This series of posts is excerpted from a chapter from a forthcoming book titled After “World Religions”: Reconstructing Religious Studies, edited by Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson.
Using ideology critique in courses I’m required to teach
like “Religions of the East” is made more difficult by the fact that students
expect a survey of a wider variety of materials, not all of which are as
easily interpreted in light of a theory of ideology—in part because I am not an
expert in all of the matters that students assume we will cover, and also because
students often lack any prior familiarity with some of the material and require
very basic instruction (that is, we can’t historicize claims about karma,
samsara, varnas, and class dharma until students learn what those terms mean).
I’m simply not knowledgeable enough about, e.g., the social contexts in which
the Rig Veda was written, to apply this form of critique. Of course, it is
likely impossible that any single instructor could have the in-depth knowledge
necessary to historicize all of the texts that students expect to be surveyed
in a broad “world religions” curriculum. However, despite this, it is
nevertheless still possible to emphasize how cultural tropes are recycled and
changed over time, even if the interests served in all particular social
contexts aren’t easily discerned.
In my
“Religions of the East” course, when covering “Hinduism” I assign
selections from ancient texts, including the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the
Bhagavad Gita, and then we jump all the way to the late nineteenth and twentieth
century with a collection of writings by Vivekananda. We discuss the fact that
although almost all “Hindus” write as if the Vedic sources are the most
authoritative—as they are the oldest—the Vedas nevertheless show little
resemblance to the themes, norms, or cosmology of the Upanishads and the Gita.
In fact, the philosophical cosmology that ends up becoming more or less
dominant and which is assumed by Vivekananda—involving the characterization of
Brahman as a divine substance, the wheel of samsara on which the atman is
continually reincarnated, the end goal of escape from samsara, etc.—is derived
more from the Upanishads. In addition, we note that while the Upanishads seem
to be concerned with the renunciation of action as a means of liberation from
samsara, the Gita criticizes that means and emphasizes instead the discipline
of acting according to class duty or bhakti worship of the gods. When we jump
to Vivekananda, it we note that he picks up some of these elements from these
texts, discards others, and weaves in a few modern ideas as well.
In retrospect, what we’ve been calling “Hinduism” doesn’t
look much like an unfolding essence so much as an evolving collection of
cultural elements with no apparent lowest common denominator among all the
elements. Thus I ask students: if “Hinduism” is a cultural tradition in a
process of ongoing evolution, but is lacking both a common set of teachings and
a stable canon anchoring the tradition, in what sense can we say it is “a”
tradition? If the Vedas and Vivekananda teach completely different things, on
what ground can we call them part of the “same” cultural tradition?
At
this point British colonialism becomes an important economic and political
context for understanding this invention of Hinduism, and I’ve found selections
from Rethinking Hindu Identity by
D.N. Jha are helpful for leading students through these considerations. When
the British arrived in India they began identifying and emphasizing some
Indians as Hindu and others as Muslim in a manner out of proportion to prior native
identifications; in addition, they tied those identities to the colonial
administration such that it put “Hindus” and “Muslims” in an
unprecedented zero-sum game. As a result, some “Hindu” intellectuals invented
this myth of an ancient Hindu identity tied to the land, with the corollary
that “Muslims” (and others) could not rightly claim power or perhaps even
belong in India. Jha writes, “indigenous propaganda writings … demonize[d] Muslims
and Christians, and propagate[d] the idea that India and Hinduism are eternal.”
On this view, “Hinduism” is thus not a “world religion” existing from eternity
or even from the creation of the Vedas; on the contrary, it is a nineteenth
century invention as a part of propaganda designed to advance the interests of
those who identified as “Hindus” against those who identified as “Muslims.
I
make it clear to my students that if we had a time-machine and went back to
talk to the authors of the Vedas or the Upanishads, they wouldn’t
identify as Hindus and wouldn’t have any idea what Hinduism was. Consequently,
one wonders, for what reason am I assigning the Vedas and the Upanishads in a
class about Hinduism? The answer, quite simply, is that the framework created
by nineteenth century propagandists has such a hegemony and an inertia that
even scholarship on India follows the propagandists’ paradigm. It is somewhat
odd, of course, that political propaganda has served as the basis for scholarly
approaches to the subject matter; however, for better or for worse, scholars
are never able to fully lift themselves to a presumably “objective” perspective
above the fray of the rest of the world’s power relations.
By
the end, it turns out we haven’t been studying “Hinduism” in itself but
rather a number of disparate ideological texts with competing teachings that
have no common thread, other than the fact that they were put together by
nineteenth century propagandists who collected them under the taxon “Hinduism.”
Two goals have been served at once: on the one hand I’ve surveyed the
literature that students expect the course will cover based on their stereotype
of what Hinduism is, yet at the same time we’ve dismantled that stereotype and
shown it to be a creation that was invented to serve a particular set of
political interests at a particular juncture in history. The cultural
inheritance that is gathered together, retrospectively, as “Hinduism” is the
result of human groups continually recycling their inheritance, always adding
some elements and dropping others, and in each case putting their inheritance
to new purposes. While as a non-expert I cannot historicize all of the texts
and cannot always demonstrate the political purposes to which the texts were
put at various times, I can sufficiently historicize certain points and the
creation of “Hinduism” as a whole to undermine the world religions paradigm and
substitute a theory of culture, ideology, and social formation.
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