The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal 2020052237, 9789004445246, 9789004445383

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The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus

Numen Book Series studies in the history of religions

Series Editors Steven Engler (Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada) Richard King (University of Kent, UK) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) Gerard Wiegers (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

volume 170

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/nus

The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal

By

Ankur Barua

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Photo by Leonid Plotkin, from the photo book Nostalgia for Eternity (Niyogi Books, 2018). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020052237

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0169-8834 ISBN 978-90-04-44524-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44538-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To all my students at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge for teaching me how to teach

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Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xxiv 1 Introduction 1 1 Bhakti in the Brahmo Samaj 3 2 The Premodern Roots of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti in Bengal 10 3 The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus 16 4 Conclusion 24 2 Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore: Between Advaita Critique and Devotional Theism 27 1 The Advaitic Worship of Rammohun 28 2 The Devotional Intensities of Debendranath 37 3 Christian Missionaries and Their Brahmo Interlocutors 51 4 Conclusion 57 3 Rajnarayan Basu: Between Religious Intuition and Ecstatic Vaiṣṇavism 61 1 Brahmo Religiosity between Reason and Revelation 65 2 Brahmo Theism and the ‘Essential Religion’ 70 3 The Devotional Affectivities of Brahmo Theism 74 4 Brahmo Adoration of the Supremely Beautiful Lord 81 5 Conclusion 83 4 Bijoy Krishna Goswami: Between Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism and Brahmo Universalism 85 1 The Vaiṣṇava Pathways of Brahmo Devotion 89 2 The Brahmo Universalism of Vaiṣṇava Devotion 93 3 Between the Brahmos and the Vaiṣṇavas 99 4 Goswami as Caitanya Redivivus 102 5 Conclusion 105 5 Sitanath Tattvabhushan and Bipin Chandra Pal: Between Hegelian Universalism and Vaiṣṇava Devotionalism 108 1 Sitanath and the ‘Intuitions’ of Brahmo Devotion 111 2 Between the Brahman of Vedānta and the Absolute of Hegel 113

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From the Upaniṣads towards Kṛṣṇa 117 The Vaiṣṇava Devotion of a Hegelian Brahmo 120 The Brahmo Samaj and Its Philosophical Foundations 122 Conclusion 127

6 Sivanath Sastri and Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar: Between the Social Gospel and Brahmo Devotionalism 130 1 The Social Orientations of Brahmo Devotion 134 2 The Universal Devotion of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj 137 3 The New Dispensation and Brahmo Rationalism 139 4 Conclusion 147 7 Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Between Brahmo Rationalities and Vaiṣṇava Affectivities 149 1 Religion as Revelation and Religion as Historical Construct 150 2 Bankim and the Ideal Kṛṣṇa of Vaiṣṇavism 158 3 Between Science and Self 163 4 Conclusion 168 8 Competing Visions of Hindu Universalism 170 1 The Brahmo Quest for Harmony and the Religions of the World 174 2 The Reconstructions of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism 181 3 Ramakrishna between Brahmos and Vaiṣṇavas 187 4 Between Traditional Modernities and Modernised Traditions 192 9 Conclusion 196 Appendix A 205 Appendix B 206 Appendix C 212 Appendix D 225 Appendix E 229 References 232 Index 244

Preface A few years ago, when I was travelling through Assam, I noticed that some songs associated with the spring festival of Bihu had become heavily infused with elements of technopop. I could still distinctly recognise the leitmotifs that I would have heard in my childhood years when watching staged performances of Bihu dances but the lyrics had been modulated with synthpop backgrounds. As I reflected on this highly synthetic blend, I realised that the performances that I had observed more than three decades ago were themselves a dynamic intermixture of past and present. It is possible that a hundred years ago, the very idea that such dances could be enacted on stages in the city, and in tandem with a fixed programme schedule, would have struck some dancers as strongly discordant with their wider sociocultural sensibilities. Be that as it may, when some people decided that Bihu dances could be transplanted from the open-air settings of paddy fields to the city stages, or when some others sought to inflect the melodies of Bihu with contemporary tunes of western origins, the protagonists who pioneered these transitions should be understood, in my estimate, not as traversing a massive gulf between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ or between ‘East’ and ‘West’, but as actively negotiating translations across their somewhat osmotic and overlapping boundaries. This book is not about Bihu and not about Assam, but about certain transitions – and translations – within contiguous Bengal and across roughly the same timeframe on the landscapes of Hindu social, cultural, religious identities. But just as the subtle shifts in Bihu dances and tunes are best understood in terms of styles of interweaving precolonial and contemporary, the projects of the Bengali intellectuals whom we study here too were directed to the construction of ways of being Hindu that were simultaneously rooted in ancient Sanskritic materials and orientated towards contemporary universalist visions with western hues. By discussing the writings of some Bengali thinkers who were associated, in different ways and to different degrees, with the Brahmo Samaj (established in 1829), I argue that they sought to configure the socioreligious dharma of Hindus as egalitarian, universal, and spiritual. These formulations were shaped by dense dialectical engagements with three groups – certain members of the Bengali middle classes with sceptical and atheistic standpoints (‘Young Bengal’), Christian missionaries, and Vaiṣṇava thinkers. This intellectual history of some decisive moments in the construction of Hindu religious universalisms during the nineteenth century in colonial Bengal is partly an inquiry into the question: ‘when was Hindu modernity?’ One distinctive marker of this modernity is said to be a universalist vision

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of the religious quest of humanity which is variously associated with figures such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), M. Gandhi (1869–1948) and others, most of whose writings were in English. Scholars of ‘Hindu modernity’ have sometimes used these English writings as their primary, or sole, point of entry into the vast terrains of Hinduism in British India, and postulated a sharp rupture or abrupt discontinuity in Hindu religious imaginations across a putative ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’ divide (Hacker 1978). Thus, we hear about defenders or propagators of a ‘neo-Hinduism’ that, from around 1950 if not from around 1900, privileges spiritual experience, accords hermeneutic priority to reason and not revelation, configures socially activist forms of world-affirmative engagement, and promotes interreligious harmony. On the eve of the second world war, Radhakrishnan (1939: 24), later the second President of the Republic of India, commented that Christianity had ‘inherited the Semitic creed of the “jealous God” in the view of Christ as “the only begotten son of God”, and so could not brook any rival near the throne … Finality of conviction easily degenerates into the spirit of fanaticism, autocratic, over-positive, and bloodthirsty’. Radhakrishnan emphasizes at several places in his writings that the different religions of the world, with the specific impulses and values that they embody, should come together in relationships of mutual friendship so that they are regarded ‘not as incompatibles but as complementaries, and so indispensable to each other for the realization of the common end’ (1927: 43). What he looks forward to is not a ‘featureless unity of religions’ in a world whose religious peoples are rapidly coming close in bonds of sympathy and warmth but a rich harmony which will preserve the integrity of each (Radhakrishnan 1967: 133–34). This is particularly so because, according to him, the specific ways in which human beings in different cultural matrices experience the real is coloured by their presuppositions, prejudices, and temperaments. Further, the ‘Hinduism’ that he presents is not limited geographically to the subcontinent: ‘There is nothing which prevents it from extending to the uttermost parts of the world’ (Radhakrishnan 1948:102). Here Radhakrishnan was partly echoing the sentiments of Swami Vivekananda who had declared a few decades ago: ‘Ours is the universal religion. It is inclusive enough, it is broad enough to include all the ideals. All the ideals of religion that already exist in the world can be immediately included, and we can patiently wait for all the ideals that are to come in the future to be taken in the same fashion embraced in the infinite arms of the religion of the Vedanta’ (Swami Vivekananda 1972: vol. 3: 251–52). In this fine-grained textual study of some nineteenth-century Bengali texts, I offer a genealogy of such Hindu religious universalisms and indicate how some of these post-1900 representations of the universalist compass of Hindu

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standpoints were already being enunciated – and also actively disputed – across various Brahmo circles from the 1820s. The vocabularies of ‘essence’, ‘unity’, and ‘synthesis’ – the stock-in-trade of Hindu universalisms throughout the twentieth century – are already beginning to emerge from the 1860s across the multiple vernacular worlds of the Brahmos. In the evolving spaces of these vernacular Brahmo contexts, we encounter intense debates relating to relative prioritization across the dyads of scriptural revelation and rational inquiry, ascetic withdrawal and social activism, spiritual experience and scriptural exegesis, meditative repose and devotional fervour, western conceptualities and Indic sensibilities, and particularity and universality – debates about the head and the heart, the temporal and the eternal, and the home and the world that continue to characterize the ongoing projects of Hindu modernities in our own times. And the Brahmo leitmotif – that the poles across all such dyads are to be sensitively ‘harmonized’ – can also be discerned in some contemporaneous configurations of modernity where one often hears about the synthesizing power of Hindu visions which are said to promote inter-religious dialogue, peacemaking, spirituality, ecological sensitivities, and comparativist ways of thinking. I thus seek to contribute to a steadily emerging stream of studies of vernacular reworkings of Indic materials which attempt to undercut projections of a sharp break between an Anglicised ‘modernity’ presented as the dynamic intrusion of European forces and a precolonial ‘tradition’ characterised as the static mass of Indian inheritances (Hatcher 2011). The chapters present some of the multiple ways in which key Brahmo figures were configuring visions of Hindu universality throughout the nineteenth century by interweaving patterns of modernist traditionalism and traditionalist modernity. Their complex negotiations between scriptural roots shaped by Sanskritic templates and contemporary routes inflected by western colonial modernities indicate that any proposed understanding of modernity as ‘whatever is extraneously received in English’ and of tradition as ‘whatever is indigenously propounded in the vernacular’ would be historically simplistic (Raychaudhuri 1988). Some of them were deeply conversant in contemporary European thought-forms but they expressed their modernist sensibilities precisely through the linguisticconceptual media of Bengali. While the Brahmo Samaj is, generally speaking, classified as a neo-Hindu movement, suggesting some kind of an abrupt rupture that was supposedly instituted by colonial modernities, I argue that this classification can obscure the subterranean continuities of subjectivities and sensibilities that were sustained through the conceptual currencies of the Bengali language. Therefore, tradition and modernity should not be viewed as polarised entities and as diametrically opposed to each other; rather, both

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should be viewed as constituting a dynamic series of processes with distinctive responses to the problem of seeking continuities amidst historical change. Traditional societies too should be viewed not as monolithically structured but as possessing creative powers to encompass a wide range of beliefs which actualise alternative types of possible behaviour (Waldman 1986). From this perspective, I revisit some of the vexed questions relating to historical origins, native agencies, and conceptual sources in the constructions of Hindu modernities by drawing attention to the significance of studying texts in the vernaculars such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, and others. As I have indicated, one of the reasons why a sharp split between Sanskritic ‘tradition’ and Anglicized ‘modernity’ continues to be defended, or suggested, in certain scholarly standpoints on Hinduism is because this ‘modernity’ is associated primarily with the writings of figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and others, which obscures the point that several influential contemporary figures were developing alternative ways of being Hindu through their vernacular writings. While it is possible to provide extracts from Swami Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan which suggest that their viewpoints are opposed to those of classical exegetes such as Śaṃkara (c. 800 CE) and Rāmānuja (c. 1100 CE), in the vernacular writings of our Brahmo thinkers we encounter subtler styles of interweaving premodern Sanskrit materials and contemporaneous European motifs. Therefore, we should speak of the emergence, across Hindu socioreligious milieus, of multiple modernities from around 1850 such that English-inflected modernities and vernacularized modernities could often diverge in significant respects even if they were otherwise shaped by the social pressures of the colonial crucibles within which they were being forged. This contribution to the religious history of Hindu modernities is, then, primarily a textual study of how some Brahmos navigated, on dialogical registers and in some ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1992) in colonial Bengal, the dynamic intersections of Indic and European cultural currents. In recent decades, scholars from various academic streams who theorise South Asian religions in the wake of Edward Said’s criticisms of the propagation of romanticized images of the Middle East by British and American Orientalists, Foucault’s excavations of the intimate relations between knowledge and power, and Derrida’s deconstructions of the metaphysics of presence have devoted their critical energies to the multiplication of histories and identities which had been consigned to the margins by the ‘discourses of modernity’. Partly in this vein, the central arguments of this book are based on primary sources in Bengali which remain largely untranslated and also understudied. Some of these writings were extremely influential in structuring the religious sensibilities of their times but

