The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal. Ankur Barua. Brill Academic Publishers. 2021. Pages 245. Rs 10,000.

How the Tale is Wrought

This book might be termed a compilation of some brief intellectual biographies. These have been put together using “theological meditations, letters, public addresses, autobiographies and sermons”[1] as the source material. A singular authorial concern concatenates these intellectual biographies. Ankur Barua has crafted and brought them together between two covers to examine how certain Bengali intellectuals in the Brahmo Samaj “sought to configure the socioreligious dharma of Hindus as egalitarian, universal, and spiritual”.[2] This very interesting and readable monograph, thus, casts a very compelling light on, as the author seems to term them, the discursive aspects of Hindu modernity as they began to assume shape in the nineteenth century. Based on what Barua gleans from the writings of some prominent Brahmo activists and thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we observe that it was fraught and unstable modernity that critically and creatively engaged with both Hindu traditionalism (in the form of Vaiṣṇavism) and the Western intellectual heritage. Barua’s account, in my opinion, is an interesting addition to the postcolonial corpus as it draws attention to the tense and ambiguous religious subjectivities that characterised several of the colonial Bengali elites who were votaries of the Brahmo Samaj. Unsurprisingly, we see him observing that their writings can “frustrate our attempts to classify them in a modular fashion as either ‘reformist’ or ‘revivalist’.”[3]

As Barua documents in some detail, nineteenth-century Brahmos were distinctly embarrassed by the Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism that commanded the allegiance of large numbers of Bengalis. They were uncomfortable with what was, in their eyes, its excessive emotionalism, anti-intellectualism, and moral laxity. They, thus, rejected its outward forms. Nevertheless, observes Barua, many conceptual stock-in-trade of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism were creatively reworked by the Brahmos. In other words, it appears that Barua’s protagonists rejected varieties of Vaiṣṇava praxis but kept the essence of its devotionalism.

Barua commences his narrative reflecting on the corpus of the founders of Brahmoism, namely, Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore. We find Rammohun critiquing and rejecting customary forms of Hindu devotion that focussed on multiple deities and their images. To serve in its stead, according to Barua, he constructed a ‘rational theism’ heavily influenced by the monism of Samkara. Interestingly, he also took, points out Barua, “creative departures on certain crucial themes from strict Advaita standpoints.”[4] These were, we are told, stamped with “aspects of devotional theism”, very likely because the child Rammohun was raised in a family atmosphere heavily suffused with Vaiṣṇava piety.[5] Nevertheless, the adult Rammohun peremptorily rejected the customary privileging in Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism of the Bhāgvata-Purāna as a revealed text and the “most authoritative commentary on the Brahmasūtras.”[6] One must note that Bhāgvata-Purāna is the ur-text of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, being the prime source of its sacred lore. He was, one notices, similarly unsparing when making an exegesis of Christianity. In the Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, Rammohun argued that the foundations of Christianity are the love of God and fellow human beings, along with faith in the indivisibility of God. He dismissed dogmas like the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the vicarious atonement as inessential to salvation.[7] Coming to Debendranath, Barua writes that he was “resolutely opposed to all forms of image worship”[8], meaning that his break with traditional Hindu devotion was (seemingly) complete. Yet, we learn that the God he venerated was a “deeply compassionate and loving” one and “intimately involved with humanity.”[9] One cannot help but notice that Debendranath imagined the Deity quite in the same way as the Vaiṣṇavas.

Rajnarayan Basu is another prominent nineteenth-century Brahmo Barua introduces us to. We learn that he stressed an “intuitive mode of apprehending the divine reality” rather than one determined by scriptural texts.[10] In this regard, Rajnarayan too seems to resemble the Vaiṣṇavas. Yet, he was clearly trying to break from traditional religiosity as he was very critical of ‘idolatry’[11] and rejected the notion that God might have incarnated in human form.[12] Rajnarayan also rejected the “‘excessive’ emotional intensity” that characterized Vaiṣṇavism.[13] He, we note, saw Brahmoism as a “religion of harmony” which sought to find a balance between extremes. For instance, “passionate frenzy and inactive quietism.”[14] This was probably because a “crucial debate” in Brahmoism “revolved around competing visions of the harmonization of polarities between reason and revelation, logic and emotion, and serene contemplation and social action….”[15]

