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Overview
From a variety of biographical sources, many of them in Bengali and never before used in research, the author makes available much valuable information. In his analysis of the interplay between the ideas, the consciousness, and the lives of these early rebels against the Hindu tradition, Professor Kopf reveals the subtle and intricate problems and issues that gradually shaped contemporary Indian consciousness. What emerges from this group portrait is a legacy of innovation and reform that introduced a rationalist tradition of thought, liberal political consciousness, and Indian nationalism, in addition to changing theology and ritual, marriage laws and customs, and the status of women.
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691642086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1548 |
| Pages: | 426 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind
By David Kopf
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03125-5
CHAPTER 1
Unitarian Social Gospel and the Foundations of Hindu Modernism
ON September 28, 1833, a funeral sermon was delivered for a Bengali by a prominent British Unitarian in the port city of Bristol on the west coast of England. Rammohun Roy had died a day earlier while visiting the Carpenter estate in Stapleton Grove. The Reverend Lant Carpenter, who had known of Rammohun and his work for fifteen years, spoke with great depth of feeling about the career of the "enlightened Brahmin from the British capital of Hindustan" who was "undoubtedly a Unitarian." "My heart is with the Unitarians," the Bengali had told Carpenter often.
The Unitarianism that in Carpenter's mind linked Rammohun to his British counterparts represented a new and radical approach to religion, society, and ethics. It was a pioneering faith that emerged out of the changing conditions of the nineteenth-century world. It challenged many of the religious presuppositions of the traditional societies of Eurasian civilizations. Though Unitarianism was never a mass movement, the implications of its protest had far-reaching effects among the modernizing intelligentsia in India. Three simple though radical ideas for the time (1815 to 1835) provided the link between the enlightened few in Calcutta and the enlightened few in England and the United States.
The first was liberal religion, or the substitution of a rational faith for the prevailing popular religions of the world, which, they thought, increasingly curtailed the freedom of human beings by enslaving them to mechanical rituals, irrational myths, meaningless superstitions, and other-worldly beliefs and values. The second was the idea of social reform, or emancipation in which all known penalized classes and groupings such as workers, peasants, and women were to be elevated through education and the extension of civil rights to participate fully in the benefits of modern civilization. Finally, there was the idea of universal theistic progress, or the notion that the perfectability of mankind could be achieved by joining social reform to rational religion.
"Though dead," said Lant Carpenter of Rammohun Roy, "he yet speaketh and the voice will be heard impressively from the tomb." That voice, which still can be "heard by his intelligent Hindoo friends," will continue to express the Unitarian credo:
It may excite them to renewed and increased effort to carry on the work of intellectual and moral improvement among their countrymen: to diffuse the pure light of religion which his writings contain, among those who are yet debased and superstitious; to give the advantages of a wise education to the young and uninformed to rise themselves and teach others to rise, above the narrow prejudices of caste and sex; and thereby weaken that thraldom which so much intercepts the progress of truth and virtue; and elevate by knowledge ... those who may thus be the friends and companions of the present generation and whose early instruction and training will so much promote the welfare of the next.
One tragic aspect of Rammohun's death was that it precluded a meeting with American Unitarians whom he admired, and with whom he had hoped to establish closer ties for coordinated Unitarian programs on an international scale. One, William Ellery Channing, whom a Unitarian later called the "Rammohun Roy of America," was, since the revolt of 1815, a leading spokesman of liberal Unitarianism in the United States. According to Lucy Aiken, who corresponded with Channing from England, and who had met Rammohun at various social gatherings in London, Rammohun had spoken to her on September 6, 1831, "of ending his days in America." "I have just seen the excellent Rammohan Ray," she wrote, "and he speaks of visiting your country ... and to know you would be one of his first objects." After Rammohun's death (October 23, 1833), she recorded sadly to Channing that "Ray has been frustrated of one of his cherished hopes, that of seeing you face to face, either in this or the other hemisphere."
The second American Unitarian with whom Rammohun evidently had long years of correspondence was Joseph Tuckerman. Indeed, the reason why Rammohun came to Stapleton Grove as the house guest of Lant Carpenter was to discuss preliminary matters in anticipation of Tuckerman's visit to England in 1833, when the Unitarian representatives of three cultures were to meet and discuss a common program of social action.
The ideology of liberal Unitarianism was slowly emerging from the parallel experiences of like-minded individuals in Boston, Bristol, and Calcutta. Channing, who was Rammohun's equal as an inventive and versatile genius, did not begin his revolt against the established church until 1815, when he was thirty-five years old. The main target within orthodoxy for the Harvard-trained Unitarian liberals such as Channing, Emerson, and Parker was Calvinist religion and ethics, with its stress on man's damnation and God's vengeance through the eternal fires of hell, as well as the notion of the predestined election of a privileged few. In orthodox Christianity generally, Channing and others repudiated all forms of religious revelation, the doctrine of Trinity, and those aspects of popular religious behavior that prohibited the human being from achieving that "sense of unity with God" experienced only by those dedicated "to a life of reason."
