Culture

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, many have examined the European descriptions of India as reflections of the power/knowledge nexus in the colonial state. Few, however, have capitalized on Said's insight that whereas the Orientalist discourse appears to be a description of a place in the world (viz. the Orient) it actually is a description of how the West has experienced the Asian cultures. This panel will present a research program which studies the West and its cultural experience by approaching Orientalism as a description of that experience. Since Orientalism developed in continuous interaction with, and as a part of the growth of, the social sciences, both making claims about man and society, the latter cannot possibly be an alternative to Orientalism. Rather, the social sciences reflect the West's experience of itself. To understand the way the western culture has described both itself and others is to begin understanding this culture. The challenge of Orientalism, then, is a challenge to understand the western culture. 2. Taking this heuristic as a starting point, the papers in this panel will look into different aspects of the European understanding of India. Rather than accepting the post-colonial claim that 'Hinduism', 'the caste system' or 'secularism' are colonial constructs in Indian society, they will look at these entities as patterns or structures in the European experience. These experiential structures came into being along with the historical development of Europe. That is, to explain the origin and nature of entities like 'Hinduism', 'the caste system' and 'secularism', one has to examine the historical process which gave shape to the West as a cultural configuration. To do so, a hypothesis is required that not only conceptualizes the characteristic dynamics of this process, but also tells one how the western culture differs from other cultures, such as the Asian. Moreover, such a hypothesis should reveal the link between the dynamics of the western culture and its experience of the Asian cultures. 3. The panel will present one such hypothesis: S. N. Balagangadhara's proposal that the emergence of the western culture is constituted by an internal universalizing dynamic of the Christian religion. According to this hypothesis, the cultural history of Europe does not exhibit emancipation from religion, but rather an internal process of secularization. In this process, the Christian religion expands by discarding some of its doctrinal content while retaining its basic structures in a minimal and variable form. These basic structures constitute and shape the cultural experience of the West. The different papers will assess whether and how this internal dynamic of Christian secularization can account for certain aspects of the European attitude towards Indian culture and society. More specifically, they will look at the question of religious conversion, the debate on Hinduism, the caste system and Aryan invasion, and the history of secularism and religious toleration.

Participants :

Jakob De Roover

Paper Title : Colonial Toleration and the Transformation of the Indian Traditions

Abstract :

A striking feature of early British colonial rule in India was its policy of religious toleration. The practices of Indian society were examined in order to find out whether or not these were sanctioned by the 'Hindu religion' and its scriptures. If certain practices were found to be "sanctioned by the Shaster," these ought to be tolerated by the colonial state. In the process, the colonials employed the pundits of local courts in order to codify the "Hindoo law." The prevalent explanations of this policy look to the power-knowledge nexus of colonial rule and its need for a precise legal apparatus to gain control of Indian society. These explanations fail on several counts. Firstly, they are ad hoc: they cannot explain as to why the British colonials required a codification of Hindu law, while the Islamic rulers had not. Secondly, they beg the question, since they do not account for the colonial obsession to interpret and endorse the scriptural injunctions of a 'false and idolatrous' religion. Thirdly, they ignore the many normative justifications of the toleration/codification policy that drew on the religious background of the British. My paper will develop an alternative explanation, which revolves around the cultural framework of the colonial state. From the start, the Europeans had looked for the ancient law giver of the heathen religion of the Indians - the equivalent of Moses for the Jews and Mohammed for the Muslims. This law giver, they assumed, would give them the key to understanding Indian society. According to the Protestant religion, all human souls had access to God's law and lived on earth to obey this law. Nevertheless, the devil and his priests, who imposed their own fabrications as divinely revealed commandments on innocent believers, had corrupted this sense. In order to understand such people and go about with them, one first had to find out what they believed to be the will of God for humanity. Which specific set of laws did the Hindus mistake for God's revelation? The early colonials looked for the answer in the text of Manu, the supposed 'ancient law giver', and in the dharmashastra tradition more generally. Because of this theological background, the colonial policy of religious toleration identified a pattern in the Indian traditions, which was completely alien to the latter. They not only located a 'Hindu sacred law' in the shastras, but also identified a particular group of scholars, the so-called pundits, as the interpreters of this law. Thus, certain texts and scholars, which had played a different and relatively minor role in the Indian traditions, were turned into the core of the Indian culture and society. Moreover, the toleration policy also compelled the spokesmen of the Indian traditions to adopt this characterization: if they wished to continue their cultural practices, they had to prove that such practices were sanctioned by the Hindu scriptures. As a result, the opposition to colonial rule also gradually accepted the European experience as a true description of the Indian traditions. Today's debates between secularism and Hindutva, my paper will argue, take place within the same framework

Marianne Keppens

Paper Title : The Caste System and Aryan Invasion Theory