Dilip Menon Religion & Colonial Modernity

Religion and Colonial Modernity: Rethinking Belief and IdentityAuthor(s): Dilip M. MenonSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 17 (Apr. 27 - May 3, 2002), pp. 1662-1667Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4412047 .Accessed: 07/02/2014 07:23

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Religion and Colonial Modernity Rethinking Belief and Identity

This paper while questioning the assumption that religious imaginary preceded modernity, argues for the need to seriously address the fashioning of the caste self and a

new collectivity within a religious imagining under colonialism. Colonial structures of governance often ignored the alternative realms - ties of locality and kinship often

articulated in religious terms - which, emerged, opposed and even were antagonistic to the idea of a national identity. In the south, the attraction of the lower castes for Christianity was partly prompted by the need to move away from the cycle

of oppression and inequality and also because the religion allowed for their entry into a wider public sphere, as individuals.

DILIP M MENON

he term modernity comes to us masking both its origins within a distinct geographical space as well

as an imagination almost entirely concerned with a description of change in Europe and America (what we refer to euphemistically as the west). It is precisely because the term modernity appears to be neither tem- porally or geographically grounded that there is an increasing suspicion towards its relevance as a term for understanding historical change. David Harvey preferred a more limited and perhaps, more accurate definition of modernity as a cultural mani- festation of early twentieth century capi- talism. He emphasised the duality inherent in this idea; though it was premised on relations within the world systems as a whole, particularly colonialism, its mani- festations were more evident in Europe and North America.1 As Anthony King has argued recently, the recent claims advanced by a theory of postmodernism which pre- mises itself on ideas of globalisation, international migration, hybridisation and so on, may be nothing more than a belated recognition by western theory of 'the world outside themselves', a world already both forcibly integrated as well as fragmented by colonialism.2 Any idea of modernity has to be understood within the historical and cultural context of its rendition keeping in mind the already given

constraints of the operation of global capital and its requirements. Hence we need to begin to think with the idea of a colonial modernity, and if we follow King we could argue that it is indeed in the colonies that the effects of modernity are felt while the contours of the idea may be European.

Colonial modernity represented a com- promise both with metropolitan modernity as well as indigenous traditions. David Washbrook puts it pithily when he remarks that during the early 19th century, "the history of the world was bowdlerised according to Modernity".3 The presumed universal project of modernity expressed itself within colonies in contradictory ways, its rhetoric and practice at great variance. Ranajit Guha explores in detail how colonial rule was characterised less by a reforming urge than a "vast tolerance of pre-capitalist values and institutions in Indian society". In fact, colonialism could have continued in India as a relation of power only if the colonising bourgeoisie " should fail to live up to its universalist

.project".4 A significant example would be the idea of the individual thatdid find legal expression in the notion of equality before the law. However, in practice, the individual was subordinated to a perception of the community as the unit of social and political order. Individuality was located

in a traditional 'private' sphere within which colonialism feared to tread.5 Simi- larly, the rhetoric of freedom manifested in notions of free labour existed alongside the sanctioning and sometimes even revival of forms of coerced servitude, even after the reluctant, formal abolition of slavery in the mid 19th century. And the fundamentally hierarchical and inegalitar- ian notion of caste cafhe to preside alongside religion as an irreducible essence of Indian civilisation, amidst colonial profes- sions of the institution of equality.6 Modernity became the rhetoric rather than the project of colonialism.

Aspects of Modernity

The term colonial modernity has come to acquire a delightful vagueness in recent writing. It is never very clear whether it is (i) a spatial term, i e, modernity occurring within a colony rather than the metropolis (as in Partha Chatterjee's idea of 'our modernity'), or (ii) a temporal term, i e, modernity experienced while under colonialism or indeed (iii) some perversion of Modernity occurring in the colonies. Sometimes it is called upon as a discursive strategy out of a current interpretive paradigm centred on elemental units such as nations rather than relationships; tired oppositions between self/other, state/na-

1662 Economic and Political Weekly April 27, 2002


tion; and the tendency to disavow power differentials as in a 'simple anti-colonialism' and the 'double-binds of colonial discourse theories'.7 One of the specific features of a colonial modernity that I wish to address is the use of religion as a mode of self-fashioning, social understanding and public critique by Indian intellectuals. The late 19th century in India is seen as the period of the emergence of nationalism and the imagining of a national community. In Benedict Anderson's formulaic modular account, there is an element in the argument that is generally ignored by readers: the imagining of the nation is the result of a need to create a new kind of believing community following the ero- sion of religious certainty consequent on modernity. In Anderson's seductive prose

Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary.8 The nation (and the novel in a particular

exemplar of the argument) becomes an expression of the disenchantment of the world and the need for a secular imagination of community. One can now see the classic lineaments of an outmoded modernisation theory here: modernity, secularism, individualism, and the nation come together in a seamless and unques- tioned sequence. Need modernity pre- clude a religious imaginary? I shall argue otherwise.

We need to address seriously the fashioning of the caste self and a new collectivity within a religious imagining under colonialism. While studying Malayalam novels written by lower caste novelists of the 19th century, it became clear to me that three questions have to be borne in mind: colonial modernity, the fashioning of the self and the centrality of the religious imagination as a way of reflecting on the social self. Sandria Freitag makes the point that British structures of governance fol- lowed the lead of the state and neglected to integrate an alternative realm that had emerged. The forms of imagined community that this realm generated were not those of national identity and may even have been in antagonism to it. In contra- distinction to an arena constituted by political discourse (nationalist rhetoric imagined in opposition to the colonial state, for instance), the other arena represented an arena of "localised, familial and fictive kin-based activities, frequently articulated in terms with religious and

kinship resonances". Freitag suggests that there may have been an expansion of a 'devotional' idiom to cover a range of reconstructions of the self and community.9 Moreover, particularly for lower caste groups, the blandishments of the nation mean very little since it seemed to involve exchanging one subsumption of identity (within Hinduism) for another (within the nation) without addressing the central questions of hierarchy and inequality.10

That lower castes chose to think with religion in their engagement with colonial modernity need not suggest that they were caught within a time warp wherein they fell back on older modes of thought. Drawing insights from the recent historio- graphy of Britain, Christopher Bayly has argued that we need to emphasise the commanding importance of religion in British social thought into the 20th century. The 19th century imperial state was mirrored and informed by a British Prot- estant spiritual empire. "Anglo-India from 1828 to 1857 could be characterised as a covert confessional state".11 Missionary effort, both in education as well as the creation of a vernacular press created a parallel reaction in which organisations began to "project a novel version of a public, all-India Hinduism under attack from western interference". This new Indian public sphere of the 19th century as he points out, represented a conflict- ridden convergence of "Indian ecumenical debate and British crypto-Christian public doctrine".12

The debates informing the creation of a 'public sphere' arose too out of these contradictions of a specifically colonial modernity. Sandria Freitag has argued that the colonial state, working on the assumption that distinctions between 'private' and 'public' were easily made, identified itself as the protector for 'general' and 'public' interests, relegating 'private' or 'particular' interests to an increasingly reified notion of community. This was premised on two related assumptions; that the state's institutions could accommodate all 'political' issues and that issues relating to religion, kinship and so on were apolitical. The removal of the state from what it perceived as private issues allowed Indians to 'experiment and contest freely the status and ideo- logical constructs they expressed in public'.13

While in north India, such collective activities were often connected to new

developments in the institutionalisation and practice of religion, in the south they came to centre on the issue of caste. A central element in this burgeoning debate was the Christian missionary presence. Evangelical Christianity saw inequality and superstition as the defining features of the indigenous world-view, starting off a chorus of assent as much as revivalist dissent. Missionary rhetoric gave a new and radical spin to the hitherto abstract idea of individuals, subjected equally to the rule of law. To be an individual was to construct oneself against a collective imagination of a well-regulated hierarchy; it was a matter of both affect and reason. If caste defined the organisation of community and the subordination of the individual within it, missionary discourse posited the choosing, reflective person as the premise of a new community of equality and brotherhood in Christ. Hindu re- vivalism responded by announcing its own renewed sense of community but the question of the individual was put in abeyance as it would raise the exigent issue of inequality within Hindu ranks. Some were more individual than others within Hinduism.