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they have rarely received systematic scholarly study. They provide multiple windows into the emerging subjectivities of some prominent Bengali intellectuals between 1820 and 1900 as they are being shaped by various intellectual and socio-political milieus, some of which were distinctively stamped with western sensibilities. One of the most significant aspects of these milieus was the emerging British re-presentation of India as the pit of moral degradation. The guiding metaphor in the writings of both father and son, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, on Indian matters was that of a hierarchical ‘scale of civilizations’, which in the very moment of implicating the British and the Indian natives in the commonalities of an antiquarian origin also rigidly distantiated the former’s progressive culture from the latter’s stationary desuetude. Whereas the former argued that the Hindus had never been in a high state of civilisation and had taken only a few steps towards it (Mill 1975 [1817]), the latter elaborated the details of a civilizational ladder, the lowermost rank of which was occupied by communities which required an absolutist ruler and the topmost by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. While the Brahmo Samaj, whose members sought to counter these Millian viewpoints, is often regarded as a ‘reform’ movement, where ‘reform’ is associated with the endorsement of certain west-imprinted motifs of social progressivism, a close reading of these Bengali sources indicates that even prominent reform-minded Brahmos often couched their socioreligious activism in the traditional vocabularies of the knowledge ( jñāna) of God and the love (prema) of God. The terms ‘reform’ and ‘revival’, which are sometimes applied in a monolithic fashion to an individual (across the different phases of a lifetime) or to a social movement, do not quite stick to our authors. Their writings can frustrate our attempts to classify them in a modular fashion as either ‘reformist’ or ‘revivalist’, for different sections of the same text can alternately seek to retrieve Vedic themes and apply them to contemporary problems (a ‘revivalist’ moment) or reformulate Vedic heritages in the light of European ideals after these have first been interrogated through Vedic lenses (a ‘reformist’ moment). They can selectively interweave ‘reformist’ themes into a ‘revivalist’ backdrop or selectively foreground ‘revivalist’ concerns even while emphasising ‘reformist’ goals (Sen 1993: 405). Here we see the gradual emergence of distinctive styles of Indian modernities which are simultaneously inflected with European idioms and rooted in indigenous subjectivities. In the words of Gyan Prakash, ‘Indian modernity has always existed as an internally divided process … There is simply no way to tidy up this messy history of India and narrate it as the victory of capital over community, modernity over tradition, West over non-West … It is thus that Indian modernity emerges as Janus-faced; crafted in the image of Europe, it is also ineluctably different …’ (Prakash 1999:234).

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This study of diverse configurations of universalisms and distinctive styles of vernacular modernities in colonial Bengal also addresses a lacuna in the existing scholarship on the Brahmo Samaj and, more generally, on religious life in nineteenth-century Bengal – namely, the agonistic interrelations between the Brahmo Samaj and Vaiṣṇava lifeforms. The secondary literature on the Brahmo Samaj occasionally presents Bengal Vaiṣṇavism as its socioreligious other but usually does not systematically explore the dialectical interrelations across their conceptual, experiential, and institutional divides. The leitmotif running through the chapters of this book is that even while some of the key leaders of the Brahmo Samaj sought to distance its institutional spaces from the worship of the God Kṛṣṇa – routinely berated in various contemporaneous circles as a devious, crafty, and immoral divinity – they consciously assimilated and creatively reworked some of the stock vocabularies, imageries, and concepts of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism relating to God, the world, and humanity. These Brahmo figures and their Vaiṣṇava contemporaries were thus inheritors of, and participants in, the millennia-old debate across the Hindu religious traditions over whether the divine reality is so utterly ineffable that any attempt to apprehend it through the prisms of human-shaped images is a lamentable corruption of the spirit or whether the ineffable divine reality is ontologically constituted of a transcendentally perfect form which is somehow mirrored in the images constructed with human hands and glorified with human songs (Lipner 2019). In marking out the Brahmo quest for the formless eternal as disjoint from the densities of Vaiṣṇava concepts, imageries, texts, disciplines, and rituals, several Brahmo intellectuals sought to de-mythologise these traditional elements and also re-mythologise them with the Brahmo vocabularies of the universal spirit. Far from becoming an accidental footnote to the Brahmo text, however, it is precisely the premodern Vaiṣṇava somatic-experiential registers of selfabasement, self-reproach, restless yearning for God (byākulatā) from within the impermanent world, cultivation of a living friendship with God, seeking refuge at the feet of God, passionate devotional love (bhakti), and ecstatic joy (ānanda) that repeatedly return to the Brahmo life-worlds during the nineteenth century marked by active contestations over the nature and the structure of Hindu religious universalism. Even as Brahmo worldviews continued to be stamped through the nineteenth century, and thereafter, by distinctively Advaita emphases on the nonduality between the human self and the divine self, this nonduality also begins to be inflected, from around 1860 onwards, by the effusive vocabularies of the devotional servitude of the devotee to the deity. In this sense, premodern Vaiṣṇava religious imaginations constituted the wider milieus within which some of the prominent modernizing Brahmo intellectuals lived, moved, and had their sociocultural being. While

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Hindu universalism is today usually associated with organisations such as the Ramakrishna Mission and ISKCON (Hare Krishna), I highlight some of the underlying continuities between their vocabularies and the Vaiṣṇava-shaped religious imaginations of some writers within the Brahmo Samaj in the middle of the nineteenth century. Along this conceptual pathway, I also highlight the point that the motifs of ‘Hindu universalism’ and ‘Advaita Vedānta’ should not be regarded as conceptually interchangeable (Inden 1990: 130). At the dynamic conjunctions of various crisscrossing currents between Indic and European streams, including the writings of figures such as Radhakrishnan and the voyages of Hindu gurus to Euro-American locations, the ‘monism’ of Advaita has often been presented as the Hindu template for universalizing the religious expressions of humanity. T. M. P. Mahadevan (1977: 124) states the point clearly: ‘Advaita … is the culmination of all religious sects and philosophical schools. It is the common end of all philosophical endeavour and religious practice’. However, as we will see in the chapters of this book, the religious landscapes of the Brahmos are characterised by a great diversity of viewpoints on the divine reality, the human self, and the relation between God and humanity, and this diversity cannot be neatly summarised by the classical motif of ontological nonduality in Advaita Vedānta. Furthermore, several textual, historical, and anthropological studies of Hindu ways of thinking and living have pointed to a more complexly diverse picture on the ground. For instance, Elaine Fisher has pointed out that the religious landscape of early modern south India was characterised by a range of devotional groups such as Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Mādhva, Smārta, and others whose public theologians defended their particular worldview as the culmination of Hindu orthodoxy (Fisher 2017: 48). She notes that ‘[b]y the sixteenth century, Hindu religiosity in South India was fundamentally mediated by the boundaries of sectarian identity. Networks of religious institutions – monasteries and temple complexes, which attained a new social prominence as region‐wide landlords and powerbrokers – were radically polarized along Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava lines’ (Fisher 2018:4). Here the term ‘sectarian’ indicates not a lamentable lapse from a putatively unified essence embodied by Advaita Vedānta, but dense affiliations to distinctive Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava communities whose members, marked by particular socio-ritual insignia, interacted in public spaces. In the religious milieus of late nineteenth-century Bengal too, one encounters multiple projections of universalism from specifically ‘sectarian’ Vaiṣṇava standpoints and the deep impress of these theistic standpoints is discernible also in the writings of some Brahmos. The claim that Advaita Vedānta encapsulates and expresses the spiritual essence of human religiosity was thus already being contested in late nineteenth-century Bengal. According

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to modernist variations on the classical templates of the Advaita of Śaṃkara, transcending the culturally-shaped and the historically-grounded factities of the religious traditions of the world lies a mystical essence. From around 1880, we find some Bengali Vaiṣṇavas claiming precisely this higher ground, though here the mystical summit is not the truth of nonduality (advaita) but the unalloyed love of the supremely personal God (Sardella 2013). In making this claim, they were aware that Vaiṣṇavism was one token of the degraded type of religiosity that was routinely characterised in Orientalist literature as idolatrous, superstitious, and regressive – and thus begins the great struggle to reconfigure, through traditionalist Vedic lenses, modernised forms of Vaiṣṇavism which would offer a devotional theism purged of its perceived aberrations. It is to such a Vaiṣṇavism that Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), the founder of ISKCON, points when he declares: ‘A directly Kṛṣṇa conscious person is the topmost transcendentalist because such a devotee knows what is meant by Brahman or Paramātmā. His knowledge of the Absolute Truth is perfect, whereas the impersonalist [follower of Advaita] and the meditative yogī are imperfectly Kṛṣṇa conscious’ (1972: 318). This association, or equivalence, between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Advaita’ which was common in various circles of British and European Orientalism also points to the intensely debated question of whether the multiple modernities that begin to appear from around 1850 should be regarded primarily as expressions of native agency or largely as reactions to western instigations. In certain forms of postcolonial theory, the emphasis falls squarely on highlighting the intricate nexus between British imperial conquest and manufacture of knowledge about India. Against the notion of ‘disinterested knowledge’, Said (1978) demonstrated that the processes through which knowledge is produced are enmeshed in a complex matrix of technologies of power the study of whose configurations is vital in understanding how ideas and values are propagated and perpetuated. Because of the asymmetrical power relations between western nations and colonised groups, Said sought to unearth the intersections between the western quest for mastery over eastern religions, languages, and cultures, on the one hand, and the imperialistic imperatives of establishing stable modes of political domination, on the other hand. Following a broad Saidian trajectory, Bernard Cohn has pointed out that colonial conquest in India had a mutual relationship with its forms of knowledge which were produced through ‘investigative modalities’ including ‘the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopedias’ (1996:5). During the eighteenth and

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the nineteenth centuries, the painstaking labour of several generations of British scholars constructed, partly through the study of Sanskrit-based texts, ‘Hinduism’ as a singular religious system centred around certain canonical editions and priestly commentators (Von Stietencron 1991). This recovery of a ‘canonical Hinduism’ resulted not only in the conception of a unified community of the Hindus whose authenticity was to be measured in terms of their fidelity to these texts but also in the consequent repudiation of the masses saturated by a ‘popular Hinduism’ whose retrogressive beliefs and stagnant customs were viewed as stalling their entry into British modernity. Even though some these Orientalists were guided by a humane desire to understand and respect the customs of the natives instead of condemning them to one extreme end of a civilisational spectrum, they thus created their own set of differences centred around a temporal alterity between the glorious past and the decadent present. Just as the Spanish enforced on the Aztecs in Central America a uniform culture from which the richness and the ambiguities associated with the local divergences of their homeland had been eviscerated, the British, who grappled at home with the contextual applications of the common law, instead sought in India to excavate the ‘eternal law’ from the Sanskrit texts which in turn reinforced the notion of a timeless India. Thus, an army of the East India Company’s servants devoted their labours to translating texts from Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit and producing grammars and dictionaries, and the reports published in journals such as the Journal of the Asiatic Society (1832) began to reach a diverse range of people in Europe such as Max Mueller in Oxford and Schelling in Germany. The guiding impulse behind the acquisition of such linguistic skills was both a curiosity to unlock the treasures buried in the mysterious past safeguarded by the Brahmin priests and a necessity, especially after Warren Hasting’s Plan of 1772, to develop tools of communication with the natives for efficient systems of law and administration. Their writings strengthened the romanticised perception of India as the ‘childhood of Europe’, and indeed as frozen in the hoary unchanging traditions of antiquity, so that it needed the benevolence of the British to set it onwards on the path of progress. As the British gained stronger footholds in the country, this notion of an ‘essential India’ continued to be operative in the indefatigable officials associated with the census compilations, cartographical projects, antiquarian collections, archaeological findings, official commissions, and ethnographic surveys which amassed a wealth of information on the people through classificatory schemes and social categories such as caste, religion, place of birth, and occupation. At the same time, however, British administrators often remained crucially dependent on a variety of Indian intermediaries (dubash) and frequently complained that they were virtually at the mercy of these

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interlocutors in their tasks of dispensing justice and collecting revenue. For instance, Governor General Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805) wrote that the servants of the East India Company were ‘obliged, both from habit and necessity, to allow the management of their official, as well as their private business, to fall into the hands of dubashes …’ (Mukherjee 1968: 118). Again, in response to the view that colonial projects tried to systematise various aspects of Oriental culture through classificatory systems such as the census, thereby producing substantive and essentialist constructions of Hinduism, Michael Haan has argued that the census reports show that the British officials involved were, in fact, unable to arrive at any modular definitions of ‘Hinduism’. The census officials used numerous tests such as reception of instruction from a Brahmin priest, acceptance of the Vedic texts, caste affiliation and so on, none of which were sufficiently discriminatory. Certain systematised pan-Indian structures began to appear through such complex processes of negotiation between European categories and Indian figures who interrogated, appropriated, and elaborated the former. In other words, rather than remaining passive onlookers of a ‘Hinduisation project’, Indians often challenged the classificatory frameworks of the colonial bureaucratic machinery. For instance, the members of the Arya Samaj (established in 1875) began to claim in 1890 that they should be classified not as ‘Hindu’ but as ‘Aryan’, and around a decade later, voices could be heard from Muslim sections arguing that if groups such as the ‘Animists’ were removed from the category of ‘Hindus’, the proportion of ‘Muhammadans’ to the ‘Hindu majority’ would be significantly increased (Haan 2005:23). I therefore concur with postcolonial theorists who have contested in recent decades the notion that a ‘traditional’ India was suddenly awakened from its Oriental slumber by colonial interventions and led across the thresholds of ‘modernity’ after the birth-pangs of the nation-state. Much of postcolonial literature has sought to dismantle the essentialist binaries that were constructed by colonial forms of knowledge which sought to draw clear demarcations between the social identities of the colonisers and the natives. Such criticism seeks instead to delineate the localised spaces of the in-between where the renegotiations, disseminations, re-articulations, and translations of the colonial discourses produced not neat replicas of the colonisers but a peculiar array of dislocations on highly contested terrain. Thus, while agreeing in some respects with writers developing broadly Saidian perspectives who have argued that the British epistemological strategies for acquiring knowledge of India were impelled by a colonial thirst for domination over the country, C. A. Bayly has also stressed the ‘dialogic’ nature of the processes through which this colonial knowledge was created. Such understanding, without which the mundane tasks of administration would have been impossible, was grounded to a

