Invitation to World Religions

The History of Hinduism  133

Colonial Critique and the Hindu Reformers When employees of the British East India Company established an imperial pres- ence in India in the late eighteenth century, they initially adapted themselves to local customs and practices. They learned regional languages, married into local families, and even embraced local religious beliefs. One particularly colorful ex- ample is Charles Stuart (1758–1828), an Irish general in the Bengal Army (“Bengal” in this case refers to the area of eastern India between the Bay of Bengal and the Himalayas). Stuart was such an avid admirer of Hinduism that his colleagues nick- named him “Hindoo Stuart.” His book, Vindication of the Hindoos (1808), was in- tended to discourage the ever-growing support for British missionaries who sought to convert Hindus to Christianity. When these missionaries tried to embarrass Stuart by calling attention to aspects of Hindu mythology that seemed strange to Westerners, he eloquently wrote in response: “Whenever I look around me in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgment, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral allegory that the world has ever produced.” 11 But not everyone involved with the British East India Company admired Hindu beliefs and customs. Many felt that the “primitive backwardness” of Hindu belief was enough to warrant colonial intervention. By the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury, and certainly after the 1857 Indian Uprising (referred to as the “Mutiny” by British chroniclers, but as the “First War of Independence” by many Indian histori- ans), the attraction to Hinduism and Indian culture represented by figures such as “Hindoo” Stuart and the linguist William “Oriental” Jones (whom we met earlier in this section) began to fade. As the commercial and administrative presence of the British East India Company gave way to the colonial control of the British Crown, critiques of Hinduism became an increasingly important means of exerting political power over the subcontinent. One of the major effects of the British presence on Hinduism was a shift to English as the common language of religious written discourse (although Sanskrit retained its role as the primary priestly language). Other major effects on Hinduism resulted from the prevalence of Christianity and its Bible. In the nineteenth cen- tury, Hindus began to reassert the place of the Vedic texts, especially the Upani- shads, as the authoritative foundation of their religion. This trend toward a more book-based religion continued, although by the early twentieth century, it was the Bhagavad Gita rather than the Upanishads that emerged as the most popular text of Hinduism. To this day, Hindus tend to regard the Bhagavad Gita much as Jews and Christians regard the Bible.

By the mid-nineteenth century, amid the movement to reassert the authority of the Vedic texts, English-educated Hindus took up the work of reform as a response to colonial critiques of Hinduism. They, too, began deriding Hinduism’s many gods, erotic symbolism, temple worship, and rituals as crass corruptions of the PROPERTY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS