The Colonial Encounter and Orientalism

In 1872, across British India, an army of clerks went house to house with a form. It was the first empire-wide census of the subcontinent, and one of its columns asked every person to state their religion. One column. One answer. A man who worshipped a village goddess, kept the observances his grandfather had kept, revered a local saint who may well have been Muslim, and could not have named a sect if asked, had to be entered as one thing. The clerk wrote: Hindu.

That column did something quiet and enormous. It took a sprawling, overlapping, local family of practices and required it to become a single countable religion, with edges, like the others on the form. The colonial encounter with Sanatana Dharma is full of such moments, where the act of describing the tradition reshaped it. It is the subtlest of all the great encounters in the tradition’s history, because its instruments were the dictionary, the printing press and the census form, and because its effects sank so deep that they are now easily mistaken for the tradition’s own ancient picture of itself.

It was, at the very same time, a genuine and magnificent act of recovery. The gift and the distortion arrived in the same hands. Pulling them apart is the work of this article.

The scholars who opened the canon

The recovery came first, and it began with a judge. In 1784 Sir William Jones, a jurist newly arrived to serve the East India Company’s courts in Calcutta, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the institutional birthplace of organised Western study of India. Two years later, in his discourse of February 1786, Jones said a sentence that founded an entire science:

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”

That insight launched comparative linguistics and the discipline that became Indology. A generation of European scholars followed Jones into Sanskrit, learning from Brahmin pandits, editing texts that had circulated only in manuscript and recited memory, and translating them, for the first time, into the languages of the West. The summit of the effort was the Sacred Books of the East, some fifty volumes edited by Max Müller and published from Oxford beginning in 1879, the first of them the Upanishads. For a great many readers, in Europe and increasingly in India itself, this was the first time the oldest layers of the tradition could be held as a single, accessible library.

The recovery was real

It is fashionable now to sneer at the Orientalists, and the sneer is its own dishonesty. Whatever else they did, they hauled a vast literature out of the narrow channels of palm-leaf and oral transmission and handed it to the world, the Vedas and Upanishads among them. Müller, who edited the Rigveda and never once set foot in India, wrote of the country with an admiration that was unguarded and real:

“If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India.”

The work was not a small thing, and the Indian scholars who worked inside it, men like Kashinath Trimbak Telang, who translated the Bhagavad Gita for the series, were collaborators in a genuine act of preservation. To dismiss the recovery because of the distortion that came with it is to refuse half the record.

The categories that came with the gift

But no description is neutral, and the men who opened the canon carried their own idea of what a religion is, an idea that quietly reshaped the thing they were describing. Trained in a Christian and European world, they expected a religion to have a founder, a single holy book, a creed, and a firm boundary. They came to India looking for these things, and the looking itself imposed a shape on what they found.

Three distortions followed, and all three are still with us. The first was a bias toward text over practice, so that the tradition came to be defined by its Sanskrit books rather than by the living, local, endlessly various worship of actual people. The second was a Brahmin-centred lens, because the scholars worked with Brahmin pandits and Brahmanical texts and so mistook one strand, the priestly and philosophical, for the whole cloth. The third was the dream of a golden age, a pure classical Hinduism in the deep past from which the messy present was imagined to have fallen, a frame that flattered the ancient and quietly insulted the living. These were not malicious inventions. They were the unexamined furniture of the describers’ own minds, laid silently over what they saw.

Orientalism, named

Much later the critic Edward Said gave this whole way of seeing a name. In Orientalism, published in 1978, he argued that European scholarship on the East was knotted together with European power over it, that the West produced an essentialised, manageable “Orient” partly in order to rule it. The book reshaped the humanities, and it is itself contested, which an honest account has to say. The historian Robert Irwin and others have charged that Said overstated his case, conflated centuries and genres, and, most tellingly, all but ignored German Indology, the richest Orientalist tradition of all, attached to no Eastern empire whatever. The German scholars who did so much of the Sanskrit work had no India to govern.