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significant extent in everyday forms of knowledge which were, however, uprooted from their local contexts and re-inscribed within European discourses coloured by racial evaluations. Through such dense transactions, Indians began to increasingly produce ‘their own knowledge from reworked fragments of their own tradition melded with western ideas and conveyed through western artifacts’ (Bayly 1996: 371–72). In this vein, our study of Bengali texts will highlight certain transactional dimensions of East-West encounters by presenting an array of Hindu thinkers who often consciously navigated the sociocultural streams structured by colonial asymmetries precisely by reworking Sanskritic theological motifs that predated these encounters by several centuries. For them ‘tradition’ is not a static set of antiquated categories but a toolbox whose resources can be hermeneutically reconfigured to engage with questions of life and death against the backdrop of the gradual entrenchment of colonial power. The scholarly literature on the colonial production of Indic knowledge tends to be shaped by an examination of texts produced in English by Hindu intellectuals, so that by highlighting their re-envisioning of Hindu worldviews through Anglicising lenses, it is argued that neo-Hinduism is largely a series of passive native responses to active western provocations. In search of a way through this theoretical thicket, we need to distinguish between two standpoints which are often conflated in these strands of reflection about the origins and the modalities of modern Hinduisms. MH1: British colonial modernities generated the institutional backdrops within which multiple modernities were gradually configured by Bengali Hindu intellectuals. MH2: British colonial modernities supplied the conceptual vocabularies with which multiple modernities were gradually configured by Bengali Hindu intellectuals. Our study will indicate that while the modernist projects of several Bengali Hindus, from around 1850, were shaped by subtle intertwinings of MH1 and MH2, their modernities should be understood primarily through the register of MH1 and not MH2. That is to say, the gradual entrenchment and institutionalisation of aspects of western values, norms, and concepts generated or facilitated certain socio-cultural milieus within which distinctive ways of being Hindu were developed, but the idioms for these distinctively newer ways of being were not imported wholesale from Europe to these colonial conjunctures. One key dimension of these milieus, as we have seen, was an Orientalist imagination of Indic socioreligious worldviews as steeped in the primordial

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past of an uncorrupted purity. Characteristic of this imagination are the views of William Clarkson: ‘Indian civilization is original and independent because of its antiquity’ (1850: 24) and ‘their language is the voice of antiquity. Their dress, their manner, their religions, their institutions, their social habits, the produce of their soil  … are but the exemplars of past ages’ (1850: 32–33). A delightful example of this projection of India as an antique land comes from George Trevelyan’s response, in 1864, of utter astonishment at the ‘horrendous din’ that roused him from his bed on the morning of the festival of Cali (Kali): ‘During a few minutes, I could not believe my eyes; for I seemed to have been transported in a moment over more than twenty centuries, to the Athens of Cratinus and Aristophanes. If it had not been for the colour of the faces around, I should have believed myself to be on the main road to Eleusis in the full tide of the Dionysiac festivals … It was no chance resemblance this, between a Hindoo rite in the middle of the nineteenth century, and those wild revels that stream along many a Grecian bas-relief, and wind around many an ancient Indian vase …’ (1864 [1907]: 210–11). Around eleven years later, Henry Maine was to argue, in a lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, that although Britain and India had emerged from a common origin in the archaic past, indeed from the ‘very family of mankind to which we belong’, this affirmation of similarity was riven by a sharp bifurcation between the Aryan customs, beliefs, and practices of India which had fallen into decrepitude and the civilizing influence of British institutions which would direct the former on the road towards development. Thus, putting forward the question, ‘Why is it that all things Aryan are older in India than elsewhere?’, he supplies, almost in a conspiratorial tone, this answer: ‘The chief secret, a very simple one, lies probably in the extreme isolationism of the country until it was opened by maritime adventure’ (Maine 1875: 8). Another dimension relates to the socio-economic shifts associated with the entrenchment of the colonial apparatus – as the British Raj began to make deeper inroads into the ‘heartland of Hindostan’, it brought about a series of upheavals which had various types of dislocational effects on traditional village communal existence (Srinivas 1968: 192). With the gradual disintegration of the jajmani system within which the interchange of goods took place among different castes, members of the lower castes had to find new patrons and often found themselves cut off from more established means of occupation, especially during times of famine. However, at the same time, it would be historically inaccurate to view British colonial re-presentations of the land in monolithic terms, for as Thomas Metcalf has demonstrated, the British did not possess a consistent imperial strategy; at times they accentuated the differences and at other times they highlighted the similarities between them and their subjects. And at times,

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‘they simultaneously accommodated both views in their thinking, making it perilously difficult to discern any larger system at all’ (Metcalf 1994: x). Such variations across the polarities of identity and difference are particularly clear in the gendered constructions of the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ which were mutually implicated in each other and which emerged from the intersections of the multiple axes of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality as British administrators, male Indian nationalists, Englishwomen and Indian women responded to the various tensions and anxieties thrown up by contemporary social and political currents (Sinha 1995). Again, while diffusionist understandings of the history of science in colonial India presented the spread of scientific notions and technological advance in a largely onedirectional manner in which European modernity rooted out primitive indigenous traditions, Indian scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) and Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944) – both of them associated with Brahmo institutions – often negotiated complex interweavings between European science and traditional scientific and medical systems, and made highly significant and internationally acclaimed contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, and mathematics (Arnold 2000). Thus, while after the British, Hindus were not the same again, their divergences from the premodern were often mediated precisely by premodern vocabularies – the complex narratives of Hindu modernities are thus shaped by marked discontinuities across subterranean continuities. Such complex navigation of newer forms of the old is by no means a distinctive feature of Hindu modernities – in fact, they are the warp and weft of all living religious streams (Kitagawa 1987; Fuller 1992; Biardeau 1989). Perhaps no scholar of religion would characterise presentday Pentecostals in Brazil as neo-Christians, if the prefix suggests some sharp breach from the messages of the New Testament. In that vein, we too can begin to exorcise the spectre of the binary ‘Either Out of India or West’s import into India’ that seems to have haunted the study of modern Hinduism. In this connection, we can invoke Percival Spear’s ‘see-saw principle’ which, according to him, has guided western perceptions of India, especially during the period of the colonial encounters: the preconceptions that some individuals held about the country were partly modified on the basis of the reports of those who had spent some time in the country, and these ideas were then applied to matters of Indian administration only to be adapted again in the light of new experience, and so on (Spear 1961: 404–5). Moving beyond the conceptual straitjacket of sharp East-West binaries, we can then also highlight the co-constitution of multiple Hindu modernities and western modernities, where against the backdrop of the gradual entrenchment of colonial power in Bengal, Hindu thinkers and western interlocutors

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become entangled in processes of borrowing each other’s vocabularies to forge their own worldviews. For one instance of this form of co-constitution, we can turn to the complex interactions between Christians missionaries and native Hindus that were partly responsible for the emergence and the acceptance of the term ‘Hinduism’ as referring to a system of closely integrated beliefs and practices. While the term ‘Hindu’ was used in pre-British times by Persians and Muslims in a geographical-ethnic sense to refer to those who lived on the ‘other’ side of the Indus (sindhu in Sanskrit), early missionaries such as William Ward and William Carey, and administrators such as Charles Grant (himself an Evangelical), often made references to ‘Hindooism’, and ‘the Hindoo system’, taking these to be a set of creeds and philosophical arguments. These missionaries usually perceived ‘Hindooism’ as an ‘other’ to their own Christianity, and projected the notion of a unified homogenous system into which local divergences were somehow submerged or assimilated. This conception of an overarching religious system that could somehow weld the diverse elements of the country into an integrated whole was taken up by some members of the educated upper classes who were beginning to respond to the routine denunciations of this system, and the urgency to put up a united front of Hindus against the common enemy was further impressed upon them when many of these Hindus began to migrate, through conversions, to the other camp (Oddie 2003). A case in point is the home-spun version of ‘biblical criticism’ that Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) – the fons et origo of various Brahmo motifs – levelled at the Baptist missionary in Serampore, Joshua Marshman. Rammohun tracked down certain ‘polytheistic sentiments’ not just in his own Hindu traditions, routinely berated by Christian missionaries for their ‘idolatry’, but also in the very Christianity that Marshman himself was espousing. Indeed, skilfully turning the charge of ‘heathenism’ on his Christian critic, he declared that ‘the idea of a triune-God, a man-God, and also the idea of appearance of God in the bodily shape of a dove, or that of the blood of God shed for the payment of a debt, seem entirely Heathenish and absurd …’ (Carpenter 1833: 57). In response to some Christian militaristic metaphors, an article in Bengali published in 1844 referred to those who ‘profess to believe that they alone are the select and beloved children of our common Almighty Father’, and commented: ‘We thank the great Architect of the universe that such are not our own doctrines, – that it is, on the contrary, our chiefest source of comfort and happiness, firmly to believe, and zealously to inculcate, that all mankind are morally and spiritually equal in the eye of a beneficent, an impartial, and an eternal Deity’ (Hatcher 2008:95). Some six decades after Rammohun, missionaries began to re-think in the 1880s their evangelical strategies in the wake of the emergence of ‘a counter-confrontationalism from a strident, neo-orthodox

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and more highly organized Hindu opposition’ (Copley 1997: 251), which, as we will see, had a significant impact on the contours of Hindu modernities. Thus, writing in 1903, the missionary John P. Jones (1903: 68–69) referred to the significant change of opinion in the ‘last quarter of a century’ as a consequence of which the contemptuous attitude towards the ‘benighted Hindu’ was giving way to respect and admiration for the speculative powers of the Hindus, the loftiness of their thought, and their ‘system of ontology’.

…

I glimpsed the contours of many of the arguments developed here during lunchtime discussions with Professor Emeritus Julius Lipner at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Questions he has put to me over the years have set me on intellectual trails which I have partly retraced in these chapters. This book is for all my undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. That waves of young men and women should be able, after only a few years of study, to acquire a deeply empathetic, conceptually sophisticated, and historically informed understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, Indian Christianity, or Indian Islam is a living testimony to the claim that the Brahmo authors studied in this book would have endorsed – in the true republic of ideas there is no East or West but only an unfinished quest in response to the irresistible call of the eternal unknown. My students defy the generalisation that people who live on an island (Latin: insula) are particularly prone to insularities, and their restless minds and inquisitive spirits constantly remind me of the truth that the self gradually begins to re-cognise itself only through its long journeys within and across the lands of the other. In many ways, this book has been inspired by them and written for them – and therefore it is also dedicated to them.