Christianity was the interface through which lower castes experienced modernity. And it was Christianity that allowed for their entry into a public sphere generated by inter-religious discussions. Such discussion as we have on the emergence of a public sphere in late 19th century India concerns itself largely with the activities of elite groups, either professional classes or mercantile groups. The idea that the lowest castes could be party to the expansion of the sphere of public debate seems beyond consideration. The missionary interface meant in a sense a proliferation of print and the,appearance of textbooks, journals and magazines.14 A number of the journals funded by missionaries were not only purveyors of sacred information but more important, a secular concern with geography, the sciences and the constitution of the social world. Potheri Kunhambu, probably the first novelist from a lower caste in India, wrote his pieces inveighing against the inequities of caste in the pages of Keralapatrika, and Keralasancari. Joseph Muliyil encoun- tered the novel Saguna by the Christian convert Krupabai Sathianathan (which inspired him to write his own novel Sukumari), in thejournal Keralopkari. The missionary journals not only democratised access to a literate sphere of debate and

Economic and Political Weekly April 27, 2002 1663


knowledge, they provided an alternative sphere of reflection on self and society. It was not only at the level of cerebration that lower castes entered the new public sphere of debate. In colonial Madras, Paraya converts had been agitating over a whole range of secular concerns including pro- tests against the delimiting of their neighbourhoods or 'paraceris', by colonial authorities as well as agitating to get their caste headmen appointed as leaders of Christian convert communities.15 Christianity and caste were the motors of the public sphere in south India.

It is not that historians of south Asia have ignored the idea of religion under modernity; it is just that they have tended to study religion as public ideology rather than as individual faith. The phenomenon of communalism, cast as the Other of a secular nationalism, has been extensively ex- plored in the modernist paradigm of history writing in India within which religion has been seen as the marker of an atavistic imagination not yet ready for the abstract citizenship of the Nation. It is this that occasioned Rustom Bharucha's passion- ate pamphlet which sought to search for 'new languages of faith' in order to differentiate religious belief from fundamentalism.16 Gauri Viswanathan has recently remarked on this reluctance of historians to take the question of individual belief seriously in the age of modernity and their proclivity to place religious identity at a stage of historical development prior to the emergence of the nation. Moreover, the modern secular state is more comfortable with regarding religion more as a category of identi- fication, than as a marker of subjectiv- ity.17 She draws upon Talal Asad's sug- gestive and nuanced work, which looks at the historical changes in the understanding of religion: from a knowledge producing activity to an otherworldly passive repository of beliefs. The marginalisation of questions of belief has meant an inability to conceptualise the 'position of belief in self-constitution'. She raises the following important questions about the 'meaning' of conversion.

What might be the link between the struggle for basic rights and the adoption of religions typically characterised as minority religions? What limitations of secular ideo- logies in ensuring these rights do acts of conversion reveal? Does that act of expo- sure align conversion closely with cultural criticism?18

In the colonial period, religion becomes a means of reflection both on the self as well as society - an act of cultural criticism.

Study of the Self

Let us take the advent of autobiography: a genre that presumes notions not only of an individual self, but also ideas of interio- rity and the placing of the individual in a historical and moral continuum. How has that which I recognise as 'I', changed over time? Tanika Sarkar in her account of the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman Rashsundari Debi in 1868 shows how she came to structure her narrative on the pattern of the Chaitanya Bhagavat. 'It was as if the two lives - God's and the devotee's - were intertwined within a single narrative frame, interanimating each other'.19 One way of understanding this rendition would be to see it as Dipesh Chakrabarty does; that women's narra- tives "being tied to the mytho-religious time of the kula...escapes and exceeds bourgeois time..."20 The casting of Rashsundari's life within an older narrative of religious biography could then be simply understood as a result of her being beached on the sands of another tempo- rality. However, implicit in this are two questionable assumptions. First that a universal rendition of modernity has managed to create a clear wedge in people's minds between secular, linear time and a mythic, presumably circular one. Second, and even more problematic, that woman represents that fraction of a culture that remains untouched by modernity; a gendered denial of coeval-ness is being practised here. To move away from this sentimental, conservative strain is to ap- prehend the possibility that modes of imagination are not directly related to changes in either political or economic conditions. That someone like Bankim- chandra may seek to recast the 'mythical' figure of Krishna within a 'historical' mode of enquiry does not make him any more 'modem' than Rashsundari who chooses a 'religious' mode to cast her 'secular' autobiography.21 That these modes of imagination can be seen as incompatible is itself a result of a false dichotomy engendered by the discourse of a universalising modernity. Of course, there may be differ- ences in their reappropriation of religion. Rashsundari looks to religion as a source of her selfhood, while Bankim seems to be more concerned with the fashioning of

a religious icon as a secular exemplar towards a resource for a public identity.