The fair conclusion keeps both halves. Said named something real, that descriptions carry power and that the describers of India were often also its rulers. He also pressed the equation of knowledge with conquest harder than the evidence will bear, as the case of the admiring, India-besotted, empire-less German philologists shows. The lens distorts. It does not follow that every Orientalist was an agent of empire.

The word that made a religion

The deepest change of all was a single word. The word Hindu is ancient in its root, and for most of its life it was a geography, not a faith. It began as Sindhu, the great river the Greeks called the Indus. Persian speakers turned Sindhu into Hindu, and used it for the land and the people beyond that river, a place rather than a creed; it appears in this geographical sense as far back as the inscriptions of the Persian king Darius. Around 1030, the scholar al-Biruni wrote his great study of India and defined “the Hindus” largely by what set them apart from Muslims, an early case of an identity named by contrast. For two thousand years the word said where you were from, not what you believed.

The noun Hinduism, naming a single bounded world religion to stand beside Christianity and Islam, is an early nineteenth-century coinage. It is commonly credited to the reformer Rammohan Roy, around 1816, the first Hindu on record to use the English word for his own tradition. It was then hardened into a fixed category by Orientalist scholarship and, decisively, by that census column, which obliged every subject to belong to exactly one religion and so turned a fluid plurality into a number in a government table.

Was Hinduism invented?

This is where scholars divide, and the division is worth knowing because both sides are now shouted past in public argument. The constructionist view, associated with historians such as Robert Frykenberg and, in a different key, with Romila Thapar’s account of an older India that had no single “Hindu religion” in the modern sense, holds that Hinduism as one unified, bounded faith was largely assembled in the colonial moment, fitted to a Semitic model the Orientalists already knew and then taken up by reformers seeking a parallel to it. Thapar’s milieu gave the result a sharp name, a “syndicated Hinduism.”

Against this stands a powerful correction. The historian David Lorenzen has shown that Hindus were naming and defining themselves against others, in their own languages, well before any Englishman arrived, and concludes the strong colonial-invention claim is simply false. Brian Pennington, in Was Hinduism Invented?, takes the careful middle: the tradition was co-produced rather than fabricated by Orientalists and missionaries, with Indian authors arguing fiercely in their own pamphlets and newspapers, agents and not blank pages. The honest verdict deserves to be stated flatly, because it is the single most confused point in the whole subject. The English word Hinduism, and the idea of one tidy bounded religion, are modern. The traditions, the texts and the practices they gather are very old. To mistake the age of the label for the age of the thing it labels is the error to avoid in both directions.

The tradition answered back

Indians were never passive material for the colonial description. They argued back, and in arguing they remade the tradition again. The nineteenth-century reform movements grew directly out of this encounter. Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828, met the missionary critique by reading the Upanishads as a pure, rational monotheism. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, answered with the cry “go back to the Vedas,” rejecting later accretion in favour of an imagined Vedic original, a move that borrowed the Orientalists’ own golden-age frame even as it defied British authority. And in 1893 Swami Vivekananda stood before the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and presented a confident, universal Vedanta to the West on Indian terms, declaring his pride in a religion that had taught the world tolerance and the acceptance of all faiths as true.

Each of these used the colonial tools, the printed book, the single creed, the comparison between religions, while turning them to Indian ends. The streamlined, philosophical Sanatana Dharma that much of the world now meets first was forged in exactly this argument. It is neither a simple survival of the ancient nor a simple colonial product. It is the tradition remaking itself under pressure, and doing so with great force.

Why it still runs underneath us

This is not a closed chapter, sealed in the nineteenth century. The textual, Brahmin-centred, golden-age image of Hinduism that the Orientalists helped build is still, very often, the exact image that both its defenders and its critics are arguing over today, in India and abroad. Much of modern Hindu self-understanding, including the streamlined Vedanta that reformers carried to the West, took shape in conversation with this scholarship, sometimes leaning on it and sometimes pushing hard against it. To read the tradition well now is partly to learn to see the lens itself, to value the genuine recovery the Orientalists achieved, to spot the distortions they built in, and to look past both to the wider, older, living tradition that no census column ever managed to hold.

The British did not invent the tradition. They did help build the frame around it. Learning to tell the frame from the picture is most of the work.