Abbreviations ADT Tagore, Satyendranath and Indira Devi, ed. 1909. The Auto-Biography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore. Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri and Co. BR2 Bagal, Jogesh Chandra, ed. 1973. Bankim Racanābalī, Volume 2. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad. BR3 Bagal, Jogesh Chandra, ed. 1969. Bankim Racanābalī, Volume 3. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad. RR Ghosh, Ajitkumar, ed. 1973. Rāmmmohan Racanābalī. Calcutta: Haraf Prakashani.

chapter 1

Introduction The diverse socioreligious movements initiated by Hindu groups during the long nineteenth century in colonial India are characterised by distinctive reworkings of some premodern life-worlds against the backdrop of English education, European scientific empiricism, and western political ideals. From around 1800 onwards, some individuals from the genteel classes or ‘gentle folk’ (bhadralok) in Bengal began to forge different ways of engaging with the concepts, norms, and subjectivities which were being introduced to, and instituted in, colonial milieus. As they negotiated the turbulent currents between traditional Vedāntic Hindu worldviews and non-Indic influences, there gradually emerged a variety of standpoints on a fine-grained continuum, ranging from recoveries of pristine layers which were putatively untouched by the colonial milieus, to thoroughgoing forms of Anglicisation and vigorous rejections of all premodern Indic associations, to subtle blendings between eastern spiritualities and western secularities. For much of the 1800s, the dominant western perceptions of the lifeworlds of Hindus were couched in vocabularies such as the heathen, the demoniac, the regressive, and the primitive, and some English-educated Bengali Hindus, stung by these representations, began to mount vigorous responses to them. This book analyses these intellectual responses through a textual study of the theological meditations, letters, public addresses, autobiographies, and sermons of a specific cross-section of Bengali Hindus who were associated with, immersed in, or opposed to, the Brahmo Samaj, which was founded in Calcutta in 1829 by Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833). More specifically, it is an intellectual history which traces the trajectories of their engagements – conceptual, institutional, existential – with patterns of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism whose cultic practices, experiential disciplines, and ritual imageries they often rejected even as they incorporated its devotional vocabularies. The Brahmo Samaj was shaped by Rammohun’s vision of a pure Vedāntic monotheism which would reject the ‘idolatry’ of multiple forms of contemporary Hinduism, including precisely the worship of Kṛṣṇa as the supreme God in Bengal Vaiṣṇavism. By exploring the representations by writers, with different degrees of association with Rammohun’s Brahmo Samaj, of Vaiṣṇava worldviews, we will highlight the point that they alternately rejected, assimilated, interrogated, and critiqued the devotional matrices of Vaiṣṇavism. In their Bengali writings which remain largely untranslated and also understudied, they often claim that certain forms

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of Vaiṣṇava belief and practice do not stand to reason, even as they are cautious to distantiate their own Brahmo-shaped rationalities from the viewpoints of their atheistic, agnostic, and sceptical Bengali Hindu contemporaries. These debates between the proponents of a Brahmo-inflected ‘religion within the bounds of reason’ and a Vaiṣṇava-structured ‘reason within the bounds of religion’ crucially shape both the emerging forms of Brahmo dharma and the reconfigurations of Vaiṣṇava dharma throughout the nineteenth century, against the socio-historical backdrops of multiple western, British colonial, and Christian representations of Hindu dharma. As some Brahmos became vigorously engaged in the processes of universalizing ancient Hindu dharma, by extending in diverse directions the socioreligious legacies of Rammohun, they often ran headlong into the projects of certain Bengali Vaiṣṇavas who declared that it was, in fact, the dharma propounded by Caitanya (1486–1534) that was truly universal and beyond all sectarian (sāmpradāyik) boundaries. These tussles between two alternative formulations of Hindu universalism – one Brahmo and the other Vaiṣṇava – would crucially shape their understandings of Hinduism as the essence of all human religiosity. These Brahmo intellectuals who lived, moved, and had their socio-political being in colonial milieus sought to engage with the western critiques of the Orient as the degenerate heart of darkness (Marshall 1970; Stokes 1959: 31) by reconfiguring a diverse array of Vedāntic Hinduisms which were rooted in the premodern exegetical-experiential templates of figures such as Śaṃkara. According to Śaṃkara’s Advaita Vedānta, the multiple images of divinity used in ritual worship are not in themselves the ultimate reality, but contemplative devotion directed towards them can be soteriologically efficacious in re-orienting individuals towards Brahman, the ineffable and transpersonal (nirguṇa) absolute underlying all worldly diversity. Various reformulations of this Advaitic reframing of image worship were the predominant notes in east-west blendings configured by the members of the Brahmo Samaj especially during the 1830s, the 1840s, and the 1850s. Their styles of Hinduism, raised on the foundations of some premodern templates of Vedānta, were presented precisely as the antitheses of certain British colonial and Christian missionary characterisations of ‘village Hinduism’, ‘folk Hinduism’, or ‘popular Hinduism’ – unlike the latter which had been denounced as regressive, irrational, and insular, the former was posited as the ‘higher Hinduism’ which was rational, experiential, and universal. This distinction between a ‘higher Hinduism’ and a ‘popular Hinduism’ begins to appear as early as 1810 in writers such as Edward Moor who distinguished between ‘esoteric Hinduism’ and ‘exoteric Hinduism’ – the first being the ‘unadulterated’ truths which were enshrined in the texts of the Brahman priests, and the second the popular mythology of the masses who were said

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to be immersed in idolatry and superstition. Therefore, though the Hindus in general, divided into various sects, would make images of the deities, Moor (1810: 3) notes that no representations are made or temples constructed to Brahman, the supreme being, the ‘infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent Spirit’. This western distinction itself was not formulated de novo by Moor, but had, as we have indicated, a premodern precursor in some Advaita Vedāntic contexts which regarded devotional love (bhakti) as a penultimate pathway, sub specie temporis, to the ultimate knowledge ( jñāna) characterised by intuitive self-realisation, sub specie aeternitatis. Rammohun himself, and some of his immediate followers in the Brahmo Samaj, recalibrated this Advaitic pedagogic distinction to present the faith of the Brahmo Samaj as a rational and universally accessible form of life which was opposed to the ‘idolatrous’ worship of temple images, as shaped by the reasoned study of the scriptural texts such as the Upaniṣads, and as driven by an impetus towards socioreligious reform (Crawford 1984: 35). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, various Brahmo leaders would repeatedly return to Rammohun’s central themes such as the indivisible unity of God whom different religions seek from within their specific socio-historical contexts, a moral faith which was geared towards the eradication of social evils such as the immolation of widows (sati), and universal theism. 1

Bhakti in the Brahmo Samaj

From the 1850s onwards, a number of these Bengali thinkers, preachers, and charismatic figures who were associated, directly or indirectly, with the Brahmo Samaj had to grapple with a key question – the precise locations, within the life-worlds of the Samaj, of the notions, experiences, and subjectivities of ecstatic devotional love (bhakti) which had largely been passed over in Rammohun’s own writings. A leitmotif in the writings of seven Brahmo stalwarts who creatively reworked Rammohun’s legacy and whom we study in this book – Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899), Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar (1840–1905), Bijoy Krishna Goswami (1841–1899), Sivanath Sastri (1847–1919), Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932), and Sitanath Dutta Tattvabhushan (1865–1945) – is the intimate presence, in the innermost recesses of the human heart, of the supremely personal, accessible, and adorable Lord. In their Bengali contexts, this theme of divine intimacy had a readymade home in the experiential milieus of premodern Vaiṣṇavisms which drew their sustenance from the devotional life of the charismatic figure of Caitanya (1486–1534). Through rich details of exegetical commentaries,

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temple rituals, and devotional songs, this style of Vaiṣṇavism articulated the theo-drama of the divine lover, Lord Kṛṣṇa and the cowherd women (gopīs). A key motif in various dimensions of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, centred around the Bhāgavata-purāṇa (c. 900 CE), is the rāsa-līlā narrative of Kṛṣṇa’s sportive dance with the gopīs, which is presented in the theological commentaries as a spiritual window into the esoteric and eternal divine love between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. However, precisely these conceptual and affective vocabularies of the God of love and the love of God were unpalatable to some Brahmo intellectuals who belonged to social classes which viewed Vaiṣṇavism as a ‘debased form of religion’ (Damen 1983: 85). In particular, they denounced as immoral and obscene the unabashed sensuality of the songs about Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in the songs (kīrtan) of itinerant Vaiṣṇava women, and tried to insulate women of respectable society (bhadramahilā) from such bawdy and distasteful influences (Banerjee 1989). In subsequent chapters, we will see how Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Pratap Chandra, Sivanath, and Sitanath, as they grappled with Vaiṣṇavism, configured a dynamic dialectic in which their bhakti-infused Advaita carefully steers away from the effusive styles of Vaiṣṇavism, even as their Advaita-shaped bhakti articulates the passionate intensity with which the finite self is devoted to, rooted in, and enveloped by the supreme self. These thinkers were either born into, or were deeply familiar with, Vaiṣṇava lifeforms – Rammohun’s father was a Vaiṣṇava; as a child Debendranath spent much of his time with his Vaiṣṇava grandmother; and Sitanath was raised in a devotional family centred around the worship of the image of Caitanya. These hybrid configurations of what might be termed the ‘Brahmo bhakti’ of Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Sitanath, Pratap Chandra, and Sivanath seek to recover the ancient roots of devotional worship (bhakti) in the Upaniṣads, while rejecting its medieval routes of ‘idolatrous’ articulations in scriptural texts such as the Bhāgavata-purāṇa which are centred around the figure of Kṛṣṇa, the beloved Lord of the Vaiṣṇava traditions. We will also see, however, that Bijoy Krishna, and his disciple Bipin Chandra, moved much deeper than the other figures on this list into Vaiṣṇava territories. Their mature spiritual pathways too were probably shaped by their familial affiliations: the biographical materials on Bijoy Krishna unfailingly indicate that he was born into a family in the lineage of Advaitācārya (1434–1559), an early associate of Caitanya himself, and Bipin Chandra’s father was a Vaiṣṇava. Bijoy Krishna and Bipin Chandra freely embraced some of the passionate intensities of the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa motif in ways that provoked the charge that their Brahmo spirituality had descended into the depths of the ‘idolatrous’. At the same time, a common conceptual thread running through the writings of Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Pratap Chandra, Bijoy Krishna,

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Sivanath, and Bipin Chandra is their reiteration, with distinctive inflections, of Rammohun’s Advaita-styled emphases on the spiritual unity of the divine reality, the harmonization of reason and scriptural text, and the quest for liberation from within householderly structures. Some of these bhadralok were themselves connected to one another through various crisscrossing circuits of familiarity – Debendranath’s father, the industrialist Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), was a friend of Rammohun; Debendranath himself had spent some time as a child in Rammohun’s home and he later revived Rammohun’s Brahmo Samaj in 1843; Rajnarayan’s father too was a friend of Rammohun; Debendranath once noted that in forty years of his life he had not found a friend like Rajnarayan; Sivanath was an associate of Rajnarayan; both Sitanath and Sivanath regarded Debendranath with deep respect; Bijoy Krishna continued to revere Debendranath as his guru even after he had renounced his institutional ties to the Brahmo Samaj; at Sitanath’s first marriage, Sivanath officiated as the minister (ācārya); Sivanath was once a classmate of Bijoy Krishna; for a while Bipin Chandra studied with Sitanath, and so on. Their Brahmo formulations were produced within the wider milieus of a resurgence of forms of Hindu traditionalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, which were associated with figures such as Pandit Sasadhar Tarkachudamani (1851–1925) and Krishnaprasanna Sen (1851–1902) (Datta 2000: 72–73). A pivotal moment on these landscapes of interrelated existential and intellectual trajectories is the emergence of Vaiṣṇava forms of ecstatic devotional intensity through the highly charismatic figure of Keshub Chandra Sen (1838– 1884), who moved away in 1866 from Debendranath to form his Brahmo Samaj of India. Keshub emphasised intensely personal forms of subjective experience where the key affective dimensions were God-vision, prayer, and spiritual sanctification. The emotive density of Sen’s religiosity is evident in this declaration: ‘The sinner who is now occupying this pulpit … is the greatest sinner in the Brahmo Samaj. This is not rhetoric, not poetry, but sober truth: my own self bears witness to this truth. There are few sinners like me on this earth. I am full of sins’ (Koar 1955: 16). In an autobiographical note, Keshub indicates that in the beginning of his spiritual life, he had possessed faith, conscience, and asceticism, but in this austere mode of living in God, his heart lacked devotional love, and he thus found himself living through a spiritual drought. However, the spirit of devotional love (bhakti) became expressed in him, and ‘in some subtle and inscrutable fashion, some One from within drew my heart’s desire towards the loving God of devotees’ (Koar 1955: 72). Through Keshub, these Vaiṣṇava motifs of self-abasement, utter reliance on God, and introspective self-reflection became the defining marks of some dimensions of Brahmo life, and it is significant that some of his initial followers – Pratap Chandra,

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Bijoy Krishna, Aughore Nath Gupta (1841–1881), Jadu Nath Chakravarty (1836– 1918), and others – hailed from Vaiṣṇava families (Damen 1983: 62). From the 1870s onwards, spontaneous forms of Vaiṣṇava religious devotion such as nagar-kīrtan (hymn singing in the street) were introduced into some Brahmo circles. According to one of Debendranath’s early biographers, the followers of Keshub did not appreciate the religious sensibilities of the group within the Brahmo Samaj which was presided over by Debendranath, and which was called, after the split, the Adi Brahmo Samaj. In their estimate, it was devoid of the highly emotive sentiments of consciousness of sin (pāpbodh) and repentance (anutāp). They were not satisfied only with searching for the infinite joy and knowledge of God in the creations of the world or with orderly forms of music which sang of the divine love and compassion in human life (Chakravarti 1916: 23). It was not simply over these dimensions of ecstatic religiosity that the younger Brahmos began to move away from the somewhat meditatively configured spiritual styles of the sagely Debendranath. On another front – namely, scripture – Keshub’s group felt that the use of scriptural quotations from primarily the Vedas and the Upaniṣads in Brahmo services was not sufficiently universalist for the spiritual visions of their Brahmo Samaj of India. Keshub compiled a new collection of texts from religious scriptures across the world, and the Sanskrit epigram of the book read: The wide universe is the holy temple of God; the pure heart is the land of pilgrimage; truth is imperishable scripture. hatcher 1999: 110–11