A look at Indulekha (1890), written by the upper caste Nair, Chandu Menon, the novel seen as the icon of Malayalam literature, is instructive. The themes pointed out by Anderson find resonance here but with a marked difference. An engagement with the modernist project of secularism and rationality is evident in the 18th chap- ter of the novel, situated significantly in Calcutta- the space of colonial modernity. It details a nightlong conversation between the hero, Madhavan, his father Govinda Panikkar and his uncle Govindan Kutty, which culminates in a sleep born out of the exhaustion of argument. This triad forms a continuum: the unreconstructed traditionalist father, the rational but religious son, and the atheist uncle given to citing Darwin, Huxley and the English atheist Charles Bradlaugh. It is a novel that engages the disenchantment of the world but the resolution is a reconciliation of the old and the new. When Govindan Kutty asserts that, "I think that as human knowledge increases, faith in religion must decrease", Panikkar snaps, "such a mon- strous doctrine as that could only be prompted by English education".22 Madhavan seeks to present Hinduism in a modern guise by arguing that the Mahabharata and the Bhagavatam are more works of literature rather than religion and should be seen as similar to the works of Milton and Shakespeare. Indian religious philosophy has both rational and atheistic traditions as seen in the Sankhya and other schools.23 He concludes by observing that "never does science teach us to deny the existence of a Supreme Power who is the first great cause of the universe".24 It is not without significance that the nascent Indian National Congress figures in the discussion as well. Again Madhavan calls for a qualified acceptance while the atheist uncle is prone to the call of the nation to be born. While the nation is an element in the imagination of Indulekha, it is only one among many and the overriding concern is with notions of the Nair self and community in the face of the modern

This paper is part of my ongoing engagement with three Malayalam novels situated within the public debates on caste inequality and the position of the former slave castes within 19th century Kerala, occasioned particularly by the challenge of Christianity. Ghatakavadham (The Slayer Slain) was written in 1864-65 by an English missionary known to history as



Mrs Collins and is as much concerned with issues of caste as the superiority of Prot- estantism over the indigenous Syrian Christianity. Her husband, with a few additions and revisions, published it in 1877. The plot deals with the change of heart of an arrogant Syrian Christian landlord, occasioned by the compassion and generosity of his untouchable Pulaya slave. Saraswativijayam (The Victory of Knowl- edge) was published in 1893, written by a Tiyya lower caste autodidact, Potheri Kunhambu, who advocated conversion to Christianity as a cure for the social evils besetting Hinduism, though he never converted himself. The novel deals with a dominant Namboodiri Brahmin landlord who embarks on a journey into the heart of the darkness within his soul after having occasioned the death of a Pulaya slave. The Pulaya, presumed dead, converts to Christianity and makes his own tryst with destiny. He becomes ajudge who presides over the trial of the Namboodiri. Sukumari (1897) is written by Joseph Muliyil, a Tiyya convert to Christianity and is set within a community of lower caste converts to the proselytising of the Basel Evan- gelical Mission. It is an enclosed world of Christians trying to negotiate new forms of self, family and community and is replete with anecdotes of mobility and salvation. The novels negotiate an uneasy terrain between perceiving conversion as a matter of spiritual illumination and as expressing an individual's shifting allegiance to community. This is a feature ofthe political context of British colonialism and the compro- mise of civil law with its concern for property and inheritance. As Gauri Viswa- nathan poignantly puts it, it is one of the distortions of a colonial modernity that "the epiphany of transcendence putatively marking the inner experience of conversion becomes a meaningless fantasy".25

