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Essays on religion, power, community

ANCIENT TO MODERN — Religion, Power, and Community in India: Edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube, Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 750.

This is a volume of essays in honour of David N. Lorenzen, a distinguished scholar and a faculty member over the last 35 years at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, whose specialisation has straddled the ancient, the medieval, and the modern periods in South Asian history and religion, especially the multiple strands of Hinduism and Buddhism. It also has an academic introduction by the editors of Lorenzen, an erudite piece by itself. The essay s, 13 in all, raise several seminal questions centring on religion, power, and community across Indian history.

The opening essay is Romila Thapar’s brilliant analysis of the Puranas as a distinctive genre of texts of frequent reformulation incorporating new religious forms, beliefs, practices, and groups through fabrication of additional mythologies around the deity for conferring legitimacy on the incorporated and effectively ‘extending the reach of both text and sect.’ Her thesis of the Puranic process involving cultural selection of inclusion and exclusion of sectarian beliefs, as a textual strategy of brahmanical endorsement of kingship is quite well known in Indian historiography. The second features Champakalakshmi’s scholarly probing of regional religious traditions in southern India between the 6th and 17th centuries. She raises important questions concerning the assimilative nature of Puranic Hinduism and argues that the Puranic process was distinctly plural in its regional manifestations, especially the areas peripheral to the Ganges valley. David Gordon White takes us on a ride through intriguing worlds of yogis, warriors, and sorcerers, in ancient and medieval India, a journey that is a tour de force. Benjamin Preciado-Solis explores the Buddhist tantric portrayals of the horrific and their beginnings, through a careful scrutiny of the canonical texts and iconography.

Purushottam Agrawal’s essay breaks new ground in solving the puzzle that surrounds the chronological and contrasting configurations of Ramanand. Linda Hess draws attention to contestations over Kabir, Ramanand’s disciple, in the 20th and 21st centuries, and unravels tensions intrinsic to the construction and conservation of a community formed around a militant figure, one who opposed institutional authority and ritual paraphernalia. In the three essays that follow, Ines G. Zupanov, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Saurab Dube diversely deal with Lorenzen’s recent interest in missionaries and converts in modern Indian history.

Both Zupanov and Trautmann discuss the ‘titanic shift of authority’ that followed the entry of British scholar-administrators into the portals of Orientalist knowledge in the late 18th century. Zupanov focusses on the life of Paulinus and Italian Carmelite missionary who lived in South India between 1776 and 1789 and published a series of books and articles concerning the subcontinent upon his return to Rome. Trautmann examines the period after 1770 and argues that while the difference between the missionary and the Orientalist was ‘strongly marked discursively and in policy’, many missionaries were Orientalist scholars. Saurab Dube, through an excellent discussion of the interplay of conversion and life history embedded within processes of evangelical entanglements between Euro-American missionaries and Central Indian peoples, explores distinct autobiographies and biographies of converts to Christianity in the Chhattisgarh region between 1920s and 1940s.

In the succeeding four essays, caste, colonial context, linguistic identity, and community come to the fore. Frank Conlon’s essay probing the different meanings and usages of caste and community by Indians and the British, argues that even prior to the British rule caste was ‘real enough’ to merit broad-based attention and that pre-colonial powers tried to use it as much as colonial regimes. Jack Hawley’s essay delineating cultural construction in colonial contexts tracks the multiple ways in which the ‘eternality’ of Hinduism came to be posed at the instance of the content and structure of two textbooks, one written in Hindi in 1878 by Pandit Gurusahay of Shahjahanpur (U.P.) and the other in English in 1903 by Annie Besant for the students of the Central Hindu College and collegiate school in Banaras.

Ishita-Banerjee Dube’s essay goes into the history of the Oriya language and its community around the cult of Jagannath symbolic of the Oriya pride and identity. It focusses on the multiple meanings, perceptions, and articulations of the community of Mahima Dharma, a radical religious order of the 19th century Orissa and its philosopher poet, Bhima Bhoi of the 20th century who personified the regional identity based on the Oriya language. Daniel Gold’s essay is an evocative account of the multiple dimensions of the community distinct for identities of religion and caste of the Gwalior city with the site of the neighbourhood on a hill named after the Sathyanarayan temple as its nucleus.

The essays in the anthology signify the complex dynamics between religion and power, as negotiated, interrogated and contested by the community in time and space. Most of the contributors take religion as a critically recuperated cultural category transcending modernist predilections and power as decentred domination, hegemony, control and subject-constitution structured by the interlocking of discursive social processes. They underscore the lurking danger of fatal mistakes embedded in viewing power as a closed top-heavy system and community as a tightly bounded entity of primordial tradition.

Edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube, the anthology indeed offers a wealth of up-to-date and in-depth study material for all levels of readership with abiding interest in Indian social history.

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