What is the relationship between vernacular languages and the birth of “Hindutva?” Despite Sanskrit’s notoriety as the language of Brahminical articulation, when Hindutva or Hindu Nationalism broadly as a political movement was born in the late nineteenth century, the vernacular became the language of its political articulation. In this paper, I probe and problematize a raucous public debate that took the religious life of Bengal by storm in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the heart of it was a polemical exchange between Brahmos and (self-identified) Hindus surrounding the nature of idolatry. As Brahmos chastised Hindus, castigating them of idol worship, those who defended image worship self-essentialized it as a fundamental fulcrum of a Hindu identity. Thus, through this debate of what Hindus worshipped emerged the identitarian category of who was a Hindu. This public articulation in the vernacular, discursively produced the category of the “Hindu.” The entirety of the public controversy was carried out in colloquial Bengali and in the medium of the Print, and the exchanges were widely accessible to the educated middle-class/caste readership. The public nature of this controversy in the vernacular, I argue, allows us a glimpse into the connection between religion, language, and a Hindu identity formation in a colonized society.
The late nineteenth century was not the first time Hindus and Brahmos locked horns about the nature and scope of idolatry within Hindu theism. The genealogy of this disagreement dates back to the early nineteenth century and the formative years of the Brahmo movement. Rammohan Roy (ca. 1772-1833), the earliest Brahmo proponent, suggested that the true essence of Hinduism lay in worshipping the formless monotheistic embodiment of the divine. While Rammohan had his detractors during his lifetime, the controversy around image worship subsided soon after his death among the colonized elite (Sen 2012: 81). In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the image worship debate saw a renewal of interest, capturing the public imagination in Bengal. Scholars trace the resurgence of the debate to a missionary named W. Hastie. In 1882 Hastie wrote a series of libelous letters in the English daily Statesman condemning Hindu idolatry (Ramos 2017). Many public intellectuals in Bengal at the time, led by the administrator novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, defended idol worship on the face of Hastie’s “vituperative rhetoric (Ganguly 2017).”
While scholars have attended to Hastie and Chattopadhyay’s disagreements, what has gone unnoticed (partially) is that the diatribe between the two ignited an older strife between Brahmos and Hindus around idol worship. Shortly after Bankim’s exchanges with Hastie, Hindu and Brahmo authors inundated Bengali periodicals with voluminous publications to disprove each other’s theological positions. By the 1890s, the contestation between the two camps had taken a rather acerbic turn. Periodicals would feature caustic arguments and counterarguments, with authors employing acrid language and even taking recourse to personal attacks. All of this, as mentioned above, was mediated through the bourgeoning institution of the printing press in Bengal. As Amiya Sen has documented (1993), at this time, print played an instrumental role in the dissemination of ideas associated with the Hindu “revivalist” movement. Several institutions and organizations closely associated with the revivalist movement in Bengal published their mouthpieces. Widely popular periodicals such as the Dharmapracharak and Hindu Patrika, among others, spearheaded this debate against Brahmo ideals.
I argue that at a time when Hindu identarian politics was wrestling with the question of what constituted “Hindu” identity, image worship served as a central axiom of self-determinism. What Hindus worshipped became a crucial piece of the puzzle of what constituted a “Hindu” identity. For late nineteenth-century authors who identified themselves as “Hindus,” image worship distinguished them from the Brahmos, for whom such an act suggested a corrupted worship engendered by inferior theologies. Image worship had become one of the self-essentializing features of Hinduism that these authors used to define and distinguish this homogeneous religious identity.
This paper studies these debates that were taking place in the realm of vernacular religious literature and weigh in on the debate about the “colonial construction” of Hinduism. I argue that these articulations about image worship discursively crafted the category of the “Hindu.” Secondly, there was an interesting paradox at play in this public controversy. As Brahmos had established that image worship had no validity in the high scriptures of Hinduism, such as the Vedas and the Upanishads, Hindu authors had to creatively invent a past and a theology of Hinduism. Much of this defense of “Hindu values of image worship” was based on obscure Sanskrit texts, vernacular religious literature, and biographies of saints, which were extracted from catacombs of anonymity and reimagined as canonical literature of Hinduism. Thus, not only did this debate craft identitarian notions of Hinduism, but it also conjured a new vocabulary of Hindu theology.
Over the last decade or so, scholars have, for good measure, debated the status of the taxonomy “Hinduism.” While the literature is infinitely complex and opinions are as varied as the scholars who participate in the discussion, there exist broadly two strands of divergent thought. On the one hand, scholars emphasize the colonial and constructivist nature of “Hinduism.” These authors, to varying degrees, point to the bureaucratization of the colonial government in crafting and reifying an essentialized category of Hinduism. Abetted by the British state, Hinduism served as a capacious canopy of divergent beliefs, sects, and practices that barely shared any relationship with each other but were standardized as a cohesive entity through colonial encounters (Kopf 1980; Oddie 2006; Pennington 2005). On the other hand, we have a scholarly opinion highlighting the pre-colonial existence of a shared nature of practice, beliefs, and intellectual currents, which Hindus adhered to in some varying degree (Lorezen 1999; Doniger 2010). There are merits to both sides of these arguments, and no amount of empirical or rhetorical evidence can prove the validity of one side over the other. However, the debate about image worship in the vernacular printing praxis can shed some light on this scholarly disagreement in a meaningful way.
What is the relationship between vernacular languages and the birth of “Hindutva?” Despite Sanskrit’s notoriety as the language of Brahminical articulation, when Hindutva or Hindu Nationalism broadly as a political movement was born in the late nineteenth century, the vernacular became the language of its political articulation. Here, I probe and problematize a raucous public debate in Bengal in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the heart of it was a polemical exchange between Brahmos and Hindus surrounding the nature of idolatry. As Brahmos chastised Hindus, castigating them of idol worship, those who defended image worship self-essentialized it as a fundamental fulcrum of a Hindu identity. This public articulation in the vernacular (at least in Bengal), discursively produced the category of the “Hindu.” This controversy, I argue, allows us a glimpse into the connection between religion, language, and a Hindu identity formation in a colonized society.