader in Dalit Theology. Chennai: Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute. Panikkar, R. 1993. The Cosmotheandric Experience. Emerging Religious Consciousness. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Pieris, A. 1988. An Asian Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Rajamanickam, S. 1972. The First Oriental Scholar. Tirunelveli: De Nobili Research Institute. Ramanujan, A.K. 1989. “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay.” In Marriot, M. (ed.). India Through Hindu Categories. New Delhi: Sage. Ricci, M. 2016. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources.

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This chapter will look at issues of peace and conflict in two ways: theoretically and historically. Regarding theory, Christianity and Hinduism have peaceful ideals, yet members of both religions have found themselves in the position of needing to justify committing violent acts. The justifications of violence given in the scriptures of these religions is itself a vast topic, with both classical and contemporary sources. To give the reader a brief sense of these literary justifications for violence, the chapter will begin by briefly focusing on two classic sources: the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and the Christian writings of St. Augustine. The chapter will then survey the issue of peace and conflict in the long history of Hindu–​ Christian encounter. After touching on the topic of the original Christian communities in India, the essay will turn to the colonial era. Following that, the chapter will discuss the independence movement and independent India. Along the way, the historical survey will demonstrate how some of the ideas introduced in the first, theoretical section, played out (and continue to play out) on the social and political plane.

Theoretical considerations The Mahabharata Early Vedic society was tribal in organization and, according to many scholars, “pervaded with…violence” (Singh 2017, p.  22). In addition to warfare between competing tribes and peoples, there was the violence of religious sacrifices. These sacrifices involved vegetable matter and animals. The purpose of these sacrifices was to renew the world and to ensure its stability. Concrete aims included the birth of children, abundant harvests, and success in battles. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, new religious and philosophical movements emerged that collectively provoked a new emphasis on non-​violence. Many of these new movements, if not most, stood outside of the Vedic tradition. Two key examples, which exist still today, are Jainism and Buddhism. The goal of these religions is moksha, which is release from the endless round of rebirth (samsara). Rather than seeking happiness in this world through sacrifices, one seeks to end suffering by ending the cycles of death and rebirth. In this view, happiness is to be found outside of entrapment in this world. Proper moral (dharmika) behavior, in terms of thoughts, words, and actions, are critical to gaining release, for immoral (adharmika) behavior binds one to 430

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the world. One of the key moral observances is ahimsa, or non-​injury. It is difficult to ascertain in which religious community ahimsa first emerged as an ideal, and the exact factors that led to its emergence (Ibid., pp. 25–​26).There was certainly a significant degree of cross-​pollination among these new religious movements, as well as between them and the Vedic tradition. However, scholars believe that these new religious movements and ideas were linked with the development of large urban centers and suffering related to high population density in the cities. In the third century BCE, the emperor Ashoka chose to patronize Buddhism. It thereby gained special prominence and influence in India. Consequently, the Brahminical tradition, which maintained the Vedic heritage, had to come to terms with Buddhist ideas and practices, such as ahimsa. The Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic composed between 400 BCE and 400 CE, deals in places with the new challenges of Buddhism. The epic concerns a war for control of India between the Kauravas and Pandavas, who were cousins in the legendary royal Bharata family. The head of the five Pandava brothers was Yudhishthira, who, according to the story, was the rightful heir to the throne. The epic explores the tension between violence and non-​ violence, especially in its twelfth book, entitled Shantiparvan, or the Book of Peace. According to the Shantiparvan, after the great war Yudhishthira becomes thoroughly disgusted with violence. Accordingly, he wants to renounce the kingdom to live as an ascetic. Yudhishthira’s family members and other prominent figures attempt to reconcile him to violence, persuading him not to renounce the world but instead to be king. One brother, Arjuna, points out that violence is simply a part of life. For instance, “The mongoose eats mice, then the cat eats the mongoose, the dog eats the cat, a wild beast eats the dog, and a man eats all of these…” (12.15.20–​26; all translations from the Mahabharata are taken from Fitzgerald 2004). Similar arguments are put into the mouth of the divine Krishna in the Mahabharata’s most famous portion, the Bhagavad Gita. Given the inevitability of violence, the Mahabharata attempts to resolve the tension between violence and non-​violence in several ways. First, rather than positing a uniform dharma for all people, it posits different dharmas for different peoples. For instance, before the war itself, Krishna, the great friend and advisor to the Pandavas, informs Yudhishthira that it is the duty of Brahmin priests to study, pray, and teach, whereas the Kshatriya warriors and rulers must fight whenever land and power are wrongfully taken (5.29.21–​22, 27). After the war itself, the highly revered elder and warrior, Bhishma, tells Yudhishthira that his non-​violent inclinations rendered him impotent, because “nothing great can be accomplished by gentleness alone” (12.76.18). In a similar vein, Arjuna persuades Yudhishthira to accept the necessity of violent punishment. Without the fear of the rod, Arjuna argues, people neglect their roles and proper behaviors, and society falls apart (12.15.38). As a further reconciliation of violence and non-​violence, Bhishma gives rules to govern warfare; violence is necessary, but it must not be wanton or barbaric (12.93–​107). A topic of special importance in these discussions is the caste system. The world envisioned by the Mahabharata is one in which Brahmins, the priests who maintain the Vedic traditions, are to be tightly linked with the Kshatriya royals (12.74.11). In contrast to the special relationship of the higher castes, the Shudra peasants and laborers are to be the servants of all (12.60.27). Punishment should be used to ensure that each caste performs the duty (dharma) proper to it and does not arrogate to itself the duties and privileges of another (12.70.3–​5). Fitzgerald explains that this approach reflects the insecure position of the Brahmins: “If non-​brahmins… can perform religious functions for important…clientele, the proper, educated brahmin loses his distinctiveness…and his livelihood.” (Fitzgerald 2004, p. 108). The discussions described above appear in the first portion of the Shantiparvan, called the Rajadharmaparvan, which is devoted to Bhishma’s teachings to Yudhishthira on how 431

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kings must govern society. The third and last portion of the Shantiparvan, called the Mokshadharmaparvan, concerns gaining release from the world. In it, various dialogues explore the different philosophical and religious beliefs and practices that were current at the time. Whereas in the Rajadharmaparvan Bhishma prescribes violence to protect the position of the priestly caste, he makes no mention of violence in the Mokshadharmaparvan. Far from it, the Mokshadharmaparvan tends to be affirming of differing beliefs and practices. Alexander Wynne states that the key priority in these dialogues is ethical development: “What matters most are personal qualities such as modesty, honesty, humility, sympathy, and so on” (Wynne 2009, p. xxxvi).

St. Augustine The historical context for the writings of the Christian bishop, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–​ 430), was the nestling of Christianity into the lap of the Roman Empire. Early in its history, Christianity was outlawed because of a refusal by Christians to worship the emperor. However, in the early fourth century, Christianity was legalized, and a close relationship between Christian leadership and leadership in the Empire subsequently developed. Christianity’s new situation raised many questions. For instance, should Christians support war against the enemies of Roman rule? Further, should they rely on the power of the state to regulate their religious affairs as Christians? In the Bible, there are moving anticipations of a future peaceful world or kingdom (e.g., Isaiah 2:4). Accordingly, like Yudhishthira, Augustine valued peace. Yet, also like Yudhishthira, he had to come to terms with the fact of violence in life. Accordingly, Augustine argued that although war is a horrible disruption of society, such disruption is sometimes needed to preserve society. He articulated that viewpoint in a letter dated 418 CE to the Roman governor of North Africa, Count Boniface. At that time, Boniface had to face various enemies to preserve Roman rule. Augustine advised, “Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace. For peace is not sought in order to the kindling of war, but war is waged in order that peace may be obtained” (Letters 189.6; unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Augustine are taken from Schaff 1979). Augustine, like characters in the Mahabharata, accepted war as a necessity and also argued, as did characters in the Mahabharata, that it must not be wanton and barbaric. He explained to Boniface that “mercy is due to the vanquished or the captive, especially” when he or she posed no further threat (Ibid.). Further, the warrior may have a constructive role to play for the enemy, for he advised Boniface that “in waging war” one should “cherish the spirit of a peacemaker, that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace” (Ibid.). To be such a leader, the Christian warrior must display character and virtue. Also, as with several of the Mahabharata’s central figures, Augustine encouraged the use of violence as punishment for the sake of maintaining social order. For instance, Augustine accepted Roman ideas of the family, in which the father had absolute authority. Augustine wrote that the “wife and children” should exhibit “prompt obedience” to the father (City of God 19.11). Further, “If any member of the family interrupts the domestic peace by disobedience, he is corrected either by word or blow, or some kind of just and legitimate punishment” (Ibid., 19.16). The family was the foundation for the society, in Augustine’s view, so discipline in the home served both domestic and civic peace. The final issue to be considered here is disagreement in matters of religion. In North Africa, where Augustine was a bishop, there was a schismatic group, the Donatists, who had been in 432

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existence for a century. The Donatists had formed in the prior century, initially upset over the appointment of a new bishop, Caecilian. They objected on the grounds that he had been consecrated by a bishop, Felix of Aptunga, who had not stood firm in the face of persecution. The Donatists developed into a separate church, not accepting the validity of the sacraments, such as baptism, performed by clerics of the Catholic Church. In their view, it was illegitimate because it had welcomed back clerics who had not stood firm in times of persecution. As the Donatist church grew, some of its members relied on violence to force adherence to their movement. Initially, Augustine discouraged Catholic leaders from responding to violence with violence. However, he eventually changed his mind, writing that using violence to turn someone to the true path may save that person from eternal damnation. That person will come to be grateful for the corporal punishment, for he or she will “understand” the “great benefit” that was “conferred…while he was complaining of suffering persecution!” (Letters 185.7; see also 93.17; translation from Deferrari 1955). In his time, Augustine’s ideas on punishment in religious matters resulted in no “physical attack, still less any death” (Lancel 2002, p.  304). Yet, many centuries later, there would be significant developments based on his teachings. In twelfth-​and thirteenth-​century France, a religious movement emerged as a rival to the Catholic Church:  Albigensianism. It was a popular movement, drawing many from the Catholic Church. In 1208, in what was in some ways an unprecedented move, Pope Innocent III turned to the secular authorities to call a crusade against the Albigenses. Next, in 1232, the first Inquisition was established to further root out Albigensianism and other heresies. Later that century, St. Thomas Aquinas, whose religious order, the Dominicans, was running the Inquisition, extended Augustine’s arguments for corporal punishment in religious matters to include capital punishment (Summa Theologica II–​II.11.3). In this way, certain Catholic thinkers came to provide justification for the use of force to coerce religious orthodoxy. Their willingness to do so contrasts with the prevailing approach of the Mahabharata, which is loose and flexible in the face of conflicting religious and philosophical beliefs. However, in some ways, the justification given by Christians for the enforcement of orthodoxy runs parallel to the Mahabharata’s rules about caste. For example, both approaches protect the interests of a priestly class.The section that follows considers how these issues played out in the historical encounter between Hinduism and Christianity.

Hindu–​Christian conflict: a survey of two millennia1 India’s indigenous Christians Unknown to most Western Christians, by the end of the first millennium, there were thriving Christian communities on India’s southwestern coast, especially in the region that is today the state of Kerala. These communities had their origins in migrations from Persia, and they followed the “Syrian Rite,” as opposed to the Latin Rite of Roman Catholicism and Greek rites of the Eastern Orthodox. There is a belief, dating back to the earliest centuries of church history, that the apostle St. Thomas established India’s first Christian communities. Thus, these Christians are often referred to as “St. Thomas Christians.” They were firmly integrated into the larger political, religious, and social fabric of the land. In fact, they constituted a warrior caste in the society, with close relationships with the Hindu rulers. Related to this, there was a history of interreligious sharing. For instance, leaders from both religions played important ceremonial roles in each other’s religious festivals. (For more on the St. Thomas Christians, see Sonja Thomas’s chapter in this volume.) 433

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The integration of St. Thomas Christians into South Indian life in this era follows patterns envisioned by the Shantiparvan of the Mahabharata. On the one hand, caste rules and roles were observed, including by Christians. On the other hand, a wide latitude in religious belief and practice was accepted as the norm. It is clear, then, that Christianity in India developed in a fashion very different from Christianity in the West. However, it is unfortunately unknown how these St. Thomas Christians understood or provided justification—​ from a Christian perspective—​for their roles as warriors, their integration in the caste system as a higher status community, and their participation in Hindu ceremonies. Many of the records of these ancient Christian communities were destroyed by the Portuguese after the Synod of Diamper in 1599 (on which, again, see Thomas’s chapter in this volume). Further, extant records present significant linguistic challenges to today’s scholars.

The colonial era A new chapter in Hindu–​Christian relations began when, in 1498, Vasco de Gama landed on India’s southwest coast in Calicut and inaugurated the colonial era in India. The Portuguese were seeking to wrest control (from regional Muslim powers) of the sea trade from Asia. To that end, in 1510 they seized control of Goa from the Muslims who ruled it and established a base. Earlier, as Spain and Portugal were both expanding their reach across the world, various popes intervened in disputes over who would control what lands. In their interventions, they established the padroado system. This entrusted the monarchies of Spain and Portugal with the responsibility of establishing the Catholic Church in the lands they conquered. Accordingly, the Portuguese placed severe restrictions on the practice of both Hinduism and Islam in Goa, provoking the migration or conversion of a significant portion of Goa’s population (Boxer 1969, pp. 66–​76). Then, in 1560, the Portuguese established the Goan Inquisition. Earlier, in the 1400s and 1500s, the rulers of Spain and Portugal had established inquisitions in their countries. The main responsibilities of these institutions were investigating Christian converts from Judaism and Islam to ensure that they were not persisting in their former ways. Further, the Spanish and the Portuguese established inquisitions not only in their own countries, but also in the lands they conquered. The Goan Inquisition’s main task was investigating former Hindus. It also played a role in compelling the St. Thomas Christians on the Malabar Coast to conform to Roman Catholicism, diminishing their distinctive, traditional ways. The inquisitions were exceptionally cruel, unfair in their investigations, and were motivated by racism and financial gain. They were also tools by which the Spanish and Portuguese exerted power over their empires (Green 2007, 149–​54). The next significant phase of Hindu–​Christian conflict would not occur until the nineteenth century (Bauman 2013, p. 637). This was because the European presence in India was minimal for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the European occupiers were mainly interested in trade. Yet, in the eighteenth century, significant militaristic violence took place as Hindu rulers, who were from what are today Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Telangana, challenged the decaying Mughal Empire (which was controlled by Muslims). To some degree, religion played a role in this chapter of Indian history. However, scholars caution against regarding these conflicts as mainly ideological or religious, pointing out that Muslim and Hindu rulers, including the highly revered Hindu warrior, Shivaji, formed cross-​religious alliances against the Mughals (Metcalf and Metcalf 2012, p. 32).Various Hindu and Muslim powers slowly whittled away at the Mughal Empire. In the power vacuum their victories progressively created in the

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eighteenth century, armed conflict emerged between the French and English, and between the British East India Company in Kolkata and the local Muslim ruler. The Company emerged from the latter conflict as a ruling power in northeast India. In the following century, through conquest after conquest, it came to govern most of the rest of India. The British conquest and rule of India involved a confrontation between Hindu and Christian peoples. It was not, however, a war of one religion against another, in part because for some time the British showed rather little interesting in uprooting Hinduism. Even well into the colonial period, there remained two competing views among the British regarding how to relate to Indian society. On the one hand, some advocated that Indian civilization should be conserved, while on the other hand, some argued that it should be reformed and supplanted. Those advocating reform recommended the establishment of Western systems of education and encouraged social interventions such as the outlawing of widow burning and the legendary thugees (the putatively murderous worshippers of Kali). The reforming stance was motivated in some cases by Christian religion and in others by the secular, Utilitarian school of philosophy. As George Bearce points out, there was a wide variety of British opinions about Indian civilization, but nevertheless a clear sense of superiority informed British rule (Bearce 1961, pp. 296–​97). Regardless of whether that sense of superiority was motivated by religion or purely secular concerns, one can detect in it echoes of the paternalism that one finds in Augustine and Aquinas. In both cases one finds the idea that, if necessary, people should be guided down the right path by force. Further, reports of the thugees and other resistant communities (whether real or constructed by the British) captured the British imagination and served to justify the forceful rule of India. (For a good discussion of the thugees, see Wagner 2009.) In 1813, those wanting to supplant Hinduism gained a significant advance. Originally, the Company had prohibited missionary activity in areas they controlled, not wanting to interfere with local ways for fear of jeopardizing profits. However, in 1813, the British Parliament renewed the Company’s charter while prohibiting Company officials from blocking missionary activity. Afterwards, the number of missionaries and native Christians increased greatly, and a new chapter in Hindu–​Christian encounter began. This encounter had a different character than it had in Goa. For instance, Pietist missionaries in Travancore focused on the outcaste group, the Shanars, who were toddy tappers, providing such low-​caste Indians basic education, in hopes that they could come to understand the Bible and make a free choice for Christianity. Significant changes in the nineteenth century caused tensions to erupt, and there were many cases of mob violence against Christians in different parts of India. For instance, the work of the Pietists in Travancore threatened the established powers, which included both Brahmins and St. Thomas Christians. Thus, violent persecutions broke out (Frykenberg 2008, p. 228). That they did recalls to mind prescriptions in the Mahabharata for the use of violence to enforce caste roles and rules. In addition to such examples of mass riots, in 1857, a major conflict took place. It began as a revolt of Indian soldiers against their British officers and involved an effort to reestablish Mughal rule and displace the British.The British have traditionally referred to it as the “Indian Mutiny,” but Indian nationalists later referred to it as the “Indian War of Independence.” Historians have identified a variety of general and specific causes, some of them involving religion. The revolt began over a rumor that ammunition cartridges, which the soldiers had to open with their teeth, had been greased with pig fat and cow fat. Consuming pork is forbidden in Islam, and for the Hindus, consuming cow fat would have meant the loss of caste status for some, and with that, severe ostracism. Beyond that immediate issue, the cartridges took on a symbolic meaning of broader significance. Wagner points out that they

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were a highly evocative symbol that encapsulated the most basic fears of many Indians: having firmly established their paramount rule, the British would irrevocably change Indian society, ultimately depriving Indians of their religious and social status in order to make them Christians. (Wagner 2010, p. 218) As Wagner points out, Evangelicals in Britain and within the Company had an increasing influence on colonial policy, leading to interventions in Indian social and religious life that gave rise to such fears (Ibid., p. 73).

The nationalist movement After the conflict of 1857, a new phase in British–​Indian relations began. On the one hand, atrocities had been committed on both sides, and so the two peoples were deeply embittered and the gulf between them widened greatly. On the other hand, the political control of India was transferred from the Company to the British Crown, and Queen Victoria made professions of good will and respect toward Indians. Some Indians would continue to resist the British with violence. Much of the resistance to British rule after this period was, however, of the non-​ violent variety. Prime examples of such non-violent protest can be found in the speeches of the popular, late nineteenth-​century leader and thinker, Swami Vivekananda. Some Westerners portrayed Hinduism as essentially an otherworldly religion, and thus weak and incapable of yielding any practical gain in this world (King 1999, pp. 112–​16). Vivekananda turned such ideas on their head. He agreed that Hinduism had otherworldly aims and a profound awareness of the transitory nature of the world. In his view, however, this was the source of its superiority, since Hinduism did not for this reason tend toward the religious intolerance and militaristic conquest so commonly seen in Christian history (Vivekananda 1989, vol. 3, pp. 178–​81, 196–​98). Thus, far from being impractical and impotent, Hinduism offered a form of spirituality that was desperately needed by the Western world (Ibid., pp. 103–​15). Partha Chatterjee suggests that Vivekananda’s position was a response to political incapacitation: bound at the political level, he turned to the spiritual domain for a sense of superiority over the oppressors (Chatterjee 1993, p. 6). Vivekananda was aware, of course, of the violent aspects of the Mahabharata discussed above. He addressed them by discussing the Bhagavad Gita, a portion of the sixth book of the Mahabharata. Therein, Arjuna expresses sadness about the impending battle, knowing that he will have to slay his own cousins. Krishna (Arjuna’s councilor and charioteer), however, considers Arjuna’s feelings as cowardice.Vivekananda accepted Krishna’s assessment and explained that it would have been a sin for Arjuna not to fight, since his disinclination to fight emerged from weakness rather than from true spiritual understanding (Vivekananda 1989, vol. 1, pp. 38–​39). A diplomatic approach was evident during this period of India’s incipient political nationalism. In 1885, with some British cooperation, the Indian National Congress (INC) was founded. It was intended to be a national, representative, and parliamentary body.The question arose as to how the Congress could be truly a national body, given the many differences, especially religious differences, among Indians. An answer from the early leadership was that, regardless of religion, Indians politically have the same concerns: “We live in the same country, we are subjects of the same sovereign, and our good and evil depend entirely on the state of the Government and the laws passed in this country” (Zaidi and Zaidi 1976, vol. 1, p. 115). A primary activity of the Congress was passing resolutions and forwarding them to the British rulers, although the British 436

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routinely disregarded them. Nevertheless, the INC took a courteous approach in petitioning the British. As a central, early leader, Dadabhai Naoroji stated, “If we honestly expect that the English nation will do its duty toward us, we must prove ourselves worthy by showing that we are never unreasonable, never violent, never uncharitable” (Ibid., pp. 111–​12). Eventually, a younger group in the Congress, known as the “Extremists,” arose.The Extremists insisted on independence from Britain, not reform of British rule or cooperation with it. The Extremists had their heyday from 1905 until 1908. In 1905, the British partitioned the land of Bengal into two other administrative regions. Many Bengalis were outraged, and widespread protests emerged which involved swadeshi, the support of indigenous goods and the boycott of British goods. The Extremists fanned the flames of rebellion by giving speeches and writing editorials, working to transform the protests into a nationwide movement for independence. They attempted to take control of the Congress from the older, traditional membership, known as the “Moderates.” In 1908, the British suppressed the movement. Certain Extremists, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose, periodically argued for the use of violence.Tilak held out the seventeenth-​century warrior, Shivaji, who had challenged Mughal rule, as a national hero. In response to ethical questions raised during Tilak’s time about Shivaji’s assassination of a Muslim general, Tilak argued, drawing upon the Bhagavad Gita, that if one is not motivated “by a desire to reap the fruit” of the deed, then “no blame attaches” to the one who commits it (Wolpert 1961, p. 87). In other words, if one’s motives are selfless, one’s actions may be beyond judgments of good and evil. Similarly, Aurobindo echoed the Mahabharata’s differentiation of behavioral norms for Brahmins and Kshatriyas.The non-​violent behavior expected of Brahmins was, in his view, meant for the pursuit of moksha, whereas “politics is the work of the Kshatriya and it is the virtues of the Kshatriya we must develop if we are to be morally fit for freedom” (Ghose 1997, vol. 6, p. 238). Although the swadeshi movement employed religious symbols, it was not, in any direct way, a protest of one religion against another. Rather, the clear target of boycotters was British rule. All the same, communal conflict was a part of this history. Lower-​class Muslims, who had little to gain from paying higher prices for swadeshi goods, clashed with high-​class Hindus. The use of Hindu religious themes in the swadeshi movement might have contributed to this communal strife. Little is known regarding Indian Christian participation in the swadeshi movement, which suggests that it did not play a prominent part in it. At least one Indian Christian, however, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, a Catholic convert from Hinduism, was a prominent Extremist. Rather than being offended at Hindu religious imagery, he was an early example of a developing trend, among India’s Christians, of knitting together Hinduism and Catholicism by regarding the latter as the fulfillment of the former. In 1908, the British suppressed the Extremists, but violent activity continued. In 1909, after the British officer William Curzon-​Wyllie was assassinated in London by an Indian revolutionary, Mahatma Gandhi took a public stance. To gain India through violence would be to establish the rule of murderers, which would not constitute true liberation or freedom (Gandhi 1958, vol. 9, p. 303). In his pacifism, Gandhi was influenced by both the Indian ideal of ahimsa and Leo Tolstoy, who embodied a pacifistic and anti-​institutional aspect of Christianity that stood at odds with prevailing Christian views on violence, as illustrated earlier in this chapter. In his classic, The Kingdom of God Is within You,Tolstoy portrayed Jesus as a man of peace and argued that churches and governments ignored his message and dressed him up with doctrines and rituals for the sake of supporting their hierarchies of power. Gandhi agreed with the Extremists that a more aggressive approach toward the rulers was needed, but he disagreed with them on the issue of violence. Thus, in Hind Swaraj, published in 1909, he advocated his famous method of satyagraha (literally “truth force”), a form of peaceful protest. 437

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A decade later, Gandhi would begin launching his famous satyagraha campaigns in India. His was a struggle of a people who were largely Hindu, against rulers who were largely Christian. However, Gandhi did not consider the struggle as that of one religion against another. Rather, he believed he was struggling to throw off the reins of a corrupt, modern, predatory culture (Gandhi 1997, pp. 35–​36). One might wonder about the perspective of India’s British rulers. Winston Churchill was adamant that Britain must not relinquish control of India. It was essential to the Empire, and the Empire was essential to Britain’s economy. Churchill articulated the struggle to maintain British rule as an ethical one, just as Gandhi believed the struggle for independence was an ethical one. He stated that the modern technology introduced by Britain was essential to the well-​being of many Indians and that British rule was necessary to keep peace, especially between Hindus and Muslims (Churchill 1931, pp. 40, 77). Also, he distrusted the Brahmin leaders surrounding Gandhi and believed that those men would not hesitate to exploit Dalits, if given the reins of leadership. He stated that conversion to Christianity brought great liberation to Dalits and that it was the duty of Britain to protect Indian Christians (Ibid., pp. 126–​29). He also made it clear that he believed in the superiority of some races over others and in the rights of superior races to displace and/​or rule their inferiors (Gilbert 2007, p. 120). A determining factor in Christian perspectives on Gandhi’s struggle, particularly those of foreign missionaries in India or Indian Christians themselves, was whether or not they regarded Christianity and Britain as inextricably knit together. Some regarded British rule as a part of God’s plan and thus Indian nationalism as an expression of “disloyalty and ingratitude” (Neill 1966, p. 110). Others, like J.C. Kumarappa, who was a well-​known associate of Gandhi, moved beyond the seeming identification of Western culture and Christianity by focusing on Jesus himself, who far predated the British Empire. From his perspective, disloyalty to the British certainly did not amount to disloyalty to Christ. Similarly, the famous missionary C.F. Andrews, who was a close friend of Gandhi’s, transcended the linkage of Britain and Christianity by sensitizing himself to India’s spiritual heritage, especially as embodied by men like Rabindranath Tagore. Overall, the general trend among Indian Christians, as the independence movement progressed, was toward support. Foreign missionaries, for their part, were mainly concerned about the survival of their institutions, and thus they tended toward neutrality (Cox 2002, p. 253).