The declaration that Keshub read out at the consecration of the temple of the new organisation in August 1869 is effectively an elaboration of this epigram: ‘No created being or object that has been or may hereafter be worshipped by any sect shall be ridiculed or condemned in the course of the Divine Service to be conducted here … No sect shall be vilified, ridiculed or hated’ (Pankratz 1987: 30). His quest for a new synthesis of the world’s religions led him towards a ‘Church Universal’ which ‘recognises in all prophets and saints a harmony, in all scriptures a unity and through all dispensations a continuity, which abjures all that separates and divides, always magnifies unity and peace, which harmonizes reason and faith, yoga and bhakti, asceticism and social duty in their highest forms and which shall make of all nations and sects one kingdom and one family in the fullness of time’ (cited in Halbfass 1990: 225). More tersely, he declared: ‘Gentlemen, trifle not with unity because in the logic of

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synthesis is the world’s salvation’ (cited in Kopf 1979: 275). This ‘synthetic’ logic was dramatically exemplified in 1881, when he performed the sacramental rite of the eucharist by replacing bread and wine with rice and water, and took his followers to the Hooghly river where, after asking them to imagine that they were in the River Jordan eighteen centuries ago, he offered a prayer to Varuna as an aspect of the divine force that pervades everything. This spiritual unity was to be realised in his New Dispensation which would bring together all the saints and the prophets of the different religious traditions of the world: ‘The Lord Jesus is my will, Socrates my head, Chaitanya my heart, the Hindu rishi my soul’ (Kopf 1979: 276). Around 1881, some members of Keshub’s New Dispensation seem to have heavily inflected their preaching with messages which would be acceptable to traditional Hindus. On one occasion, Keshub’s lecture in Nainital in May 1880 was announced by a ‘proclamation with beat and tom tom saying that Babu Keshub Chunder Sun, a bhakta [devotee] from Calcutta, was to hold Hari-katha [Vaiṣṇava religious discourse narrating the deeds of God]’ (Damen 1983: 245). Starting from February 1880, Keshub started a series of pilgrimages where he and some of his followers would imaginatively recreate and enact scenes from the lives of holy figures such as Moses, Socrates, Caitanya, Buddha, and others. Before the pilgrimage to Caitanya, celebrated on September 26, 1880, preparatory services were held for three days where spiritual characteristics of Caitanya were recalled such as his renunciation and his intoxication with divine love. A special hymn composed for the occasion declared: ‘Let us go on a pilgrimage to the regions of Gour’s love. / Nowhere else is such a place of joy./ Sing in one chorus the praise of Hari with exceeding joy and enthusiasm, and let us behold dear Chaitanya Gossain with the whole heart …’ (Damen 1983: 268). From January 1881, Keshub introduced a series of special sacraments, such as the Arati with bells, drums, incense, and five lights before the altar; the New Eucharist where some ‘Hindu apostles’ of Christ sat on the floor with a plate of rice and a goblet of water; the sacrifice to the fire where Keshub prayed to the Vedic deity Agni; and so on. If we thus find that his religiosity, around 1881, was deeply suffused with Vaiṣṇava motifs, his youthful perceptions of Vaiṣṇavism, however, had been much more aligned with those of his bhadralok contemporaries. Through his English education, he had moved away from the Vaiṣṇava devotional forms of his family, and, in fact, had developed a ‘strong prejudice’ against the use of musical instruments such as the khol (Sastri 1911: 217). Keshub was to note later that though Caitanya had proclaimed a spiritual message of social egalitarianism, liberation through the grace of God, and devotional love of God to whom we should dedicate our entire lives, Caitanya’s teachings were debased by latter-day followers who dance and sing with loud exclamations, in

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‘a spectacle [which] is disgusting and even ludicrous’ in the sight of educated people (Sen 1889: 17). However, ‘[t]o the Brahmo Somaj must India be ever indebted for the vindication and revival of the spirit of Chaitanya, and the true appreciation of his creed and character’ (Sen 1889: 16). Debendranath, Sitanath, and Sivanath were associated in different ways and to different degrees with the epicentral figure of Keshub, but they had rather different views about the precise status of Caitanya within the wider fabrics of the Brahmo Samaj. Even after moving away from Debendranath, Keshub retained a filial affection towards Debendranath, and he signs one letter to Debendranath in 1865 with the words: ‘He who became proud in the cause of self-reliance, and he who became hated by others in the cause of independence, he [Keshub] remains your well-wisher, friend, and devoted follower’ (Sastri n.d.: 172). In his youth, Sitanath became an active follower of the charismatic Keshub, and the doctrines and the forms of worship developed by Keshub deeply influenced him (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 18). Sivanath indicates that when Keshub left for England in 1870, he was sorely distressed – he had developed a deep friendship with Keshub, they were often engaged in delightful banter, and an acquaintance had remarked that Sivanath possessed a key to Keshub’s mind (Sastri 1918: 160). However, Debendranath, Sitanath, and Sivanath were far more circumspect than Keshub in directly invoking Caitanya as an exemplar of the Hindu religious life, even as they cautiously sought to interweave certain motifs from premodern bhakti into their quests for Brahman in and beyond the structures of the mundane world. On the one hand, some of the leitmotifs of premodern Caitanya or Gauḍīẏa Vaiṣṇava theology recur throughout their writings – the impermanence of the world which is enfolded by the supremely personal Lord, sincere repentance before the merciful Lord, the Lord as the most intimate friend and the deliverer of the fallen, spiritual purification through devotional love of the Lord, and communion with the Lord in the spiritual depths of the innermost self. For instance, some of the ‘entreaty’ prayers of Narottama-dāsa (c. 1600 CE) highlight the wretched condition into which the supplicant has fallen, and appeal to Kṛṣṇa to compassionately deliver the supplicant from the cruel ocean of transmigratory existence (saṃsāra). A characteristic aspect of these prayers is the note of self-deprecation in which the poet acknowledges one’s faults and one’s lowly status (adhama) as an evil doer. The poet laments that he has spent his life in vain (bifale), for having attained birth as a human being, he has yet not worshipped Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa (O’Connell 1980: 125–26). One of the immediate followers of Caitanya and also one of the principal systematizers of Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theology, Rūpa Gosvāmin (1489–1564) had expressed in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (I, 2, 154) this stance of self-abasement with his

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assertion that the ‘acknowledgement of wretchedness’ (dainyabodhikā) of the devotee lies in this conviction: ‘There is no one who is more sinful (pāpātmā) or guilty (aparādhī) than I am. I am ashamed even to ask for forgiveness (parihāre ʾpi lajjā me)’ (Haberman 2003: 53). Highlighting the presence of these Vaiṣṇava motifs in some circles of Brahmo life, Sivanath notes that the introduction of Vaiṣṇava hymns into Brahmo congregational worship ‘induced a sudden expansion of religious enthusiasm. The sense of sin and human unworthiness was more strongly impressed than ever on the minds of the Brahmos, and a spirit of lowliness was suddenly developed in many minds’ (Sastri 1881:19). On the other hand, however, Brahmo intellectuals, such as Sivanath himself, generally excise from their writings, addresses, and sermons the distinctively Vaiṣṇava articulations relating to Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs, even when they speak of the intense sweetness of the human love of God and the majestic splendour of God’s accessibility to humanity. They would have balked at Keshub’s effusive exhortation to his followers that they should become like Caitanya himself: ‘Verily, verily Chaitanya was Krishna and Radha in one … He was a virtuous man and a sweet woman. He was a stern yogi and a loving devotee. May we be likewise!’ (Sen 1915:73). The distance that Keshub, during the 1870s, had travelled down a Vaiṣṇava pathway which many other Brahmos such as Debendranath, Sitanath, and Sivanath would have hesitated to take can be gauged through a Brahmo reflection on Caitanya published around three decades earlier in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā in 1844 (no. 17: 134), the monthly journal of the Brahmo Samaj. The writer begins by noting that with the waning of the light of dharma, certain individuals began to conjure up scriptural treatises to pursue their own selfish interests, and the common people too, who were incapable of careful discernment, began to accept as truth what is patently false. Thus, around two hundred years ago, some individuals began to declare that Gaurāṅga (Caitanya) is indeed the supreme divine reality (Brahman) – the unborn and the undying. The writer charges that the worship of Gaurāṅga is driven by the sensual impulses of the devotees and is associated with shameful and disgusting practices. A year later in 1845, the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (no. 32: 269–70) complains that those who seek to propagate the worship of Kṛṣṇa depart from the wellestablished meanings of words and instead offer fanciful etymologies. The writer ridicules Vaiṣṇava appeals to a sense of the mysterious by vigorously cutting through dense layers of Vaiṣṇava scriptural exegeses. It is not surprising, we are told, that the dwellers of the land of Vṛndāvan were able to see Kṛṣṇa, because what has form is indeed visible. What is indeed contrary to perception, however, is the claim that someone who has a finite form – Kṛṣṇa – is yet said to be the all-pervading divinity.

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The Premodern Roots of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti in Bengal

One aspect of this general Brahmo distaste for Vaiṣṇavism relates to its perceived anti-intellectualism, where the unstinting and ecstatic devotion to Kṛṣṇa is put forward as the sole pathway towards participation in the unfolding companionship between God and humanity. Partly with Keshub in mind, Rajnarayan cautions his readers that religious enthusiasm, while it has a proper place in our devotional love of God, should be governed by reason which is given to us by God as a ‘regulating principle’ in all spheres of our life. The way to God is shaped by a deep, stable, and enduring love and not a passionate, intoxicating, irrational, and directionless frenzy. Therefore, Brahmo leaders should not allow their disciples to sink into a state of spiritual slavery where they fall down at the feet of their teachers and exclaim, ‘Lord! save me!’ or ‘May I be saved through the merits of the dust of thy feet!’ (Basu 1869: 7). Rejecting such Vaiṣṇava-shaped forms of self-abasement, Rajnarayan writes: ‘We should not make a show of our sorrow for sin. A parade of repentance like every other kind of moral parade should be avoided’ (Basu 1869: 1). Around forty years later, A. Chakravarti argues, in his biography of Debendranath, that the Gauḍīẏa Vaiṣṇavas have not been able to establish a living union between knowledge of the divine reality ( jñāna) and devotional sentiment (rasa). If Vaiṣṇavism can be seen as the moment of intense self-constriction in the religious history of Bengal, Rammohun’s religious life, according to Chakravarti (1916:15), is the process of self-expansion towards the world to the outmost limit. Writing around a decade later, M. T. Kennedy was to argue, from a Christian standpoint, that Caitanya bhakti is not a ‘full and rounded type of religion, because it does not encompass or satisfy the whole personality of man’. First, it is intellectually feeble, for reason plays no role in its religious life; second, it has a self-absorptive dimension which is not concerned with social matters; and third, it has no ethical substance, for the excessive nature of the bhakti experience is morbid and draws people away from God (Kennedy 1925: 245–47). Given such general perceptions and representations of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism as a pathway of unbridled non-rationalism, ecstatic experience, and social quietism, the Brahmo contemporaries of Keshub would have been shocked by his lachrymose confession: ‘Though I am a Pagal [madman], there is method in my madness. I am not as other Pagals are. My insanity is different from theirs. Too much thinking has made me mad, and marred all my prospects in the world. Yet am I not unhappy’. Keshub immediately clarifies, however, that he is mad in the sense that in everything that he does there is a human ‘me’ and a divine ‘me’ interwoven into his life: ‘This double personage, this duality is a marvel to me’ (Bhattacharji 1903: 219–20). Nor did Keshub’s admission

