Religion in India is an ideal first introduction to India's fascinating and varied religious history. Fred Clothey surveys the religions of India from prehistory and Indo-European migration through to the modern period. Exploring the interactions between different religious movements over time, and engaging with some of the liveliest debates in religious studies, he examines the rituals, mythologies, arts, ethics and social and cultural contexts of religion as lived in the past and present on the subcontinent.
Key topics discussed include:
Hinduism, its origins and development over time
minority religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Buddhism
the influences of colonialism on Indian religion
the spread of Indian religions in the rest of the world
the practice of religion in everyday life, including case studies of pilgrimages, festivals, temples and rituals, and the role of women
Written by an experienced teacher, this student-friendly textbook is full of clear, lively discussion and vivid examples. Complete with maps and illustrations, and useful pedagogical features, including timelines, a comprehensive glossary, and recommended further reading specific to each chapter, this is an invaluable resource for students beginning their studies of Indian religions.
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How clearly can you see? This is an apt question as one begins an attempt to understand the religious heritage of India. It is apt because metaphors of vision spiral their way throughout Indian religion and thought: the term, dar
an, for example, “seeing” (the deity) is the highpoint of Hindu ritual. Dar
an is also the viewpoint from which one sees something of the truth. Another term, vidy
– “knowledge” – is derived from the Sanskrit term vid – “to perceive or know”; avidy
(“not seeing/knowing”) is perceived to be the fundamental human problem. Buddhi (enlightenment or awaking) is a matter of understanding, of seeing correctly. Indian religions ask again and again: “How well do you see?”
This is also an apt question because it invites us to check our lenses before we start this enterprise. What one sees in the Indian setting is often a product of how one sees. We bring agendas, presuppositions, and images to our examination of Indian religion which may not be accurate or helpful. It is important in our viewing that we be self-conscious of the lenses we bring. As one studies Indian religion, one finds that there is wisdom in stepping into the optometrist’s office to check one’s focus and the adequacy of one’s vision.
Lenses used through the years
Seeing clearly is especially important when one reflects on the various lenses that have been worn throughout the years by those purporting to interpret the religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. All of us stand in a long line of “viewers” whose lenses have colored, shaped (often mis-shaped) that landscape. Those lenses have affected the kinds of books that have been written on India, for every book about India, even every translation, reflects the viewpoint of the writer or the translator.
It may be useful as we begin this journey toward understanding to make self-conscious a few of the lenses that have been employed in the interpretation of India. Five such points of view will illustrate the dynamic.
Pejorative putdown
One of the least desirable perspectives that have been used in the interpretation of India is that which has described her in such terms as “heathen,” or “benighted.” One of the early expressions of this point of view occurs in a book by William Ward, written around the turn of the nineteenth century. Ward was a member of the “Serampore Trio,” the first English-speaking missionaries in India; Ward was seeking to gain England’s support for the missionary enterprise. His strategy was to record all the negative things he could observe about the India of his time, taking little care to put things in perspective or engage in objective historical scholarship. His conclusions are expressed baldly in the preface of his book:
There is scarcely anything in Hindooism, when truly known, in which a learned man can delight, or of which a benevolent man can approve; and I am fully persuaded, that there will soon be but one opinion on the subject, and that this opinion will be, that the Hindoo system is…the most PUERILE, IMPURE, AND BLOODY OF ANY SYSTEM OF IDOLATRY THAT WAS EVER ESTABLISHED ON EARTH. [sic]1
Ward’s relentlessly dark descriptions of infanticide, widow burning, and other excesses, accompanied by letters and reports from some other missionaries, informed the mind-set of some Christians in England and North America for generations. This perception was expressed by a verse in a nineteenth-century children’s book, entitled “The Heathen Mother”:
See that heathen mother stand Where the sacred current flows; With her own maternal hand Mid the waves her babe she throws. Hark! I hear the piteous scream; Frightful monsters seize their prey, Or the dark and bloody stream Bears the struggling child away. Fainter now, and fainter still, Breaks the cry upon the ear; But the mother’s heart is steel She unmoved that cry can hear. Send, oh send the Bible there, Let its precepts reach the heart; She may then her children spare – Act the tender mother’s part.2
This attitude persisted in much of the literature on India into the twentieth century. Katherine Mayo, an American writer, published Mother India in 1927. Purporting to be a friend of India, after a six-month trip, she nonetheless described India as a chamber of horrors from child-marriage and the low status of widows to unsanitary conditions, untouchability, the arrogance of brahmans and a host of other presumed shortcomings.3 Needless to say, Mayo’s “friendly advice” generated a hailstorm of reactions.
While this pejorative attitude was often the handmaiden of colonialism, it has not been the possession of Westerners alone. Certain Indian expatriates or their descendants have entertained pejorative perceptions of the homeland of their ancestors. Nobel-prize winning V. S. Naipaul, for example, after his first visit to India, wrote India: A Wounded Civilization, a book in which he recorded his embarrassment and revulsion of anything which he did not appreciate. Naipaul’s views of India have moderated and become more sympathetic with subsequent visits, but the first impressions as expressed in his first book on India clearly revealed an “expat” delighted to be away from the subcontinent.
Pejorative attitudes continue to be expressed even into the present day. They surface in some American responses to the increased visibility of Hindus and Hindu temples in the US from “dot-busters” who harass Indian women to those writers of letters to the local paper in Aurora, Illinois, who, worried about the building of a Hindu temple in their city, voiced concern that the city would now be overrun with rats! Vandalism on newly dedicated Hindu temples (such as at the Jain-Hindu temple near Pittsburgh) and declarations by church bodies (like the Southern Baptist convention in 1999) that Hindus in the US needed to be “evangelized” perpetuate this image of a less than civilized India. This is hardly a perspective that engenders understanding or serious scholarship.
Romanticism
The apparent opposite of the arrogance of pejorative attitudes is that of selective romanticism. The romantic view of India goes back to at least the Greek period when Herodotus, Horace, and others rhapsodized about India’s fantastic wealth and extreme forms of religion. Basing his comments on reports from travelers and the presence of Buddhists and Jain ascetics in certain cities of the Mediterranean region, the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, for example, wrote of enormous ants, gigantic eels, fabulous gold and jewelry, as well as religious extremities.4
This tendency toward romantic overstatement in both India and the West is found in a whole range of writers, travelers, and scholars. In American history, this attitude was expressed, for example, in Walt Whitman’s celebration of India’s “primordial wisdom”: India was the “soothing cradle of man,” “the p...