Independent India For Gandhi, the struggle for India’s freedom was not a struggle between religions, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. Rather, it was an ethical and spiritual fight. However, in his time, there were Hindus for whom the nationalist agenda directly involved religion. A key example was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–​1966), who was arrested in 1910 and released in 1924, in relation to his revolutionary activities against the British. In 1923 he published a book, Hindutva, which later became highly influential. The main concern of Savarkar’s Hindutva is Hindu identity. Given that what is generally referred to as “Hinduism” includes a broad array of sects, traditions, and philosophies, scholars have had a hard time identifying defining characteristics of Hinduism.The defining characteristics were a critical matter, however, since the British used different legal codes for different communities and used religious identity in determining political representation. In Hindutva, Savarkar altered the question somewhat. Whereas Hinduism had often been considered a specific belief system, he considered Hinduism more broadly in terms of Hindutva, or “Hinduness.” This broader appellation refers to an Indian civilization that includes many different belief systems 438

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(Savarkar 1969, p. 90). To be a Hindu in this sense involves considering India as not only one’s “fatherland” but as “holy land,” and being Indian by “blood” (Ibid., p. 100).This, in turn, implies having India’s classic Sanskritic civilization as one’s heritage, though Savarkar’s broad definition included within it non-​Hindu religions, like Jainism and Buddhism, that originated in India. While accepting Jains and Buddhists as part of the “Hindu” whole, Savarkar’s approach laid a foundation for violence against Indian Christians and Muslims.Those Christians and Muslims who were Indian and were born in India shared with Hindus a common fatherland, blood, and heritage. However, that heritage was not sacred to them; India was not to them a Holyland.... Their holyland [sic] is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil…they must, to a man, set their Holyland above their Fatherland in their love and allegiance. (Ibid., p. 113) Further, Savarkar stated that, historically, the Buddhist ideal of ahimsa left “India defenseless and unsuspecting” in the face of foreign invaders (Ibid., p. 25). He expressed admiration for Buddhism’s noble, non-​violent experiment, but felt he could not join the ranks of the non-​ violent because “the law of evolution...is too persistent and dangerously imminent to be categorically denied by the law of righteousness” (Ibid., pp. 37–​38). Over the decades, the ideology of Hindutva gradually gained a foothold in Indian politics. A  key date in the expansion of support for this ideology was 1925, when Keshav Baliram Hedgewar established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS prepares youths to be highly disciplined individuals, ready for service in the defense and building up of what they understand Hinduism to be. Originally, it was marginal to India’s political scene, and it played no active role in India’s independence movement. In fact, in 1948, a member, Nathuram Binayak Godse, assassinated Gandhi because of his political concessions to Muslims. Subsequently, the RSS was banned and went underground. Today, however, the RSS is ascendant. It supports and is closely related to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power in India for roughly half of the years since 1998. The Party’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is a long-​time member of the RSS. In certain ways, the post-​independence era was conducive to positive interreligious relations. The new government endorsed no particular religion and instead attempted to support the variety of religions in India. It was an era in which many Indian Christians identified with the larger whole of India and considered how they, as a distinctive group, could contribute, both practically and spiritually, to the new India. Many Hindus responded positively to this outreach. Accordingly, the post-​independence era was also one in which prominent Western contributors to Hindu–​Christian dialogue, like Swami Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths, flourished. In the late 1970s, Hindutva ideology began to gain broader support in Indian society. The rise of Hindutva was associated, from the beginning, with an increase in Hindu–​Muslim conflict and violence. In the 1980s and ’90s, much of that conflict centered on the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The Babri Masjid is a mosque which is said to have been built on the destroyed ruins of a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu God, Rama. In 1990, then BJP president, L.K. Advani, led a procession across India that converged on Ayodhya to rebuild the temple. The government arrested him for disturbing the peace and protected the mosque, so there was no violence at that time. Later, in 1992, however, enormous mobs converged upon and tore the mosque down. They were stoked by the anti-​Muslim preaching of Hindutva organizations and by politicians within the BJP itself. Subsequently, riots spread across the country in which 439

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thousands of Muslims were killed. A decade later, there were similar riots in Gujarat, when some Hindus returning from Ayodhya were killed in a train fire, which was rumored to have been set by Muslims. Thomas Blum Hansen, who conducted extensive field research in India, suggests that much of the support for Hindutva comes from the rising, educated middle class. In his analysis, “To human beings experiencing social mobility, or a loss of socioeconomic and cultural status produced by urbanization or ‘minoritization,’ the issue of identity...becomes more acute.”These issues are “particularly relevant in periods of rapid political and cultural change, when authority and certitudes are undermined” (Hansen 1999, p. 212). In such situations, there may be a desire to protect identity by expunging a “foreign” element. While the main target of communal violence in the 1990s was Muslims, later in that decade, with 1998 being a “turning point,” there was a sharp increase in violence against Christians (Bauman 2013, p. 633). That is trend which continues to this day. Much of the violence of the 1990s “occurred particularly within a belt that stretches from the Dangs of Gujarat through barren wilderness to the forests of Orissa” (Frykenberg 2008, pp. 477–​78). The incident that received the most international attention in that era was the 1999 burning of the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two boys, as they slept in their van. Hindu–​Christian conflict again garnered international attention in 2007 and 2008, when a series of anti-​Christian riots in the state of Odisha resulted in the death of around fifty people, physical and sexual assaults in the hundreds, the destruction of hundreds of homes and places of worship, and the temporary or permanent displacement of tens of thousands. Most, but not all of the victims were Christian. Central to Hindu–​Christian conflict is the issue of conversion. Many Christians, for their part, claim that it is their obligation and right to evangelize, and insist that their provision of social service emerges from a compassionate concern to care for the basic, human needs of the poor and impoverished. Hindus, however, often claim that Christians prey on those who are poor or lack educational opportunities, luring them to Christianity with financial and education incentives. It is thus standard among many Hindus to refer to conversions associated with relief work as “forced.” (For more on such conversion controversies, and on India’s anti-​ conversion legislation, see Ian Richards’s chapter in this volume.) Such claims emerge with particular force from upper-​caste Hindu communities, which leads some to interpret violence against Christians (who are most frequently members of lower-​caste communities) as a response to the rising financial and educational achievement of lower-​caste converts to Christianity, which jeopardize the interests of higher-​caste communities. Here we can hear, once again, echoes of the Mahabharata’s justification of violence for the purpose of maintaining traditional caste hierarchies and roles. There are likely a variety of other causes. It is almost certainly the case that at least some BJP politicians stoke Hindu conflict with Muslims and Christians in hopes of provoking concerns about minorities, thereby driving Hindu voters into the arms of the more explicitly Hindu party, the BJP. Bauman suggests another possible explanation—​increased globalization—​for the uptick in anti-​Christian violence that began in the 1990s. According to Bauman, “with globalization came greater foreign involvement and foreign control in India’s economy.” This foreign involvement introduced “new routes to wealth…based on merit and skill rather than ascriptive status,” which “threatened traditional status arrangements within and among castes and communities at all levels in the caste hierarchy” (Bauman, 2013, p. 645). Christianity, in the eyes of many affected negatively by globalization, symbolizes these changes. Christians may therefore be attacked, rhetorically and at times even violently, as proxies for them (Ibid., p. 650). Note, here, how even an external force such as globalization, by threatening the caste hierarchy, has the effect of pitting India’s upper-​and lower-​caste communities against one another. 440

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It is therefore fruitful to consider the current situation in light of the theoretical discussion with which the chapter began. On the one hand, nothing in the Shantiparvan of the Mahabharata would advocate interreligious violence as such. Thus, one might be tempted to suggest that interreligious violence associated with Hindutva ideologues follows a pattern of intolerance more typical of Western Christianity than of texts like the Mahabharata. Yet, the Mahabharata does advocate violence for maintaining the caste hierarchy and ensuring that each caste plays its traditional role. To the extent that Christianity threatens to undermine the caste hierarchy because of its espousal of modern ideals and its growth within and support for lower-​caste communities, violence against Christians could perhaps find justification in the Mahabharata. However, as Fitzgerald points out, the text’s interest in preserving the caste system is bound up with traditions of Vedic recitation (Fitzgerald 2004, p. 108) which are no longer as prevalent today. Moreover, today’s wanton violence does not reflect the norms for violence laid out in the text. On the Christian side, today the use of physical force for the sake of converting individuals seems to be rare, if not non-​existent, in India. However, given that two of the West’s most influential theologians, Augustine and Aquinas, argued for the use of violence in matters of religious belief, given the prior history of forced conversions in India, and given the strong expansionistic impulse that has characterized Christianity through time, the wariness and suspicion of India’s critics of Christianity is understandable. (On those critics, see the chapters by Young and Bauman in this volume).

Note 1 This section is indebted to Bauman 2013, pp. 636–​41.

Bibliography Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. n.d. Letters. Cunningham J.G. (trans.). In Schaff, P. (ed.). A Select Library of Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Vol. 1. 1885. Reprinted 1979. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Available at https://​ccel.org/​. —​—​—​. 413–​426. City of God. Dods, M. (trans.). In Schaff, P. (ed.). A Select Library of Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church.Vol. 2. 1885. Reprinted 1979. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Available at https://​ccel.org/​. Bauman, C.M. 2013. “Hindu-​Christian Conflict in India: Globalization, Conversion, and the Coterminal Castes and Tribes.” The Journal of Asian Studies 72(3): 633–​53. Bearce, G.D. 1961. British Attitudes towards India: 1784-​1858. London: Oxford University Press. Boxer, C.R. 1969. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-​1825. New York: A.A. Knopf. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Churchill, W.S. 1931. India: Speeches and an Introduction. London: Thornton Butterworth Limited. Cox, J. 2002. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-​1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deferrari, R.J. (ed.). 1955. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation. Vol. 30. New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc. Fitzgerald, J.L. (trans.). 2004. The Mahābhārata,Vol. 7. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frykenberg, R.E. 2008. Christianity in India:  From Beginnings to the Present. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Gandhi, M.K. 1958. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,Vol. 9. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust. —​—​—​. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Parel, A.J. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghose, A. 1997. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.Vols. 6–​7. Pondicherry: Aurobindo Ashram. Gilbert, M. 2007. Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Green, T. 2007. Inquisition: The Reign of Fear. London: Macmillan.

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Edward T. Ulrich Hansen, T.B. 1999. The Saffron Wave:  Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East”. London: Routledge. Lancel, S. 2002. Saint Augustine. Nevill, A. (trans.). London: SCM Press. Metcalf, B.D. and Metcalf, T.R. 2012. A Concise History of Modern India. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neill, S. 1966. Colonialism and Christian Missions. New York: McGraw-​Hill. Savarkar,V.D. 1969. Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan. Singh, U. 2017. Political Violence in Ancient India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vivekananda. 1989. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.Vols. 1, 3. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Wagner, K.A. 2009. Stranglers and Bandits:  A Historical Anthology of Thuggee. New Delhi:  Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2010. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Oxford: Peter Lang. Wolpert, S.A. 1961. Tilak and Gokhale:  Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wynne, A. (trans.). 2009. Mahābhārata: Book Twelve: Peace: Volume 3: “The Book of Liberation”. New York: NYU Press. Zaidi, A.M. and Zaidi, S. (eds.). 1976. The Encyclopedia of Indian National Congress. Vol. 1. New Delhi: S. Chand & Company Limited.

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The faith and praxis of those called Hindus and Christians—​using the shorthand reifications “Hinduism/​Hindu” and “Christianity/​Christian”—​have mostly developed in geographical isolation from one another.This has led to significant differences across daunting cultural and experiential boundaries. (For surveys of the history of Hindu–​Christian encounter, see Rambachan 2013 and Robinson 2004, chapt. 1.) On the Christian side, the twentieth century saw an increasing advocacy among some Protestants, but more widely in Roman Catholic circles, for a shift away from received missionary and evangelistic emphases toward a more accommodating and appreciative evaluation of Hinduism (Swamy 2016, chapt. 1).The emergence of dialogue—​ informal and formal—​can be traced in the activities and writings of individuals, groups, and institutions from the global north, including a significant initial role by some missionaries. Among almost all Catholics and Protestants there has been not only a growing reluctance to claim what earlier generations had regarded as the doctrinal, ethical, and epistemic superiority of Christianity (at times asserted with impatience or contempt) but also an increasing readiness to replace monologue with dialogue as the preferred means of communication. In India, the openness of the Catholic Church is well illustrated by the energy and activities of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India’s Office for Dialogue and Desk for Ecumenism. The response from an increasingly self-​confident Hinduism, with growing willingness to assert the far-​reaching cultural and nationalist implications that its majority status affords, has ranged from interest to indifference, suspicion, and opposition, in part because it retains continuities with the ancient cultures of India in a way that other Indian religions such as Christianity and Islam do not. In sum, “of the many relationships Christians have with other religious traditions, the most elusive and indefinable relationship is that with the Hindus” (Ariarajah 2017, p. 177).

What kind of Hindu–​Christian dialogue? Formal or informal? When discussion of the Hindu–​Christian encounter is confined mainly to a meeting of the elite, educated, and articulate expressions of the two faiths, the use of the word “dialogue” in the formal sense can indicate that ordinary conversation has broken down or not even started. Although discussion of dialogue usually centers on formal rather than the many kinds of informal dialogue, the most common forms of dialogue are the most prosaic: the everyday

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meetings of Hindus and Christians, which often involve conversation as perhaps the most basic form of dialogue. Religion, however defined, has consequences in the textures of daily life with implications well beyond the textual authorities and ritual practices that often dominate formal discussion (Robinson 2004, pp. 41–​53; for the complex link between ritual participation and dialogue, see Moyaert and Geldhof 2015). There are many situations where informal dialogue has long been an established reality, made possible and even inevitable by the proximity of neighbors of differing faiths. One obvious example is the sustained friendship that is both a means of, and one of many conditions for, fruitful dialogue, which can become a hermeneutical key for interreligious understanding (O’Connor 1994; Fredericks 1998). As Klaus Klostermaier notes, stimulated by his experience in India, informal dialogue differs from “prearranged dialogue”: It is less systematized, less theological and much more complex. It is also much more challenging. In daily life, the rules of courtesy which determine the reactions in a formal discussion among intellectuals are sometimes forgotten, and convictions clash rather hard and sharp. (Klostermaier 1986, p. 15) There are many other examples of informal dialogue. Every time Hindus and Christians look with interest at the portrayal of the other in art, literature, drama, music, films, television, a kind of implicit dialogue occurs. Whenever there is cooperative endeavor for the common good, joint participation in gatherings and organizations, attendance at one another’s weddings or funerals, a serious attempt to understand the beliefs and praxis of another, or even the “double-​ belonging” of some Hindu–​Christian marriages, then a kind of dialogue has begun. Enquiries into the beliefs and practices of the other, including study (both formal and casual) can also become a form of dialogue. The academic discipline of Religious Studies, especially when it embraces the virtues of self-​consciousness, defamiliarization, and empathy, can also enable informal dialogue.

Formal, intentional dialogue Beginning in the early 1960s, there was a gradually increasing trend among both Protestants and Catholics to consider formal discussion as an additional or even preferable means of meeting people of other faiths, especially as a means of countering a history in which “miscommunication was too often the norm, as one tradition tried to overcome the other or, conversely, to ignore the other completely” (Clooney 2017, p. 124). Ashrams and other sacred sites became one locus of meeting (Aguilar 2016). From about 1960, the word “dialogue” itself began to be used with increasing frequency in both Protestant and Catholic circles, and even among Hindus, to describe the intentional encounter (Robinson 2004, chapt. 2b). No precise or common definition of such dialogue is in use, but a six-​fold taxonomy, which can be ordered in terms of increasing complexity, has begun to emerge. The word “dialogue” began to mean an intentional meeting in one of the following somewhat distinct and sometimes overlapping categories (Robinson 2004, chapt. 2c). The first is discursive dialogue: discourse as a (shared) quest for clarity of understanding. The second is dialogue of action: discussion intended to enable a joint response to issues of common concern such as social justice, peace, and human rights, a response that recognizes, affirms and enhances the ongoing “dialogue of life” that has characterized Hindu–​Christian relations over many centuries (Ariarajah 2017, chapt. 1). A further dimension of fruitful dialogue is the realization by participants (either before or during 444

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or after actual meetings) that comprehension of partners in dialogue from their perspective is needed in order to increase understanding and reduce possible bias. This third form of dialogue has been called interior dialogue and can include reading, reflection on, and observation of apparent similarities and differences, perhaps even guided in some way by the other. The process begins with careful and “open” listening. This form of dialogue is intended to enable the development of an insider perspective (cf. Flood 2013; Greco 2017).There is also a fourth form of dialogue that Eric Sharpe called reformist dialogue: the realization that parts of one’s tradition might need reform that a partner in dialogue could help provide (Coward 1989, p. 102). A fifth form has been called existential dialogue, a call for a direct and open acceptance of the other and a sympathetic understanding of the faith, values, and practices of the other. Cornille calls it “not only an intellectual but also an experiential understanding of the other [that] must include some grasp of the religious meaning of particular teachings and their impact on the life of believers” such that “they may have an impact on one’s own religious tradition” (Cornille 2008, p. 5). Finally, a dialogue of spirituality promotes mutual spiritual growth and enrichment by means of encounter.This is what Staffner calls “dialogue with people striving towards closer union [with] God” in light of the quest for transcendence that is a continuing feature of contemporary Indian life (Staffner 1993). Hindu–​Christian dialogue is, then, multi-​layered, often containing each of these discourses.

Conditions: loyalty and openness Recent decades of intentional dialogue propose a number of conditions that, if met, appear both to enable productive dialogue and to deepen the usually harmonious relations between Hindus and Christians. Prominent among the conditions are qualities related to the inter-​personal dimension of the encounter because fruitful dialogue is not mainly a matter of discussion but of relationship. Dialogue has more to do with people than with ideas and implies a readiness to respond to the partner in dialogue not merely as an adherent or representative of a different religious tradition but as a person (while remembering the near-​impossibility of isolating a person from their religio-​cultural context). These personal dimensions include mutuality, directness, and “presentness,” alongside qualities such as honesty, sympathy, generosity, goodwill, deep friendship, patience, curiosity, respect, and a quiet and relaxed spirit. Empathy seems especially conducive to dialogue; it includes an ability to enter into the spirit and mind of another and to grasp (or be grasped by) the world-​ and life-​view of the other. Empathy enables the possibility of saying, “I know what it means to you” in interreligious conversation. Both the Hindu and Christian traditions applaud the virtue of love and, in dialogue, love might express itself in the kind of listening that draws the other to speak, and the kind of speaking that draws the other to listen. The offering and receiving of appropriate forms of hospitality (even when hesitant or awkward) might also facilitate dialogue. A well-​informed understanding of the other also seems required, that is, an accurate and reasonably comprehensive knowledge of the beliefs and practices (and perhaps history) of the other’s religious tradition, including their self-​understanding(s) of those beliefs and practices. An acceptance of the realities of religious plurality (though not necessarily the endorsement of its prescriptive ideological derivative, religious pluralism) together with an openness to the intellectual and emotional welcoming acceptance of diversity and difference seem also to be conducive to dialogue. One obvious impediment to dialogue can be any unwillingness to accept the other as different. Dialogue is also inhibited when partners insist on defining others in their own categories. Nonetheless, loyalty to one’s own religious faith, praxis and identity is also usually seen 445

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as important for productive dialogue, provided the appeal to loyalty does not overlook the possibility and consequences of the inter-​communal oppression that has marked some interfaith encounter in, for example, South Asia during recent decades. Fruitful interfaith engagement seems to require that participants exhibit openness to the other while maintaining a particular religious identity, even if there is appears to be an inescapable and unresolvable paradox in this dual requirement. One consequence of this tension between loyalty and openness has been the advocacy of a (perhaps temporary) suspension of evaluative judgment, that is, the call to epoché, the provisional placing in parentheses of all those evaluative processes that might impede a profound hearing of the self-​understanding of the other. However, the quest for an empathetic but non-​evaluative dialogue seems futile. Authenticity in dialogue seems to require the honesty of conviction and the acknowledgment of the differences of discrete religious particularities that the epoché seeks to bracket. Perhaps acceptance of the virtues of risk-​taking, patience with ambiguity, and a measure of appropriate disinterestedness are also required. The willing acceptance of difference may require an epistemic humility induced by an acknowledgment of the fragmentary and necessarily limited and provisional character of all human perception, and the inevitable cultural conditioning of religious claims. Such acknowledgment might also encourage dialogue. In recent decades, Francis Clooney and others have advocated comparative theology with its deployment of a methodology that “though grounded in tradition and committed to truth in its particular cognitive and practical forms, is also resolutely open, resisting too tight a binding to any given viewpoint” (Clooney 2017, p. 112. See also, Robinson 2004, chapt. 2d; Cornille 2008, pp. 177–​201).

Diverse understandings of dialogue The usual terminology of a two-​part Hindu–​Christian dialogue is misleading. Neither tradition is an essentialized, monolithic structure; each derives from a complex entanglement and interplay of diverse past and present strands. There are many ways in which participants in dialogue identify with (or distance themselves from) their own Hindu or Christian traditions. There are also varieties of “double-​belonging”—​what Swamy calls “the ability of individuals to construct religious identities for themselves and to use them consistently in their dealings with other individuals”—​that might be considered implicit forms or consequences of Hindu–​Christian dialogue (Swamy 2016, p. 102). Further examples are the bhakti-​influenced communities of Yeshu bhakta (Duerksen 2015) and Khrist bhaktas (San Chirico 2016) who are devotees of Jesus or Christ, respectively, and who seem to occupy a space both between and beyond more unambiguously and traditionally defined Hinduism and Christianity. (On the implications of multiple religious identities for dialogue, see Peniel and Dayam 2015; Cornille 2015; Dobe 2015; and Swamy 2016, part 3.) Within Hinduism, the traditions of Vaishnavism and Shaivism, a range of philosophical schools, and further variants are visible (including beyond India, such as in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Swaminarayan movements).These variants open the possibility of “rewriting Hindu traditions from global perspectives” by means of “the multiple Hindu traditions in many parts of the world” that can both enlarge and challenge any received understanding of Hindu identity and experience based on supposedly normative accounts from India alone (Narayanan 2013, p. 67). A further variation is represented by a new generation of non-​Indian Hindu gurus in America with their various interpretations of Hinduism. Such gurus are at times viewed with misgivings by more traditional Indian Hindus (Gleig and Williamson 2013). Each of these varieties of Hinduism, including that embodied in the ideology of Hindutva (“Hinduness,” see below), is likely to assess dialogue with Christians in different ways. 446

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Christians also display considerable diversity in their attitudes toward dialogue. Approval and interest are most apparent among “mainstream” Protestants and Catholics, even if not all Catholics would discern and endorse what Clooney calls “an easy and deep resonance between Hindu and Christian truths, virtues, and practices” (Clooney 2017, p. 113; cf. Clooney 2010, chapts. 4 and 5), nor identify with the Jesuit priest, Michael Amaladoss, who self-​describes as a “Hindu-​Christian” (Amaladoss 2011). Some Indian Catholics remain opposed to liturgical innovations that deploy Hindu-​derived elements. Protestant evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, which are growing rapidly in India, display little overt interest in Hindu–​Christian dialogue (Hedlund 2017, chapts. 8 and 9; Bauman 2015, chapts. 3 and 5). However, the creative cultural expressions and contextualized praxis of so-​called “Indigenous Christianity” often offer evidence of what might be called a modest form of reflective interior dialogue (Hedlund 2017, chapt. 12).

The justification of dialogue How might dialogue, especially in any of its formal senses, be justified? Both Hindus and Christians may bring distinct motivations for dialogue. Elsewhere, I  have developed the following six categories that can be shared by participants from both traditions (Robinson 2004, chapt. 3).1

Understanding and the reduction of tension The simplest reason for dialogue is the need to understand why others believe and act in the ways they do, and to offer explanations for one’s own beliefs and actions in turn. This deepens mutual understanding and removes misunderstandings (perhaps even diminishing the likelihood of reciprocal defamation). Interreligious understanding is especially important in situations of inter-​communal tension, actual or potential, where ignorance, social isolation, and prejudice can and do breed misunderstanding, fear, and alienation. Dialogue can enable a more careful self-​ expression and may help avoid unnecessary misunderstanding or the giving of offense. When violence occurs, such dialogue may also provide opportunity to suggest that religion is often an instrumental but not necessarily an initiating cause of the violence.

Common social concern Concern for the other is both a reason for and a basis of dialogue, as urgent human needs are tackled together by Hindus and Christians rather than separately. Those who meet in this “dialogue of action” do so as neighbors and not simply as members of different religious groups; in a pluralist setting, justice is an interfaith task. Participants may engage complex questions from the particularities of their traditions, such as whose justice? And what kind of peace is envisioned? Nonetheless, dialogue in its discursive and cooperative senses seems to offer a means toward a more positive cohabitation in place of the self-​contented passivity, insecure suspicion, and aggressive chauvinism often found both within and between Christian and Hindu communities.