Bijoy Krishna Goswami, the next votary of Brahmoism that Barua brings up, comes across as a figure very different from Rajnarayan Basu. He appears to have considerably melded traditional Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism and Brahmoism. In fact, in the words of Barua, he occupies a “somewhat hybrid location” on their religious spectra.[16] Unlike his contemporaries in the Brahmo Samaj, he did not reject ‘idolatry’.[17] He also, after the fashion of the Vaiṣṇavas, engaged in ecstatic dances, while his followers sang frenzied congregational devotional songs.[18] Bijoy Krishna Goswami, thus, Barua opines, expressed certain “hybrid Brahmo-Vaiṣṇava standpoints”[19] and a “Vaiṣṇava-inflected Brahmo bhakti.”[20]

After Bijoy Krishna Goswami’s, Barua acquaints us with the religious thought and imagination of Sitanath Tattvabhushan and Bipin Chandra Pal.  According to him, both “reworked Hegelian vocabularies” in developing their “styles of devotionalism.”[21] We find that Sitanath found the “‘Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa cult’” lacking in “serious philosophical grounding” while being replete with elements of immorality and idolatry.[22] He, thus, arrived at a notion of God through “dense patterns of Hegel inflected argumentation.” This notwithstanding, Barua observes that the God Sitanath philosophically indicates is characterised by a loving nature, just as the God of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism.[23] This must be, it appears, since Sitanath came from a family whose religiosity centred (in typically Vaiṣṇava fashion) around the figure of Caitanya, devotional singing, and the chariot festival.[24] Like Sitanath, Bipin Chandra Pal too came from a devout Hindu background. That his father disowned him when he “rejected all caste restrictions” upon joining the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj[25] underscores in our eyes Pal’s staunchly conservative origins. Thus, even after he adopted a philosophical vocabulary drawn from Hegel, his notions of God bore an unmistakable imprint of the traditional Vaiṣṇava vocabulary. Pal believed in a “cosmic person” who was the “‘regulative ideal’” behind the “progressive and rational evolution of the universe”.[26] He called this cosmic person Viṣṇu.

The next protagonists of Brahmoism we come across in Barua’s account are Sivanath Sastri and Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar. We find the former articulated a Brahmo universalist vision that considered all humanity a family, God their father, the world their collective residence, and society “the wide field of dharma.”[27] Sivanath was critical of what he saw to be the Hindu tendency for “mysticism in the subjective dimensions of spirituality and formalism in the objective expressions of spirituality.”[28] He too sought to find a compromise between Advaita inspired monasticism and the effusive devotionalism of Vaiṣṇavism.[29] Sivanath stands out in our eyes for not developing an idea of the Deity which subliminally drew from Vaiṣṇava motifs. Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar was very different though. He defended rituals and devotional exuberance.[30]

The last personage whose religious imagination Barua delves into is a literary giant familiar to us all – Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Bankim, it appears, rejected both the contemporary Western view of Hinduism as well as aspects of traditional Hindu conduct. He was, for instance, dismissive of Orientalist scholarship which considered the hymns of the Ṛg Veda “the products of a polytheist people.”[31] On the other hand, he thought that what went in the name of Hindu dharma was “merely an aggregate of behavioural regulations.”[32] Perhaps to ‘discipline’ Vaiṣṇava devotion (removing its ‘degenerate’ aspects), Bankim trained a rational lens upon what he thought were a plethora of myths accreted around the historical Kṛṣṇa. He tried to slough them off through some elaborate textual exegesis and discovered a Kṛṣṇa who was “largely human”[33] but still an ideal to be followed. Bankim’s rationality was, nevertheless, still ambiguous. He rejected aspects of scripture in the light of science and, at the same time, thought that science cannot be “the final word on spiritual matters which are beyond its epistemic research.”[34] Bankim’s understanding of dharma was a universalist one. In his view, dharma was not restricted to some specific set of social conventions.