Most probably, however, the most radical departure in the thought of Channing and other Unitarians was not on the level of theology and religion. Though it is true that the abandonment of revelation for intuition led Unitarians into the mystical realms of monism and transcendentalism, when modified by reason and a constructive social philosophy this led not to other-worldliness but to intellectual emancipation. In fact, the general Unitarian outlook was itself a reflection of a new social conscience and consciousness.
According to one biographer, Channing was "not content to preach an arid religion from the moral isolation of the pulpit, but sought to realize his Christian ideals in the market place of daily living." In an important sermon entitled "Religion, a Social Principle," he referred to "progressive religion," which purifies men's minds by stressing "good done to others." "Religion was no private affair, between man and his maker," he said, "nor was it a secret to be locked up in our hearts." Rather, religion is to be "communicated, shared, strengthened by sympathy and enjoyed in common with all."
The underlying assumption of the new social gospel of Unitarianism is contained in a simple sentence by Channing, which was radical for the time he lived in: "every human being has a right to all the means of improvement which society can afford." Like most Unitarians, Channing was a staunch abolitionist, and believed that "never will man be honored till every chain is broken." He expressed a strong sympathy with those oppressed by colonialism, and in 1840 he viewed his own work in establishing night schools for workers as the start of a "social revolution." As he put it, "I see in it a repeal of the sentence of degradation passed by ages on the mass of mankind. I see in it the dawn of a new era, in which it will be understood that the first object of society is to give incitements and means of progress to all its members.
Joseph Tuckerman, with the same Bostonian upbringing and Harvard degree as Channing, was equally affected by the misery of the poor and underprivileged. In 1826 he left a well-to-do congregation to whom he ministered in order to work and live among the urban poor of Boston. Soon a chapel was constructed for his use, which was not only a religious center but a social welfare center designed to find ways and means of alleviating the agonies of poverty.
In 1839 a tract of Tuckerman's was published describing his philosophy of religion as a social gospel, and his method for coping with the problem of the poor. As was common with pre-Marxist reformers, he attributed poverty to intemperate habits, and rebuked those who profited from the small pay of poor workingmen — earnings that were diverted from family savings to gin mills. He was dismayed with the callous indifference of nominal Christians who "ignored the masses in the city" and made no allowance for the fact that these people would increase in proportion to the increase of urban areas. After describing the grim life of the poor, he advocated a program of moral training and attending to physical wants "as a means of inculcating the desire for self-improvement."
When Tuckerman came to England, in 1833, he immediately lectured in the new industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution, where he found cesspools of humanity living in conditions that defied description. Lant Carpenter's daughter, Mary, was so taken with Tuckerman's humanitarian spirit and practical efforts to help the poor that she turned to social work as a career. When in 1835 Tuckerman returned to America, he left behind him in Bristol a Society for Visiting the Homes of the Poor of the Congregation. The Carpenters could now gain entrance into the families of the poverty-stricken to render assistance to them directly. Mary Carpenter was its secretary for twenty years.
Lant Carpenter had himself come to the same conclusions as had the Americans about the need for religious leaders to help the poor. In 1817 he had first come to Bristol to take over the congregation at Lewin's Mead, a notorious slum neighborhood in the port city. There, like Tuckerman in Boston, this well-educated elitist could so modify his sermons as to be appreciated by the common man, and he was certainly the first minister at the Unitarian chapel to attract a mass following. Again like his American counterparts, he stressed education and moral training for the purpose of self-strengthening. Until his death in 1840, the same year Tuckerman died, Carpenter remained consistently liberal both socially and politically. Carpenter joined the antislavery agitation in 1824, he worked to alleviate the deplorable conditions in British prisons, and in 1831 he joined the great struggle for the passage of the Reform Bill.
Equally interesting are Carpenter's theological expositions on the new Unitarianism, which not unlikely influenced Rammohun Roy in Calcutta. In a discourse published as early as 1810, which Carpenter entitled On the Importance and Dissemination of the Doctrine of the Proper Unity of God, there is a brief but illuminating summary of the pillars of modern Unitarianism as it later came to be known after its formal inauguration in England and America in 1825. There was, for example, an eloquent defense of what may be termed the pivot of Unitarianism, or the belief in God without second, which is so reminiscent of Rammohun Roy in his own writings. There was the stress on Christ as the ethical teacher, which again recalls Rammohun's approach in his Precepts of Jesus written a decade later. There was Carpenter's defense of the Unitarian doctrine of atonement, which not only denied all the mystery and metaphysics surrounding the crucifixion, as well as the Calvinist view of sin and damnation, but also reestablished the image of a merciful God full of justice and compassion for mankind.