Common humanity and the shared ideal of community Motivation for dialogue is also found in the ideals of shared humanity and communal harmony that point to the distinctly personal basis of dialogue in which the encounter is not a meeting 447

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of Hinduism and Christianity but the encounter of human beings, of individual Hindus and Christians. “The purpose of structured dialogues is to deepen this ongoing dialogue of life. It is to make this natural human interaction the arena where we strive to build community” (Ariarajah 2017, p. 29). A global Hindu–​Christian consultation held in Varanasi in 1997 met “to discuss Hindu–​Christian relations in the perspective of our final aim of ‘Ek Dharti Parivar ki ore’ (Towards One World Family)” with a keynote address that stressed communal and global harmony (Rambachan 1997). Nonetheless, notions such as common humanity and communal harmony are open to the same criticism as the concept of the supposed unity of religion: that they impose an idealized or totalizing abstraction upon a dynamic and complex reality. Perhaps they might be complemented by a further ideal:  that of a (highly) differentiated unity that implies a continuing recognition of religious particularities.

Understanding and the quest for truth Moving beyond enhanced understanding, a dialogical quest for truth both can become a shared venture with each partner conscious of grasping a truth that neither fully possesses alone and can help correct any impression that dialogue is merely an exchange of information. A  starting point can be the acknowledgment and clarification of differences in belief and practice. One variation upon the theme of understanding is that of enhanced self-​ understanding prior to actual conversation. However, when the wide diversity of understandings of truth in Hinduism and Christianity is acknowledged (Vroom 1989, chapts. 3 and 4), then certain questions must be raised, for example, related to the content and validation of relevant epistemological criteria such as anubhava and sangha—​experience and community. What people think ought to be done in a given situation can depend quite acutely upon what they believe; how or even why one ought to act is not always self-​evident. Dialogue does not offer some privileged mode of access to the truth. Both Hindus and Christians are likely to agree that, given human finitude and fallibility, “truth” is best seen as provisional and, given its relational and cultural dimensions, inherently (perhaps irretrievably) complex and elusive as well.

The promotion of religious growth Dialogue can be a means of a mutually enriching spiritual development of individuals, communities, and perhaps even whole religious traditions. This theme is especially prominent in Catholic discussions of dialogue; Clooney, for example, writes that “the theological confidence that we can respect diversity and tradition, that we can study traditions in their particularity and receive truth in this way, in order to know God better, is at the core of comparative theology” (Clooney 2017, p. 112, emphasis added). And a not untypical Hindu reason for dialogue is that it enables the participants to “seek the total spiritual nourishment which God has furnished us through various religions” (Nityabodhananda 1971, p. 94). A liberal Protestant, however, sees “only relative value” in the historical expressions of religion and prefers “the emergence of an authentic religious life for contemporary society that has the imprint and input of the spiritual resources of the different traditions” (Ariarajah in Coward 1989, p. 252).The notion of religious growth as a motive for dialogue often assumes the desirability of change and its facilitation by dialogue. (If so, dialogue might help some Indian Christians be less dependent upon Western theological and philosophical categories, and some Hindus to move away from a dependence upon wholly Advaitin categories of thought.)

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Common or complementary religious experience Both Hindus and Christians may appeal to the Divine as the ontological ground for everything that exists, along with a common experience of this divine foundation as the deeper reality beyond and behind deities and symbols. This assumption is made by the Orthodox Christian David Bentley Hart, in his The Experience of God, whose subtitle, Being, Consciousness, Bliss, intentionally evokes the Hindu Saccidananda (Hart 2013). Hart argues that to define and speak of God in this way is consonant with the world’s great religions, including Hinduism (Ibid., pp. 4, 30, 44). Otherwise seemingly incommensurate acts of worship and prayer meet on this common ground (cf. Amaladoss 2013). Nonetheless, any appeal to supposedly self-​evident (or self-​authenticating) religious experience, shared or solitary, is problematical; as Baird asks in a discussion of Hindu–​Christian dialogue, “if we have no access to the thing itself, how do we verify if the experience itself is the same (though variously described) or different (as described)?” (Baird 1989, p. 227; cf. von Brück 1992, chapt. 12). Alongside what might be mutually agreed reasons for dialogue, there are distinctly Christian motivations (Robinson 2004, pp. 118–​25). These include the desirability of a contextual theology and an inculturated church in India. That is, dialogue can help identify those elements within Hinduism that might be critically adapted to enable a more distinctly Indian theology, worship, and general ethos. Christians may pursue dialogue as a means of, or complementary to, some form of mission, not perhaps in the sense of evangelization, but with a widened definition of mission in which the reign of God includes a convergent relationship between mission, dialogue, liberation, and inculturation. Dialogue may also be seen as a fruit of the gospel, for example in the compassion and dialogical example of Jesus (Robinson 2006, 2012). Dialogue is also important for Christology: given the central importance of the place of Christ in Christian self-​understanding, considerable attention has been given to the elaboration of Christology in distinctly Indian categories (Robinson 2004, chapt. 6; Schouten 2008).

Asymmetries and impediments India’s attitude to plurality in general, and Hindu appraisals of religious diversity in particular, have enabled other religious traditions, both local and imported, to live in harmony with most forms of Hinduism (Hedlund 2017, chapt. 16). Nonetheless, in discussing the state of Hindu–​ Christian dialogue in India, Clooney considers that a host of dysfunctions infect the field: monologues, rather than serious mutual learning; the rejection of the very idea of anyone speaking for Hinduism or Christianity as wholes; the myriad political, economic, forces, quite aside from theology, that militate against shared and mutually transformative study; and…the inevitable elitism of that small group which chooses to pursue these matters. (Clooney 2017, p. 7; cf. Machado 1996) Among the asymmetries that have appeared in the dialogue, it is apparent that the level of mutually sympathetic Hindu–​Christian contact has been much higher in the large cosmopolitan centers, especially Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai, than in the rest of India. It has been in the cities that nationalism, higher education, and reformed and reforming neo-​Hinduism have facilitated fruitful contacts. But a decidedly narrow view of the Hindu–​Christian encounter emerges if attention is restricted to predominantly urban contacts.

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The colonial context of many of these encounters also contributed to asymmetrical dialogue between the two traditions. Because the discussions and controversies between Hindus and Christians before the mid-​twentieth century coincided with the period of colonial rule and missionary activity, the encounter was rarely between equal partners. A one-​sidedness in the history of Hindu–​Christian dialogue is apparent, not least because the initiatives have almost always come from the Christian side, often framed in Christian categories that ignore Hindu priorities and approaches; the results have often appeared more like Christian–​Hindu monologues lacking in reciprocity and openness, although this imbalance is diminishing. A further asymmetry, within both traditions, has been the way in which formal dialogue has become a somewhat elitist enterprise usually out of touch with the interests and even self-​ understanding of the wider communities (Swamy 2016, chapt. 7). The uncritical adoption of the constructs “religion” and “religions, ” including the homogenized identities of “Hinduism and Christianity” (on which, see San Chirico’s chapter in this volume), has contributed to the narrowing of eligible dialogue partners, as has an uncritical acceptance of a secular–​religious dualism that fails to recognize the religious dimensions of everyday life (Swamy 2016, chapts. 3 and 4). A related impediment is the narrowing of religion toward its textual and doctrinal foundations, rather than the ritual, visual, oral, and performative foundations to which most Hindus appeal. This impediment is related to an understandable tendency for each side to self-​define in ways that may appear to challenge (or even exclude) the other (Rambachan 2013, p. 342). Even the turn to comparative theology (see below) faces the challenge that it inherits a mostly text-​based methodology formed by the comparative reading of religious texts. Sacred texts do, of course, play a significant role in both Hinduism and Christianity (Ariarajah 2017, chapt. 3), but the Hindu and Christian traditions, as a whole, seem to revolve around quite different axes. The writings of the Mar Thoma theologian, M.M. Thomas, for example, argue that the core of the Christian tradition includes its incarnational, prophetic, and social emphases, which he contrasts with the rich Hindu heritage of mystical spirituality (see chapts. 1–​3, 7, 16, 17 of Athyal, Zachariah, and Melancthon 2016). Not to acknowledge this difference becomes an impediment, a difficulty further compounded by the finite and fallible condition of all human discourse and assertion-​making that, in turn, chastens and qualifies any claims of a prescriptive uniqueness, even though the qualification does not, in itself, negate the reality of difference. The presence of some measure of incommensurability ensures that the Hindu–​ Christian encounter carries its own karma that can lead either to arrogance and triumphalism or to mutual respect and genuine dialogue. Glenn Willis cautions against any naïve search for supposed common ground between religions, partly because to overlook the problem of difference is to risk neglecting or dishonoring the integrity of the other or belittling one’s own original faith commitment (Willis 2018). (Among theologically conservative Christians, lack of interest in intentional dialogue usually emerges from a prior commitment to mission understood as something that excludes the way of dialogue; for a suggested corrective in the Indian context, see Robinson 2006.)

Missions and conversion, violence and Hindutva Impediments to dialogue also include a mix of issues related to mission and conversion, violence and nationalism, and the promotion of the ideology of Hindutva (“Hinduness”). A World Council of Churches–​initiated consultation in 2011 grappled with a number of these continuing Hindu–​Christian tensions, some of whose most negative features have intensified in recent decades (Dash 2013). 450

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In the case of mission activity, the tension derives, in part, from the historical reality that missional activity has been part of Christian self-​understanding. Many Hindus acknowledge a beneficial role of missions in education, health care, and social justice. Nonetheless, the Indian theologian of dialogue, Wesley Ariarajah, points to a complex relationship between dialogue and mission and acknowledges that “mission history” carries a surplus meaning of colonial power and domination (Ariarajah 2017, chapt. 7). Debates about conversions in India have led to accusations of unethical proselytizing and to legislation intended to prevent conversions (cf. Saraswati 2009; Barua 2015).This, in turn, has raised questions about religious freedom, including the rights to change, practice, and propagate faith (Ariarajah 2017, chapt. 13), and the rights of reasonable protection against proselytism (on which, see Richards’s chapter in this volume).The issues are complex; a Hindu academic can write that “the case for Christianity being a proselytizing religion is not as open-​and-​shut a case as they [Hindus] have been led to imagine” especially given that “both particularistic and universalistic strands are present” in Hinduism as well (Sharma 2008, pp. 26–​27). Nonetheless, another Hindu academic considers that “[m]‌ost Hindus today believe that proselytization remains the principal concern of Christians, and suspect that Christian interest in dialogue is still part of a larger evangelical [sic] agenda” with missionary activities amounting to “divisive efforts to destroy the unique religio-​cultural heritage of India.” The result has been disastrous: “the dialogue between Hindus and Christians remains stuck in mutual stereotyping” (Rambachan 2013, p. 342). Such Hindu–​Christian debates and disagreements about conversion may derive, at least in part, from logically prior differences about the nature of religion and religious liberty. For example, is one’s birth-​religion “fixed” in some transcendent way and therefore something that ought not to be changed, as in the usual Hindu view? Assessments of conversion will also differ according to the importance that dialogue partners attach to religious plurality (in which the recognition of religious difference is both descriptive and open to evaluative judgments about the differences) and to its quasi-​ideological derivative, “pluralism” (with its prescriptive implications or refusal to consider any evaluative judgment that might encourage or condone non-​coercive conversion). There appears to be evidence that, contrary to assumptions about the supposed self-​evident superiority of religious difference, conversion can integrate and not divide a Dalit slum community of Christians and Hindus (Roberts 2016). In some situations of social deprivation where conversion does enable beneficial consequences, it can be argued that conversion should not be rejected on the grounds of its potential harm to Hindu–​Christian relations and dialogue elsewhere. Rambachan considers that “there are few serious attempts on the Hindu side to understand the meaning and attraction of Christianity to convert[s who]… experience their home tradition as oppressive and as negating their dignity and self-​worth” (Rambachan 2013, p. 343). Despite a long tradition of religious tolerance in India, the routinization of anti-​Christian violence in India that began in the late 1990s, with the increasing politicization of religion accelerated by the rise of a Hindu-​nationalist BJP government, has provided a further disincentive to dialogue. A related issue is the rise of the advocacy of Hindutva, with its claims to embody a permanent and authentic Indian identity. The proponents of Hindutva, while they represent only a minority of Hindus, nonetheless provide challenges and even threats to non-​Hindu minorities, including Christians and Dalits (Pinto 2015) such that even the usually sympathetic Stanley Samartha complains of “a majority community with a minority complex” (Samartha 1991, p. 23). The advocacy of Hindutva appears to stand in marked contrast with the concept of “composite” Indian culture proposed by Vivekananda and others. Moreover, despite the usual assumption that dialogue reduces violence, one analysis of two examples from Hindu studies seems to show that the opposite can be true, that is, that dialogue 451

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can become an incentive to violence (Balagangadhara and Claerhout 2008). Moreover, because the expression of human identity seems at times to include the desire to dominate, the discussion and practice of Hindu–​Christian dialogue can neither ignore nor accommodate the human self-​centeredness and perversity that has been highly visible in the inter-​communal violence of recent decades.

The future of Hindu–​Christian dialogue Some observers are rather pessimistic about the future of Hindu–​Christian dialogue. One Hindu proponent regrets “the absence of sustained theological engagement between these traditions” in India and the anti-​intellectual trends, together with “the politics of nationalism and proselytization,” that impede mutual learning and cooperation. For this reason, he argues, renewed interest and energy is likely to come from Hindu and Christian communities outside of India (Rambachan 2013, pp. 343–​44). Contemporary postmodern, pluralist, and postcolonial contexts have generated interest in comparative and cross-​cultural studies. A relevant example of this interest is found in the emergence of the “comparative theology” championed by Francis Clooney and others. For Clooney, Hindu–​Christian studies ought to be seen as a distinctively theological study, “a kind of inter-​ religious theology” that navigates a path between “a faith enclosed upon itself or immune to the benefits and challenges of inquiry, but also from any mode of reasoning that merely distances itself from faith, religious community, and religious practice” (2017, p. 4) Clooney also argues for the provision, in the future of the Hindu–​Christian encounter, of “shared (or ‘third’) spaces” between or beyond the usual bounds of Hinduism and Christianity, which will enable Hindu–​Christian studies to flourish, and where “thoughtful practitioners of the two traditions could meet and learn mutually, authentic to their own traditions but benefiting from the other, all for the sake of a learning that neither tradition could attain on its own” (Ibid., p. 124). It intends “deep learning grounded in both heart and mind, and performed by Christians learning Hinduism, ideally alongside Hindus learning Christianity” (Ibid., p.  4). Perhaps some of this “third space” has already been occupied by the Khrist and Jesu bhaktas, and by other exemplars of the “double-​belonging” mentioned above. (For an explanation and defense of comparative theology, see Clooney 2010; Clooney and von Stosch 2018, and Gupta 2016. For a more precise discussion of the relationship between “comparative theology” and “inter-​religious dialogue,” see Clooney’s chapter in Cornille 2013.) Emma O’Donnell and Michelle Voss Roberts (and others) suggest that comparative theology might better be grounded in a multi-​faceted epistemology that includes the experiential, which is part of the recent tendency in theology toward a broadened experiential methodology that includes the performative, material, and aesthetic (O’Donnell 2018; Voss Roberts 2015 and 2018). For example, the 2015 volume of the Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies is themed, “Aesthetic Theory and Practice in Hindu and Christian Experience,” and was constructed to make sensory experience a starting point for a Hindu–​Christian comparison of religious experience, given that “an aesthetic framework for Hindu-​Christian studies makes room for diverse experiences within dialogue” (Voss Roberts 2015, p. 9). A further scenario in the future of the Hindu–​Christian encounter is suggested by Stephanie Corigliano, who questions the idea that an explicit faith loyalty is a necessary criterion for comparative theology. She points to the emergence of what she calls a more “agile and fluid” generation of younger comparative theologians whose perspective is “aerial” rather than “rooted,” that is, not limited to one established religious tradition (Corigliano 2018, chapt. 15).

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Narrative studies that reflect the actual encounter of living traditions, and not merely abstract discussion or speculation in romanticized (or demonized) categories, also offer promise. Considering some lived examples can also be helpful and reassuring to those, either Hindu or Christian, who have misgivings about the relatively novel turn to dialogue. On the Hindu side there is Mahatma Gandhi (1869–​1948), who so clearly seems to represent the common humanity of both Hindus and Christians and to exemplify a dialogical ideal. Most Indian Christians acknowledge in Gandhi the moral and spiritual resources of Hinduism, which is why Klostermaier calls him “the most important and the most influential figure in actual Hindu-​Christian dialogue so far” (Klostermaier 1986, p.  248). Another writer calls him a “Living Embodiment of Hindu-​Christian Dialogue” and of a tolerant quest for interreligious understanding and harmony (Dabholkar 1992). On the Christian side, there are many examples of whom a representative few might be mentioned. Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889–​1929), whose influence, especially among Protestants, has been widespread, combined a deeply christocentric faith and life of decentered, sacrificial simplicity with a quite positive and creative adaptation and use of Hindu terminology as part of his commitment to “offer the water of life in an Indian cup.” Among Catholic examples are Abhishiktananda and Raimon Panikkar, discussed separately in this volume by Cornille and Ranstrom; even more widely known and admired by many Hindus is the humble example of Mother Teresa toward people of all faiths. Within both traditions, calls for dialogue elicit a wide range of reactions, from resistance, to indifference, to receptivity to change. Some report that an excessive number of meetings has led to dialogical “fatigue,” indicating that formal dialogue may not always and everywhere be the best or the only response to situations of inter-​communal misunderstanding or tension, despite the usual reasons advanced for its advocacy and practice. At times, it might be reasonable to accept or even advocate a variety of responses beyond the usual forms of intentional dialogue; for example, by the deployment of the genres of disputation, doctrinal confession and exemplary (auto)biography, or by the advocacy of uncertain coexistence, uneasy or confident silence, verbal and other resistance to the claims and actions of the other. The future of Hindu–​Christian dialogue, especially in its formal senses, faces difficulties and uncertainties. Broadly speaking, three major issues call for attention: the unresolved tension between the virtues of openness and commitment; the quest for acceptable epistemic starting points (whether these should be textual and/​or experiential); and whether commonality exists (because of shared ontology such as some attenuated form of theism), or whether dialogue partners must accept incommensurability between their traditions. Despite these questions, there are sufficient and even compelling reasons for the adventure of Hindu–​Christian dialogue to continue. There may be no reasonable alternative to continuing to advocate dialogue despite the impediments, tensions, ambiguities, and the lack of clarity that persist. Possible solutions to the problems are unlikely to emerge without persistence in dialogue itself. “The nature of the further shore becomes clear only as the journey continues” (Chatterjee 1991, p. 399).

Note 1 Alongside what might be mutually agreed reasons for dialogue, there are distinctly Christian motivations that include: the desirability of a contextual theology and an inculturated church in India; dialogue as a means of, or complementary to, some form of mission; dialogue as a fruit of the Gospel; the need to describe christology in distinctly Indian categories (Robinson 2004, pp. 118–​35 and chapt. 6; Schouten 2008).

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Contemporary Hindu–Christian dialogue Klostermaier, K. 1986. Indian Theology in Dialogue. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Machado, F. 1996. “Hindu-​Christian Encounter: General Problematic.” Vidyajyoti 60: 825–​42. Moyaert, M. and Geldhof, J. (eds.). 2015. Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue:  Boundaries, Transgressions and Innovations. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Narayanan, V. 2013. “Rewriting the Hindu Traditions from Global Perspectives.” In Singh, P. and Hawley, M. (eds.). Re-​imagining South Asian Religions: Essays in Honour of Professors Harold G. Coward and Ronald W. Neufeldt. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 67–​87. Nityabodhananda. 1971. “Dialogue and Devotion.” In Samartha, S. (ed.). Dialogue Between Men of Living Faiths. Geneva: World Council of Churches, pp. 92–​95. O’Connor, D. 1994. Relations in Religion. New Delhi: Allied Publishers. O’Donnell, E. 2018.“Methodological Considerations on the Role of Experience in Comparative Theology.” In Clooney, F.X. and Stosch, K.v. (eds.). 2018. How to Do Comparative Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 259–​70. Peniel, J. and Dayam, J.P. (eds.). 2015. Many yet One? Multiple Religious Belonging. Geneva: World Council of Churches. Pinto, A. 2015. “The Challenges of Hindutva to Minorities, Christians and Dalits.” Vidyajyoti 79: 323–​39. Rambachan, A. 1997. “Towards One World Family.” Current Dialogue 31. Available at http://​wcc-​coe.org/​ wcc/​what/​interreligious/​cd31-​04.html. Accessed on March 31, 2020. —​—​—​. 2013. “Hindu-​Christian Dialogue.” In Cornille, C. (ed.). The Wiley-​Blackwell Companion to Inter-​ Religious Dialogue. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, pp. 325–​45. Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. The Anthropology of Christianity 20. Oakland: University of California Press. Robinson, B. 2004. Christians Meeting Hindus. An Analysis and Theological Critique of the Hindu-​Christian Encounter in India. Carlisle: Paternoster. —​—​—​. 2006. “Christian-​Hindu Dialogue –​Are There Persuasive Biblical and Theological Reasons for It? A Critical Assessment.” Dharma Deepika 10(2): 7–​22. —​—​—​. 2012. Jesus and the Religions:  Retrieving a Neglected Example for a Multi-​cultural World. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Samartha, S. 1991. One Christ—​Many Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. San Chirico, K. 2016.“Holy Negotiations in the Hindu Heartland: Abundant People and Places among the Khrist Bhaktas of Banaras.” In Monge, R.G., San Chirico, K.P.C. and Smith, R.J. (eds.). Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 183–​98. Saraswati, D. 2009. Conversion Is Violence. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Schouten, J.P. 2008. Jesus as Guru: The Image of Christ among Hindus and Christians in India. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Sharma, A. 2008. “The Role of Ethics in Hindu-​Christian Dialogue.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 21(8): 24–​27. Staffner, H. 1993. Dialogue, Stimulating Contact with Hindus. Anand: Gujurat Sahitya Prakash. Swamy, M. 2016. The Problem with Interreligious Dialogue: Plurality, Conflict and Elitism in Hindu-​Christian-​ Muslim Relations. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Voss Roberts, M. 2015. “Aesthetics in Hindu-​Christian Studies:  A Theological Framework.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 28: 3–​10. —​—​—​. 2018. “Embodiment, Anthropology, and Comparison.” In Clooney, F.X. and Stosch, K.v. (eds.). How to Do Comparative Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 137–​63. Vroom, H.M. 1989. Religions and the Truth: Philosophical Reflections and Perspectives. Amsterdam and Grand Rapids, MI: Rodopi and Eerdmans. Willis, G. 2018. “On Some Suspicions Regarding Comparative Theology.” In Clooney, F.X. and Stosch, K.v. (eds.). How to Do Comparative Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 122–​34.

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38 RESPONSE: SHARED AND CONTESTED SPACES Hindu–​Christian relations through a performing arts lens Vasudha Narayanan

Prelude On a warm summer day in 2020, a young girl had her dance arangetram (Tamil: “ascending the stage,” Sanskrit: ranga pravesa), a first full-​length concert performance of South Indian classical dance performed after several years of training under the tutelage of a Bharata Natyam teacher. By itself, such an event would ordinarily not be noteworthy within the Indo-​American community of the United States; in any given year, one typically sees dozens of such arangetrams, with appropriate fanfare, every weekend through the three months of summer. But this one, like many other events in 2020, was different because it was the summer of COVID-​19. The arangetram took place in an auditorium in a large city in the US, but very few people were physically present. It was streamed live around the world and family, friends, dance teachers, and their teachers, all well-​known performers themselves, watched from India. In her welcoming address, the dancer’s mother expressed her profound gratitude to the teacher who, she said, was like a sister to her. The dance program was also slightly different in content from several others I had seen. The performance began with a traditional prayer to Ganesha and the dancer went on to do many dances in a traditional Bharata Natyam margam (“path,” referring to a sequence of dances in the performance).There were a few dances to Krishna, one to Shiva, the lord of Chidambaram, one in praise of the Goddess, and so on. But inserted into the program were also two items addressed to Jesus Christ, and an additional one addressed to Mary.The last piece of any South Indian classical music or dance program is a song of blessing, one which affirms well-​being, a benediction traditionally called mangalam. Most Bharata Natyam songs use the mangalam composed by the renowned musician, Tyagaraja (1767–​1847), in honor of Rama. The mangalam in this program, however, was composed by Vedanayagam Sastriar (1774–​1864), a contemporary of Tyagaraja, and was in praise of Isa, or Jesus Christ.This mangalam glorified Jesus as the lord of the earth, the righteous one with (all) knowledge, the most respected being, the child of the Virgin Mary, and the one who hails from Bethlehem.

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I note two points briefly here. The first is the connection between Christians and classical performing arts in South India that goes back more than 200 years. The arena of classical music and dance has become an unlikely but extremely volatile area of contention in Tamil Nadu, one that affects relationships between Hindus and proselytizing Christians. At issue is the shared heritage of classical music and dance as it intersects with Christian attempts at inculturation, which some Hindus now consider a covert tactic used for the purpose of conversion. I will return to this topic later in this response. The second is the obviously personal and affectionate relationship between the dancer’s mother and her daughter’s teacher. Such relationships between Hindus and Christians can be multiplied manifold across India, and close friendships are seen between neighbors and colleagues in schools, colleges, and workplaces. One can well say that the observation in the Introduction to this volume, “[o]‌verwhelmingly, India’s Hindus and Christians have managed their differences without resort to violence,” is an understatement. The relationship between Hindus and Christians, for a large swath of the population, is cordial and, one may say, even unremarkable. Apart from personal relationships, we also see close bonds in many other areas: theology, ritual sharing, and so on. Many significant earlier works on comparative religion and theology have been built on personal connections and friendships and this response begins with a brief discussion of these shared spaces.The friendships and close personal connections enjoyed between Hindus and Christians at the local level are seldom studied, and these relationships are diametrically at odds with the palpably acrimonious and sometimes violent interaction that we see between actors who claim to represent institutionalized Christianity and Hinduism in the socio-​political domain.