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in a lecture that he ‘scarcely reads two books in 365 days’ go down well with Sivanath, who retorted that those who wilfully disassociate themselves from the stream of human thought condemn themselves to ‘darkness and confusion’ (Sastri 1881: 86). Another thick cluster of Brahmo objections to Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism revolves around a crucial debate in medieval Caitanya theological circles regarding whether Rādhā, the eternal consort of Kṛṣṇa, is dutifully married to him (svīyā) or is another’s wife (parakīyā). The locus classicus of these socioreligious debates is the rāsa-līlā narrative in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa which shows some cowherd women (gopīs) hurriedly abandoning their homes and wifely duties (dharma) to participate in a circular dance with Kṛṣṇa on an autumnal night. The Caitanya traditions have struggled with the tension between the claim that the Lord is the transcendent source of all worldly dharma and the depiction of the Lord as the immanent deity who violates precisely these socioreligious principles through his amorous dalliances with the gopīs. To appreciate this tension, we need to grasp some of the foundational elements of the developed theology of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, which was formulated by figures such as Rūpa Gosvāmin (1489–1564), Jīva Gosvāmin (1513–1598), and others. These theologians established the conceptual and ritual links between the Caitanya movement and Vaiṣṇavite myths and practices, and bestowed on Caitanya lifeforms ‘the respectable mantle of Brahmanical philosophy’ (Chakravarti 1985: 92). According to their understanding, the intrinsic nature of the divine reality (svarūpa-śakti), Brahman is constituted of three aspects. With the samdhinī power, Brahman upholds all reality including Brahman itself, the power of saṃvit enables Brahman to know and make others know, and through the power of hlādinī Brahman enjoys delight and enables others to enjoy delight as well. The most perfect aspect of this svarūpa-śakti, which is the ground of the other two aspects, is the hlādinī-śakti who is Rādhā. Thus, in his Bhagavat-sandarbha, Jīva states that the reason why sandhinī, saṃvit, and hlādinī are arranged in this sequence is that each successive power is more excellent than the previous one (kramādutkarṣanena) (Chatterjee 1972: 152). Therefore, the ultimate reality is the eternal hyphenation of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, that is, the delighting power and the delighted one who are inseparable. The individual selves and the finite objects in the empirical world are all partial reflections of this supreme relish and bliss (ānanda) of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa. The hlādinī-śakti becomes even more relishable to Kṛṣṇa when it is reflected in the hearts of his devotees and generates intense love (prema) towards Kṛṣṇa, a love that is enjoyed by Kṛṣṇa himself (Chakravarti 1969: 48–49). Thus, for Rūpa, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa’s narratives of the sports of Kṛṣṇa are an ‘aesthetic-religious drama’ in which the characters are Kṛṣṇa and his eternal associates, and the

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human devotee of Kṛṣṇa is the ‘religious aesthete’ who cultivates a relish for the play (Holdrege 2013: 173). In other words, eternal reality has a dramatic structure and religious life here on earth is a progressive immersion in its dramatic narrative. Therefore, for the Caitanya tradition, the goal of human existence is not the traditional triad of socio-moral living (dharma), material wealth (artha), and pleasure (kāma), which is transcended by liberation from the cycles of transmigration (mokṣa), but the experience of spontaneous love (prema) for Kṛṣṇa (Gupta 2007: 4). In the dress of a cowherd youth (gopa), Kṛṣṇa dwells in the celestial Vṛndāvana with his powers who are personified as his attendants (parikaras), and through the inscrutable power of Kṛṣṇa, this non-phenomenal Vṛndāvana, while continuing to exist celestially, also appears as the worldly Vṛndāvana with the river Yamunā and with the gopas and gopīs. While this earthly replica may seem to us to be worldly because of our imperfect spiritual vision, those who have attained the perfection of devotion are able to see the divine cosmic sports of Kṛṣṇa with his retinue (parikaras) even when they continue to live physically in worldly abodes (Kapoor 2008: 110). This return to Kṛṣṇa through devotional love is divided by Rūpa into four broad classes in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu: sāmānya-bhakti, sādhana-bhakti, bhāva-bhakti, and prema-bhakti. The first is religious devotion in general; the second is devotion that can be attained through specific types of disciplined effort; the third is devotion that arises spontaneously; and the fourth is devotion that has matured into love. Both vaidhi-bhakti and rāgānuga-bhakti are forms of sādhana-bhakti. The former is developed by following specific scriptural injunctions (vidhi) such as resorting to a spiritual guide, following the ways of saintly people, residing in places of pilgrimage, circumambulating an image of the Lord, and so on. The former is viewed as a stepping stone to the latter which is a spontaneous attraction towards the Lord, and which involves the imitation of the actions and feelings of the Lord’s attendants (Chakravarti 1969: 203). Crucially, the theologians of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism differentiate between eroticism (kāma) which is sensual appetite seeking its worldly fulfilment and pure love (prema) which is an intense desire for the happiness of Kṛṣṇa alone. The gopīs are said to have exhibited such selfless love by directing all their efforts towards the supreme happiness only of Kṛṣṇa, and such love can also be imaginatively recreated and imitated by the highest devotees at the rāgānuga-bhakti stage. For the affective cultivation of this rāgānuga-bhakti, a devotee vicariously participates in the mood (bhāva) of a particular attendant (parikara) of Kṛṣṇa, by adopting the dress (veśa) and the habit (svabhāva) of that dear one. By keeping in mind the ongoing divine sports in the transcendental Vṛndāvana, the devotee imaginatively constructs oneself as the beloved of Kṛṣṇa and thus vicariously experiences the sentiments of the eternal

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attendant for Kṛṣṇa (Chakravarti 1969: 215). By thus initially modelling oneself on one of the characters of Vṛndāvana, the devotee can progressively become completely absorbed in (āveśa) the world of that character and become identified with the character to such an extent that she is that character (Haberman 1988:75). One such visualization (līlā smaraṇa) is the meditation where the devotees project themselves as a particular handmaiden (mañjarī) to Rādhā and create a spiritual body (siddha-rūpa) that is inwardly female. They have to memorize the details of the heavenly Vṛndāvana, including the locations of Rādhā’s house and Kṛṣṇa’s house, and the various bowers around the pond where they meet. They should learn about the eternal pastimes of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā during each of eight divisions of the day, and visualize these activities in their spiritual body (McDaniel 1989: 49). Through this meditative following of the activities of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā throughout day and night, they place themselves within these divine sports till the remembrance can be performed spontaneously and without interruption (Dasa 1999: 213–35). For the theologians and poets of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, these celestial trysts between the divine couple are regarded as emblematic of the love of the human soul for the divine reality. Crucially, they view the separation of human lovers as the best image of the individual’s love for Kṛṣṇa, since such separation draws the mind away from absorption in one’s own self towards the other and increases love for the other. To return to the paradigmatic motif of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa in which the cowherd women leave behind their worldly obligations and run to meet Kṛṣṇa, Jīva Gosvāmin argues that they leave behind illusory forms which remain with their husbands. They themselves attain spiritual forms in the company of Kṛṣṇa, and because he is their true husband, there is no violation of social convention when they leave behind their worldly husbands who are manifestations of the Lord’s spiritual power (Schweig 2005: 283–84). Thus, in his Prītisandarbha, he states that both in the manifest and in the non-manifest sports of the Lord, these gopīs are of the form of the Lord’s essential powers (svarūpaśaktitvameva) (Syamdas 1998: 450). If Jīva thus deftly negotiates this somewhat delicate point through a spiritualized reading, the worldview of a group called the Sahajiyās employ more forthrightly sexual imageries to argue that love between man and woman replicates the mutual love between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. They argue that the secret meaning of the rāsa-līlā is that the cowherd women were the wives of others (parakīyā), and that the experience of separation (viraha) is more intense for the parakīyā than for one’s own (svakīyā), because of the uncertainties in the former case as to whether one will meet the lover again. Through this fear of separation, there arises intense grief and passionate longing which lead to the supreme enjoyment of rasa among the cowherd women. Whereas those who follow

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the path of Vedic regulations (vidhi) are in a svakīyā relationship with Kṛṣṇa, which revolves around his transcendental majesty, those who have developed the higher parakīyā love are able to relish the relationship of sweetness (mādhurya) with Kṛṣṇa (Dimock 1966: 211). Another group which was located outside the socio-ritual universes of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism was the Kartābhajās whose teachings and practices were based in the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā and other Tantric schools. They viewed the ultimate reality underlying and pervading all things as the spontaneous or innate nature (sahaj) which indwells the core of human beings as the ‘man of the heart’ (maner mānuṣ), and which has to be attained through yogic techniques and not through elaborate rituals or doctrines (Urban 2003: 495). The Kartābhajās emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in and around Calcutta, and most of their members were lower caste and poor peasants who had been adversely affected by the land revenue policies of the British (Oddie 1997). They claimed that after the Caitanya movement had been corrupted by its followers, Caitanya himself decided to be born in the form of a poor madman called Āulcāṅd and establish a simple (sahaj) path for the poor people. Caitanya thus arrived secretly to set up this ‘religion of humanity’ (mānuṣer dharma) in the ‘secret marketplace’ of the Kartābhajā tradition. Their members wrote in styles of spoken Bengali and deliberately avoided Sanskritised Bengali, and were indifferent to the contemporaneous concerns of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ such as educational reform, scientific advancement, or recovery of a Hindu monotheism grounded in Vedāntic sources (Urban 2003: 505). In turn, various styles of engaging with the perceived cognitive deficits, emotive excesses, and moral transgressions of these ‘deviant’ modalities of Vaiṣṇavism were developed by some of the bhadralok themselves. Such Vaiṣṇavas shared the wider bhadralok concerns about the impropriety and the immorality of certain forms of Vaiṣṇava folk expressions. A Vaiṣṇava contemporary of the Brahmo figures mentioned above, Bhaktivinoda Thakur (Kedarnath Datta) (1838–1914), sought to restore a pure (śuddha) form of Vaiṣṇavism by removing the excrescences which, according to him, had led the bhadralok to reject Vaiṣṇavism completely. He considered certain traditions (sampradāẏ) such as Bāuls, Neḍās, Sahajiyās, and others to be non-Vaiṣṇava, and argued that they were harming pure Vaiṣṇavas by using the label of ‘Vaiṣṇava’ for themselves. While they take the name of Caitanya, their instructions and spiritual practices are, in fact, contrary to Vaiṣṇava dharma (Fuller 2003: 191–92). Bhaktivinoda represents the ‘orthodox’ Vaiṣṇava response to the charge of immorality in Kṛṣṇa’s sports with the gopīs, which states that the cowherd women are to be understood as the eternal companions (parikara) of Kṛṣṇa, and thus ontologically inseparable from him. They became embodied on earth

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along with his descent so that their dance was, in truth, a worldly manifestation of Kṛṣṇa’s timeless sport with his powers (Nelson 2004: 355). Reflecting this standard position, Bhaktivinoda regarded an aspirant’s spiritual persona as consisting of eleven aspects including items such as the age, name, form, dress, residence, and mode of service of a certain associate of Kṛṣṇa whether as a female servant (mañjarī) of a gopī friend of Rādhā, a cowherd friend of Kṛṣṇa, and so on. Thus, for instance, an aspirant could have the spiritual identity of a young girl between ten and sixteen years, be placed in one of the groups of the female friends (sakhī) of Rādhā, receive assignments from a principal gopī friend of Rādhā, and so on. The aspirant must reflect on their own inclinations and feelings regarding which spiritual persona they seek to cultivate, and declare this intention to their guru. When the guru grants this inner identity, the aspirant must seek to cultivate it through devotional practice (Dasa 1999: 222– 29). Certain aspects of this spiritual reading would later be transmitted by his son, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874–1937), to his own disciple, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), who founded ISKCON in the United States in 1966. In a recent study which helps to illuminate some of these tensions between earlier generations of Brahmos and Vaiṣṇavas, S. Sarbadhikary notes that in the Nadia region of present-day West Bengal, the Gosvāmins who are Brahmin priests, the Bābājis who are Vaiṣṇava celibate renouncers, the Sahajiyās, and the members of ISCKON have developed spiritual techniques which are overlapping in certain respects and also sharply disjoint in other respects. The Gosvāmins and the Bābājis cultivate the spiritual discipline of mañjarī-sādhanā in which they imaginatively place themselves as handmaidens of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, and through this practice the celestial space of Vṛndāvana is said to become manifest in the mind-heart (manas) of the devotees (Sarbadhikary 2015: 71–72). Both the Bābājis and the members of ISCKON regard the imaginative envisioning of the divine sport (līlā) of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa as the expression of rāgānuga devotion, but they oppose the Sahajiyā claim that this līlā is to be recapitulated in the body of the devotee through ritual sex. The Sahajiyās claim that they not only imaginatively witness the pastimes of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa but also experience in the interior affective levels of their bodies, configured as a sacred place, the sexual pleasures of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa (Sarbhadhikary 2015: 112). While ISCKCON does not reject the significance of rāgānuga devotion, it reserves the cultivation of such Vaiṣṇava subjectivities for the spiritually adept. One should, they argue, serve Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa by living in, developing, and beautifying the land of Mayapur (in Nadia) which is the worldly manifestation of the celestial Vṛndāvan (Sarbadhikary 2015: 23). According to them, spiritual practice involves not only the cultivation

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of interiorized states of devotion but also joint service to the physical landscape of Mayapur, which is a veiled Vṛndāvana, by constructing beautiful temples which resound with congregational singing (kīrtans) and are suffused with incense. Through such service (sevā), any place on earth can be turned into a sacred abode (dhāma) of Kṛṣṇa, so that the whole world is potentially Vṛndāvana (Sarbadhikary 2015: 153–55). 3