It is significant that the three lower caste novels of the 19th century that I study in this paper see slavery as central to their narration. While they were written between the 1860s and the 1890s, their authors locate the story around the time of the abolition of slavery in India or just prior to it.26 The circumstance of the reluctant abolition of slavery in India in 1843 (10 years after the Emancipation Act of 1833) is a case in point of the distortions that a modern rhetoric of freedom underwent within a colonial context. The Act of 1843 was limited in scope since the Company as legislator was bound by a ruling of the Calcutta Sudder Court in 1798 that, inso-

far as rights to property in slaves were recognised by Hindu and Muslim law, they were valid in the Company's civil courts. It was only through criminal law that the Law Commission could attack slavery by endowing the slave with legal rights equal to that of their master.27 In Kerala, while there was no domestic slavery as in eastern India; most of the slave population con- sisted of Hindu slaves employed in agri- culture and known as field slaves or prae- dial slaves In 1819, the number of slaves in northern Kerala, largely belonging to the caste groups called Pulayas and Cherumas, was estimated at 1,00,000.28 In the evi- dence put before the parliament prior to the abolition of slavery, Alexander Walker drew upon his years of experience in Malabartomakethefollowing observation:

The Chermas are absolute property; they are part of the livestock on an estate. In selling and buying land it is not necessary that they should follow the soil; both kinds of property are equally disposable and may fall into different hands. The Chermas may be sold, leased, mortgaged, like the land itself or like any cattle or thing.29 It is possible to find the resonance of a

universal experience of slavery within the novels studied in this paper. The experience of loss, homelessness, and sudden, violent death loom large within the texts. The question of literary influence here is expressed in a radical gesture of affilia- tion. When Mrs Collins wrote Ghataka- vadham, she expressly referred to the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin, written in a place elsewhere but recording man's inhumanity to man. The connection between race/slavery and caste/subordination is quickly made, and this extraterritorial affinity offers a vantage point for critique. To a large extent, missionary discourse was responsible for this far-flung connection. Sanal Mohan has suggested that missionaries, in their desire not to use caste terms, called the converts by such names as 'peasant Christians' and 'slave Chris- tians'. The status of the lower caste converts as 'freedmen' then became important since this discourse could be rooted in a comparative reading of black American experience.30 More interesting is the rendition of the central characters. Uncle Tom - the forgiving and compassionate Chris- tian slave - and Evangeline St Claire - the young girl who redeems her father through her death, are recast as the Pulayan slave, Paulose and the Syrian Christian girl Mariam. The plots of the two novels are different but the characters embodying compassion and redemption are introduced

to start a new life within Malayalam literature. In Saraswativijayam, we have again, the young girl Saraswati as the conscience of the novel questioning the inequality of caste. Sukumari, the young Christian girl and Tejopalan the old and destitute man who adopts her are the dyad in Sukumari.31

Death as Motif

One way into the religious imagination in these novels is through studying the central trope in these novels, that of Death. In fact it is such an integral element of the plots that one may well ask why there are no deaths mentioned in the otherMalayalam novels of the period like 'Indulekha' or 'Lakshmikesavam'. Deaths figure in the historical novels of C V Raman Pillai, writing in the princely state of Travancore, but his novels are explicitly historical and deal with the carving out of the state in blood by its larger than life kings. Both Ghatakavadham and Saraswativijayam begin with a death. In the former, Koshy the landowner in a fit of rage kills a Pulaya boy after his labourers refuse to work on the Sabbath.32 In Saraswativijayam, a Pulaya labourer is kicked and left for dead for the simple crime of singing before a brahmin. In Sukumari, there are a profu- sion of deaths throughout the novel, occasioned by want and illness, rather than violence. The only people left standing are the protagonists, or perhaps we can iden- tify them as such because they are the only ones left! At one level there is the simple empirical fact of death - sudden and violent or a wasting one - which is part of the experience of lower casteness. Their lives are subject to the arbitrary whims of individuals and a structured devaluation of the value of their life itself. This is a tradition canonised in folk performances of the 'teyyattam', in which lower caste victims of unjust killing are deified and worshipped within a community of both lower and upper castes.33