Introduction This response has three primary aims.The first (provided in Part 1) is to supplement the chapters by Locklin and Ponniah in this volume, by making several observations on shared intellectual and ritual spaces. The second aim (in Part 2) is to provide some context and thereby help elucidate the reasons for Hindu concern about Christianity in India. We hear much about Hindu–​ Christian conflict in this volume and elsewhere, and authors in these pages (e.g., Bauman, Richards, and Ulrich) rightly note that the contentious issue of conversion is a significant factor in it. But two other important issues and causes of Hindu consternation—​the lack of a uniform civil code and government interference in the administration of Hindu temples—​go largely unmentioned. The third aim of this response (offered in Part 3) is to demonstrate what can be gained from approaching the topic of Hindu–​Christian relations through the lens of the performing arts (largely neglected in this volume, except in passing by Beldio), particularly Carnatic music and the dance form known as Bharata Natyam. The performing arts have historically constituted and continue to constitute a rich space of interreligious engagement. As indicated in the Prelude, this interreligious engagement is often quite friendly. But not always. By attending to several recent Hindu–​Christian controversies situated within these art forms, I  show that such controversies manifest and perpetuate the sources and kinds of concerns (described just above) that some Hindus have about Christians and Christian proselytization. I write from multiple registers in this concluding essay. I write as a Hindu raised in a fairly orthoprax family in South India and Mumbai, and as one who has been part of a social landscape where Hindus with whom I have associated have established warm friendships and multiple shared spaces with Christians and Muslims. The physical landscape in which I lived featured temples, churches, dargahs, and mosques in close proximity. Hindu friends went to dargahs in Kovalam, near Chennai; family members went to Sister Alphonsa’s chapel, also in Chennai; and 460

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as a bus in which I regularly rode went through Worli in Mumbai, I would see Hindus walking at low tide to Haji Ali dargah, situated not far from the famed Mahalakshmi temple. I use these personal experiences, evolving worldviews, and network of connections as lenses that refract my observations and analyses. I also write as one who has studied these relationships (albeit from the perspective of shared spaces) for several years. My work in the academic arena (on Vaishnavism, among other topics) has been closely connected with the active theological engagement of many Christian scholars with Hindu texts and practices over the decades. John B. Carman, for example, studied Ramanuja and the Sri Vaishnava tradition in the 1970s, and also wrote on Christians in village settings. Our collaboration on a Sri Vaishnava commentary in a hybrid language (Carman and Narayanan 1989), as well as my learning from the work of several scholars who have studied Christianity in India (e.g., Selva Raj, Corinne Dempsey, Chad Bauman, and Reid Locklin), have been important in framing my views. In particular, the works of Francis Clooney have opened many paths for me to better understand religious faith, texts, and praxis, and how to study them. While I draw from many chapters in this volume in order to identify its prominent themes, I will also make use of the classical performing arts as a site to discuss issues related to those themes.This is not by happenstance or because of a casual interest. Anyone familiar with Hindu popular practices will know that music and dance are important media for the transmission of traditions. Musical and dance performances come in many varieties, e.g., aarti or bhajans in a home or neighborhood, a community sankirtan, a Bollywood song in a temple, a Bharata Natyam dance, a women’s garba dance in a village, or dancing to high tech music during Navaratri. While philosophers like Sankara or Ramanuja certainly consider sacred texts (sabda pramana) and the hearing of scripture as the path toward knowledge of the supreme Brahman, most Hindus pursue and gain similar knowledge through singing or reciting the holy names and/​or qualities of Shiva,Vishnu (and his incarnations), Ganesha, the Goddess, and their manifold local manifestations, in a neighborhood temple or shrine. Hindus and Christians have expressed their faith through popular, folk, and classical music and dance; these are ways to apprehend the divine. The sense of the transformative nature of the right sounds, of music and dance, in the larger Hindu culture cannot be overestimated. Indian Christians have internalized some of these local notions of performing arts. Many believe, for example, that it is not hearing the holy word in a church or reflecting on it in contemplative prayer that is significant, but rather hearing and singing the praises of the divine being. In popular Hindu traditions, even the unintentional singing of a song or reciting of a name may have the power of a mantra or create a spiritually efficacious aesthetic and emotional mood. Thus, there is a fear among some Hindus that when proselytizing Christians use familiar Hindu tunes, ragas, or words, they do so in an attempt to co-​opt Hindu traditions and lure people into the snare of conversion. In this concluding essay, therefore, I begin with (a) shared spaces, both intellectual (such as comparative theology) and physical (e.g., rituals and pilgrimage areas). I then move into (b) areas of dissatisfaction and anger for Hindus that affect their relationships with Christians and other religious minorities, such as the lack of a uniform civil code and perceptions of inequality in the government’s treatment of Hindu institutions relative to their treatment of other religious institutions. Finally, I discuss (c) the contested areas of culture, along with issues of inculturation and conversion, as they are manifest in classical music and dance. Regrettably, there is considerable generalization in discussions of “Hindus” or “Christians,” even when these discussions qualify their assertions with phrases like “in general,” or “some Hindus,” etc. Hindus and Christians interact with and react to each other in diverse ways. People adopt different attitudes in different contexts and there are also significant differences 461

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from person to person, related to their education, class, caste, immediate circumstances, personal experiences, political awareness, and their susceptibility to the influence of manipulative social media. The generalizations about “Hindus” and “Christians” appear most regularly when scholars reflect on Hindu dissatisfaction with government policies or concerns about conversion. Because of this, in the next sections I go beyond the usual echo chamber of my closest personal relationships to write with more complexity and details about the diverse voices I have heard in numerous conversations with family, friends, and street vendors, or on social media. Unfortunately, Facebook and WhatsApp have amplified voices that take cover in anonymity; on platforms like these, conspiracy theories pass as “facts.” From a scholarly perspective, however, there is some advantage in the sharing of opinion on social media: the fact that people in our personal high school, college, local bhajan, or Indian neighborhood chat groups send messages through these apps gives us a kind of access to their sentiments we might not have otherwise.

Part 1:  Encounters and shared spaces of theology and rituals Studies comparing specific features of the Hindu and Christian traditions, from the perspective of history of religions and theology, have flourished in recent decades, as attested to by the rich essays in this volume’s Comparative Theology section. The list builds on the work of several well- known names like A.J. Appasamy (e.g., 1930 and 2010 [1928]), and recent scholars include Holly Hillgardner (e.g., 2017), M. Thomas Thangaraj, and, in this volume, Amaladoss, Clooney, Scheid, Rajkumar, Sydnor, Ganeri, and Voss Roberts. These works are quite different in texture from those of many colonial scholars, who, starting around the seventeenth century, “discovered” Hindu sacred texts and interpreted them to their advantage; early Europeans’ theological encounters with Hinduism generally manifested negative views of Indian religions and deities. With Rudolf Otto (1896–​1937), a scholar who had also met Appasamy, we begin to see both personal and intellectual engagements. In the 1930s, Otto visited Mysore and met with a Sri Vaishnava scholar, Alkondaville Govindacharya, who had written several books on the Alvars and Ramanuja in the first decade of the twentieth century. Evidently, the discussions with Govindacharya on Ramanuja made a difference in the thinking of Otto. Hitherto, Otto and several other theologians (Carman 2018) had thought of Sankara as the gold standard for comparing Hindu thought with Christianity.Traveling together to Melkote, a temple-​town near Mysore, Otto and Govindacharya encountered a guest book, in which Otto wrote: “When I return to Germany I shall write a book on Rāmānuja” (Ibid., p. 72). Otto did not subsequently write much about his friendship with Govindacharya, but India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted (1930) made good on the promise by discussing Ramanuja’s theology extensively. Thirty-​ three years later, Govindacharya’s grandson, Yamunacharya (also a Sri Vaishnava scholar) and John Carman signed the same guest book. John Carman relates being delighted to see Otto’s signature and words in the guest book, because India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted had a major impact on his own intellectual life in his freshman year in college (Ibid.). The encounters between these scholars and between their traditions have increased since then, and Carman’s work over the decades has influenced numerous scholars in India and the United States, including Clooney and me. This kind of scholarly work, often emerging from personal relationships, has brought together many Hindu and Christian scholars, and has given rise to a rich field of study on Hinduism and Christianity. While scholars have different theoretical approaches to the two traditions, almost all note both their similarities and differences. The similarities sometimes are the most striking, and 462

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structural similarities in theologies and rituals have sometimes facilitated conversions from one to the other, as Dennis Hudson (1972) demonstrates in the case of Krishna Pillai (1827–​1900), who converted from the Sri Vaishnava tradition to Christianity. It is this Sri Vaishnava tradition that Otto and, later on, Carman and Clooney studied. However, Otto also skillfully highlights the distinct nature of Christianity in India’s Religion of Grace, as many of his successors would do.

Contiguous communion: moving between the cowherd and the shepherd In addition to exploring theological spaces, Hindus and Christians also recognize the sacrality and power of the deity in specific spaces. Raj (see Locklin 2017) has written extensively about these places and we see sophisticated discussions on the shared vocabulary of the ritual in this volume also (e.g., in the chapters by Locklin and Ponniah). Rambachan’s (2019) nuanced exploration of the friendships and challenges between Hindus and Christians has added much to our understanding of their relationship. Growing up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, I  watched family and friends pay visits to the chapel of Sister (now, Saint) Alphonsa on the corner of Greenways Road and Ramakrishna Mutt Road. Over the years, I have seen thousands of Hindu devotees go to two well-​known South Indian churches: the Basilica of Our Lady of Health at Velankanni, Tamil Nadu, and the Infant Jesus Shrine at Viveknagar, Bangalore. These are two of the most popular Christian shrines among Hindu devotees. The forms of the deities venerated in these shrines—​infant and healing mother—​are at once distinct and familiar to Hindus. Hindus worship the deity in diverse ways, e.g., as father, mother, lover, child, and warrior-​protector. Perhaps the most beloved representations of the divine in South India are as mother and as child, and it is these that we see in Velankanni and in Bangalore. In Bangalore, Jesus is not the Jesus on the Cross or the risen Christ; he is the ever beloved baby Jesus, spoken of in terms that are commonly used in Tamil Nadu by those addressing the baby Krishna or the child Murugan (for songs addressed to the baby Jesus, see Richman 2003). In all these cases, what we see is the continuity of structures and ritual vocabulary oriented around a different object of veneration, the kind of continuity that was seen and has been documented in Krishna Pillai’s life in the nineteenth century. For Krishna Pillai, ideas of devotion and surrender to Vishnu were transferred to Christ. What is different in Krishna Pillai’s case is that he took a step that these Hindu pilgrims and devotees at Velankanni do not: he converted to Christianity. The Hindu worshippers in a Catholic shrine or in a Muslim dargah move from one milieu to another, but the vocabulary of veneration remains continuous with that at the temple. This, then, is an example of contiguous communion where one moves from the cowherd to the shepherd, or from the goddess Mariamman to Jesus’ mother, Mary-​ amman. The contiguous communion in such cases is temporary; the Hindu devotee may visit one of the dargahs with the ease of a citizen in any EU country traveling to another within the Schengen Area. However, when it comes to marriages (and until the earliest part of the twentieth century, even commensality), the walls and boundaries between religious communities have remained in place.

Part 2:  Conversion, government management of Hindu temples, and the uniform civil code Despite deep personal friendships between Hindus and Christians, over the last few decades, there have been several fault lines that have emerged between Hinduism and Christianity. Of the many one can list, I will touch upon just three, very briefly, in this section: conversion, the uniform civil code, and government interference in the financial affairs of Hindu temples. The 463

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last two issues are connected with the government’s lack of will to take any action on matters of pressing social concern (no matter the party in power). It is possible that the frustrations some Hindus feel in socio-​economic spheres, especially with regard to temple finances, are directed even more strongly against what is seen as a rapidly progressing conversion agenda on the part of Christians. Even Hindus who are moderate in their attitude toward other religions, or ambivalent about other Hindu issues (for example, building a temple on the disputed Ram janma bhoomi site) express their anger when they discuss disparities between the ways in which the government deals with the finances of Hindu institutions on the one hand, and with Christian and Muslim institutions on the other. The same goes for contemporary conversion practices. In the last few decades, conversion has been probably one of the most challenging issues in Hindu–​Christian relationships. For that reason, we will now turn to this and other areas of unrest among Hindus as they look upon their Christian and Muslim neighbors.

Conversion The aggravation that large swaths of Hindus feel about these issues—​including conversion—​is not just connected with political affiliations or sympathies. One can well argue that it goes much further than Bauman and Ponniah’s observation that those who oppose Christianity, and particularly conversion to Christianity, are generally motivated by a religiously inflected nationalism (Hindu in India, Buddhist in Sri Lanka) that considers Christian proselytization both a debased, politically motivated religious practice, and a threat to the demographic superiority of the religious majority. (Bauman and Ponniah 2017, p. 68) This may be true, perhaps of those who “oppose” Christianity itself. But the numbers who oppose conversion to Christianity extend beyond those motivated by a religiously inflected nationalism in India. While scholars (e.g., Bauman 2015, Barua 2015) distinguish between various Christian denominations, some more aggressively proselytizing than others, Hindus do not make distinctions between the traditional Christian denominations that have been in India for years, and the more recently arriving, heavily funded proselytizing groups. Government reports on the receipt of foreign donations regularly place Christian groups like World Vision, the Believers Church India/​Gospel for Asia, and the Missionaries of Charity at the top of the list (cf. Bauman 2015, p. 148). Rambachan’s (2019) insightful analyses of the challenges of conversion and what members of both traditions can and ought to do, as well as Barua’s (2015) careful discussions are germane to this discussion. One of the exacerbating issues is the inequality created by caste in Hindu society. Together with this inequality, the aggressive nature of the conversion techniques (often labeled “predatory proselytization,” on which see Bauman’s chapter in this volume) employed by Pentecostals, the influx of foreign funds to support Christian (and Christianizing) activities, and the “dalitization” of Christianity have created social tremors in many parts of India, which, with political instigations, can develop into devastating earthquakes.

Government interference in Hindu temples’ financial affairs Annoyance over the government’s interference in the management of Hindu temples has been festering for a few decades, and there did not seem to be any promise of impending improvement until very recently. In July, 2020, however, a Supreme Court verdict returned control of 464

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the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram to the Royal Family of Travancore. Most South Indians who are very conscious of and aggrieved at the government’s interference in and appropriation of the income received by Hindu temples rejoiced in the verdict. Although India is officially secular, the government has exercised control over many Hindu temples while having a “hands-​off ” policy to the management of other religions’ institutions.Temples have been a source of major revenue for the government since the British days, and no Indian government has wanted to relinquish it. On the other hand, the government had subsidized the hajj pilgrimage for Indian Muslims—​a subsidy initiated by the British—​until 2018. At that point, and only because of the prevailing Muslim opinion that to take a government subvention for an obligatory duty was “un-​ Islamic,” it was decided to divert these government funds to other Muslim causes. While minority religions can control their educational and religious institutions in India, the same right has been denied to Hindus, even though the “State has to treat all religions and religious people equally and with equal respect without, in any manner, interfering with their right to freedom of religion, faith, and worship” (Anonymous 2019).The British had introduced The Religious Endowments Act (1863), which was later replaced by the Madras Religious and Charitable Endowments Act (1925). Because Muslims and Christians were angered by the Act, it was later revised to become the Madras Hindu Religious and Endowments Act (1927), thenceforward applying only to Hindus.The situation endured through independence and until today, and the following statement from The Organiser: Voice of the Nation, an affiliate publication of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, articulates what I have heard many Hindus (and not just “right wing” or fringe groups) assert: Despite the stated objectives of the Endowment Acts and observations by the [Supreme Court], over the decades the control of government over Hindu temples has only concretized with hardly any challenge or the control being returned to the original trust. This has led to a widespread legitimate grievance and feeling of discrimination among Hindus. Hindus today feel that despite the Constitutional provisions and judicial decisions, Hindu temples and religious and charitable institutions are routinely taken over by the secular State on the pretext of maladministration, mismanagement, etc., whereas mosques and churches of the minorities are allowed to be exclusively managed by the respective communities. Even though Article 26 confers equal rights upon all sections of citizens, Hindus and their institutions do not enjoy the freedom as that of the minority communities. Hindus also genuinely feel that such State control has resulted in large scale misappropriation of the temples’ income and properties by the State and redirected to cater to its political compulsions. (Anonymous 2019) Further, state governments also collect taxes from temples. Dr.  Rangarajan, a priest from a Hyderabad temple, who has been very active in voicing several grievances of the temples through social media, points out that [t]‌he State governments collect 23.4 per cent tax on the income of the temples including endowment administration tax (15 per cent), audit fee (2 per cent), and common good fund (2 per cent). That apart, money is also taken away from the temples for the Archaka Welfare Fund and other purposes…But, such taxes and share in revenue is…collected from not a single church or mosque. (Express News Service 2019) 465

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When contrasted with church control over its own funds, and when compared with the infusion of missionary funds into Christian religious organizations, the grievances of Hindus over temples’ lost wealth become magnified.Thus, the recent litigation, ending on July 13, 2020 with the Supreme Court awarding custody of the famous Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple to its hereditary trustees, the royal family of Travancore, was widely welcomed by the Hindu public. Although conversion and the long-​term government control over Hindu temples have been major areas of concern in many parts of India, the lack of a uniform civil code, a law that is applicable to all Indians, irrespective of their religion, has also been an issue with which many educated Hindus are concerned.

A uniform civil code The lack of a common law for all citizens of India is another area of discontent which indirectly affects Hindu–​Christian relationships. While it is perhaps the least important among the issues discussed here, it still regularly emerges as a point of contention. The patchwork of distinct Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian personal laws (governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.) divides and fragments the social fabric of the country, and is perceived to cause complex and significant problems. Article 44 of the Indian Constitution, one of the Directive Principles of State Policy, commands that “the State shall endeavour to secure for all citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India.” Looking back now after seven decades since the writing of the Indian Constitution, one can say that the state does not seem to have endeavored with any enthusiasm. While each religion’s personal laws loosely follow their religious laws, because they are based on older customs and traditions (which tend to be androcentric), they often privilege men. Because they do, these disparate laws would seem to clash with Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law. However, many Christian (and Muslim) institutions strongly oppose any attempt to forge a more equitable uniform civil code, which causes resentment among Hindus. In this context, we can begin to understand why some Hindus perceive that the interreligious playing ground is not level, at least on some political and religious issues. And that perception in turn helps us understand the furor over conversion and concerns of “cultural appropriation” (in dance, etc., as discussed above). Some of these concerns are justified, while others are stoked by politicians and other interested parties who use social media deftly to shape and manipulate public opinion to goad people into believing in fearful scenarios (and voting appropriately). When issues such as conversion and the government’s considerable appropriation of temple funds are festering, any spark can set off a conflagration of anger. These days, social media regularly provides the spark, as in 2018, when singers of classical Carnatic music in South India were under attack.

Part 3:  Performing arts—​shared spaces or contested territory? I begin Part 3 with two telling quotations: Singer Yesudas is the beloved voice of Kerala. He has serenaded Malayalis [the dominant ethnic group in Kerala] and those outside the state with film music and devotional songs in equal parts. However, despite the numerous songs he has sung in praise of Krishna, his religious identity has meant that the singer has not been allowed to enter the famous Sree Krishna temple in Guruvayur…Yesudas has always been vocal about his wish to enter the Guruvayur temple…The singer’s pain was apparent in his 466

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words: “If I had been born as a cockroach or a fly, it would have been possible for me to enter the Guruvayur temple.” (TNM Staff 2018) After Serfoji had heard [Vedanayagam Sastriar, a Protestant poet] recite Bethlehem Kuravanci [a literary work the latter had composed], he asked Sastri to compose a kuravanci for his own Lord, who was Siva…in the sanctum of Tanjore’s huge and beautiful Brihadesvara Temple. Sastri refused. He said he could not praise anyone other than God. (Hudson 2000, p. 138; emphasis added) Yesudas (“Servant of Jesus,” b. 1940) is one of the most popular and decorated singers in contemporary India, while Vedanayagam Sastriar (1774–​1864), a prominent musician who composed numerous Carnatic music songs to Jesus, lived in the Thanjavur area about 200  years ago. Yesudas and Vedanayagam Sastriar are at two ends of a spectrum.Yesudas has sung hundreds of devotional songs addressed to Hindu deities. He goes with devotion to many temples, including Sabarimala, and was overjoyed when he was allowed into the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, despite being born into a Roman Catholic family. Meanwhile, Vedanayagam Sastriar refused to sing about anyone but Christ. Although “Yesudas has sought permission to enter the famous Sree Krishna temple in Guruvayur several times…[he] has been always been denied” (TNM Staff 2018). Nevertheless, when, wearing the garb of a traditional Hindu devotee, he sang Harivarasanam with fervor in the Sabarimala temple, a YouTube video capturing his performance went viral. The description accompanying one version of the video says:  “Though there have been many versions of this song sung by many renowned vocalists…the Sabarimala temple plays the rendition by K. J. Yesudas…every evening after the final pooja” (Gold Star Devotional 2016). Indeed, it is Yesudas’s rendering of the song, Harivarasanam, that is played for Lord Ayyappa and broadcast through the PA system in the Sabarimala temple every night as the temple closes down (Outlook Web Bureau 2017). Along with theological and ritual spaces, the space of performing arts is one where people of many faiths meet in harmony. Just as Yesudas has sung hundreds of Hindu devotional songs in classical and popular modes, many Hindu singers have sung devotional songs to Jesus or Mary. As one can expect, it is in the expressive arts and in sports that one most regularly sees people of different religions coming together in friendship. As described at the beginning of this response, the classical art of Bharata Natyam regularly brings together people of different faiths. Likewise, historically speaking, the local music culture of South India also freely borrowed from the colonial (Christian) culture, and continues to borrow even from Western Christian aesthetics today. For example, Baluswami Dikshitar, brother of the famous musician Muthuswami Dikshitar (1775–​1835), introduced the violin (which is now indispensable to any Indian musical concert) into Carnatic music. Meanwhile, several of Dikshitar’s famous Nottuswara compositions, such as his shakti sahita ganapathim (in the raga Sankarabhranam), resemble lilting Celtic tunes (on which, see Maddy 2010). However, it has been pointed out that while this kind of borrowing is common, Baluswami Dikshitar was not using these melodies for the purposes of conversion. In 2018, an unlikely controversy arose in Tamil Nadu, one which initially seemed inconsequential, but which smolders to this day. It provides a useful lens through which we can get perspective on Hindu–​Christian relationships, one which complements and expands those offered in this volume. At stake in the controversy were the following questions. Is the classical Carnatic music of South India part of the larger common heritage from which all Indians can 467

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draw, or is it Hindu and just for Hindus? Can Hindu musicians sing Christian songs, as they had been doing for decades? And when there are Christian songs in Carnatic music, is it simply an expression of a cultural heritage or is it cultural appropriation? The controversy was exacerbated by the fear, among some, that by adopting these artistic modes, Christians were implying continuity and similarity between Hinduism and Christianity for the purposes of proselytization. For many Hindus, this was the real issue; they viewed Christian Carnatic music as a form of cultural appropriation intended to further “predatory conversion.” This furor illustrates how, in combination with heightened political tensions, latent (and sometimes blatant) anger with the government’s putative callous treatment of Hindu temples, and a lack of movement toward a uniform civil code, controversies such as these have potential to create major social divisions between Hindus and Christians. The controversy erupted in August 2018, when a Carnatic musician, O.S. Arun, announced a concert of classical music with all Christian songs.The announcement was criticized by a Hindu activist, Ramanathan Seetharaman. Hitherto, no one had heard of Ramanathan Seetharaman or the political party, Rashtriya Sanatan Seva Sangh, which he said he had founded. Now, however, he was threatening several Hindu artists and demanding they not sing Christian songs (Ge 2018). He also released a short YouTube video (Rashtriya Sanadhana Seva Sangam 2018) accusing Christian missionaries of atrocities and of having offered lucrative compensation to Carnatic music singers to sing Christian songs. He specifically accused two singers of being involved in such endeavors, and he accused Arun of adapting a popular verse of Andal (an eighth-​century Tamil saint) to the Christian faith. He vowed to stop these people from singing in public forums and appealed by name to a prominent family who were patrons of the music festivals (Ibid.; Ge 2018). He also promised to physically assault the prominent musician, T.M. Krishna, at his next concert. Krishna, in response to all these threats, tweeted: “Considering the vile comments and threats issued by many on social media regarding Karnatik compositions on Jesus, I announce here that I will be releasing one karnatik song every month on Jesus or Allah” (Lalwani 2018). In response, a few Hindu temples in the United States, including the prominent Shiva–​Vishnu temple in Lanham, Maryland, withdrew performance invitations they had previously given to Krishna. Social media exploded with people who vented their anger against Hindu artists who sang Christian songs, especially against those who were perceived to adapt classical songs addressed to Hindu deities to the Christian milieu. This was deemed to be cultural appropriation which would undermine Hinduism.While some, like T.M. Krishna, went on the offensive, most others went on the defensive. A National Public Radio broadcast reported, Amid accusations that singers might be trying to stealthily convert listeners to Christianity by playing their music, the Carnatic singer Aruna Sairam tweeted that rumors that she had “modified” traditional songs were untrue and she would “never tamper with classical content” nor sing for “evangelical purposes” or “commercial gains.” (Frayer 2018) A few commentators, while condemning Arun’s compositions, offered a defense of some earlier Christian songs. “The albums released thus far have been original Christian songs set in Carnatic music,” said one. Carnatic music, as such, is available to anyone who has learnt it to put to use. If a composer has used their own mental faculties to set lyrics composed by them to the 468