Besides rational theology and the social gospel, there appeared a third integral part of liberal Unitarian ideology, which not only set off Unitarians from the more orthodox Christians in their own culture, but contributed greatly to bridging the differences between themselves and the more enlightened portion of contemporary Calcutta society. That same liberal religious and social spirit which Unitarians attributed to their imitation of the true ethical Christ, they gradually extended tolerantly to peoples of all cultures. If most religious institutions of the time were moving away from the universal humanism and rationalism of the eighteenth century toward the romanticism and nationalist self-glorification of the nineteenth, Unitarians maintained an outgoing cosmopolitanism, which ultimately became the most significant pillar of the Unitarian faith.
On June 8, 1826, Joseph Tuckerman, in response to an appeal from Rammohun's Calcutta Unitarian Committee, printed and circulated a public letter addressed to American Unitarians asking for their support in missionary enterprises. Rammohun Roy, the Unitarian "spokesman of the East," began Tuckerman, has "solicited our assistance in establishing there in Calcutta a perpetual Unitarian mission." Tuckerman then went on to say that: "Native gentlemen in India have contributed largely to the cause of establishing Christian worship upon Unitarian principles, in their country; and they with their English associates, are earnestly requesting the aid of Unitarians in England and America for the accomplishment of their object."
Especially noteworthy about Tuckerman's letter was his commentary on the principles of missionary enterprise, which he appears to have shared with another sympathetic American Unitarian named Henry Ware (the same Henry Ware who had corresponded with Rammohun from as early as 1821). On the surface, Tuckerman's conviction that the Christian gospel was superior to anything indigenous in Asia for the purpose of effecting religious and social reform may seem to differ little from the attitude of the orthodox Christian missionary. But a closer examination of Tuckerman's position reveals that what he meant by Christianity was not the institutional trappings that followed Christ's death, but simply Christ's acknowledged teachings, which could be readily adapted anywhere. Rather than equate Christianity with Western civilization, he demonstrated how the benevolence of Christianity "modified and improved civil government and public morals [in the West]" itself.
Moreover, Tuckerman rejected the most common beliefs by orthodox missionaries that all non-Christians were heathens consigned for all time to damnation. Tuckerman could not accuse "God of partiality in conferring the benefit of revelation upon so small a portion of the human race." To him, it was a shockingly false idea "that the actual knowledge of revelation is necessary to salvation." His conclusion was that Christianity ought not to come to India to save souls, but to improve the human condition and society: "from what it has done, bad as Christianity is, we can demonstrate its adoption to the condition and to the wants of all men, and its tendency to an indefinite improvement of the human mind and character."
Channing's Remarks on Creeds, Intolerance, and Exclusion is equally revealing in the context of a developing Unitarian universal humanism. Christianity, he argued, was a spirit rather than a fixed creed, dogma, institution, or theological system. "Christian truth is infinite," he wrote, "it is a spirit ... of boundless love and cannot be reduced to a system." Thus, the spirit of Christ's teachings can transcend human diversity or "the immense variety of opinion and sentiment in the world." His conclusion directly applicable to Unitarian missionary principles is contained elsewhere, but is meaningful only when set against his liberal interpretation of the Christian spirit, which to him was not an integral part of any cultural system but was free, tolerant, and adaptable.
Precisely how and when Unitarianism reached Calcutta — if indeed it reached there at all by diffusion in its earliest stage — it is impossible to say. It may be argued that Bengali Unitarianism was a movement parallel to the Unitarian movements in the West, but some caution must be exercised in this judgment for the reason that the conditions which gave rise to it in Bengal were not akin historically to those of England and America. Nor when viewed as a functional equivalent can it be said that the ideological developments in Bengal and the West served the same purpose. An alien ideology, whether Marxism today in Bengal, or Unitarianism over a century ago, should be seen essentially in terms of historical and cultural relevance. It should be analyzed in the manner it stimulates change or in the manner it is adapted by the receiving culture for its own purposes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind by David Kopf. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Tables. List of Illustrations, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xi
- Preface, pg. xiii
- Chronology, pg. xxi
- 1. Unitarian Social Gospel and the Foundations of Hindu Modernism, pg. 3
- 2. The Deification of Science, Humanity, and Reason: Brahmo Secularism, pg. 42
- 3. Identity, Achievement, Conscience: The Human Development of the Bhadralok Reformer, pg. 86
- 4. Family, Faction, and the Dilemmas of Political Reform under Colonialism, pg. 129
- 5. The Confrontation between Trinitarian Christianity and Reformed Hinduism, pg. 157
- 6. The Issue of Brahmo National Identity and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism, pg. 176
- 7. The Frustration of the Bhadralok and the Making of a Revolutionary Nationalist: The West Desanctified, pg. 187
- 8. Western-Inspired Brahmo Evangelism and the Vaishnav Spirit in the Mofussil, pg. 217
- 9. World Crisis and the Quest for an Ideology of Salvation: Keshub, Prophet of Harmony, pg. 249
- 10. Rabindranath Tagore as Reformer: Hindu Brahmoism and Universal Humanism, pg. 287
- 11. The Brahmo Reformation Diffused: Bengal's Legacy to Twentieth-Century India, pg. 313
- Notes, pg. 335
- Bibliography, pg. 357
- Index, pg. 387