The question is what are the 'deaths' made to mean? In the novels that we look at death appears as a notion of a life elsewhere. People die, or appear to, only to be reborn into a better life, whether in earth or, perhaps in heaven. There is a theodicy in operation here. A violent, contingent and irrational act naturalised as justifiable in terms of caste ideology, is rendered as a meaningful death. Within the teyyattam, death gives access to power. The performer of the 'teyyam', while possessed by the



deity, dances to the retelling of the story of the killing and castigates upper caste members of the audience. Within these novels death is given a meaning in two different ways. Each death in Sukumari, for example is a re-embodiment of the drama of redemption: just as Christ died to save the sinning, so the characters die to redeem. The young girl Manikkam dies of an illness, but in the hope of her mother realising the love of Christ. On her deathbed she has Pilgrim's Progress read out to her. The believer is burnt by his enemies and out of the ashes arises Hope. Manikkam believes that out of the sorrow caused by her death, her mother will emerge as a believer.34 Jnanabharanam dies to redeem her son from a possible life of avaricious- ness and deceit in the city. Tejopalan on his deathbed explicitly calls for Paul's Letter to the Corinthians to be read to him: 'Death where is thy sting, O grave thy victory'? In Ghatakavadham, the priest's wife is transformed from the local gossip into a devout Christian and loving wife only after the death of her eldest son.

The second theme, of death as misap- prehension, appears in Ghatakavadham and Saraswativijayam. Pulayan Paulose in the former and Marathan in the latter are presumed dead, launching their antago- nists on a journey into repentance and redemption. Paulose jumps into the raging river to save the life of little Mariam, even though her father Koshy had killed Paulose's grandson. "You killed my child, but I have saved yours. We are now equal". The "words of Paulose [fell] upon Koshy's heart like hot coals on some precious metal which melts away all impurities". 35 But equally important is the idea of the death of the 'caste' self. At the end of Ghataka- vadham, Koshy in search of Paulose stumbles on him preaching forgiveness and compassion to a congregation in the wilderness. Overcome with remorse, Koshy accepts the Pulayan as his teacher and equal, if not moral superior. "From now on, you are not my slave. I have known that you are more suited to be my master. I wish to learn from you".36 Marathan, presumed dead, finds his way to the near- est mission, and through sheer application elevates himself to judge the Brahmin who had condemned him to be killed. Death allows a movement to a place elsewhere, relieved of the baggage of inequality and caste.

Jane Tompkins analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin is relevant here. She argues that the 'sentimental novel' should be seen less as

answerable to certain formal criteria and more as a "political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory that both codifies and attempts to mould the values of its time".37 In Stowe's enterprise, dying becomes the supreme form of heroism; it brings an access to power not a loss of it.

The pure and powerless die to save the powerful and corrupt and thereby show themselves more powerful than those they save. They enact...a theory of power in which the ordinary and "commonplace" view of what is efficacious and what is not ...is simply reversed...the idea central to Christian soteriology, that the highest human calling is to give one's life for another.38 While the central Christian message of

redemption allows for a transformation of the everyday banality of death within the caste system, it is interesting to consider the fact that the appeal of social mobility and wealth were as important in these novels. There are two important features of the Protestant Christianity that came to Malabar that we have to bear in mind. The first was an unequivocal opposition to caste unlike the compromises arrived at by the Catholic missions concerned more with working along the faultlines of local society. The 1859 constitution of the Basel Evangelical Mission had stated in no uncertain terms, "any attachment of Evan- gelical Christians to the caste system is not permissible..." The Church Missionary Society in Travancore extended its activities to Hindus only from 1834; till then they had been active among Syrian Chris- tians. From the 1840s, the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society had been putting pressure on the monarchy for abolition of slavery or at least the sirkar giving up its slaves. The British missionary societies had a background in the 'Evangelical Revival' which partly explains their negative attitude towards caste. The individual had a moral obligation to live according to the word of god as revealed in the scriptures.39 Moreover, the Evan- gelism of the Basel Mission was the off- spring of Wurttemberg Pietism that was based primarily on craftsmen, petty com- mercial business entrepreneurs and small- scale manufacturers.40 It was the business community that provided Pietism with a link to the colonial world and as Fischer astutely observes, the Christianity that was exported emphasised "industriousness, efficiency and rationality" not only as the

hallmarks of a Christian existence but also the basic characteristic of modern man in general.