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tune, one can still appreciate it as art for art’s sake.This time, however, the album at the center of controversy contains songs that have blatantly plagiarised Tyagaraja. (Konduru 2018) In other words, the author did not object to the use of Christians using Carnatic music, per se, but only to artists deliberately changing or adapting well-​known Hindu songs to Christianity. A prominent feature of this controversy was the labeling of Carnatic music as Hindu. It is very clear that most Carnatic songs, especially those familiar to people who frequent music sabhas (halls where the concerts are held), are addressed to Hindu deities. In that sense, a lot of Carnatic music is Hindu. But there is also a long history of Christian compositions in the field of Carnatic music and “[s]‌ince the late eighteenth century, the devotional song form of kīrttanai has been the most widely adopted and performed indigenous Christian song form among Protestant Tamils” (Sherinian 2007, p. 240). Sherinian also notes that “Vellalar (educated upper-​ caste) Christians composers in the Tanjore and Tirunelveli districts first composed Christian kīrttanai…Further, they borrowed tunes from their contemporary Hindu Karnatak composers such as Tyagaraja” (Ibid., p. 241). Similarly, the teacher of the young dancer we encountered in the beginning of this chapter had choreographed the final Christian mangalam of her students to words composed by Vedanayagam Sastriar. Although it is the mangalam of his contemporary, Tyagaraja (1767–​1847), that dominates the Carnatic music scene in the large music halls, Vedanayagam Sastriar’s is similar in structure, and from the very same period. Vedanayagam Sastriar was a Protestant poet who was a close friend of Serfoji II (1777–​1832), the Maratha king of Thanjavur. Sherinian writes that in 1853, the American Congregational missionary, Edward Webb, collected more than a hundred Christian songs of Vedanayagam, compiling them as the core of the Tamil hymnal titled Christian Lyrics for Public and Social Worship, and widely disseminated to villages and towns by Protestant missionaries and Tamil catechists, soon becoming a canon of Karnatak hymnody among the diverse Protestant missions. (Ibid., p. 241) At the beginning of the Carnatic music controversy, several people pointed out the Carnatic musical contributions of Vedanayagam Sastriar and others like him. Noting how Carnatic music singers were being hounded and harassed by social media, and how many venues were beginning to boycott them, Sriram V., secretary of the prestigious Music Academy of Madras, wrote, in a measured opinion piece for The Hindu, What is the threat they have posed to Hinduism? How can this music, which is predominantly Hindu, be used this way is a prominent question in many minds. Forgotten in the midst of all this is the fact that there has been a long-​standing Carnatic tradition in the church and which goes back to the time of Tyagaraja himself. The composer’s contemporary, Vedanayagam Sastriar, created songs and operas in the Carnatic style. Some of the tunes are very closely modelled on Tyagaraja’s songs. (Sriram V. 2018) Sriram additionally gave several examples of friendships and rich collaborations over the last two centuries between Carnatic musicians who were Hindu and Christian, and it is these friendships that one should not forget in the loud rumblings of hatred. 469

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Similar considerations are connected with the classical South Indian dance form, Bharata Natyam. Is this a dance form that can express different ideas or is it inextricably connected with Hinduism? Like Carnatic music, Bharata Natyam has become closely associated with Hindu deities. However, it also historically offered space to express human love and to enjoy dance for the sake of dance. While Bharata Natyam was never connected exclusively with religion, it has become framed thus, especially in the diaspora. However, unlike Carnatic music, where we have had important contributions from Christian figures such as Vedanayagam Sastriar, Abraham Pandithar, and other poet-​musicians, Bharata Natyam has not had a history of close connections with Christian deities. This old, but still evolving, art form has until relatively recently been more intimately tied to the world of Hindu deities, temple devadasis, courts, and courtesans. The use of Bharata Natyam in Christianity has been controversial at many levels, and as Zubko (2014, p. 68) writes, “who” can freely participate in Bharata Natyam, as well as “who” is marginalized, continues to be a central issue within the dance form. Many Christians and Christian institutions vociferously oppose Christian participation in Bharata Natyam (Mortillaro 2019). For example, Joshua Raj, a convert to Christianity, argues that Bharata Natyam is incompatible with Christianity, noting with disapproval that many Christian Bharata Natyam dancers adapt original mudras, innovate new ones, or argue from an inclusivist theological position that it is acceptable for Christians to dance songs to Hindu deities because Hindu and Christian names for god ultimately reference the same divine. Such an approach is true of some of the productions of Kalai Kaviri, a Christian institution devoted to the classical arts in Tiruchchirappalli. At Kalai Kaviri, a dance with the Gayatri mantra is interpreted as ultimately referring to Christ (Zubko 2006, p. 37). Raj’s strong recommendation, which reflects much of the unease that many Christians feel about classical Indian performing arts, is simple: At this time, it is not advisable to bring Bharatanatyam, including “Christianized” forms, into the church or Christian functions. It is presently too much in sync with Hindu worship to be allowed for Christians (Ex[odus] 20:3–​5). Christian parents should seek other dance forms for their children. (Raj 2008, p. 139) Still, many Christians have chosen to engage with Bharata Natyam, and have found ways to adapt it to their use. For example, since Bharata Natyam did not have hand gestures (mudras) to refer to Christ, the Trinity, or to Mary, several new ones were invented (Zubko 2014). In these innovative forms, we see what Hephzibah Israel has observed about the choice of linguistic terms in Protestant translations. Israel notes that Protestant translations of the Bible were “governed by one of two broad principles: to either use existing terminology with their accrued meanings intact or invent a new sacred vocabulary to convey Protestant meanings” (Israel 2011, p. 84). Some Hindu writers have also objected to Christian Bharata Natyam quite strongly. For example, Malhotra and Neelakandan (2011, p. 116) argue that when Christian dancers invent new mudras to depict Christ, the Father, Mother Mary, and so on, the strategy becomes “strikingly similar to the development of Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga by western practitioners who take what they want from yoga but reject or replace any symbols or concepts that are too explicitly Hindu.” Further, it is seen as one more way Christians undermine Hinduism: To understand the syndrome we are dealing with, it is important to first understand the strategy known as inculturation and its colonizing influences upon a growing number of Indian dancers.What this dancer feels is precisely the result of inculturation—​namely, 470

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to de-​Hinduize the tradition in such a manner that it is welcomed by the practitioners who begin to see this shift as a kind of modernization and globalization program. The first stage is to diminish the dharmic metaphysical context by emptying the symbols of their deeper meanings, and this gets gradually secularized and eventually Christianized. (Rajiv Malhotra, quoted in Anonymous 2011) While this articulates what some Hindus feel, a second set of objections, which is far more widespread, come from those who see Christians using music and dance as a way of connecting with Hindus and then drawing them into the snare of conversion. Continuity in structure between religious traditions is important in the conversion process; it is argued that some Hindus may not see the differences between the religions and therefore, for any number of reasons, move from Hinduism into Christianity.

Conclusion: cultural appropriation, continuity, and conversion There is no question that both Catholic and Protestant missionaries have expressed Christian ideas and thoughts through Indian cultural idioms, both to make Christianity meaningful to the lives of Indians and also to bring in more converts. Essays in this volume by Clooney, Jones, Amaladoss, and Beldio have illuminated these efforts. According to Hedlund, the process began with Roberto de Nobili (1577–​1656), who rendered the gospel in a Tamil form, and later, Tamil Nadu had Vedanayagam Shastriar (1774–​1864), H.A. Krishna Pillai (1827–​1900) and others who enculturated the Protestant Christianity of the South. In Bengal the most radical attempts were the Christo Samaj of Calcutta (1887), led by Kali Charan Banerjee (1847–​ 1902)…In Maharashtra the Brahmin poet Narayan Vaman Tilak (1861–​1919) brought the richness of the Hindu bhakti tradition into the Marathi Church. (Hedlund 2019, p. 261) Today, however, these expressions of Christianity in Indian cultural forms are considered problematic on two fronts. First, as Corigliano, Krishnamurti, and Miller explore from different angles in this collection, they are perceived to undermine Hinduism by taking its practices (like yoga), stripping away Hindu elements in order to make them secular, and then, with some minor changes, rendering them Christian. Second, these adoptions of Indian cultural forms are perceived to have the ulterior motive of making Christianity appear continuous with Hinduism in order to make it easier to convert Hindus to Christianity. While the issues of the uniform civil code and the government control over temples are hot button items, much of the current angst about Christianity in India emerges from the issue of conversion. And where does our discussion of the performing fit into this larger picture? A lot of Carnatic music is Hindu in texture and origin, but people of different religions have composed in this genre for over 200 years. Nevertheless, most Hindus are unaware of Christian composers like Vedanayagam Sastriar, and historical knowledge regarding Christian Carnatic music is spotty. While there have been many concerts, recordings,YouTube videos, and popular articles in newspapers and magazines about the Christian element in Carnatic music, there is also widespread ignorance about it. For example, Kamini Dandapani, who blogs on Carnatic music from New  York, writes about her surprise in discovering about Vedanayagam Sastriar and Christian contributions to Carnatic music—​this, after having spent a lifetime learning 471

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Carnatic music (Dandapani 2010). So, at least on one level, one can argue that the dissemination of more knowledge about these issues can be helpful on the level of dialogue and to promote understanding of the rich, shared heritage of the music. There have also been, as we saw, accusations of appropriation and coopting the music for conversion. Much of it is based on the possibility of continuity—​what we called contiguous communion. Hudson’s comment on Krishna Pillai from the nineteenth century is instructive here and worth reproducing in detail: All of his Christian life he remained strictly vegetarian, observed the rules of purity and pollution regarding the food and caste (jati) relations, and carefully preserved his status as a Vellala, the highest group of castes among the non-​Brahmans of Madras Presidency…Thus, there were important cultural continuities between his life as a Hindu and as a Christian—​his cultural world remained Tamil, his religious thought in both traditions was in Tamil, his style of life remained that of the Vellalas—​and they suggest that a similar continuity may have existed in his religious faith.This seems even more likely when we observe that the kind of Hinduism from which he converted (Tengalai Sri Vaisnavism) and the kind of Christianity he found persuasive (evangelical Protestantism of the Church of England) parallel each other remarkably in their mode of thought and devotion…The continuity I mean is in the form or structure of his faith, the way he thought about himself in relation to God and the nature of his devotion and practical piety. This structural continuity did exist, I think, and can be summarized in the Sanskrit terms bhakti and saranagati: both as a Hindu and as a Christian [Krishna] Pillai understood devotion (bhakti) as the highest relation of man to God and refuge in the Lord of the Universe as the only means to salvation (saranagati). (Hudson 1972, p. 192) This is very similar to many other situations in India.The object of devotion changes but all else remains the same. Dandekar (2019) writes eloquently about how her mother’s family preserved their Brahmin caste status well after they became Christians. Accepting caste and providing a continuity with the convert’s previous life (when much else was discarded) became part of the strategy of conversion from the eighteenth century in Tamil Nadu (Hudson 2000). It is probably this idea that fuels the fears some Hindus seem to have in what they think of as appropriation of music or dance. Remember, the cultures and religions that let their practices be digested into Abrahamic faiths thinking, “Oh, what harm can come out of cultural appropriation,” are today extinct, and we learn of them only in museums and encyclopaedias. Cultural appropriation is dangerous. It strips a culture of its uniqueness and makes the followers of the religion that the culture is based in to think there is nothing special about their way of life—​and this is what stirs trouble. (Konduru 2018) One can see the assertion of Christian–​Hindu continuities in Christians’ dancing the Gayatri mantra, interpreting its dedication to Savitr (a sun deity) as a reference to Jesus as the light of the world, and so on. In such appropriations by others, the uniqueness of one’s cultural tradition is lost, and one might therefore be more easily converted to a new faith. Konduru says that “slow cultural appropriation is the modus operandi for digesting a native culture and completely 472

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replacing it with an Abrahamic one, successfully followed everywhere by the proselytising Abrahamic faiths” (Ibid.). The real fear in the performing arts controversy is clear: that appropriation asserts and produces continuity, and thereby the unique elements of a religion are lost, leading to a greater likelihood of conversion. And there is yet one more idea that links the performing arts and conversion. There is a strong belief in several Hindu traditions that performance can lead one to salvation (Haberman 1988). There are also ideas of the transformative nature of the music or dance, to which many of the articles written during this controversy allude (e.g.,Venkataraman 2018). One has to sing and dance with bhava or the right mood, the bhava of devotion, which in some parts of India is called bhakti-​rasa (Zubko 2014).The bhava, the rasa (the aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional flavor of the music or dance), as well as the reality of the devotion, transform a concert into a religious experience (Konduru 2018); it is only one step from here to conversion.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Mrs. Hema Sampath, Senior Advocate, Madras High Court, for pointing me to sources connected with the government’s interference in the finances and control over the administration of temples. I take responsibility, however, for the interpretation of the materials.

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Vasudha Narayanan Ge, Krupa. 2018. “More Threats and Warnings in Tamil Nadu to Carnatic Singers Who ‘Dare to Sing Christian Songs’.” The Wire. Available at https://​thewire.in/​communalism/​communal-​campaign-​ threats-​carnatic-​music-​artists-​ramanathan-​rsss. Accessed August 15, 2018. Gold Star Devotional. 2016. “K.J. Yesudas Live Harivarasanam at Sabariamala.” YouTube.com. December 14. Available at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=bRWVCTzLIv4. Accessed August 3, 2020. Haberman, D. 1988. Acting as a Way of Salvation. New York: Oxford University Press. Hedlund, R.E. 2019. “Independents.” In Ross, K.R., Jeyaraj, D. and Johnson, T.M. (eds.). Christianity in South and Central Asia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 261–​73. Hillgardner, H. 2017. Longing and Letting Go:  Christian and Hindu Practices of Passionate Non-​Attachment. New York: Oxford University Press. Hudson, D.D. 1972. “Hindu and Christian Theological Parallels in the Conversion of H.A. Kṛṣṇa Piḷḷai, 1857–​1859.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40(2): 91–​206. —​—​—​. 2000. Protestant Origins in India:  Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-​1835. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Israel, H. 2011. Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language,Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Konduru, L. 2018.“The Carnatic Christian Conundrum: It’s an Alarming Case of Cultural Appropriation.” #SWARAJYA. August 19. Available at https://​swarajyamag.com/​ideas/​the-​carnatic-​christian-​ conundrum-​its-​an-​alarming-​case-​of-​cultural-​appropriation. Accessed August 3, 2020. Lalwani, V. 2018. “Communalising Carnatic Music: Artists Face Threats for Singing Devotional Hymns in Praise of Jesus.” Scroll.in. August 11. Available at https://​scroll.in/​article/​889990/​communalising-​ carnatic-​music-​artists-​face-​threats-​for-​singing-​devotional-​songs-​in-​praise-​of-​jesus. Accessed August 3, 2020. Locklin, R. (ed.). 2017. Vernacular Catholicism,Vernacular Saints: Selva J. Raj on “Being Catholic the Tamil Way”. Albany: SUNY Press. Maddy. 2010. “NottuSwara—​Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s European Airs.” Maddy’s Ramblings. September 4.  Available at https://​maddy06.blogspot.com/​2010/​09/​nottuswara-​muthuswamy-​dikshitars.html. Accessed August 3, 2020. Malhotra, R. and Neelakandan, A. 2011. Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines. New Delhi: Amaryllis. Mortillaro, M.C. 2019. “Indian Dance in Christianity.” In Lanphar, E. and Wilczek, A. (eds.). Understanding New Perspectives of Spirituality. Leiden: Brill. Otto, R. 1930. India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted. Foster, R.H. (trans.). London: Student Christian Movement Press. Outlook Web Bureau. 2017. “Legendary Singer Yesudas Allowed Entry into Kerala Temple after Years of Waiting and Singing for Deities.” Outlook. September 19. Available at www.outlookindia.com/​ website/​story/​legendary-​singer-​kj-​yesudas-​allowed-​entry-​into-​kerala-​temple-​after-​years-​of-​wait/​ 301905#:~:text=Legendary%20Singer%20Yesudas%20Allowed%20Entry,Waiting%20And%20 Singing%20For%20Deities&text=Legendary%20singer%20K.J.%20Yesudas%20has,singing%20for%20 the%20Hindu%20deities. Accessed August 3, 2020. Parrinder, G. 1970. Avatar and Incarnation. New York: Barnes and Noble. Raj, J. 2008. A Biblical Approach to Indian Traditions and Beliefs. Singapore: Armour Publishing Pte. Ltd. Rambachan, Anantanand. 2019. Essays in Hindu Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rashtriya Sanadhana Seva Sangam.2018.“Madham Maarum SangeedhaVidhvaangal /​Christian Missionaries’ Atrocities.” YouTube.com. August 7.  Available at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=aLJkKcrQnRo. Accessed August 3, 2020. Richman, P. 2003. “Praising Baby Jesus in Iyecupiran Pillaitamil.” In Frykenberg, R.E. and Lowe, A. (eds.). Christians and Missionaries in India:  Cross-​Cultural Communication since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 376–​97. Sherinian, Z.C. 2007.“Musical Style and the Changing Social Identity of Tamil Christians.” Ethnomusicology 51(2): 238–​80. Sriram,V. 2018. “A Chronicle of Collaboration.” The Hindu. August 20. Available at www.thehindu.com/​ opinion/​op-​ed/​a-​chronicle-​of-​collaboration/​article24732325.ece. Accessed August 21, 2018.

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Response: shared and contested spaces TNM Staff. 2018. “Could Have Entered Guruvayur if I’d Been an Insect: Singer Yesudas on Temple Entry.” The News Minute. March 24. Available at www.thenewsminute.com/​article/​could-​have-​entered-​ guruvayur- ​ i f- ​ i d- ​ b een- ​ i nsect- ​ s inger- ​ yesudas- ​ t emple- ​ e ntry- ​ 7 8451#:~:text=Yesudas%20has%20 always%20been%20vocal,to%20enter%20the%20Guruvayur%20temple.&text=The%20singer’s%20 pain%20was%20apparent,to%20enter%20the%20Guruvayur%20temple.%22. Accessed July 3, 2020. Venkataraman, Swami. 2018. “Christian Appropriation of Carnatic Music:  Why Musicians Can’t Hide Behind the ‘Secular’ Hypothesis.” #SWARAJYA. October 3. Available at https://​swarajyamag.com/​ politics/​christian-​appropriation-​of-​carnatic-​music-​why-​musicians-​cant-​hide-​behind-​the-​secular-​ hypothesis. Accessed August 3, 2020. Zubko, K. 2006. “Embodying ‘Bhakti Rasa’ in Bharata Natyam:  An Indian-​Christian Interpretation of ‘Gayatri’ Mantra through Dance.” Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 19(10): 37–​43. —​—​—​. 2014. Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam. Lexington, KY: Lexington  Books.

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39 RESPONSE The Handbook in light of the past and future of Hindu–​Christian relations Francis X. Clooney, SJ

When I began doctoral studies in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at the University of Chicago in 1979, two books already had a certain authoritative status for me.The first I had already encountered a few years earlier in Nepal: Religious Hinduism (Ten Jesuit Scholars 1964). It is a collection of thirty essays on various dimensions of Hinduism, by ten distinguished older and younger Jesuit scholars (seven European, three Indian). Religious Hinduism began as journal articles, and in its finished form was intended to be both a textbook (a kind of handbook, of about 300 pages), and a scholarly resource toward evaluating Hinduism in light of the Christian faith and toward charting a fresh Christian response to Hinduism. The book is comprehensive. It covers the sacred books in Sanskrit and the vernacular; the epics and Bhagavad Gītā; the Bhāgavata Purāṇa; the Vedānta schools of Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva; folk Hinduism; Hindu ethics; Hindu understandings of sin; personal and communal rituals, pilgrimages, images, and idols; the gods and goddesses; nineteenth-​century reform; and great figures such as Ramakrishna,Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi. Fr. Fallon’s final chapter sizes up the situation in India in the 1960s, the looming divisions in a quickly secularizing India, and urgent work facing the Church if it was to lead Hindus through their own Hindu faith to Christ. This was a useful volume that combined a great deal of information with a progressive Catholic attitude toward Hinduism, though over the years I have found it increasingly dated, not only in its information, but also in the way its “fulfillment in Christ” theology prompted its authors to oversimplify the Hindu–​Christian encounter. The second was a home-​grown Chicago product, The Literatures of India: An Introduction, a collaborative work by Edward C. Dimock, Jr., Edwin Gerow, C.M. Naim, A.K. Ramanujan, Gordon Roadarmel, and J.A.B. van Buitenen, founding members of SALC, and, except for the last two, faculty when I arrived there. Essays treat the Indian epic, Sanskrit drama, the story literature of the epics, Indian poetics, lyric poetry, classical literary categories evident in modern Indian fiction, and the modern Hindi short story. The preface gives a little history of how the volume came to be, and it indicates how, in trying to rebalance the study of India away from nearly exclusive focus on religion, “the vast literature of the philosophies, theologies, and ritual” had to be left “entirely aside,” though without any disrespect intended (Dimock et al. 1974, p. xii). It is up to the reader, the authors add, whether those philosophies, theologies, and rituals are noticed or not. Literature was now to stand at the center of things.

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I note too that when I came across The Literatures of India in 1979, it was only a short time after Edward Said’s Orientalism had appeared in 1978, providing an ideology to chart the forward course of South Asian studies in a way Dimock and his colleagues probably did not anticipate. In any case, South Asian Studies thus began unfolding as a field with its own agenda and interests, and for some decades it was to reign supreme. If the 1960s Jesuit project did not adequately leave breathing room between scholarship and Catholic doctrine, the 1970s Chicago project too neatly imagined a South Asia that could be understood at a distance from religious India as imagined and lived, assertive and demanding the attention and even person of the scholar who would learn from it. South Asian Studies (after the golden era of Dimock, Ramanujan et al.) was increasingly driven by faith in Foucault, a manner of Marxist creed, and fidelity to postmodern critique, while the religious study of Hinduism by Jesuit scholars lost its bearing in an India increasingly impatient with missionaries and their designs. Young Indian Jesuits moved on to matters of justice and social critique, and largely put aside the work of studying classical Hinduism seriously. South Asianists found themselves increasingly inarticulate in the face of the new, reborn, and sometimes fierce religiosity of Hindu India. I recollect the two volumes not to criticize either noble venture, but rather to put in perspective the remarkable accomplishment of the Handbook of Hindu–​Christian Relations. It shows that missionary expositions, area studies, and historical investigations can be brought together in a more fruitful conversation that recognizes and does justice to the theme of Hindu–​Christian relations. It moves notably beyond the dichotomies to which individual disciplines are prone, such as the divergence between the lingering missionary religiosity of the 1964 volume and the blossoming post-​religious literary focus of the 1974 volume. The differences and divergences between missionaries and scholars, and between theology and Indology and South Asian studies, are not erased, but the boundaries are now made permeable. The expertise of Indology and South Asian studies is a crucial component of the theologically attuned study of Hinduism, while area studies that do not take the truths of traditions seriously in the end seem inarticulate before the very texts being studied. In the Handbook, the various disciplines cooperate in an exemplary fashion, and the overall education offered by the volume is sensible and well-​rounded because non-​reductive. The Handbook marks a turning point, putting back together religions, literatures, and histories, objective but also subjective realities that belong once more together. As Bauman and Voss Roberts note in their editors’ introduction, it is important to remember also that the volume is about “Hindu–​Christian Relations.” We ought not make too much of a single word, of course, but “relations” suggests the wider range of this volume, wherein a variety of approaches to the study of the Hindu and the Christian can be found to cohere once more in interesting and productive ways. “Relations” leaves room for but is larger than the theologically inflected “Hindu–​Christian studies” or the practice indicated by “Hindu–​Christian dialogue.” The 1964 and 1974 volumes are inscribed with the circumstances wherein the volumes arose. Inevitably too, we must readily admit that this Handbook is, in many ways, representative of our times. India, the wider South Asia, and the West have all changed greatly. Hinduism is now more visibly a global religion, and we have come to expect of scholars respect and tolerance for even those topics whereby the greatest differences from the West come to the fore. Distanced scholarship and insider perspectives, reasoned examination and faithful attentiveness, begin to cohere nicely in these pages. The best projects of this sort do not arise artificially or merely by commission, but only from longer and richer conversations. This Handbook is the case that proves the point. It is rather a prime fruit of the thirty-​plus years of the Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies (previously the Bulletin), started by Harold Coward in 1988, and the twenty-​five-​plus years of the

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Society for Hindu-​Christian Studies, which he founded in 1994. Nearly all the Handbook’s contributors have presented at the Society’s meetings or written for the Journal. Indeed, the Handbook itself might have benefited, then, from a reflexive gaze turned on the field of Hindu–​ Christian relations, perhaps an essay on a hundred or fifty years of Hindu–​Christian scholarship, for instance. How the field is maturing is shown by the six subdivisions of the volume: “Theoretical and methodological considerations;” “Historical interactions;” “Contemporary exchanges;” “Sites of bodily and material interactions;”  “Significant figures;” and “Comparative theologies.”There is no single event or set of events or shared history or single lineage of great ideas that define the Hindu–​Christian relationship, so the ways of understanding the Hindu–​Christian relation vary widely. Y   et much is accomplished under these headings. Indeed, there is an impressive consensus emerging here, which serves as the basis for further work in the field. Several striking features stand out. First, we are now comfortable with criticizing the simplifications of “Hinduism,” “Hinduisms,” “religion,” “religions,” and even of “Christianity” and “Catholicism” and “Protestantism.” But we are not paralyzed by the presence of such words in the body of our essays (where “Hindu” appears over 1,400 times, and “Hinduism” over 500 times) and even in the title of the volume. Several essays remind us that “Christian” too, is a complicated term that evokes a variety of traditions—​Catholic, Protestant, and Syriac, for instance—​and, within each of those traditions, important differences. Jones’ essay is particularly valuable to me, a Catholic, in this regard, since many if not most of us tend to study India from within our comfortable silos and not with sufficient breadth. Of course, the volume is about Hindu–​Christian relations, and this focus may still communicate an unintentionally narrow focus, a too simple binary of the Hindu and the Christian. An essay on “Hindus, Christians, and Muslims,” for instance, would have been a welcome addition to the volume. Routledge already has a Handbook of Christian–​Muslim Relations, and hopefully it will envision a Muslim–​ Hindu handbook in the near future. Second, popular religion is now a regular part of Hindu–​Christian studies. We are not surprised to find scholars writing about rituals in a more popular context, focused on popular devotions and shared spaces.Yet, as another sign of the maturity of the field, this fresh interest does not preclude attention to liturgy, including even, as Locklin shows us, natural and constructed Christian liturgical analogies with the Vedic and Sanskritic models. The underlying message is that there is no need to choose, since dominant and hierarchically privileged forms of religion do not preclude attention to religions lived and practiced locally, on the ground, inclusively. Conversely, it would only be for ideological reasons that one would entirely rule out interest in classical Sanskrit models, as if the promotion of the popular and subaltern requires reducing canonical Vedic and Catholic ways of worship to matters of hierarchy and clerical power. It is pleasing to see that a deep concern for justice and criticism of caste abuses do not in this volume obliterate interest in Brahminical Hinduism. Third, critical voices, historical and contemporary, from a Dalit or Hindutva perspective, for instance, are given a place, including even those which would dispute the very idea of beneficial Hindu–​Christian relations, or who are indignant at the very idea of Christians making it their business to study Hinduism. Bauman shows us all this in an honest and elegant manner. His is the right move: not to pander to the loudest complaints, but neither to preclude hearing a very wide range of views. On this basis, we might wish for several more conservative voices in the Handbook, both of evangelical missionaries on the one side, and orthodox pandits on the other, if one could persuade such people to write for an edited volume of this sort.