The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaiṣṇava Milieus

Our study of Brahmo engagements with the vitalities of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism will highlight certain distinctive departures from, as well as some underlying continuities with, the ‘Vedāntic monotheism’ of Rammohun. The major writings of four of these Brahmos – Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Pratap Chandra, and Bijoy Krishna – were produced between 1850 and 1900, while those of Sivanath, Bipin Chandra, and Sitanath span the divide between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (see Appendix A). Even as they reject the full-blooded Vaiṣṇava notions of the descents (abatār) of God, the soteriological role of the guru, ritualised styles of worship, and so on, their God is not simply impersonal; rather, God is fully personal but without any limiting worldly qualifications – a theme richly articulated by a Brahmo writer in an article published in 1900 (Appendix B). We begin, in Chapter 2, with an analysis of some of Rammohun’s own prose writings where he critiques the worship of images and some traditional Bengal Vaiṣṇava understandings of divinity (Killingley 1982). At the same time, Rammohun was not quite a sceptical ‘free thinker’ and he was, in fact, deeply distressed by the forms of atheism that were emerging through the secular education that students had received at Hindu College in Calcutta, established in 1817 (Basu 1902: 12–13). As B. C. Robertson (1999: xxv) has argued, Rammohun’s worldview was shaped by his struggle to resolve ‘the antinomy of reason and revelation. He came to the hard fought conclusion that the end, the goal of all human inquiry is atmavidya (knowledge of the Supreme Self)’. All the figures we study in the chapters of this book would grapple with this ‘antinomy’ – some sought to reform reason through scriptural prisms while others claimed to have purified scripture through rational means. Debendranath himself resolutely maintains Rammohun’s vigorous opposition, structured by rational argumentation, to styles of Vaiṣṇava ‘idolatry’, even though his own religious discourses are powerfully infused with Vaiṣṇava-styled depictions of the divine reality. Thus, on the one hand, when Keshub requested Debendranath to officiate as the ācārya at the inauguration of the temple of the Brahmo Samaj

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of India in 1869, Debendranath expressed his concern that along with the dearest Brahman, insignificant and erroneous (akiñcitkar bhrānta) manifestations of divinity such as Caitanya too might be worshipped (Sastri n.d.: 185). On the other hand, Debendranath’s writings are often charged precisely with the Vaiṣṇava vocabularies of the devotee’s passionate yearning for the divine presence, which are also reflected in some of the devotional Brahma-sangīts translated in Appendix B. Thus, he writes in a letter to Rasik Lal: ‘If the heart does not become restless (byākul) for God, if the heart does not burn in the absence of God, then there is no desire to find God. Why would they who do not experience the torment of a disease go looking for medicine (auṣadh)? The medicine which can pacify the restlessness of the mind is the sole supreme person, the Lord – you are on the holy path (puṇya pathe) of the Lord and this is your great blessedness (saubhāgya). This path stretches out to infinite time – God is our means of subsistence for infinite time (ananta kāler upajībikā)’ (Sastri n.d.: 221). Chapter 3 discusses Rajnarayan’s Vaiṣṇava-inflected writings which are deeply suffused with themes such as the fleetingness of human existence, the impermanence of all worldly glory, the inability of temporal goods to provide genuine satisfaction, the significance of self-control for spiritual development, the supremely sweet nature of God who is love, the beauties of nature in which we should discern the supreme beauty of God, and so on. On the one hand, Rajnarayan scathingly critiqued certain forms of Vaiṣṇava devotion which had been offered to Keshub by some of his followers. With Keshub in his sights, he queries pointedly: ‘What shall we say of the man who would dance day and night through excess of religious enthusiasm, or run frantic over hill and dale in quest of his beloved God?’ (Basu 1869: 8). On the other hand, however, Rajnarayan carefully reworked Vaiṣṇava motifs of the divine reality and resituated them within Brahmo spiritual lifeworlds. Thus, he argues that the Brahmo-dharma is extremely sweet because it teaches us that God is infinitely compassionate, our supreme friend (param bandhu) and our truly beloved, and that we should love God and remain devoted to performing actions which are pleasing to God. The Brahmo-dharma is beneficial because if all people follow it, the earth would be transformed into a heavenly place (Basu 1866a: 109). Somewhat echoing Keshub’s styles of interiority, sinfulness, and repentance, Rajnarayan declares, in a speech to the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj in 1850, that we should engage in self-analysis in solitude to understand to what extent we are successful in staying away from sin and developing love of the Lord. Those who have lost their loved ones know that it is futile to set their hearts completely on human beings who are impermanent entities made of earth. They are unlike those who remain immersed in deep slumber, forgetting that this lifetime is

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but a moment in comparison with divine eternity and that worldly pleasures cannot be compared with the supreme goal (Basu 1861: 19–21). Evoking classical Vaiṣṇava motifs of divine intimacy even more directly, he notes in a speech to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1859 that God is the purifier of the fallen (patitapāban) and the friend of the poor (dīnabandhu). If we call out to God with a restless heart (byākul hṛdaẏe) God listens to our painful cry (ārtanād), if we seek refuge at God’s feet with a penitent heart God delivers us from sin, and if we worship God with a pure heart melted with the rasa of devotion God showers us with nectarine joy. When the dust of saṃsāra falls on us, we are immersed in the darkness of grief, and when we are burdened with suffering and are restlessly seeking shelter in the four directions, we become soothed through God’s shelter (āśraẏ) (Basu 1870: 52). In Bijoy Krishna, whom we study in Chapter 4, we encounter, as it were, a rogue Brahmo who more forthrightly incorporates some of the theological motifs and the ritual practices of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism into what he regards as the true dharma of the Brahmo Samaj. (See Appendix D for a precis of his standpoint, in his own words, on the worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.) Bijoy Krishna, whom H. Adhikary (2012:141) describes as an ‘eclectic’ and ‘uncommon’ Vaiṣṇava, came to the conclusion that it is not necessary to remove ‘idolatry’ from religious life, for it can be a pathway where the joyful sport (līlā) between divinity and devotee takes place. Living beings can attain liberation through the spiritual power of the community of holy persons and of the true guru who enables them to view the rāsa-līlā through a spiritual vision. Five central themes recur as deeply interwoven threads throughout Bijoy Krishna’s autobiographical reflections and hagiographies written by his disciples – first, his intoxicating, heart-melting, and tear-inducing speeches had an electrifying effect on some of his listeners who were turned around from their scepticism or their half-hearted practice of the Brahmo-dharma; second, at some point he refused to accept financial assistance from the Samaj for his preaching activities and he had to go without food for days, and he gladly bore such afflictions for the cause of spreading the truth; third, he courageously faced the ostracism, hostility, ridicule, vilification, and animosity of various groups of traditional Hindus; fourth, his spiritual life was marked by intense thirst for dharma, utter reliance on God alone, deep restlessness (byākulatā) for God, simplicity, and introspective gaze into his inner being; and fifth, he sought the dharma that could not be restricted by any sectarian bounds. These ecstatic dimensions of his spirituality are reflected in the following account by one of his disciples, Kuladananda Brahmachari. At a gathering in the month of Magh (January–February) in 1886, as Bijoy Krishna was standing and listening to a devotional song, his gaze

Introduction

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became steadfastly fixed in front of him, his face was swollen, his lips were trembling, and tears were rolling down his eyes. His left hand was placed on his chest, and his right palm was folded in the karamudrā posture and placed on the crown of his head. Crying out ‘Haribol, Haribol’, he was at times jumping up to a height of around two or three feet. After a while, he started laughing loudly and the entire hall seemed to vibrate with his laughter (Brahmachari 1895, vol. 1: 24–25). In marked contrast to Bijoy Krishna, Sitanath, whose writings we discuss in Chapter 5, was an austerely philosophical mind who was opposed precisely to the fervid types of ‘sentimentalism’ he would have perceived in the religious subjectivities of Bijoy Krishna. Thus, he once indicated that his position has affinities to Vedāntic philosophy and also to Hegelian Christianity, and is based on the view that all theological questions are ultimately metaphysical themes (Tattvabhushan 1909: 37–38). Sitanath was deeply indebted also to Keshub from whom he had received the religious teaching that God is with each individual at every moment in their daily activities, and that as a lover, God stands begging for their love (prem bhikhārī ha ʾẏe raẏechhen). If we do not offer to God our entire life and do not become submerged in God’s love (preme ekebāre nā duble), we have not experienced at all the divine intoxicating love (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 208). At the same time, however, Sitanath criticised attempts to base Brahmo religiosity on intuitions or claims of self-evidence, and believed that a theistic worldview should be founded on self-knowledge (Kopf 1979: 81). Thus, Sitanath begins a sermon at the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, which was formed in 1878 by some Brahmos who had moved away from Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India, by arguing for the primacy of self-consciousness in our religious existence, for it is in the light of self-consciousness that we have to meditatively understand the proper relation between humanity and God. All our perceptual dealings with the world take place through the soul, and God, who is the life of the soul, ultimately enables us to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Again, we are able to recollect past events because such events too are contained in the all-seeing and ever-awake God who brings them back to us, and after deep sleep we regain our memory, understanding, and power because it is God who gives them back to us. Thus, every soul is directly related to God as a field of God’s unceasing activity (Tattvabhushan 1916: 181–84). Our lives, and all the things and people that surround us, are waves on a boundless ocean of divine love into which God plunges us even as we remain wicked, base, and ungrateful beings who are indifferent to God in the midst of our worldly existence. After thus subtly intermingling Hegelian and Upaniṣadic vocabularies, he ends the sermon on a note with markedly Vaiṣṇava resonances:

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The weight of thy love I can bear no more; My heart cries out and bursts When I see thy love; I take refuge in thy fearless feet. tattvabhushan 1916: 188

Bipin Chandra Pal, who was once Sitanath’s classmate at the Sylhet Government School (in present-day Bangladesh), shared Sitanath’s concern to establish the Brahmo-dharma on solid philosophical foundations, though his quest took him much further into the theological systems of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism. Pal’s complex religious sensibilities – somewhat betwixt and between the rational theism of some strands of the Brahmo Samaj and the effusive Vaiṣṇavism of his guru, Bijoy Krishna – are reflected in this autobiographical note: ‘I do not think I have any mystic element in my composition. I am, if anything, a stern rationalist. Yet I have had experiences that could hardly be explained by ordinary reason. These experiences helped to confirm my conviction that there was a Higher Power that constantly watched over us’ (Pal 1932: 457). In his reminiscences, Pal sketches some detailed narratives of the quests of the Brahmo Samaj, within and across which he sought to forge his own religious pathways. Thus, reflecting on the early decades of the Brahmo Samaj, Pal writes that both Debendranath and Keshub possessed a strong natural belief in the existence of God (prakṛtigata āstikya-buddhi), which is why they were able to set up their religious understanding on the basis even of unstable intuitions. However, others who entered the Brahmo Samaj had been influenced by forms of European rationalism marked with scepticism, and they sought to build their religious ideas on the foundation of logical reasoning (Pal 1916: 166–67). To the forms of disorder introduced by the educated groups who were inspired by western notions of liberty, there were diverse types of responses such as the Arya Samaj, the Theosophists, the revivalism of Sasadhar Tarkachudamani, and others. However, these individuals were not able, Pal argues, to blend their conclusions with a deep understanding of local customs, social institutions, and aspects of ancient civilisation and spiritual practice (Pal 1916: 180–81). From within this dynamic milieu of crisscrossing east-west intellectual and spiritual currents, Pal sought solace, after his wife’s death in 1890, in the writings of Emerson, and it was through Emerson that he moved towards the ‘transcendental monism’ which he found articulated more clearly in the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, and the Vedānta-sūtras. As he began to read these texts, mainly in Bengali translations, his spiritual life received fresh inspiration from Bijoy Krishna, from whom he received initiation in 1895 (Pal 1932: 461). Interweaving