In this paper, I have tried to tie up the issues of colonial modernity and the think- ing of self as well as social criticism through religion. The colonial state, while it adopted the rhetoric of freedom and individual dignity, was reluctant to dismantle social structures like slavery that would involve both a loss of revenue as well as the allegiance of the landed groups who were their bulwark. Missionaries rushed in where the colonial state feared to tread. It was Christianity that appeared as the mediator of modernity to those who were wrestling with the problem of a subordinate identity. Religion proved good to think with. As Gauri Viswanathan' s nuanced work shows there appears to have been an intimate connection between the social criticism of subordinate groups (whether upper caste women like Ramabai or lower caste men like Ambedkar) and an anguished and persistent engagement with the eman- cipatory potential of religion and conversion. Of course, elite groups too turned to a refashioning of religious tradition (Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa among others), but for them it was easier to find a habitation within the resources of Hindu- ism itself. At one level this turn to religion may have arisen from the aborting of civil society under colonialism that denied citizenship to Indians. As Partha Chatterjee argues the loss of selfhood in the material sphere may have signalled the retreat into a questing within the spiritual realm, an autonomous sphere where the sources of the self could be mined. What this paper has suggested is that for the lower castes and subordinate groups a refashioning of Hindu tradition may still leave unresolved the question of their subalternity. They have to leave home. ll

Notes 1 See David Harvey, The Condition of

Postmoderity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change, London, 1989.

2 Anthony D King, 'The Time and Spaces of Modernity' in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash et al eds, Global modernities (London, 1997) and idem, 'Spaces of Culture, Spaces of Know- ledge' in Anthony King (ed), Culture. Globali- sation and the World System (London, 1991).

3 David Washbrook, 'From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-history of Modernity', Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40, 4 (1997), p 414.



4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Delhi, 1998), p 5, 64-5.

5 See David Washbrook, 'Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India', Modern Asian Studies, 15, 3, (1981).

6 See Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990); Nicholas Dirks, 'Castes of Mind', Representations, 37, 1992.

7 Tani E Barlow, "Introduction: On 'Colonial Modernity"' in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, 1997).

8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev edn, London, 1991), pp 11, 24-25.

9 SandriaFreitag, 'Introduction', special volume on Public Sphere in South Asia, South Asia, XIV, 1 (1991), p 3.

10 See Dilip M Menon, 'Caste and Colonial Modernity: Reading Saraswativijayam', Studies in History, XIII, 2, 1997.

11 Christopher Bayly, 'Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial hegemony', SouthAsia, XVII, 2 (1994), pp 4-5.

12 Ibid, p 25. 13 Sandria Freitag, 'Contesting in Public: Colonial

Legacies and Contemporary Communalism', in David Ludden (ed), Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Delhi, 1996), p 212.

14 N Sam, Keralathile Samuhika Navotthanavum Sahityavum [Social renaissance in Kerala and literature] (Kottayam, 1988).

15 See two recent unpublished MPhil. Dis- sertations submitted to the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1999: Aparna Bala- chandran, 'Caste, Community and Identity Formation: The Paraiyars in Late 18th and Early 19th Century Madras' and Bhavani Raman, 'The Emergence of the Public in 19th Century Tamil Nadu'.

16 Rustom Bharucha, The Question of Faith (Delhi, 1993), p 4, passim.

17 Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, p xii. 18 Ibid, p xvi-xvii. 19 Tanika Sarkar, 'A Book of Her Own. A Life

of Her Own: Autobiography of a Nineteenth Century Woman', History Workshop Journal, 36, 1993, p 36. See also Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win. The Making ofAmarJiban: A Modem Autobiography (Delhi, 1999).

20 Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal', History Workshop Journal, 36, 1993, p 26.

21 On Bankimchandra see Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness (Delhi, 1994).

22 0 Chandu Menon, Indulekha (Calicut, 1965), trans W Dumergue, p 301.

23 Ibid, pp 323-24. 24 Ibid, p 326. 25 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the fold:

Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Delhi, 1998), pp 88-89.

26 Ghatakavadham, begun in 1859, describes events of 'Twenty Years Earlier', Sukumari (1897) of 50 years earlier and Saraswati- vijayam (1893) has a direct reference to the ignorance regarding the abolition of slavery among upper caste landowners.

27 See Nancy Cassels, 'Social Legislation under the Company Raj: The Abolition of Slavery Act V 1843', South Asia, XI, 1 (1988), p 60.

28 Copy of despatch from the Governor-General of India in Council to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, February 8, 1841, Parliamentary Papers 1841, XXVIII (262) [henceforth PP]. For an excellent discussion of slavery in Kerala see K Saradamoni, Emergence ofa Slave Caste: Pulayas ofKerala (New Delhi, 1980).

