FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

But, why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?
--Benedict Anderson1

In 1895 a bitter dispute broke out in the north Indian town of Vazirabad between the Arya Samaj, a Hindu revivalist group, and orthodox Hindu intellectuals. The dispute centered on the rationality and legitimacy of shrãddha, the ritual of ancestor worship. The Arya Samaj, established in 1875, denounced this and other Hindu rituals as manifestations of superstitious beliefs invented by priestcraft and contrary to the scientific wisdom contained in the Vedas, which it considered the authentic source of Hinduism. The orthodox Hindu intellectuals of Vazirabad took exception to the Arya Samaj's relentless attack on shrãddha, as unscientific and illegitimate, and agreed to a debate. The disputation was held in May 1895 to answer the question, Should the ancestral ritual propitiate only the living or both the living and the dead? Pandit Ganesh Datta Shastri, arguing the orthodox case, wrote an essay in Sanskrit defending the ritual against the Arya Samaj, which was represented by two scholars who jointly wrote an essay on the subject.2 The two sides disagreed on the impartiality of the Indian Orientalist judges and forwarded the essays to Max Müller at Oxford for arbitration. Müller replied in September 1896, stating that ancestor worship, found among both Aryan and non-Aryan nations, arose "simply from a very natural human feeling to give up something that is dear to us, to those who were dear to us."3 No one asked if the departed came back to eat the offerings made. The shrãddha encompassed both the departed and the living; the ceremony was held when remaining members of the family partook of a meal offered to both the living and the dead. Soon, however, superstition took over and people began to believe that the departed returned in bodily shapes to partake of the offerings, and "then the scoffers began to say that the Shraddhas were absurd because the departed spirits were never seen to consume them or benefit from them."4 Müller then quoted from the Vedas to establish that the ceremony honored both the dead and the living. Apparently the Arya Samajists, stung by Müller's verdict, responded by hiring drummers who paced up and down the town, drumming the charge that the letter was forged.

At the center of the dispute over shrãddha, was its authorization as a rational and scientific ritual. Such a framing of the authority of Hinduism may appear peculiar, but it illustrated the extraordinary burst of conviction in the antiquity and authenticity of Hindu science that British India witnessed during the late nineteenth century. This conviction was shared by Hindu intellectuals ranging from religious reformers to practicing scientists who spoke repeatedly and obsessively of a forgotten but true religion of the ancient Hindus and contrasted it with the "irrationality" and "corruption" of contemporary Hinduism. Attributing the contemporary state of Hinduism to the loss of ancient Hindu science, these intellectuals seized on such issues as the existence of the caste system, the condition of women, and the grip of priesthood and rituals to demonstrate that irrationality and unreason had so overpowered the Hindus as to render them powerless before the West.

The criticism of indigenous traditions was not new; contrary to British beliefs, Hindu religious practices included lively traditions of critical thought. What was new, however, was the invocation of science's authority in the critique of religion and society. The beginnings of this authority can be traced back to the early-nineteenth-century "civilizing mission," which identified reason with the West. A sense of awakening to reason and of a renaissance took hold among the emergent Western-educated elite, which saw itself as uniquely placed to reform and revive traditions. Its project of reform expanded and took a new shape after the 1830s, when colonial policies began to change under the combined influence of utilitarianism, evangelicalism, and the successful attack against Orientalist learning. As new technologies of governance--geological and land surveys, census operations, mining, telegraphs, railways, medical and sanitary establishments--emerged, they became modes of articulating science's authority. Science came to signify not just scientific research in laboratories but also new forms of rule and authority; it became a metaphor for rationality, modernity, and power. Thus, even as Indians took up scientific education and research, the reach of science's authority extended far beyond the laboratory to function as a grammar of social and cultural transformation. Formed in this milieu, the Hindu educated elite projected science as the true heritage of its religion and culture and represented itself as the agent for the "recovery" of the nation supposedly lost to myth and superstition. There appeared powerful movements to reconfigure the flawed body of contemporary Hinduism in the immaculate shape of ancient Hindu science, and Hindu intellectuals reached back for the ancient knowledge of the Hindus to recover the space of the modern nation. Such efforts were reinforced by the findings of European Orientalists and Indian scholars showing that the ancient Indian culture could rightfully boast of significant achievements in fields ranging from mathematics to medicine. Elaborating, substantiating, and seizing on these findings, Hindu intellectuals claimed that their ancient religion discovered and incorporated scientific truths, that science was Hindu. With science signifying religion, culture, and the nation, not just laboratory practices, the representation of the modern nation as the return of archaic Hindu science became a compelling and enduring trope in the nationalist imagination, a trope that survives powerfully into the present.

1. Benedict Anderson, "Narrating the Nation," Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1986, p. 659.

2. [Ganesh Datta Shastri], Shãstrãtha beech _rya Samãj aur Pandit Ganesh Datta Shastri [The Disputation between the Arya Samaj and Pandit Ganesh Datta Shastri] (Lahore, 1896), pp. 1-16, provides details leading up to the disputation and the personalities involved.

3. Quoted in ibid., p. 19.

4. Quoted in ibid., p. 20.

Gyan Prakash is associate professor in the department of history, Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990) and the editor of After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995). He is currently preparing a manuscript on science and the imagination of modern India.