Session 65: Religion and the National Imaginary in Colonial India

Organizer and Chair: Vasudha Dalmia, University of California Berkeley

Discussant: David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University

Keywords: history of religion, South Asia, colonial period.

Reform in the nineteenth century was almost always coupled with ‘religion,’ the two together with notions of the past as much as the future. However, though reform movements within the various streams that together constituted Hinduism were centrally concerned with the position of women in society, this was a discourse that was differently configured within Muslim reform movements in South Asia. There were other important differences between the emerging Hindu and the Muslim blocks. A major concern of Hindu reformulations was to consolidate the disparate traditions within. One strategy, particularly in the nineteenth century, identified the ‘true’ religion, which almost inevitably found its fountainhead in the Vedas, by including and excluding the movements that emerged in the course of the many centuries that followed. Early twentieth century strategies were more concerned with inclusion. However, the strategy common to both ways was to draw a strict boundary line between Hinduness on the one hand and Islam and Christianity on the other. Yet, Iqbal, credited with being the originator of the idea of Pakistan, sought other ways to conceive these relations. A central concern of our panel will be to discover and discuss the similarities and differences of Hindu and Muslim religious reform, particularly with regard to its significance today.

Muslim Women in Colonial India: Gender and the Boundaries of Class, Religion, and Nation

Barbara D. Metcalf, University of Michigan

Though the place of women in the narrative of the larger Indian nationalist project is central, the place of women in Muslim political ideology in colonial India is one of absence. The narrative of Muslim political life is typically told as one of men in several senses. The actors are male. Their rhetoric does not focus on women, for example by identifying the reform of women as the key to independence or the success of the state. Neither visual nor literary representations imagined the nation through gendered images of the Bharat Mata/Mother India sort. This emphatically does not mean that there were no reformers concerned with women; several figures associated with the Aligarh movement as well as others engaged in movements of sectarian reform, as also women activists notable in journalism and education, addressed women’s issues. But these reforms took place outside colonial public life and focused on the community, not on the emerging vision of the nation state.

The lack of a gendered narrative of the nation has meant, however, a gaping hole in Muslim nationalist thought. Problematic as it has been in terms of gender equality, the modern nation state has typically imagined itself in terms of idealized real women and a mythic maternal land as the mother of a brotherhood of sons. My paper will explore the issues related to the nationalism that produced Pakistan, riven as it has been by regionalism, thickened only by a counter-productive culture of defense, and bitterly divided over competing images of what "the new Pakistani/Muslim woman" should be.

Aryas, Hindus and Notions of Territorial Belonging

Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley

Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) followed an old practice when declaring the Vedas to be the primeval text of the Aryas and subsequently distilled from the tradition what he saw to be the truth in his major work, Satyarth Prakash or the Light of Truth. Nonetheless, he saw himself constrained to devote a whole chapter to "An Examination of the Different Religions Prevailing in Aryavarta" in formulating his creed. For, if religion henceforth was to be more closely tied than ever to territory, credible ways had to be found to account for the differences that still prevailed. Half a century later, Savarkar (1883–1966) could also be found maintaining: "The earliest records that we have got of the religious beliefs of any Indian community—not to speak of mankind itself—are the Vedas." But contrary to Dayananda, Savarkar was more interested in inclusion than exclusion: "Hinduism is a word that properly speaking should be applied to all the religious beliefs of any Indian community that the different communities of the Hindu people hold." However, the various religious traditions of the subcontinent had yet to be accommodated or rejected on the basis of the criteria he set up, which was to bring in the ‘holy’ through the back door, as it were. My paper will examine the strategies adopted by these two major figures in the modern religious history of the subcontinent, as they seek to work out and define the relationship between religion, territory, and the state.

Outside the Language of Citizenship

Faisal Devji, Yale University

The historical and contemporary relations between Hindus and Muslims in India continue to provide the subject matter of innumerable academic analyses. For the most part, and especially when dealing with communal relations in colonial and independent India, these studies concentrate on the various political and economic interests that are said to define the relations of Hindus and Muslims. And these interests, of course, only have meaning within a larger language of citizenship. While this is certainly an important way of looking at such relations, it tends to ignore the fact that the language of citizenship by no means encompasses the totality of everyday relations between these communities. Indeed that there well might be explicit moves to dissociate these relations from such a language. In this essay I want to look at an example of the way in which the relations between Hindus and Muslims have been thought about outside the language of citizenship. I will explore in particular the work of Muhammad Iqbal, an important poet, thinker and Muslim politician of the early twentieth century, who blamed much of the violence between Hindus and Muslims in his time precisely on the language of citizenship, striving in his literary and political work both to take into account and develop other ways of conceiving such relations.