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Fourth, it is now possible to say that Hindu–​Christian relations is a theologically defined field, since the philosophical and theological reflection that has energized Hindu and Christian learning for millennia is not something apart from the South Asia that non-​theological scholars attempt to decipher. These essays remind us, however, that re-​theologizing the study of South Asia requires a properly capacious notion of theology, which allows for different disciplines to flourish in relation to differing forms of theology and, indeed, for authors in the field to refrain from theological (or sociological, or political, or area studies) language altogether. None of these points, of course, is shocking, particularly if recognized as generalizations, subject to exceptions. My guess is that the Jesuits writing for the 1964 volume and Chicago South Asianists of the 1970s would have been able to recognize and agree with them. But my point is that after the intervening seismic shifts in the study of India, the academic critique of “Hinduism,” etc., the field is being woven together again, without a sure confidence that Christ is the answer to Hinduism erasing other views of the matter, and without excluding theological reflection from academic discussions of India. The “Contemporary exchanges” section balances the historical review by putting before the reader a series of challenging issues that matter today. In the contemporary moment there is much to discuss that is, though not entirely new, nevertheless possessed of fresh features. Caste, race, conversions, and the evolving dynamics of the Hindu–​Christian relation now occur across the global diaspora too, as Penumala shows us in great detail. The subsequent “Sites of bodily and material interactions” section draws us even further into the world of practice. We are drawn into the realm of the arts and visual culture, the world of popular festivals on the local level and, as Ponniah shows us, into the charged atmosphere of shared spaces that are the property of neither tradition by itself—​which, I would add, provide a template for the many emerging intellectual, affective, and performative sites that are shared by Christians and Hindus. Bloomer’s extraordinarily vivid first-​person account of the 2004 tsunami manages, too, to shed light on the place of the Virgin Mary and Hindu goddesses in people’s lives, particularly in times of disaster. Kent’s essay, immediately after Bloomer’s, nicely gives a longer view, including insights into the roles race and gender played in British India, as yet more hurdles to be jumped along with other cultural negotiations and accommodations. The emphasis is on the contemporary scene, but as I have already noticed, Locklin shows us how attention is still paid to continuities, de facto and intentionally constructed, between Vedic rites and Hindu pujas and Christian worship. As Miller’s historically rich essay shows us, yoga is unsurprisingly a vital area for Hindu–​Christian exchange in nearly every culture on earth, and has been such for a long time. This fact itself is productive of discussion and debate about yoga’s Hindu roots (such as there be), its popularity in Christian contexts as Christian yoga and even Ignatian yoga, plus new turns in the critique of “white yoga,” a critique that ironically relies on stereotypes hitherto considered objectionable. Key figures are dealt under the title, “Significant figures.” The list is a good one, and the authors expertly take us deep into the figures considered, even if there are no surprising names on the list. Other figures appear in essays elsewhere the Handbook. Robison’s essay gives us good insight, too, into the ministry of the leading Gauḍiya teachers such as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, who founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness which, as she rightly points out, has for various reasons long had an affinity to Christianity. Miller notes the important role that Paramahansa Yogananda played in the early twentieth-​century interplay of Hinduism and Christianity in the United States. Since the featured figures are thus only males, it would have been interesting to have a few more women figures featured, such as Mātā Amritānandamayī Devī, whose worldwide impact is well known, and Mother Teresa, who even

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decades after her death remains of compelling interest to Hindus as well as Christians. With reference to intellectual crossovers, an essay on Sister Vandana Mataji, RSCJ, or Sister Sarah Grant, RSCJ, practitioners of Christian Advaita, might have been in order. In the end, we might wonder whether the twenty-​first century will produce such stellar Hindu and Christian figures. Since Hindu–​Christian learning is everywhere around us, and in no danger of going away, we no longer need visionary pioneers, but rather home-​builders, planners, good citizens of the growing Hindu–​Christian polis. It is due diligence for a respondent to point out what is missing from a volume. But in this instance, it is hard to do this, since so very much is already here, in thematic essays and tucked away within the invariably rich and diverse essays. Still, a few points can be made. It would have been good to include a finely honed essay on translations that looks in both directions: the Bible into Indian languages, Hindu texts into Western languages. Conversion and conversions are talked about in portions of many of the essays. Bauman discusses debates over the matter among Hindu critics of Christianity in the twentieth century, while Richards’s fine essay in part focuses on debates in conversions in post-​Independence India. Jones gives us a good sense of Protestant views of conversion as a prime missionary goal. Still, the Handbook might have benefited from a dedicated essay on the topic, with more concerted focus on traditional Christian understandings of the importance of conversion. Rebirth is dealt with only in passing, although it is one of the issues that has loomed largest in Hindu–​Christian debates from the sixteenth century on. In terms of shared concern, something on Hindu and Christian responses to modern irreligious secularism might well have merited a place, so as to highlight a common ground for religious people in contexts where religion is marginalized altogether. I cannot but notice that a notably high proportion of the volume’s contributors are of a Christian background, and a majority are academics living in Europe or the United States. And I of course am one of these white (Irish-​American) Christian scholars living mostly in the West, even if for most of my life I have found India to be a spiritual home away from home. For many reasons it is not surprising that the list would be a bit uneven, but it is nevertheless an imbalance. Both editors and contributors are aware of this problem, and most have striven to compensate, going to lengths to step outside a merely West-​looks-​to-​India perspective, so as to see things if not from a purely Hindu perspective (were such possible), at least in a way that does not reduce Indian insights and Hindu voices to grist for the mill of Western and Christian scholarship. We can hope that the fact and availability of the Handbook prompts new voices, in India and globally, to join the great conversation, even writing essays suited to a hypothetical supplement to the Handbook. So too, we can hope that reviewers of the current volume include many Hindus, with some at least residing in India. Given my own disciplinary interests and views on the matters at hand, I was particularly glad to see the “Comparative theologies” section that concludes the volume. This is where theology ought ordinarily to stand, not replacing but following up on everything else we know. I  have long thought that Hindu–​Christian Studies must be a theological field if it is to be coherent and focused; despite their clumsiness and excessive generality,“Hindu” and “Christian” are most successful when they are recognized to be marking off the faith positions, practices, and commitments around which communities form. Even the best historical and sociological analyses on their own, keeping their distance from theology, dissolve communal and individual faith positions into a host of other factors.This Handbook both disproves and confirms my proposal. It offers a kind of disproof, since there is much in the Handbook that is not strictly speaking “theological.” Some of the descriptive work included here quite capably surveys how words such as “Hindu” and Christian” have been used, but without a grasp at a theological perspective that would give religions a coherence not gainsaid by other modes of analysis. And yet many of the 480

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volume’s essays confirm my proposal, since they are acutely aware of the theological concerns that aid traditions in maintaining their identity over time, giving them resilience in times of change: there is a “there” there, as “Hindu” and “Christian” define communities that do endure over time and can interact with one another. Deconstruction is a powerful and purifying tool, provided we do not overdose on it. The theological section unsurprisingly offers substantive insights, and here too I can only mention them in passing. Amaladoss reflects on the meaning of “inculturation,” a term often used to describe the work of missionaries seeking to make it possible for the gospel to take root and flourish in a new cultural setting. He shows how both historically and in post-​ Independence India Christians found in this term (as well as “transculturation,” and even “translation”) a way to move beyond the unhappy history of combative evangelization to better encounters that do justice to both the Hindu and Christian religious traditions (and, on that basis, also to the wider community of those who do not fit neatly into one tradition or the other). Voss Roberts sets out rules for making the interreligious learning work well and, importantly too, for knowing how to discern whether it is working well. As she points out, reliance on mystical meeting points can be deceptive, since this too is a Christian starting point, while an appeal to an intuitive and experiential rapprochement may deflect and weaken more solid engagements among traditions. Sydnor reflects first on the many facets of embodiment, with particular reference to the gendering of the divine body and the meanings of embodiment in the world (incarnation, avatar). At the essay’s end, he intriguingly contrasts Jürgen Moltmann and Vedānta Deśika (Veṅkaṭanātha) on images of the glorious or suffering deity. Barua firmly but gently reminds readers that there are still substantive differences between the traditions regarding the nature of the human and the nature of the spiritual path of sanctification (to use an old Christian word). The door then is open to thinking anew about such differences—​and beyond them, too, though Barua does not hint at what might come next. Rajkumar similarly highlights differences regarding the human person and the meaning and the possibility of salvation, refined by a sense of the history of the ways differences have been dealt with. He urges us to keep our theologies relevant by paying more attention to economics and politics, demographics and globalization, and many other factors that are inescapable contextual elements for what we do. If some of us (such as myself) burrow down and engage in what we hope is deep study, on our own, we have to be careful to pay attention to the world in which such texts were composed, and to the worlds in which the texts were passed down and interpreted; similarly, I cannot but add, historians need to remember to look inside texts—​actually read them—​as well as at their contexts. Scheid gets practical in a most compelling way, drawing our attention back to the ecological crisis that overshadows all others. He sketches a common ethical/​theological grounding, regarding ecology and nature, that would suit well a shared agenda of practice. If Hindus and Christians are intentional about our relations, and notice what we have in common, we can work better together to preserve mother earth and all that lives on Earth. Ulrich is similarly practical, facing up to the problem of violence that cannot convincingly be detached from the traditions wherein violence has been perpetuated and intensified, and interreligious violence as a very urgent issue in the twenty-​first century. Rambachan’s essay, though focused almost entirely on the Advaita side of things, helps us to re-​envision Advaita in a way accessible to a Christian reader with different presuppositions about God and the world. That he writes in a way that brings Advaita to life for Christian readers is not surprising, given his career-​long teaching at St. Olaf College, a Lutheran Christian college. It is intriguing to consider how this essay might aid us in rethinking the many ways that Advaita has appeared so prominently over the history of Hindu–​Christian encounters, and indeed in this volume. 481

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In addition to having essays on theological themes, the Handbook as such has a certain theological significance. First, it widens and deepens the context in which any theological reflection related to Hinduism and Christianity occurs. It hedges the work that any of us do, reminding us of the place of our work on a wider map, of the limits of any particular project, and of our necessary and good reliance on the work of others in the field of Hindu–​Christian relations broadly conceived. The boom years of the “wild West” (so to speak) of entrepreneurial, I-​do-​ it-​my-​way engagement in Hindu–​Christian relations should now be over. The frontier (so to speak) has long been occupied, and we might as well recognize that just as important as doing something truly new is connecting our research to what others have done before us.We need to read more of each other’s work, for example by making use of the considerable bibliographies accompanying the essays. If only each of us could keep a copy of this Handbook on her desk! For example:  I am a Catholic theologian who learns theology in large part by learning interreligiously from premodern Hindu traditions of text and commentary. I study the Vedānta of Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja and their heirs, the (moderately understudied) Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, and the Mīmāṃsā tradition that rarely makes its way into Hindu–​Christian studies. Nothing in the volume indicates that I should stop reading classical texts (although the essays of Ganeri and Nicholson remind me of the history and politics operative in choosing Vedānta as an area of study), or focus instead on contemporary issues, or on lived religion (which in any case is in part generated by the presence and influence of great texts) or say more about the meta-​ debates about “religion” and “Hinduism,” or become a historian or social theorist. But on every page the Handbook does remind me to notice the choices I make and the implications of what I do in a larger context, alert to the political implications of working with classic texts and to what is missing from my work because I do not do ethnographic work, or read in accord with Protestant sensibilities, or think from the perspective of the subaltern. It is not that I have been entirely unaware, but the Handbook makes possible and thus expects that I do better from now on. My guess is that most readers of this volume will find their work similarly margined and stretched. Second, and in the same vein, the complexity and sophistication of the volume helps those of us who are theologically inclined to bring Hindu–​Christian theological reflection to greater maturity as a theological discipline. Theology is today a far more complex field than even fifty years ago. It is as a matter of course subdivided into many sub-​disciplinary areas, as individual theologians are expected to master exegesis, historical matters, the dynamics of power in ecclesial circles, the implications of old doctrines in today’s world, and the relation of all of this to pressing issues of poverty, human rights, and the environment. Hindu theological traditions too, from the darśanas to Kashmir Śaivism and Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇavism to tāntrika traditions, are exceedingly complex, and these are also of necessity changing in contemporary India and throughout the diaspora. It follows then that Hindu–​Christian theology, within the wider space of Hindu–​Christian relations, must as a matter of course be diverse, worked out in accord with the questions and methods identified in the major sections of this volume:  theoretical foundations; historical perspectives; contemporary developments; ritual and material embodiments; key thinkers; and theological and ethical reappropriations of the sources. Another way of thinking about this is to say that the more Hindu–​Christian theological reflection is up to date with how theological reflection more generally proceeds in the two traditions, the less likely it is to be marginalized. There is no use in debating the role of theology in the study of Hinduism, if one’s understanding of theology is rudimentary or very much out of date. Constructive steps can be taken. Ranstrom, for instance, makes the point that we should seriously assess Raimon Panikkar as a Catholic thinker, in light of the developments in Catholic theology during his long life. 482

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Third, it follows that we can think differently and more maturely about the great questions that have arisen for centuries in Hindu–​Christian encounters:  monotheism or polytheism, pantheism or panentheism; whether God has one true name or many names; the work of images, idols, and the apophatic; birth and rebirth; caste as a valid ordering of society or innately oppressive; conversion as a religious or political matter, or both; India as a secular society or in essence a Hindusthan; and so on. We cannot and need not imagine that these topics are amenable to one adequate presentation or liable to be clarified by a fully satisfactory set of simple, univocal insights. This is not relativism or abandonment of the very idea of truth, but rather an admission that none of the issues that concern us are liable to solutions that make further thinking superfluous. Once we factor in Hindu–​Muslim relations and Christian–​Muslim relations, every issue becomes still more complex, and there is no indication that things will simplify any time soon. Given this complexity even regarding doctrinal issues and differences, the future may require of us more collaborative work among Hindus and among Christians, and among Hindus and Christians collaborating in their theological inquiries. It is fitting that Robinson’s essay comes last, the contribution of a most respected expert on the history and dynamics of Hindu–​Christian dialogue. His essay is rich in historical details, clear in its categorization of features of dialogue, and also solidly theological, alert to the presuppositions and implications of dialogue as significant interreligious exchange between Hindus and Christians. The Handbook shows us that “Hindu–​Christian relations” can mean many things; but “Hindu–​Christian dialogue” pertains to more precisely and intentionally focused conversations that require good will and openness on both sides. Robinson valuably sorts out different kinds of dialogue, emphasizing the importance of being clear on the nature and purpose of any given dialogue before it begins. He also emphasizes the importance of facing up to the harder topics, lest dialogue doom itself to predictability and irrelevance. Much dialogue prepared the way for this Handbook, and moving forward, it should be a resource for the vital conversations and collaborations that should follow. In closing, I return to the two volumes with which I began this essay, Religious Hinduism and The Literatures of India, quoting from them in order: The herald of Christ must first learn much, before he can be fit to teach. He must learn, not only from books, but through a daily and intimate contact with Indian life. He is not a tourist coming to a new country to take some photographs and pass hasty judgments on customs he has only observed in passing; rather he has to learn from within and abstain from judging things and people on the ground of his alien or preconceived ideas. He is not a sociologist or anthropologist dispassionately compiling statistics and looking at the people as mere objects of research. On the contrary, his concern, inspired by divine charity, must be to understand and love the people of this country and make himself one of them. He is not to live in their midst as a kind of paternal benefactor or glorified schoolmaster, dispensing gifts or learning from some superior position. He is the living prolongation of the Word Incarnate Who came to share with us everything except sin. (Ten Jesuit Scholars 1964, p. 313) To understand Indian literature, then, one must understand its context; and one must define Indian literature not only in terms of its quality, but also in terms of its sometimes unique aims. If one is to speak of Kālidāsa’s dramas, Shakespeare’s aims are irrelevant. If one is to judge the Rāmāyaṇa, the Odyssey should be far from one’s mind. Western approaches to literature may not only be passively irrelevant to one’s 483

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appreciation of the Indian tradition, but may actually foster and encourage principles of criticism that make unintelligible the literature one wishes to study. (Dimock et al. 1974, p. 42) The contributors to those two volumes, nearly all now deceased, tried in two noble ways to free up the space that has for centuries been the Western encounter with India, the Christian encounter with Hinduism: the Jesuits, by still greater intimacy with the people of India and their religious and cultures, in a deeply personal way; the Chicago scholars, by the discipline of scholarly distancing, a kind of erudite abnegation that makes it possible to read Indian literature “on its own terms,” and not through the thick lens of religious expectations or one or another literary theory trending in the West. All of us who have contributed to this Handbook may find ourselves sharing both sentiments—​learning the other as deeply, intimately as possible, while yet freeing that other from the heavy embrace of all we have known before. We are long past the missionary era (evangelists who come and go notwithstanding), and the golden era of South Asian studies too has come to an end. But the field of Hindu–​Christian relations, in a far more complex situation than either of the volumes could have anticipated, summons us to a mix of deep learning and abnegation such as the best of our scholarly predecessors would expect of us, that the field may continue to reinvent itself and flourish in new ways. It allows India and the West, the Hindu and the Christian, to learn intimately from one another without imposing, even for the best of intentions, one’s expectations on our religious and scholarly neighbors. In sum: the Handbook is now a reference work of great value, that will be of use for several generations to come, because it enables and challenges all scholars to put their work in the wider context, and putting back into closer conversation many of the crucial disciplines that have over the centuries helped us to understand Hindu and Christian realities in relation to one another. But the field is a quickly changing one, and in just a decade or two surely a revised edition will be much in need.

Bibliography Dimock, E.C., Gerow, E., Naim, C.M., Ramanujan, A.K., Roadarmel, G. and van Buitenen, J.A.B. 1974. The Literatures of India: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ten Jesuit Scholars. 1964. Religious Hinduism. Allahabad: St. Paul Publications.

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INDEX

Abhinavabhāratī 271 Abhinavagupta 389 Abhishiktananda, Swami 12, 63, 334, 388, 425, 439; importance 340–​1; life 334–​6; thought 336–​40 abhyudaya 376 Abrahamic faiths 473 Abrams, Minnie 254 Abridgement of the Vedant 302 absolute 29, 35, 37–​8, 281; self-​expression 47; World Spirit 48 adaptation 81–​2 Ādiśaiva ritual specialists 128 Adivasi Christians 69 Adivasis 69, 73–​4, 426 Advaita 386, 409, 412; doxographies 39; and idealism 45; non-​dualism 329; school 37 Advaita Vedānta 3, 12, 30, 35–​7, 42–​3, 62, 282, 338, 341, 355–​6; Advaita relationship 360–​2; in Chicago 181; concept of Brahman 52; cosmology 46; dual mode of seeing 364–​6; idealism 37; many as illusion 358–​9; māyāvāda of 35; nirguṇa bhakti yogi 281; one and the many 359–​60; ontological singularity and uniqueness 363–​4; self-​multiplication  362–​3 Advani, L. K. 439 aesthetics, art, and visual culture 268; emerging trends 275–​7; global contexts 268–​73; scholarship 273–​5 Africa, Hindu–​Christian relations 206–​7; colonial Indian diaspora 209–​12; pluralism and internal diversity 207–​9; South Africa 210–​11 Afro-​Trinidadians  5 ahimsa 377; see also non-​violence Ajmer, Rajputana 122 Akkiyāṉikaḷ 129 Albigensianism 433

Althaus-​Reid, Marcella  63 Amaladass, Anand 85, 269 Amaladoss, Michael 13, 85 Ambedkar, B. R. 58, 91, 158, 426 American Academy of Religion (AAR) 187 American countercultural movements 196 Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) 116 Anglican Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 115, 118 Anglicists 24 Anglocentric Indian intelligentsia 139 Anglophone scholarship 200 antagonism 124 antaryamin 411 anthropocentrism 369 anthropomorphism, accusations of 394 anti-​black racism  5, 185 anti-​caste movement  190 anti-​Christian violence 7, 139, 164, 440 Anti-​conversion Act in 1968 161 anti-​conversion laws, post-​independence India 155–​6, 440; Arunachal Pradesh 161, 164–​6; Chhattisgarh 166; constituent assembly debates 158–​9; conversion 156–​7; first wave of 161–​4; foreignness of religious conversion 157–​8; Gujarat 165; Himachal Pradesh 166; Madhya Pradesh 161–​4; Odisha 155, 161–​4; second wave 164–​6; state missionary enquiry reports 159–​61; Tamil Nadu 165 anti-​Hindu organizations  186 anti-​Hindu polemics  130 anti-​minority and anti-​Christian projects 95–​6 anti-​Muslim discrimination and violence 190 anti-​national propaganda  160 Antoine, Robert 85 Apostolic Faith 255

485

486

Index Appasamy, Aiyadurai Jesudasen 64, 111, 410–​11, 462 Aquinas, Thomas 46–​7, 50, 52, 62, 85, 373, 394, 419, 441 arangetram 459 Archbishop of Canterbury 115 Ariarajah, Wesley  451 Arjuna 431 ārōkkiya aṉṉai 239 Arokkiyasamy 239 Arun, O. S. 468 Arunachal Pradesh’s Freedom of Religion Act 161, 164–​6 Aryan hypothesis 34 Ārya Samāj 91, 289, 307–​8 Asad, Talal  2 Ashoka 431 Ashtanga Yoga  285–​6 Asiatic Society of Bengal 34 Assī Ghāṭ on the Ganges 134 āstikas 32 ātman 29, 35, 133 Ātmīya Sabhā 299, 302; attributes [saguṇa] 281 Augustine 46, 432–​433, 441 Augustinian–​Calvinist–​Barthian notion 384 Augustinians 382 Aurobindo 30, 60–​1, 270 Avalon, Arthur 282 avarṇa 130 avatara 374–​5 Avatar and Incarnation: A Comparison of Indian and Christian Beliefs (Parrinder) 393 Axiom of Dependence (AOD) 386 Axiom of Impermanence (AOI) 386 “Ayodhya” decision 231, 439 Azariah,V.  S.  111 Baba, Meher 277 Babri Masjid 439 Baby Krishna, Infant Christ: A Comparative Theology of Salvation (Largen) 393 Bādarāyaṇa 34, 351, 355 bahu syām 362 Baker, A. W.  210 Baldaeus, Philip 102 bal vihar programs 182 Banaras 25 Banerjea, Krishna Mohana 302, 406–​7 Banerjee, K. C. 318 Baniya 91 Baptist baptism 118 Baptist missionary movement 105 Bar Kokhba Revolt 19 Barlow, George 118 Barth–​Brunner debate  383 Barua, Ankur 12, 265

Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health, Velankanni 225 Bauman, Chad 8, 156–​7, 160, 464 Bäumer, Bettina 334 Bayle, Pierre 35 Bayly, Susan 263 Beaman, Lori 183 Bearce, George 435 Begum of Samru 103 Bell, Catherine 264 Bell’s ritual theory 265 Benares Sanskrit College 132 Bengali Renaissance 274 Bengali Vaiṣṇavism see Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Bengal Regulation III of 1793 116 Bengal Regulation III of 1832 123 Bengal Renaissance 269 Bentham, Jeremy 299–​300 Bentinck, William 118, 121 Bergunder, M. 255 Bernard, Pierre 46 Bertrand, Joseph 84 Besant, Annie 316 Beschi, Constantine 81 Bethlehem Kuruvanchi 104 bhadralok 299–​300 Bhagat Singh Thind’s Supreme Court case 181 Bhagavad Gītā 24, 38, 258, 281, 284, 287, 311, 316, 370–​1 Bhāgavata Purāṇa 370, 385 Bhagwat, Mohan 150 Bhajan,Yogi  197 bhajans 426 bhajan singing 182 Bhakta, Chiraag 290 bhakti 26, 106, 410–​14 bhakti marga 405, 409–​10, 412 Bhaktivedanta, A. C. 9, 193, 195–​6, 198, 201, 479 Bharata Natyam 276, 469, 460; Christian 470 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 74, 111, 140, 185, 204, 238, 439 Bhaskara 36 Bhishma 431 Bible, King James 300, 306 Bible and the Third World,The (Sugirtharajah) 63 Bījak of Kabir, śabd 30, 23 Bishop of London 115 Black Skin,White Masks (Fanon) 57 Blavatsky, Madame 316 Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja,The (Overzee) 393 Boopalan, Sunder John 4–​5, 79 Booth, Parker 210 Bopp, Franz 34 Bouchet, Jean Venance  83 Boyarin, Daniel 18–​19

486

487

Index Brachmans 35 Bradley, Francis Herbert 44 brāhamana texts 34 Brahman 29, 33, 35, 44, 281; advaitic concept of 52; doctrine of 37; identity 35; spirit 37 brahmanical patriarchy 72 brahmaniṣṭha gṛhastha 303 Brahma-​Sutra 36 Brahmins 17, 63, 71; ancient writings of 32 Brahminical elites 22 Brahminical Hinduism 25, 106, 415, 478 Brahminical learning 34–​6 Brahmo Mandir 137 Brāhmo Samāj 8, 30, 107, 287, 289, 299 “breast-​cloth” controversy  122 bribery (dhanadāna) 133 British colonialism 243 British Columbia 180 British-​controlled territories  248 British East India Company (BEIC) 93, 102, 105, 281 British India 24–​5, 41 British inheritance law 6 British orientalists 32 British Raj 92 Brown, Wendy  183 Brunette-​Debassige, Candace  190 Buddha 35, 37, 311 Buddhism 32, 219, 430–​1 Buddhists 269, 439 Bunch of Thoughts 140 bureaucratization of conversion 166 Butler, William  250 California 180 Campbell, George 34 Canada’s Continuous Journey policy of 1908 181 Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988 183 Carey, William 105, 117 Carman, John B. 461 Carson, Penelope 7 Casanova, José 26 caste (varna-​jati) 3–​5, 24, 26, 169; caste-​based discrimination and violence 190; caste-​based taboos 246; colonial Christian self-​and other-​ understandings 171–​3; colonial Hindu self-​and other-​understandings 174–​5; Dalit agency and anti-​conversion laws 175–​6; epistemological and tactile collusions 170–​1; Hindus 173–​4; precolonial caste-​based antagonisms 170 Catholic Ashrams: Sannyasins or Swindlers? (Goel) 144 Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) 144 Catholicism 29, 79, 90; divinity 224; formation of Hinduism 93–​5; in Goa 86; pilgrims 224; sacraments 220 Catholic Matridham Ashram 222