29 Quoted in K Saradamoni, Emergence of a Slave Caste: The Pulayas of Kerala (Delhi, 1981), p 52.

30 Sanal Mohan, DalitDiscourse andthe Evolving NewSelf: Contextand Strategies, Lateral Study Series, 13. M G University, Kottayam, 1994, p 18.

31 For a very recent repetition see Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Delhi, 1998) viz, the relation between little Rahel and the lower caste Velutha.

32 The British Resident John Munro had exempted Christian converts from forced labour (uriyam) on Sundays, and by 1857, this practice was falling into disuse. See Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State:

Travancore, 1858-1936 (New Delhi, 1998), pp 60-62.

33 See Dilip M Menon, 'The Moral Community of the Teyyattam: Popular Culture in Late Colonial Malabar', Studies in History, IX, 2, 1993.

34 Sukumari, p 289. 35 Mrs Collins, Ghatakavadham [The slayerslain]

(Iottayam, 1977, first edn 1877), p 73. 36 Ibid, p 134. 37 Jane B Tompkins, 'Sentimental Power: Uncle

Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History', reprinted in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Norton Critical Edition ed, Elizabeth Ammons (New York, 1994), p 506.

38 Ibid, p 507. 39 See Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil

Society: Social and Religious Change in South India (1840-1900) (London, 1994), pp 61-62.

40 Quoted in Rudolph H Fischer, 'Christianis- ation and Social Mobility in 19th Century South Kanara and Malabar: A Look at the Basel Mission Experience' in G A Oddie ed, Religion in South Asia: Religious Conversion and Revival Movements in South Asia in Medieval and Modern Times (Delhi, 1991, rev edn), pp 126-7, 138.

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Issue Table of ContentsEconomic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 17 (Apr. 27 - May 3, 2002), pp. 1561-1692Front Matter [pp. 1561-1614]Letter to EditorBHU: Then and Now [pp. 1562+1692]

EditorialsPrivatisation and Corporate Control [pp. 1563-1564]The Other Tragedy [p. 1564]Groping for a Policy [pp. 1564-1565]Andhra's Initiatives [pp. 1565-1566]Good Intentions, but... [p. 1566]

Current Statistics [pp. 1567-1568]Calcutta Diary [pp. 1569-1570]Of Life, Letters and PoliticsOf Rallies and Reluctant Allies [pp. 1570-1571]

Money MarketCautious Capital Account Liberalisation [pp. 1572-1578]

CommentaryPutting Gujarat in Perspective [pp. 1579-1583]Creating Public Discredit for Asset-Grabbing [pp. 1585-1586]Trade Facilitation: A Singapore Issue Knocking at WTO's Door [pp. 1587-1590]Issues in Asset Liability Management - VII: Management of Securities Portfolios [pp. 1591-1593]An Indian in Pakistan [pp. 1593-1594]

PerspectivesPrivatisation: Gains to Taxpayers - and Employees [pp. 1595-1598]

Review of Women StudiesThe New Segregation: Reflections on Gender and Equity in Primary Education [pp. 1600-1613]Literacy, Power and Feminism [pp. 1615-1620]Enrolment, Dropout and Grade Completion of Girl Children in West Bengal [pp. 1621-1637]Gender and Curriculum [pp. 1638-1642]Pre-Adolescent Girls in Municipal Schools in Mumbai [pp. 1643-1646]Missing Indigenous Bodies: Educational Enterprise and Victorian Morality in Mid-19th Century Bombay Presidency [pp. 1647-1654]

ReviewsReview: A Life in Political Economy [pp. 1655-1657]Review: Science for Humanity or for Profit? [pp. 1658-1659]Review: Retelling History [pp. 1660-1661]

Special ArticlesReligion and Colonial Modernity: Rethinking Belief and Identity [pp. 1662-1667]Telecommunications Liberalisation: Critical Role of Legal and Regulatory Regime [pp. 1668-1675]Economic Reforms and Rural Poverty [pp. 1676-1685]Quality of Reproductive Care in Private Hospitals in Andhra Pradesh: Women's Perception [pp. 1686-1692]

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Dilip Menon Religion & Colonial Modernity

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