Apart from their backgrounds in traditional Vaiṣṇavism, was there any other reason why many Brahmos were simultaneously critiquing and reworking the conceptual material of Vaiṣṇava devotion? It seems that in the second half of the nineteenth century Vaiṣṇavism had assumed both social and intellectual salience in Bengal. Barua writes that numbers of Bengali intelligentsia were now engaged in revitalizing Vaiṣṇavism by purging it of the “accumulated dross of the centuries.”[35] They sought to root this ‘purified’ Vaiṣṇavism in the figure of Caitanya.[36] Bengal Vaiṣṇavism was, alongside Brahmoism, seeking its own universalism which would embody the “spiritual essence of the historically shaped religious standpoints of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and others across the world.”[37] Probably, this quest spoke through Ramakrishna who, avers Barua, was “deeply immersed in Vaiṣṇava life-worlds.”[38] Yet, he thought that “true divinity is neither the Upaniṣadic Brahman of the Brahmos nor the Rāḍhā-Kṛṣṇa of the Vaiṣṇavas.”[39] Ramakrishna’s religious universalism, it seems, was averse to conceptually confining the divine. He considered Brahman a “shoreless ocean.”[40] Meanwhile, the Brahmos were deriving material for universalism from Christian Unitarian themes. Barua points out how some of them were “enthusiastically reading” Unitarian Christian women such as Sophia Dobson Collett (1822-1894) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904).[41] Thus, based on the multifarious religious imaginations he encounters, Barua concludes that “diverse configurations of universalism” were “posited and propagated” as colonial modernities were entrenching themselves.[42]

What the Tale Caused Me to Think

While reading this monograph, I thought of Partha Chatterjee and his postulation of Indian nationalism multiple times. Chatterjee has termed Indian nationalism a ‘derivative discourse’ as in his view its “justificatory structures” (or, its “thematic”) were unoriginal. He thinks that, first, Indian nationalist thought accepted “the essentialist conceptions” of the distinction between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’. Secondly, he claims that it reasoned within “a framework of knowledge” whose representational structure corresponded to the structure of colonial power.[43] Now, nationalism, as a Western type of political sentiment and outlook, is unmistakably an aspect of what we broadly call ‘modernity’. This is since it occasions, as one might put it, a drastic “step-change forward in human organization and experience”[44] in the non-Western context by birthing what is essentially the post-industrial, centralised and bureaucratic Western state form. Since Chatterjee calls Indian nationalism ‘derivative’, Indian modernity, too, by extension, becomes so.

In my view, the chief significance of The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus is that it makes it obvious to our eyes that Indian modernity in its colonial inception was anything but ‘derivative’. Yes, at some level it was indeed complicit with Western knowledge and its representational structures since we see our Brahmos deriding the moral ‘lacks’ and ‘failures’, along with the ‘idolatrous’ ways, of Vaiṣṇavism. Anglophilic as most of them seem to us, they had apparently bought into the dour Englishman’s discomfiture with this emotionally abandoned Hindu sampradaya. But they were not, so to speak, ‘copying and pasting’ a totally Western text of modernity into the Indian context. Hence, this book by Ankur Barua, in my opinion, is an important reflection on the nature of colonial subjecthood, at least in its elite manifestations. We discover that it was by no means completely lacking in agency. The elite colonial subject was not a passive receptacle for the political, or, in this case, the religious and philosophical ideas issuing from the West. The Brahmo elites, as we saw, used, or discarded, them as they saw fit—Rammohun Roy dismissed certain core elements of Christianity as inessential, while Sitanath Tattvabhushan and Bipin Chandra Pal used Hegelian reasoning to arrive at their notions of God. The agency, in the way of religious and philosophical ideas, that these Brahmo elites demonstrated, took the form of multiple subjectivities. From seeking a compromise between frenzy and quietism, or Advaita and Vaiṣṇavism, to melding Brahmoism and Vaiṣṇavism, to defending rituals and devotional exuberance, to retrieving the historical Kṛṣṇa and presenting him as a moral ideal, they did it all. Certain non-Brahmo elites, as we saw, also tried to craft, and present, their own distinct Vaiṣṇava form of universalism or modernity. Being a play of multiple subjectivities, the modernity that these elites articulated in the form of multiple universalisms was rather unstable. Thus, if I may resort to M.M. Bakhtin here, Barua brings to our notice how Indian modernity at its source is a “hybrid construction” and characterised by “heteroglossia”[45] (from ‘heteroglot’, the quality of speaking multiple tongues). I think we continue to inhabit this modernity in India. Our contemporary modernity too, much like its colonial forebear, is a melange of subjectivities that use and dismiss modes and elements of Western modernity in a somewhat random fashion. The challenge before us is to render our modernity stably and substantively Indic.