Catholic Orientalism (Xavier and Županov) 93 Catholics (kethālika) 21, 133 Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi 55 Centering Prayer 288 Chacko, Neenu 74 Chakkarai,Vengal  111 Chakravarti, Ananya 87 Chāndogya Upaniṣad 361, 384 Charitable Endowments Act (1925) 465 Charnock, Job 114 Chenchiah, Pandipeddi 111 cheri 170 Chhattisgarh’s Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act 166 Chidananda, Swami 335 Chidester, David 18, 200 child marriage 6, 109 Chitpavan Brahmin family 248–​9 Choenni, C. E. S. 207 Choudhury, Soumyabrata 91 Chowgule, Ashok 146–​7 Christ, the Messenger 311 Christendom 21 Christian(s) 2–​3; Dalits 426; dogmatics 18; God 394–​5; hermeneutics 8; Hindu puja 228; ideas of salvation 410; immigration from Asia 6; in India 2; Islamophobia 98; meditation 288; missionaries 3, 33–​4; proselytization 4, 9–​10; religious experience 289; theology 11, 41, 46; theology and spirituality 41; see also Christianity Christian ashrams 63; institutional indigenization 262; movement 54 Christian-​based National Center for Law and Policy 285 Christianismos 19–​20 Christianity 20; as bhakti religion with mystical elements 410; early formations in relation to another 18–​21; global imbrication of 8; Indian religious and secular philosophy 413; religious fluidity 414 Christianity in India: The Hindutva Perspective (Chowgule) 146 Christianization 94 Christians, Thomas 268, 435 Christian Yoga (Dechanet) 288, 290 Christian yoga critique 189 Christian yogaphobia 283 Christian yoga practice in North America 280; acceptance 287–​9; ambivalence 285–​7; anxiety 282–​5; Hindu perspectives on 289–​91; roots of 280–​2 Christ in Hindu terms 8 Christ the avatar (avatāra) of God 134 Chrysostom, John 20 Churchill, Winston  438 Church in modern world 421

487

488

Index Church Missionary Society (CMS) College 73 Church of South India (CSI) 239 Church of Yoga  283 Cīkaṉpālku 128 Citizenship Amendment Act 231 Citpāvan Brahmins 134 Civil War  115 Clarinda, Raja 6, 247, 249 class 5–​6 Clooney, Francis X. 5, 14, 11, 79, 259, 264, 275, 351, 356, 393, 448 Clough, Bradley 8, 14 coastal regulation zones (CRZs) 237–​8 Coeurdoux, Gaston-​Laurent  83 Cold War  277 Colebrooke, H. T.  36–​7 Collins, Paul 257 colonial Christianity 99, 405 colonial Christian self-​and other-​understandings  171–​3 colonial civilizational project 250 colonial construction of history 56 colonial era 434–​6 colonial Hindu self-​and other-​understandings  174–​5 colonial imagination 3 colonial imbalances of power 8 colonial Indian diaspora 209–​12 colonialism 55, 61, 270; conversion 9–​10; hegemony 7–​8; hegemony and scholarship 10–​11; psychological power of 60; psycho-​ spiritual aspects of 59; resistance 7–​8 colonization 6, 9 colonizer and colonized 57 Common Era 18 Communal Award 174 communal decisions 110 communitas 226 Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV) 249–​50 Comparative Theology (Ram-​Prasad)  87 Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (CWSV) 310–​12 Comstock, Anthony 287 concremation 303 Confucian Chinese Empire 94 Congress Party 95 Constantine (kānaṣṭān) 133 constructivist 23–​4 contextualization 422 contiguous communion 463 conversion, religious 9, 464; Christians 10; Hindus 10 conversion to Christianity 33; barriers of language 80; of Brahmins 80–​1; “foreignness” 157–​8; multi-​tiered model for 156; see also anti-​conversion laws, post-​independence India

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 272 coonan kurisha 72 Corigliano, Stephanie 3, 8 Cornille, Catherine 12, 265 Correia-​Afonso,  J.  80 Courtright, Paul 187, 260 COVID-​19  459 craftiness (kauśalya) 133 creatio continua 327 creation, theologies of 369–​70; cosmic and planetary order 379–​80; divine, immanent presence of 370–​4; inherent goodness of nature and of nonhumans 374–​5 creative autonomy 58 critiques of Christianity 139–​40; Chowgule, Ashok 146–​7; Gandhi, Mahatma 140–​2; Goel, Sita Ram 143–​4; Golwalkar, M. S. 140; Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram 140; Hindu American Foundation (HAF) 149; Malhotra, Rajiv 149–​50; Rajan, Radha 147–​9; Saraswati, Swami Dayananda 147; Savarkar,V. D. 140; Shourie, Arun 144–​6; Swarup, Ram 142–​3 crucifixion 258, 399 Cudworth, Ralph 50 cultural appropriation 64–​5, 471–​3 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 56 Curzon-​Wyllie, William  437 Da Gama,Vasco  257 Dalhousie’s Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850 125 Dalit(s) 169, 176, 190, 276, 426, 451; Bahujan 69, 73–​4; Christians 73, 426; in colonial period 173; communities 73; coreligionists 4 Dalit agency and anti-​conversion laws 175–​6 Dalit castes see lower-​caste communities Dancing Bodies of Devotion (Zubko) 276 Dandapani, Kamini 471 Dandekar, D. 472 Dandoy, Georges 85 Dasgupta, Surendranath 358 Datta, Narendranath see Vivekananda, Swami Dawn of the Abyss: The Spiritual Birth of Swamiji (Le Saux) 334 De, Abhay Charan see Bhaktivedanta, A. C. Dechanet, Benedictine Jean Marie 288 decolonization 57 defamiliarization 444 deification 384 deities 22 demeritorious (adharma) 385 Dempsey, Corinne 220 demythologization 132 denationalization 157, 161 de Nobili, Roberto 33, 62, 82–​3, 86, 94, 144, 171, 418 deśakālabheda 133

488

489

Index Descartes 41 descent: as incarnation 399–​400; without modification 398–​9 De Smet, Richard 85, 87 Deussen, Paul 37, 39 Devanandan, Paul David 111 Devassia, P. C. 137 developmental activist in Gujarat 98 Devi, Mahasweta 56–​7 Devī Bhāgavatapurāṇa 396 Devī Gītā 396 devotion 26, 202–​4; see also bhakti dharma 26, 127, 170, 376 Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM) 187 Dharma Civilization Foundation 188 dharmasabhā 123, 130 dharmayuddha (holy war) 56 dharmic ecology 370 Dhavamony, M. 389 dialogue of spirituality 445 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume) 301 Digby, John 298 Dikshitar, Baluswami 467 Directive Principles of State Policy 466 Dirks, Nicholas 24 Dispelling of Ignorance (de Nobili) 83 Dissenters (ḍiseṣṭara) 133 distinction-​in-​non-​distinction (acintyabhedabheda) 347 diversity and plurality 219 “divide and rule” 170 divine embodiment: Christian God 394–​5; descent as incarnation 399–​400; descent without modification 398–​9; female body 395–​6; Goddess a feminist 397; God-​forsaken God 400; as incarnation 398–​402; infinite absolute, finite particular 392–​3; infinitely compassionate God 401–​2; menstruating Goddess 396–​7; personal embodiment as divine 393–​4; resurrection 401; seeming to descend 399 Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Clooney) 393 divine power 221 divinization of humans 330, 384, 417 Dnyanodaya (Jñānodaya) 131 doctrine of Man-​God 305 Doke, J. J. 317, 322 dominant caste 69; Catholic 4; centered model 172; Christians 4–​5; communities in India 4; Hindus 4, 69, 72; imagination 178; Nair Service Society 75; narratives 91; non-​Christian communities 5 Donaldson, Laura 64 Dotbusters 184 doxography 22 D’Sa, Francis 85

dualisms 3 Duff, Alexander 105, 130 Dundas, Robert 119 Dutch colony of Chinsurah 117 Dvaita 49 Dwivedi, O. P. 370 Dwyer, Rachel 273 East India Company 114–​15, 243, 245; center versus periphery 120–​1; Christian raj 125–​6; company and Christian education 122–​3; company’s charter renewal, 1813 119–​20; ecclesiastical establishment 121–​2; Hindu 125–​6; Hinduism under siege 124–​5; Indian hostility 118–​19; Lord Bentinck and Hinduism, 1828–​1835 123–​4; presidencies 114; pressure intensifies 115–​16; soldiers of Christ 116–​18 East India Vade-​Mecum (Williamson) 246 ecclesiastical establishment 121–​2 economic mobility 55 Edelmann, Jonathan 265 Ek Dharti Parivar ki ore 448 Elliot, Hugh 120 Elphinstone, Mountstuart 120 empathy 444–​5 Empire of Apostles,The (Chakravarti) 87 Encinitas Unified School District (EUSD) 285 English Education Act of 1835 125 epics 22; see also Mahabharata epistemic humility 265 Equality Labs 190 eternal dharma 17 ethnicity 5–​6 Eucharistic theology 258 European Catholics 5 European Christian missionaries 5 European/​Christian superiority  56 Europeanization of Indian converts to Christianity 110 European Jesuits 85 European Protestants 5 Evangelical Revival 115 Evangelicals 24 evangelization 62; see also proselytization exclusivism-​inclusivism-​pluralism 13, 405 existential dialogue 445 extremists 436–​7 Fallon, Pierre 85 Fanon, Frantz 57–​8; anti-​colonial strategies 58; violence, analysis of 58 Farquhar, John Nichol 407–​8 father of modern India see Roy, Rammohun Federation of the Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) 423 female body 395–​6 female divinity 397

489

490

Index female sexuality 72 Fernandes, Gonçalo 94, 171 Fernandes, Jason 3–​4, 79 Ferrao,Victor  96 Ferro-​Luzzi, Eichinger  26 Fiji 211–​12 Fijian Christians 212 Fijians 5 flying machines (ākāśayāṇayantra) 133 Forum for Break-​up of Caste 58 four-​caste system  71 Four Vedas Society  124 Francis, Pope 373, 375 Francke, August Herman 128 Fraser, Alexander Campbell 50 fraudulent conversion 161 Frykenberg, Robert Erik 21 fulfillment and bhakti approaches, confluence of 406 Fundamental Right in Article 25(1) 158

God-​forsaken God  400 God-​forsakenness  400 Goel, Sita Ram 142–​4 Golwalkar, M. S. 8, 140 Goreh, Nilakantha 8, 134–​5 Gospel According to Luke, The 19 gospel–​culture encounter  421 Gospel of John 13, 258 Govindacharya, Alkondaville 462 Gracias, Oswald 97, 99 Gracias,Valerian  97 Gramsci, Antonio 55 Grant, Charles 116 Grant, Sara 63, 480 Greek Platonism with Hindu elements 46 Griffiths, Bede 63, 388, 439 Guha, Ranajit 55 gurus 27 Guyana 207

Gadamer, Hans Georg 30 Gandhi, Leela 58 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 4, 8, 30, 60, 110, 140–​2, 174, 316, 438, 453; anti-​colonial strategies 58; assimilations of Christianity 58, 316–​20; Christian responses 322–​4; Hind Swaraj 58; objections to Christianity 110; pragmatist approach to truth of other 411–​12; prospects of Hindu–​Christian relations  320–​2 Gandhi, Shreena 189–​90 Gandhi’s nationalism 95 Ganeri, Martin 11, 265 Ganesh Temple in Queens 182 Ganga and Galilee 404, 415 garba dance 461 Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism 194, 198, 482 gender 6–​7 gender and social boundaries 243–​5; Colonial era 248–​55; Company Raj 245–​7 Genealogy of Religion 2 Genealogy of the Malabarian Gods (Ziegenbalg) 102 General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI) 123 General Service Enlistment Act 125 Geneviève, Sister 275 Gentili (Gentiles) 22 ghar wapasi 166 Ghose, Aurobindo 437 girmit (indenture) 206 Gita Govinda (Javadeya) 374 global spiritualities 64–​5 Glorious Revolution of 1688 115 Gnanananda, Swami 335 Goan Christians 221 goblins (īrātcatar) 129 Goddess a feminist 397

Hacker, Paul 30, 38 Haji Ali dargah 461 Hall, Stuart 57–​8 Handbook of Christian–​Muslim Relations 478 Hansen, Thomas Blom  440 Haqq, Susannah 108 Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement 183, 193 harijans 58; see also Dalit(s), lower-​caste communities Harris, Reggie 287 Hart, David Bentley 449 Hastings, Warren 123, 281 Haṭhapradīpikā 284 haṭha yoga 281–​2, 284 Havell, E. B. 272 Hazare, Anna 309 Heathenism 17, 120 Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram 140, 289 Hegel, G. W. F. 37, 48, 282 Hellenismos 18, 20, 27 Henriques, Henrique 81 Herder, J. G. 37, 282 heresies 72 heretic/​schismatic  21 Hick, John 61–​2 Hicks, Dawes 50 high-​caste converts  244 High-​Caste Hindu Woman,The (Ramabai) 107, 252–​3 Hillgardner, Holly 462 Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006 166 Hindi 127 Hind Swaraj 58, 197, 437 Hindu 2–​3, 7, 79, 180; caste 173–​4; diaspora 13; nationalism 3; philosophy 22; polytheism 302; rashtra 157; reformers 8; and religious

490

491

Index distinctions 3; religious identity 31; renaissance 287; superiority 38; universalism 3 Hindu American Foundation (HAF) 64, 149, 188, 191, 290 Hindu analysis of the self–​world relationship 59 Hindu–​Christian apologetics  8 Hindu–​Christian debates  127–​37 Hindu–​Christian dialogue 443; asymmetries and impediments 449–​52; common humanity and shared ideal of community 447–​8; common social concern 447; diverse understandings 446–​7; formal and informal 443–​5; future 452–​3; Hindutva, missions and conversion, violence and 450–​2; justification of dialogue 447–​9; loyalty and openness 445–​6; quest for truth 448; religious experience, common or complementary 449; religious growth, promotion 448; tension, understanding and reduction 447 Hindu–​Christian Epistolary Self-​Disclosures (Jeyaraj and Young)  86 Hindu–​Christian relations 2–​3, 96, 180, 190; Advaita Vedanta 12; Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific 5; castes in 4–​5; Christian ways of relating to Hindu traditions 79; genealogy 5; neo-​Vedanta in 12; postcolonial theology 54; social boundaries 243–​52; state power 90–​9; theological exchange 11–​13; theology 345–​3; women in 6–​7; see also North America, Hindus and Christians in Hindu–​Christian violence 7; see also anti-​Christian violence Hindu communities in Africa 5 Hindu contemplative practices 54 hindudharma 130 Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha (HDAS) 147 Hindu dharmic subjectivity 286 Hindu divinity 224 Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) 188 Hindu goddesses 479 Hindu-​inspired meditation movements 183 Hinduism 3, 29, 41, 79, 280; in academia 186; appreciative evaluation of 443; British and 31–​2; credits High Orientalism 93; early formations in relation to another 18–​21; etic construct 22; hypothesis 31; in the West 61; orientalized conception of 3; paths (margas) to liberation/​ salvation (moksha) 405; preparatory value of 406–​7; under siege 124–​5; spread around the world 9; yoga 8, 289 Hinduism vis-​à-​vis Christianity and Islam (Swarup) 142 Hindu–​Jesuit encounters 79–​80; adaptation 81–​2; cautious new beginnings 84–​5; Francis Xavier and beginnings 80–​1; global scene 87–​8; Hindu views of Jesuits 86–​7; seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 81–​4; Society of Jesus

as Indian society 85–​6; Suppression era 84; venues for 86 Hindu Mahasabha 140 Hindu Marriage Act (1952) 92 Hindu nationalism 91, 112, 185; see also Hindutva Hindu–​Protestant encounters  102–​12 Hindu Raj 117 Hindu Saccidananda 449 Hindu Samaj temple in Hamilton, Ontario 184 Hindu spirituality 183 Hindu temples management of 463–​6 Hindu Trinidad (Vertovec) 209 Hindutva 25, 140, 146, 165, 187 Hindu universalism 60 Hindu universalism and theology of difference 59–​64 Hindu varna (caste) system 58 Hindu Vidyala  123 Hindu widow 55 Hindu Widow Remarriage Act  125 Hindu yogis 282 Hirudayam, Ignatius 82, 85 History of Hindu-​Christian Encounters (Goel) 143 Hogg, Alfred George 110 Holy Yoga Global LLC 290–​1 honor killing 75 human depravity 129 human dignity 90 human embodiment 393 human identity 369 human person, philosophies and theologies of 381; dependence of 381–​4; dependent reality 387–​8; Hindu–​Christian engagements 388–​9; ontological divinity 384–​7 human subjectivity 44 Hume, David 301 Iberian Christianity 26 Iberians 21 identity-​blurring and ritual interactions 227 idolatry 34 Ignatian Spiritual Exercises 288 Ignatian Yoga  87 Ignatius of Antioch 19 Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 197 immoral (adharmika) behavior 430 incarnations 417; avataras of Visnu 374–​5; descent as 399–​400; divine embodiment as 398–​402 inclusive Christ 407–​8 inclusivism (Inklusivismus) 38, 405 inclusivist–​fulfillment approaches  405–​8 inculturation 63, 417–​18, 421–​2; Church in modern world 421; defined 421; Indian Christian art 426; Indian Christian spirituality 425; Indian Christian theologies 427; Indian praxis and theology of liberation 426; Indian

491

492

Index sites for 424–​7; Indian story 419; Mateo Ricci 418; popular religiosity 424–​5; Roberto de Nobili 418; Second Vatican Council 419–​21 Inden, Ronald 36 Independent India 438–​41 Indian anti-​conversion laws 175–​6 Indian Benedictine ashram 419 Indian Christians 64; art 426; ashrams 219; seminaries 63; spirituality 425; theologies 427 Indian Constitution, Article 25 25 Indian Councils Act of 1909 174 Indian Independence Movement 91 Indian Jesuits 85 Indian Mutiny see Sepoy Rebellion Indian National Congress 140 Indian national movement and Catholicism 95–​6 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004 230–​41; competitive compassion 230; Marian possession 230; Nagapattinam deaths 231; neo-​capitalism 230; political vote-​mongering  230 Indian philosophy 32–​3, 41 Indian praxis and theology of liberation 426 Indian prostitutes 6 Indian Rebellion of 1857–​1858 see Sepoy Rebellion Indian religion 32–​3 Indians in South Africa (Arooran) 209 Indian xenology 22 Indian yogis 8 India’s Cries to British Humanity (Peggs) 123 India’s independence 25 India’s indigenous Christians 433–​4 indigenist 23–​4 indigenous Christians 69 Indo-​European hypothesis  34 infanticide 119 Infant Jesus Shrine in Bangalore 225 Infinite Absolute 392–​3 infinitely compassionate God 401–​2 ingenuity (cāturya) 133 innermost self see ātman Integral Yoga  277 inter-​caste marriages  235 inter-​communal oppression  446 interior dialogue 445 International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) 9, 194, 197; ISKCON-​Christian condescending comparisons 196–​201; ISKCON-​Christian devotional interlocution 202–​4; ISKCON-​Christian discourse 2; ISKCON-​Christian encounters 193–​6; missionaries 197; sannyasis 203 interreligious relationships 247 intersectional feminists 4 Intimate Enemy,The (Nandy) 59–​60 intra-​Hindu intellectual polemic 41 intrinsic diversity 127

invention of Hinduism hypothesis 31 Ioudaismos 18–​20, 27 ishtam 408 ISKCON see International Society for Krishna Conciousness Islam 20, 27 Jacobite Christians see Yakoba Christians Jaffna peninsula of Ceylon 136 Jain, Andrea 65, 189 Jainism 32, 39n1, 91, 219, 430 Jains 439 Jaspers, Karl 231 jātis 27, 170 Jat-​Pat Todak Mandal  58 Jenkins, Laura Dudley 165 Jerusalem 19 Jesuit 79 Jesuits in India 80–​1, 265; see also Hindu-​Jesuit encounters Jesus 135, 417: as avatar 311; as Messiah 19; renunciation the idea of mukti (salvation) 409; in terms of Krishna’s teaching 12 Jewishness, 18 Jews 21 Jeyaraj, Daniel 86 jīvanmukta 390 jñāna-​kaṇḍa 34 jnana marga 405, 412–​13 Johannine Scriptures 46 Johanns, Pierre 62, 85, 419 John of the Cross 46 John Paul II, Pope 423 Johnson, Mordecai 324 Jois, Pattabhi 285–​6 Jones, Arun 5–​6, 14 Jones, William 34, 281 Joseph, Kevin P. 74 Joshi, Khyati 184, 187 Journal of Hindu-​Christian Studies 1, 452, 477 Judaisms 2, 18–​20 Judeans 19; banishment, from Judea 19; from Pentecost 19 Judeo-​Christian contexts  54 Jung, Carl 282 jyotiḥśāstra (astronomy) 132 Kabir 23 Kailāsa 135 Kālidāsa 483 Kali worship in Trinidad and Tobago 210 Kamakhya Temple in Assam  396–​7 Kāma Sūtra 271 Kaṇapati 129 Kant, Immanuel 37, 44 karma 26

492

493

Index Karma and Redemption: An Essay toward the Interpretation of Hinduism and the Re-​statement of Christianity (Hogg) 110 karma-​kaṇḍa 34 karma marga 405, 411–​14 Kashmir Śaivism 482 Kassam, Tazim  243 Kaundinya, Anandarao 105–​6 Kaur, Rajkumari Amrit 111 Kauravas and Pandavas 431 Kavirāyar, Muttukkumarak 136 Keating, Thomas  288 Kelamangalathuveliyil, Anupama 75 Kent, Eliza 6, 14, 103 Kerala’s Malabar Coast 20 Kester, Howard 324 Kevalā dvaita 32 Khrist bhaktas 222, 446 Killingley, Dermot 8, 106 The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Tolstoy) 318 King, Richard 36 Kingdom of Heaven Is within You,The (Tolstoy) 437 King Jr., Martin Luther 324 Kipling, Rudyard 60 Klostermaier, Klaus 405, 444 Knanaya Christians 71 Knitter, Paul 405 Komagata Maru case of 1914 181 Konar Thoppu  239 Konkani 81 Koodapuzha, Xavier 70 Kothari, Rajni 55 Kottayam Cheriyapally 345 K. P. Manu, Malabar Cements Ltd vs. Chairman, Scrutiny Committee for Verification of Community Certificate 92 Krishna consciousness see International Society for Krishna Consciousness Krishnamacharya, T. K. V.  64 Krishnamurti, Sailaja 5, 10 Kristapurāṇa of Thomas Stephens 81 Kristubhāgavatam (Devassia) 137 Kshatriya 71, 431 kula teiyuvam 228 Kumarappa, J. C. 438 kuṇḍalinī 282, 284 Kurien, Prema 186 kuruvanchi 104 Kuvalayananda, Swami 64 Kwok, Pui-​lan  61–​2 Lamb of God 258 Largen, Kristen Johnston 393 Latin Catholic fisherman 74 Latin Catholicism 72 Laws of Manu 370, 397 Le Gobien, Charles 35

Le Saux, Henri see Abhishiktananda, Swami Leviticus 397 LGBTQ 149, 186, 190 liberation 64 liberation hermeneutics 63 liberation theology 64 Lieu, Judith 18 Lievens, Constant 86 liminality 227 Lindell, John 283 Liṅga, Rāma 289 Literatures of India,The (Dimock, et al.) 476–​7 Littleton, Henry 103 Liturgy of Liberation (Locklin) 264 Lobo, Lancy 98–​9 Locana 271 Locklin, Reid 3, 14, 264 logic (nyāya) 36 London Missionary Society (LMS) 117 Lord Rāma 133 Lorenzen, David 22, 31–​2 lotus posture (padmāsana) 283 lower-​caste communities 4; see also Dalits; harijans lower-​class Muslims  437 Löwner, Gudrun 269 Lushington, Stephen 117 Luther, Martin 372 Lutheran church in Thanjavur 103 Lutheran missionaries 115 Macaulay, Colin 121 Madhva 36, 49, 355 Mādhva Vedānta 50 Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam 161–​2 Madonna Lactans 396 Madras Board of Revenue 120 Madras Hindu Religious and Endowments Act (1927) 465 Madras Rethinking Group 411 Madurai Mission 93, 414 Magnesians 10, 20 Mahabharata 430–​2, 441 Mahadevan, T. M. P. 358 Mahalakshmi temple 461 Maharshi, Ramana 12 Maitland 124 Malabarian Heathenism (Ziegenbalg) 102 Malankara coast 20 Malcolm, John 120 Malhotra, Rajiv 8, 149–​50, 284 Malkovsky, Bradley 367 mangalam 459 Manners and Customs of the Indians (Coeurdoux) 83 marga (panth) 19 Marshman, Joshua 105, 304 martyr 269