Because of the varieties of responses to the West that it examines and reveals in the context of colonial Bengal, The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus also frequently reminded me of Tapan Raychaudhuri’s Europe Reconsidered.[46] Barua, thus, one might say, expectedly uncovers that a particular articulation of modernity in colonial Bengal was, often, also a distinct response to the West. However, in one regard, this book by him is quite deficient. It never dwells on why modernity must go hand in hand with universalist assumptions or imaginations. Is it because, representing radically new forms of organization and experience, modernity ruptures one’s world and causes one to want to make it whole again? I wish Barua had addressed this issue. Again, though Barua perhaps did not set himself this brief, it would have helped if he had provided a little more biographical information on his subjects. The lives of Rammohun and Bankim are known well enough in their essential details, at least to those whose scholarly focus is on colonial Bengal. But we could learn more about the early lives and family backgrounds of the other figures studied in this book. That could have helped us better understand and contextualise the trajectories they assumed later in their lives. Due to the paucity of biographical information, I, somehow, had this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that the people whose religious imaginations and subjectivities Barua is telling me about are not fleshed out well enough. Further, I missed learning if Barua’s protagonists had any responses for the more radical advocates of the West in their milieu – think of the youths who called themselves Young Bengal and the converts to Christianity amidst the colonial Bengali elite (Michael Madhusudan Dutt being the most noteworthy instance). He does allude to the Young Bengal at the start of the book, but, unfortunately, does not return to considering the engagement (if there was one) that Brahmoism had with them. Nevertheless, these are relatively minor drawbacks in what I think is a noteworthy examination of the fraught modernities that characterised colonial India. I recommend that you have a look at it.

 

References

 

[1] The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaisnava Milieus (Leiden, Boston: Brill). Introduction, p.1.

[2] Preface, p.ix.

[3] Ibid., p.xiii.

[4] Ibid., p.31.

[5] Ibid., p.32.

[6] Ibid., p.34.

[7] Ibid., p.51.

[8] Ibid., p.39.

[9] Ibid., p.46.

[10] Ibid., p.65.

[11] Ibid., p.68.

[12] Ibid., p.69.

[13] Ibid., p.70.

[14] Ibid., pp.70-71.

[15] Ibid., 74.

[16] Ibid., p.85.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p.87.

[19] Ibid., p.89.

[20] Ibid., p.96.

[21] Ibid., p.108.

[22] Ibid., p.118.

[23] Ibid., p.114.

[24] Ibid., p.121.

[25] Ibid., p.123.

[26] Ibid., p.124.

[27] Ibid., p.134.

[28] Ibid., p.137.

[29] Ibid., p.136.

[30] Ibid., p.144.

[31] Ibid., p.153.

[32] Ibid., p.154.

[33] Ibid., p.162.

[34] Ibid., p.163.

[35] Ibid., p.171.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., p.172.

[38] Ibid., p.188.

[39] Ibid., p.190.

[40] Ibid., p.190.

[41] Ibid., p.173.

[42] Ibid., p.192.

[43] Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, p.38. In The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: OUP, 1999).

[44] C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. 1780-1914 (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p.9.

[45] See ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in Michael Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (New Delhi: Pinnacle Learning, 2014).

[46] Europe Reconsidered. Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 1989 [Second Impression]).