493

494

Index Mary Mata (Mother) 220 Mashruwala, K. G. 319 Masuzawa, Tomoko  243 Mātā Amritānandamayī Devī 9, 479 Mataji,Vandana  480 Mataparīkṣā (Muir) 132–​3, 135 Mataparīkṣāśikṣā 133 Matridham Ashram 227 Mauritius 207 māyā 35–​7, 132 Māyāvāda of Advaita Vedānta 35 Mays, Benjamin 324 McBrien, Richard 29–​30 McFague, Sallie 379 Medhavi, Bapu Bepin Behari Das 248–​9 medieval period identities 24 Meher Baba 194 Mehta, Rajchandra Ravjibhai 318 Memmi, Albert 57 menstruating Goddess 396–​7 meritorious (dharma) 385 Merton, Thomas 326, 340 Mesopotamia 21 Meurin, Leo 84 microdoxy 327 migration from Asia to Canada and US 182 Mill, J. S. 124 Miller, Christopher 8, 14 Miller, Elliot 284 mind–​body–​spirit complex  381 minim 20 minoritization 440 Minto, Lord 118 miracles 70, 241, 395, 424 Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (Shourie) 145 model minority 185 modern Hinduism 26, 29–​30; British and 31–​2; Hegelian versus perennialist interpretations of Vedānta 37–​8; Hindu inclusivism 38–​9; Indian philosophy (Vedānta) 32–​4; and the Kevalādvaita of Śaṁkara 34–​7; Western influence 30–​1 Modi, Narendra 74, 238, 309, 439 modus vivendi 117 Mohler, Albert 189, 284 Moira, Lord 120, 122 moksa 370, 376 Mokshadharmaparvan 431 Moltmann, Jürgen 400–​1, 481 Monchanin, Jules 63, 144, 425 Monier-​Williams, Monier  281 monogamy 81 monotheism 33 Montgomery Bus Boycott 324 Morabhaṭṭa Dāndekara 130 moral (dharmika) behavior 430

Moral Re-​Armament (MRA) 195 Morley-​Minto Reforms  174 Mosse, David 220–​1, 223 Mother Teresa  274 Moyaert, Marianne 351 Mozumdar, A. K. 182 Mughal Empire 115 Muhammad 311 Muir, John 132 Muktananda, Swami 197 Mukti Mission 253–​4 Mulakkal, Franco 75 Müller, Friedrich Max 34, 96, 282, 353 multiculturalism 180, 183 Multiculturalism Act 183 multi-​faith Hindu–​Christian religious rituals see ritual sharing multi-​religiosity and secularism 95 Munro, John 121 Munro, Sir Thomas  120 Munshi, K. M. 158–​9 mūrti suppression 257 Muslims 7, 21, 73 mystical traditions 46–​7, 331 mythology 37 Naba Vidhan  137 namaste greeting 170–​1 Namboodiris 71 namjap 426 Nandy, Ashis 59–​61, 270 Naoroji, Dadabhai 437 Narada Sutras 351 Nārāyaṇa 394–​5 Narayanan,Vasudha 14, 220, 225, 371 nāstik 22, 32 Nāth-​yogins  387 National Art Movement in Bengal 272 National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 238 nationalist movement 436–​8 natural objects (padārtha) 133 Natural Theology (Paley) 301 nature-​based spirituality  64 Nāṭya Śāstra 271 Nāvalar, Āṟumuka 136 Nāyars 21, 71, 74 Nayar Shaktas 243 Nazrani (“Nazarenes”) 20 Nehruvian secularism 95 neo-​Advaita Vedānta 43 neo-​Advaitins  50 Neo-​Hindu authors  38 neo-​Hinduism  25 neo-​Vedanta 3, 12, 61, 410, 415 neo-​Vedantins  62 Neufeldt, Ronald 158 Neusner, Jacob 18

494

495

Index Nicholson, Andrew 22, 31–​2, 36 Nicholson, Hugh 3 Nikhilananda, Swami 310 nirguṇa 23, 35, 281, 346 niṣkāma karma 24 Nivedita, Sister 272 Niyogi Committee 95 Niyogi Report 159–​61 non-Abrahamic traditions 31 non-​Christian worship  224 “non-​covenantal” theology of Christian Eucharist 260 non-​dominant Sudra-​caste peoples  69 non-​dual Brahman  371 non-​dual Hinduism  62 non-​dual identity  348 non-​dualist  30 non-​duality see advaita “non-​modern” cultures and traditions 59 non-​Sanskritic folk Hinduism 220 non-​violence 430–​431, 436–​7, 439; see also ahimsa North America, Hindus and Christians in 180; conflicts and controversies 186–​90; diversifying Hindu voices 190–​1; Hindu communities and Protestant narratives 182–​3; migration and interconnection 180–​2; religion, advocacy and the racialization of 184–​6 Nostra Aetate 288 Nottuswara 467 Notzrim 20 Novalis 37 OBCs see Other Backward Castes O’Callaghan, M. 210 Odisha Act 162 Okakura, Kakuzo Tensu  272 Om 63 one’s self [ātman] 281 Oor 170 Orientalism (Said) 56, 477 orientalism and postcolonial theory 54–​5; global spiritualities, cultural appropriation, and liberation 64–​5; Hindu universalism and theology of difference 59–​64; subaltern voices 55–​9 Orientalism 24, 91 oriental religious traditions 56 Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967 161 Orthodox Syrian Christians 72 Other Backward Castes 69 Otto, Rudolph 348, 462 Overzee, Anne Hunt 393 Oxford Group 195 padatiks 56 Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram 465 Padris’ Secrets Disclosed, The (Umāpati) 135–​6

Padroado 93 pagan 21 “pagan” religions 213 Painadath, Sebastian 85 Paley, William  301 “pan-​Asian” movement  272 pandarasamis 83 panentheism 361, 372 Panikkar, Raimon 12–​13, 326–​33, 340, 347, 427; as Hindu-​Christian 328; ocula fidei (eye of faith) 326; religious pluralism 326, 328 Panikkarianism 332 pan-​Indian concept  31 pan-​Indian deities  24 Paṇṭitar, Caṅkara 136 parādhīnaviśeṣāpti 50–​1 pāramārthikavidyā 133 Paranguis 94 paravartan 166 Parker, Edwin 109 Parmenides 37 Parrinder, Geoffrey 393 parting-​of-​the-​ways theory  18 Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra 281, 284, 288 Patankar, Prachi 189–​90 Pauline theology on human depravity 129 pazhaykuttukar 72 peace and conflict 430; colonial era 434–​6; Independent India 438–​41; India’s indigenous Christians 433–​4; Mahabharata 430–​432; nationalist movement 436–​8; St. Augustine 432–​3 Peggs, James 123 Pennington, Brian 14, 17 Pentecost 9 Pentecostal Christianity 25, 26, 107, 112, 209, 254–​5, 425 Penumala, Pratap Kumar 5 performing arts 459–​62, 466–​71; contiguous communion 463; cultural appropriation, continuity, and conversion 471–​3; encounters and shared spaces of theology and rituals 462–​3; Hindu temples, management of 463–​6; uniform civil code 466 Persians, Achaemenid 17 personal embodiment as divine 393–​4 personal Lord (Īśvara) 35 philosophical Hinduism 32–​3 Pieris, Aloysius 418 Piḷḷai, C. W. Tāmōtaram 136 Pillai, Krishna 472 Pinney, Christopher 273 Plato 37, 46 Platonic hierarchy of being (Aquinas) 395 pleroma of Christ 336 Plotinus 46

495

496

Index pluralism 180, 405, 412–​13, 451; and hierarchical inclusivism 408–​9, 412–​13; and internal diversity 207–​9 pluralistic–​vedantic approaches  408–​10 Plütschau, Heinrich 102 polygamy 119 polytheistic Hindu religious imagination 220 polythetic-​prototype approach  26 Ponniah, James 3, 280, 464 Pons, J. F. 35–​6 Poona Sanskrit College 130–​1 Pope, George Uglow 110 popular Hinduism 26, 32 Portuguese 418 Portuguese-​converted Latin Christians 72 Portuguese Inquisition in Goa 7 post-​authoritarian ethics  61 postcolonial anxiety 160 postcolonial scholarship 65 postcolonial theology 54; in India 55; of religious difference 61–​2 Power of Non-​Violence, The (Gregg) 324 Practical Vedanta  307–​8 practicing Hindus 187 pragmatist approach 411–​12 prajāyeyeti 362 Prakash, Gyan 58 prākṛtic mind 386 Prarthana Samaj group 182 pratyakṣa 132 precolonial caste-​based antagonisms 170 Presbyterians (presbyṭerīyān) 133 Priolkar, A. K. 86 Prithvi Sukta of the Atharva Veda 376 promulgation 33 proselytization 4, 8–​9, 124, 159, 321 prosperity gospel 415 prostitution see Indian prostitutes Protestantism in India 106; see also Hindu-​ Protestant encounters Protestant missionaries 73, 104, 115, 128 Protestants (prateṣṭāṇṭa) 99, 133, 156 pṛthakśāstra 133 Pseudo-​Dionysius  259 Puar, Jasbir 184 pūjā devotional worship 32, 257 Puranas 22, 38, 81 pure spirit (puruṣa) 385 Pūrva Mīmāṃsā 34 puthankutukar 72 Puthiadam, Ignatius 85 Quebec 180 Queen Elizabeth I 114 rabbinical Judaism 19 race 5–​6

racialization of Indian communities 5–​6 racialization of religion 244, 248 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 30, 38, 41, 61; and Advaita 45, 47; Christian educational institutions 42; evolutionary cosmologies 45; Indian Philosophy 48; mystical traditions 46–​7; philosophy 42; pluralism with bhakti and jnana margas 409–​10; universal religion of Spirit 43; Western philosophy 42 Raj, Selva J. 220, 261, 263, 274 Rajadharmaparvan 431 Rajamanickam, S. 83 Rajan, Radha 8, 147–​9 Rajanayankan 103 rajavritta widows 56 Rajkumar, Peniel Jesudason Rufus 13 Ram, Kalpana 220 Rama 439 Ramabai, (Pandita) Mary 6, 107, 244–​5, 248–​54 Rāmacandra 130 Ramakrishna 307 Ramakrishna Mission 272, 310 Ramakrishna movement 91 Rāmānuja 36, 49, 260, 355, 390, 393–​4, 411; cosmology 47 Ramanujan, A. K. 427 Rambachan, Anantanand 12, 346, 464 Ram-​Prasad, Chakravarthi 87, 265 Ram Rajya 96 Ramsay, James 125 Ranstrom, Erik 12 Rāo, Nārāyaṇa 130 Rāshtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 140, 289, 439, 468 Ratzinger, Cardinal 283, 422 Ravindra, Ravi 258–​9 Ray Smith Symposium 243 reformist dialogue 445 Refutation of Calumnies (De Nobili) 82 Rege Report 160 regulation of sexuality 6 reincarnation 83 religio-​cultural context  445 religionization 127 religion of the Spirit 43 Religious Endowments Act (1863) 465 Religious Hinduism 476 religious identity 5 religious pluralism 61 renunciation 26 Resistant Hinduism (Young) 86 resurrection 401 Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. AIR 908, 1977 163 Rev. Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Ors. AIR 1975 162 Ribeiro, Julio 97–​8

496

497

Index Ricci, Mateo 418 Richards, Ian 4, 9 Right-​wing Hindu  236 Rig Veda  34 Rinehart, Robin 8 rishis 17 ritual and ritualization 257–​8; hybrid practice and embodied dialogue 261–​3; ritual metaphor 263–​6; theologies of sacrifice 258–​61 ritual hospitality 227 ritual imitation 225 ritualism 34 ritual sharing 222, 228, 280 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Bell) 257 Roberts Nathaniel 25, 92, 170 Robinson, Bob 13 Robinson, Rowena 220 Robison, Claire 2, 9 Rogerius, Abraham 102 Roman Catholicism 30 Romantic Orientalist 290 Romantics 282 Roy, Rammohun 8, 11, 30, 33, 106, 108, 137, 287, 297–​8; anti-​slavery and feminist movements 305; Ātmīya Sabhā 299; birth 298; early life 298–​301; East India Company 299; and Hinduism 297–​8; 300–​3; legacy 305–​6; rational theism 301–​2; relations with Christians 303–​5; Vaishnava Brahmin 298 Royal Danish mission in Tranquebar 115 Rukmani, Trichur  S.  87 Ruth 64 Sabbath 81 sabda pramana 461 saccidānanda 336 Sacred Ash Society 124 sacred texts 3 sacrifice, theologies 258–​61 ṣaḍaṅga 271 saddarsana 22 Sagarmala Programme 238 Sahi, Jyoti 275–​6 Said, Edward 56, 477; see also Orientalism Śaiva ritual text 31 Śaiva Siddhānta 389 Śaivism 31–​2, 49 Śaivite Brahmin 129 Śakas (Scythians) 22 Sākta Theism 49, 396 śakti 284 śakti pīṭha 396 salvation 9, 29, 34; and liberation 415 Samaj, Brahmo 127, 137 Samartha, Stanley Jeddiah 404, 412–​13 Śaṁkara 3, 12, 30, 34, 36, 37, 61–​2, 281, 355, 392 Sāṁkhya 386

Sāṁkhyakārikā 385 Sāṃkhya-​Yoga 282, 385 saṃsāra 132 sāṃsārika 133 samskaras 182 sanātana dharma 17, 196 San Chirico, Kerry 2, 14, 220 Sangh Parivar 155, 157 saniassi see sannyāsinas Śaṅkara; see Śaṁkara Śaṅkarācārya; see Śaṁkara Sanskrit 127 Sanskritic civilization 439 Sanskritic Hinduism 223, 258 Santhal Christians 221 sants 27 sannyāsinas (renunciants) 36 Saraswati, Swami Dayananda 8, 91, 147, 149, 289, 307 Sarkar, Tanika  248–​9 Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (Compendium of All Schools) 39 sarva-​dharma-​samabhava 144, 146 śāstra 22 Śāstrī, Kṛṣṇa 131 Sastri, S. Subrahmanya 110 Sastriar,Vedanayagam 104, 471 śāstric texts on Christianity 131–​2 śāstric traditions 127, 130 Satchidananda, Swami 197 Sathe, Krishna Shastri 8, 130–​1 sati 55, 119 satkāryavāda 385 Satsang 182 satyaṁ jñānam anantam 357 Saussurean semiotics 18–​19 Savarkar,Vinayak Damodar 8, 140, 157, 438 Savitri (Aurobindo) 276 Scheid, Daniel 12, 348 Schlegel, Friedrich 37, 282 Schmalz, Mathew N. 220 Schopenhauer, Arthur 37 Schultze, Benjamin 103 Schwartz, Friedrich 103 Schwartz, Seth 18 Schweitzer, Albert 50 scientific truths (jñātavijñānatattva) 133 Seat at the Multicultural Table: The Development of a Multicultural Hinduism, A (Kurien) 186 Second Vatican Council  419–​21 sects 22 Seetharaman, Ramanathan 468 self-​assertion and advocacy 186 self-​authenticating authority (svataḥprāmāṇyatva) 134 self-​consciousness  444 self-​identification  410

497

498

Index self-​realization  410 Self-​realization Fellowship (SRF) 287 Selling Yoga (Jain) 189 Sen, Keshub Chandra 127, 305, 406 Sepoy rebellion in 1857 109, 247, 435 Serampore Trio  105 Serfoji, Rajah of Thanjavur 103 Sermon on the Mount 317, 319 Sethupati, Bhaskara 310 sexism and casteism 75 sexual regulations 6 sexual relationships between European men and Indian women 245 sexual slavery 253 Shankara; see Śaṁkara Shankaracarya; see Śaṁkara Shantiparvan 431 Sharada Sadan 253 shared religious space 219; common rituals/​r itual objects 221–​2; defined 219–​20; domestic spaces as 227–​8; human objects 221; liminal space 226–​7; as loci of shared deities 223–​5; religious and social boundaries, collapse of 225–​6; shared indigenous cultural universe 220–​1; shrines as 220; as sites of ritual dialogue 222–​3 shared ritual performances see ritual sharing Sharma, B. L. 155 Sharma, B. N. K. 41, 50–​1 Sheridan, Daniel 351 Sherma, Rita 370, 374 Sheth, Noel 85 Shikoh, Dara 243 Shobhana, Nidhin 98 Shourie, Arun 8, 130, 144–​6 Shraddhanand, Swami 4, 174 Shrine of St. Anne in Arulanandapuram 263 shuddhi 166 Shukla, Aseem 64 Shukla, Suhag 189 siddha 390 siddhāntas 132 Sikhism 219 Śilpa Śāstras 271 Singhal, Ashok 155 sinister yogi 281 Śiva 135 Śivadharma 87 Śivajñāna Siddhiyār Parapakkam 398 slum religion 25 Smārtas 32 Smiley, Glenn 324 Smith, Huston 29–​30 Smith, Jay Holmes 324 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 31, 38–​9, 243 Smith, William  134 Soares-​Prabhu, Georges  86 social activism 58

social identities 4 social mobility 55 social organization 24 Society for Hindu-​Christian Studies (SHCS) 12, 14, 478 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) 115 Sood, Sheena 190 Soundarajan, Thenmozhi  190 South Africa 210–​11 South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) 186 South Asian Christianity 257 South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) 476 South Asians, immigration 6 Souza, Francis Newton 275 spiritual body 382 spiritual energies 221 spiritual freedom from sin 258 spirituality 41, 64; in India 49 spiritualization 258 Spivak, Gayatri 55 Srinivasachari, P. N. 41, 48–​9 St. Anthony’s shrine at Puliampatti, Tamil Nadu 221 St. Anthony’s shrine at Uvari 225 state power 90; Catholic elites and Indian national project 96–​9; Catholic formation of Hinduism 92–​5; Indian national movement and Catholicism 95–​6; Indian state 90–​2 Stephens, Thomas  81 sthūla deha 270 St. John de Britto’s shrine at Oriyur 225 St. John of Damascus 395 St. Mary’s Orthodox Syrian Church, Kottayam, Kerala 345 Stoler, Ann 246 storytelling 350 Stri Dharma Niti (Ramabai) 249 St. Thomas 20, 69–​70 St. Thomas Christians 4, 7, 9, 433 subalternity 55–​56 Subaltern Studies 55 subaltern voices 55–​9 śuddha-​sattva 398 Sudra 71 Sufism 277 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 63 sūkṣma deha 270 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas) 351, 433 Sunni Muslims 243 sun salutations (sūrya namaskāra) 285 Supersoul 374 superstition 34 Suriname (Dutch Guyana) 207 svadharma 142

498

499

Index svagata bheda 357 svajātīya bheda 357 svataḥprāmāṇyatva 137 swadeshi 437 Swarup, Ram 8, 142–​3 Sweetman, W.  22 Sydnor, Jon Paul 348 Sylvester, Jerome 220 Syndicated Hinduism 25–​6 Synod of Diamper 72, 433 Syrian Christians 21, 69, 72–​3, 243; blackmail/​ sexual exploitation 75; caste hierarchy 71; dominant-​caste politics 69, 73–​5; history 70–​3; honor killing 70–​3 Syro-​Malabar Christianity 72, 127, 433 Tagore, Abanindranath 272 Tagore, Debendranath 137, 305 Tagore, Rabindranath 272 Taittirīya Upaniṣad 357 “Take Back Yoga” campaign 189 Talghatti, S. R. 32 Tamil 102, 127 Tamil bhakti 103 Tamil Catholicism 261, 263 Tamil Christians 221, 231 Tamil Heidentum (Heathenism) 128 Tamil Hindus 128; in Jaffna 102 tāntrika 482 Tarkapañcānana, Haracandra 8, 133 Tejani, Shubnam 91 Tempāvaṇi 81 Terry, Edward 102 Thākurdvār Temple  131 Thangaraj, M. Thomas  462 Thapar, Romila 25 theocentric Christology 413 Theology after Vedanta (Clooney) 351 theology of Hindu–​Christian relations 345–​6; in/​ adequacy of speech 346–​7; mystical teachings 352–​3; narrative and presence 348–​50; one and many 347–​8; particularity of encounter 350–​2 Theosophical Society 64 Thomas, Apostle 268 Thomas, Madathiparampil Mammen 111, 413–​14; 450 Thomas, Sonja 4–​5 Thomas Christians 21; see also Syrian Christians Thomas of Cana 20 Thomason, Thomas  121 Thomists 382 Thompson, Marmaduke 121 thugees 435 Thurman, Howard 324 Tiele, C. P. 96 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 437 Tirumala-​Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh 377

To Be Cared For (Roberts) 25 To Christ through the Vedanta (Johanns) 419 Tolstoy, Leo 318 trading centers in India 102 Tranquebar 102, 128 transcendentalists 64 trans-​ethnic Christian community 213 transformation (pariṇāma) 35 transgression of boundaries 225 transmigration 83 Trento, Margherita 86 Trinidad 209–​10 Trinitarian themes 13 Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (Panikkar) 330 True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,The (Ricci) 418 true religion (saddharma) 133, 135 truth and salvation 404–​5; bhakti and jnana margas 409–​10, 412; bhakti-​based experiential approaches 410–​14; fulfillment and bhakti approaches, confluence of 406; Ganga and Galilee 404, 415; inclusive Christ 407–​8; inclusivist–​fulfillment approaches 405–​8; karma marga approaches 411–​12; karma marga of humanization and justice 413–​14; pluralism and hierarchical inclusivism 408–​9, 412–​13; pluralistic–​vedantic approaches 408–​10; pragmatist approach 411–​12; preparatory value of Hinduism 406–​7; truth and self-​identity  414 Tuḥfat (Roy) 301 Tuḥfatal-​Muwaḥḥidīn (Roy) 298, 301 Turner,Victor  226 Turtle Island 180 turuṣkas (Turks) 22 Tyagaraja 459 Tytler, Robert 305 Ulrich, Edward 7 uniform civil code 466 Unifying Hinduism (Nicholson) 22 Unitarianism 299 United Progressive Alliance (UPA) 238 unity (waḥīd) of God 301 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 149 universalism 61, 90 Upadeśa Candrikā 130 Upadhyay, Brahmabandhab 62, 144 Upaniṣads 12, 22, 34, 37–​8, 44, 281, 302, 346, 360 upper-​caste hegemony  92 urbanization 440 Urquhart, William Spence  199 Uttara-​Mimamsa-​Sutras 260, 351 Vācārambhaṇaṁ 362 Vācaspati Miśra 36

499

500

Index Vaikuṇṭha 135, 394 Vaishya 71, 91 Vaiṣṇavism 31–​2, 49 Vajpayee, Atal Behari 155–​6 Valentinian (Gnostic) tradition 399 vānaprastha 194 varna 170; see also caste varnashramadharma 170, 177 vāstava 132 Vāstu Śāstras 271 vasudeva sarvam 370 Vatican Council 262 Vātsyāyāṇa 271 Vattanky, John 85 Vedanayagam 104 vedāṅga 132 Vedānta 29–​30, 34, 132, 181; core tenet 35; Hegelian versus perennialist interpretations 37–​8; philosophy 35–​7; Upaniṣads 34–​5 Vedānta, Mādhva 50 Vedānta Deśika 260, 398–​9, 481 Vedanta Society 307 Vedānta Sūtras 302 Vedāntic Hinduism 38 Vedārthasaṉgraha 394 Vedas 34, 286 Vedic authority 22 Vedic Experience, The (Panikkar) 259–​60 Vedic Foundation (VF) 188 Vedic rites 35, 258, 384 Velankanni 231, 236 Vellala Christians 97 Veḷḷala Hindus 129 Vellore Mutiny 121 Vempeny, Ishanand 85 Venkateshwara Temple in Pennsylvania 182 vernacular Catholicism 225 vijātīya bheda 356 Vijñānabhikṣu 36 violence 58 violent anti-​Christian activists; see anti-​Christian violence Virgin Mary 235, 395–​6, 479 vishistadvaita 49, 347, 411 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 140, 155, 185 Viṣṇu 49, 135 vivarta 35 Vivekananda, Swami 8, 12, 30, 38, 61–​2, 64, 91, 287, 307–​9, 436; birth 307; on Christianity 310–​11; critique of Christian missionary efforts 313–​15; evolution and development of religions 313; Jesus-​as-​avatar 311; life 309–​10; nature of God 311; pluralism and hierarchical inclusivism 408–​9; prophets, avatars, and other religious leaders 311–​13; teachings 310

von Stietencron, Heinrich 31 Voss Roberts, Michelle 12, 142, 265, 273, 389, 481 vote banks 24 Vyāsa, Somanātha 8, 132 vyavahārikavidyā 133 Wallace, William  84 Ward, William  105 Was Hinduism Invented? (Pennington) 17 Wassan,Yogi  182 We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Golwalkar) 140 Weltgeist 37 Wesley, Frank 275 Western academic writing 10–​11, 41 Western Christianity 27 Western civilization, criticism of 197 Western philosophy and Christianity 41–​2; creation 50–​1; idealism 44–​6; Mādhva Vedānta 49–​52; mystical traditions 46–​7; nature of God 51–​2; Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Advaita Vedānta 42–​7;Viśiṣṭādvaita 47–​9 Western spirituality 46 Western yoga 182 White Christian hegemony 10 Wilkins, Charles 281 Wilkinson, Lancelot 132 Williamson, Lola 183 Williamson, Thomas  246 Willis, Glenn 450 Willis, Laurette 286–​7 Wilson, H. H. 32–​4, 39 Wilson, John 130 Wolff, Lilli 189 Wood, Charles 125 world religions 19 Xavier, Francis 72, 80–​1, 83, 86, 93, 128 Yakoba Christians 72 Yamunacharya 462 Yaśodhara 271 yavanas 22, 133 Yeshua bar Youseph  19; see also Jesus Yeshu bhakta 446 Yesudas, K. J. 467 YHWH God 379 yoga 8, 64–​5, 284; in elementary schools, California 64; Hindu-​ness of 54; West 64 Yogananda, Paramahamsa 287, 350 Yoga of the Christ, The (Ravindra) 258 yoga philosophy 285 Yoga Sūtras 258, 284, 286–​7 Yogavāsiṣṭha 385

500

501

Index yogin(ī) 287 yogis 8, 281, 347 Young, Richard Fox 3, 8, 14, 79, 86, 139–​40 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 281, 286 Yudhishthira 431

Zachariah, K. C. 74 Ziegenbalg, Lutheran Bartholomäus 33, 102–​3, 128–​9 Zoroastrianism 316 Zubko, Katherine 271, 276, 470 Županov, Ines 80, 93–​4 Zwick-​Maitreyi, Maari 190

501

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