Introduction

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classical Vedāntic terminologies and Hegelian vocabularies, Pal argues that according to Vaiṣṇava thought there is an eternal self-differentiation in God such that God becomes the divine object of God’s own love, knowledge, and will. The supremely personal God is puruṣa and the object is prakṛti, which includes both the insentient entities and the conscious finite selves in the world. Human beings exist in their eternally realised forms in the prakṛti of God through which God is temporally realising the divine personality. Therefore, ‘there has existed from eternity to eternity, a society of eternally realised and perfected personalities in the very Being of the Lord Iswara or Bhagavan’ (Pal 1939: 148–49). Through this Hegelianised re-reading of Vaiṣṇava thought, Pal seeks to rebut Brahmo critiques directed at Vaiṣṇava spirituality as vulgar sensuality. He argues that all human relations are reproductions of the eternally realised relations of love which exist in the being of Kṛṣṇa, and in cultivating the supreme rāgānuga bhakti through forms of art and music, we seek to remember the spiritual body with which we stand in spiritual relations in the transcendental domain. In these eternally realised bodies, we are not Rādhā but the companions of Rādhā who are helping the sport of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, and thus we participate in this loving sport not directly as the principal agents but in a vicarious manner where the sense of self-enjoyment is removed (Pal 1933: 67–70). In contrast to the more philosophically minded Sitanath and Bipin Chandra, who often invoked Hegelianised vocabularies in their writings, Sivanath, whom we study in Chapter 6, represents the more social reformist front of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. As its missionary, he undertook several arduous trips to different parts of northwestern India, with the conviction that he would rely solely on providential help. At the same time, Sivanath sought to rebut criticisms that the members of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, in pursuing their reformist agendas, had become detached from the ground of devotional experience. Along with contemporaries such as Rajnarayan, Keshub, and others, Sivanath seeks to establish the Brahmo Samaj firmly on the foundation of a proper harmonisation of knowledge, devotion, and will (Appendix E). With evident pain, he notes that it is ‘an insult going very deep’ into the heart when the followers of Keshub’s New Dispensation characterise members of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj as infidels, sceptics, rationalists, and deists (Sastri 1881: 96). For Sivanath, the Brahmo Samaj should seek to establish a complete religious life in which knowledge, love, and service (sebā) are united. It would not seek to produce either Vaiṣṇavas who are full of enthusiasm and madness (ucchvās o mattatā-pūrṇa) in which the intellect is dimmed, or ascetics in the tradition of Śaṃkara who remain immersed in and satisfied with contemplative forms of knowledge. God has created us, according to Sivanath, so

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that we can stay with God, roam with God, and be blissful with God, and God has promised us that we will become friends with God (sakhā kariben baliẏā aṅgīkār kariẏāchen) (Sastri 1903: 228–29). Thus, Sivanath exclaims: ‘Our God is full of love and holy, and we, the worshippers of God, are so devoid of love and so impure! We should feel ashamed. Let us resolve that we will be struck by God, and in this way we will sing to the world a song of love. We will be full of enthusiasm so that we spread the name of Brahman and bring in the new age – may God fulfil our prayer’ (Sastri 1903: 233). Sivanath’s contemporary, Pratap Chandra, who happened to be a relative of Keshub, remained within the folds of the New Dispensation and was engaged in a harmonising project, similar to that of Sivanath, of integrating the active and the contemplative impulses in the religious life. He notes that the religious landscape is divided between those who have denounced all forms of religious piety and arrived at a ‘mindless, soulless materialism’, and those who are desperately seeking to ‘revive the age of unreasoning faith’ in which religion, consisting of numerous superstitions, has become a regressive force (Mozoomdar 1882: 346). Forging a via media through this contested terrain, Pratap Chandra argues, on the one hand, that God is our true friend in the world of distress, and we should prayerfully turn to God who providentially rescues us even in our sinfulness, pride, and vanity. With a pure mind we should cultivate a deep sense of communion with God in all our activities, and with the infusion of God’s spirit, fight against evil habits which take us away from God (Mozoomdar 1894: 5–8). On the other hand, against the backdrop of the critiques of Keshub-styled devotionalism, Pratap Chandra argues that the religious devotions of the Brahmo Samaj are unfortunately characterised by tender sentiments, and it is forgotten that religion is also a matter of rugged holiness, pure wisdom, prophetic insight, fiery enthusiasm, and ceaseless work for the good of others: ‘Tenderness and sweetness without strength and sternness is bodily flesh without backbone’ (Mozoomdar 1894: 126). Religion is not ‘mere feeling’, Pratap Chandra cautions his readers, but is a light which illuminates everything, and is an ongoing struggle to fulfil the divine will in all worldly actions and through all worldly afflictions (Mozoomdar 1894: 140). In Chapter 7, we continue this Brahmo narrative of the harmonisation of polarities – reason and revelation, devotional intensity and worldly engagement, and contemplative spirituality and social activism – through the writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) on religious themes. While Bankim was not institutionally affiliated to the Brahmo Samaj, certain aspects of his hermeneutic retrievals of a Kṛṣṇa who operates within and through the causal networks of the empirical world would have resonated with the rational projects and the spiritual exercises of Brahmo stalwarts such as Debendranath,

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Rajnarayan, Sitanath, and others. Bankim’s Kṛṣṇa-centred religiosity, painstakingly reconstructed through exegetical and historical reasoning, allows us to cast a sideways glance at the Brahmo-dharma of his contemporaries which we have been exploring. In his historicising retellings of foundational scriptural texts such as the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, Bankim applied certain Positivistic criteria to excise the miraculous and the supernatural elements from the narratives of Kṛṣṇa which he rejected as latter-day interpolations into a fundamental core. Bankim argues towards the beginning of his Kṛṣṇacaritra that many Hindus believe that Kṛṣṇa is an abatār of God, and the worship of Kṛṣṇa is widespread across Bengal among those who believe that worshipping Kṛṣṇa, taking the name of Kṛṣṇa, and reciting the narratives of Kṛṣṇa are means of spiritual progress. However, critics have noted that Kṛṣṇa is, in fact, presented as a thief in his childhood and as a deceiver in his later life, and such textual descriptions have also promoted sinful behaviour among the people. These sinful episodes associated with Kṛṣṇa, Bankim will show, are imaginary, and once these are removed, we find an extremely pure, holy, and noble ideal. He indicates that he will not, however, seek to demonstrate the divinity of Kṛṣṇa – he will only discuss the human character of Kṛṣṇa (Bagal 1973 [BR2]: 406). Thus, Bankim’s Kṛṣṇa, according to S. Kaviraj (1998: 91), is ‘transformed from a lovable popular figure of eroticism, excess, transgression, playfulness, a subject of both admiration and admonition, to a classic figure – calm, poised, rational, perfect, irreproachable’. While Bankim had once been Keshub’s classmate at Presidency College (1856–1858), he would keep at an arm’s length certain styles of Vaiṣṇava religiosity and he rejected Vaiṣṇava kīrtans for their sentimentalist flavours (Sen 2008:89). He systematically demythologised various narratives from the Bhāgavata-purāṇa which was a principal resource for Vaiṣṇava devotional music. Quoting extensively from the Viṣṇu-purāṇa and the Harivaṃśa, he instead argued that terms such as rāsa and rati (‘love’) are to be properly understood in terms of the dance through which the devotees of Kṛṣṇa worship him (BR2, 453–62). Thus, as in the case of Bhaktivinoda, Bankim’s ‘reformed Hinduism’ too was configured as a via media between two polarised standpoints in the colonial milieus of the bhadralok – the wholesale acceptance of everything associated with traditional Hinduism in quotidian forms of thought and worship, and the complete rejection of Hinduism by the Anglicized Bengali intelligentsia who vigorously pursued modes of modernism (King 1977: 139). In conclusion, Chapter 8 brings together some of the intellectual trajectories of the visions of Brahmo-dharma that run through the preceding chapters, by putting them in relief against two movements which were gaining ground towards the end of the nineteenth century – the spiritual milieus centred

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around the charismatic guru Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886) and his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), and the reconstructions of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism undertaken by Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati. Today two distinctive styles of Hindu universalism are associated – in India as well as in western locations – with their institutional expressions, namely, the Ramakrishna Mission and the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) respectively. The former speaks in mystical vocabularies, at times Advaita-tinged, of the supreme reality as encompassing all notions of divinity, while the latter foregrounds the supremely adorable Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa as the ultimate origin, basis, and goal of all humanity. These universalist dimensions, as we will see throughout this book, were often enunciated also by Brahmos in their writings, sermons, and discourses. 4

Conclusion

A precise characterisation of some of the shifts that we have highlighted within the intellectual milieus of the Brahmo Samaj is provided by Ishan Chandra Basu, an associate of Debendranath, who divides the history of the Brahmo Samaj into three stages, such that each stage is characterised by a specific form of devotion (niṣṭhā). The first – from around 1828 to 1838 – is marked by devotion to scripture, when the worshippers of the Samaj discussed the Brahmasūtras and its commentaries, the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, and other texts. The second – from 1839 to 1849 – is the period of devotion to the understanding of truth, when the worshippers sought to establish which scriptures are infallible (abhrānta), and discussed truths relating to scientific, historical, and scriptural matters. The third – from 1849 to 1859 – is the decade of devotion to the Brahmo-dharma when scriptural truths, established through intuitive knowledge, were compiled and explained. From 1859 onwards, however, different factions began to emerge which were divided with respect to the question of idolatry (pauttalikatā) in family life and in religious worship (Basu 1914: 82–85). Ishan Chandra’s reference to the spectre of ‘idolatry’ (pauttalikatā) is a pointer to the reason why the Brahmo-shaped styles of bhakti of Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Sitanath, and Sivanath keep a careful distance from the ‘excesses’ of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, even as they richly draw on Vaiṣṇava motifs of the intimate relationship between deity and devotee. Thus, evoking a standard Vaiṣṇava trope, Ishan Chandra himself argues that we feel thrilled when we hear that our petty self (kṣudra ātmā) is yet eligible for co-dwelling (sahabāser adhikārī) with the Lord of the world and of all the gods: ‘The supreme Lord, the

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deliverer of the fallen (patitapāban), is blessed, who would elevate and make holy even a wretched (adham) person such as me’. The Lord is the treasury of love and the abode of joy, and the Lord waits at the door of the heart – we should overcome our pettiness, spread our love, and establish our mind in the Lord, and the Lord will become expressed in our hearts and release the imperishable stream of the joyful festival (Basu 1914: 121). The miseries of the world will then not afflict us, for joy and auspiciousness are established in both the outer and the inner worlds, and we will enjoy divine peace even in the mortal world. Various scriptures such as the Mahābhārata caution us, Ishan Chandra goes on to say, not to fritter away our time slothfully and indifferently, and to carefully exercise control over ourselves so that we remain on the correct path. However, we mistakenly regard this world as truly substantial (sār), and develop an egoism which draws us towards crookedness, deceit, falsehood, violence, and other such forms of sinfulness (Basu 1914: 125–29). Yet, we should trust that the Lord who is boundlessly compassionate will deliver us from our sins and take us to the abode of immortality. In the holy light of the Lord, we see our impurity (malinatā) which abounds in countless sins and we become distressed – our only trust is therefore in the mercy (kṛpā) of the Lord (Basu 1914:134). Here is a more full-blooded articulation, from within the Caitanya worldview of Narottama-dāsa around three centuries before Ishan Chandra, of the same dialectic between, on the one hand, human sinfulness, worthlessness, and suffering and, on the other hand, divine sweetness, majesty, and accessibility: When will all my body bristle up (in joy) in taking the Name of Gaurāṅga? When will tears flow from (my) eyes when taking the Name of Hari? When will (my) precious Nitāi (Nityānanda) take pity (on me)? When will (my) worldly desires become as vain things for me? When will my mind give up the world, and so be cleansed? When shall I visit the glorious Vṛndāvana? When shall I yearn after Rūpa [Gosvāmin] and Raghunātha [Gosvāmin]? When shall I properly understand the love of the (Divine) Couple? May my hopes be in the feet of Rūpa and Raghunātha. So does Narottama-dāsa ever pray. sen 1935:98

Such iterations of the impermanence of the world, the urgency of cultivating devotional love of the Lord from within the evanescent textures of human existence, and the glorification of the Lord who is supremely blissful, adorable, and compassionate are the stock-in-trade of multiple layers of Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theology, ritual, and spiritual practice. As we will see over the next

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five chapters, several Brahmo figures creatively reworked these theological and soteriological vocabularies without – in the manner of Ishan Chandra – actually naming this Lord as the Kṛṣṇa who sports with the cowherd women, chief of whom is Rādhā, and who descends to the world as Caitanya, the saviour of all humanity. Their God is not the transpersonal (nirguṇa) Brahman of Advaitic milieus which is beyond all categorisations whatsoever – their God is deeply personal and is intimately interwoven into the hearts of the loving devotee. But, and this is the recurring Brahmo critique of Vaiṣṇava lifeforms starting from the writings of Rammohun to the essay in Appendix C, God has no specific form, no particular descent (abatār), no unique intermediary, and no specially chosen guru.

chapter 2

Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore: Between Advaita Critique and Devotional Theism The charge frequently levelled at the Brahmo Samaj by individuals centred around Keshub – that its systems of belief and modes of spiritual practice were dry, austere, disputatious, and insipid – can be traced back to Rammohun’s rejection of the richly evocative forms of the effusive worship of images in Bengali religious lifeworlds. In this chapter, we will outline the re-articulations of Rammohun’s religious visions in the writings of two central figures in his Brahmo Samaj – the meditative and yet devotionally charged reflections of Debendranath, on the one hand, and the more sceptical standpoints of Akshaykumar Dutta, on the other hand. Notwithstanding their mutual differences, however, both Debendranath and Akshaykumar were united in their opposition to the universalisms that were being proclaimed by Christian missionaries in Bengal – an opposition which they also inherited from Rammohun. For such Brahmos, Christian universalism – pivoted on the life, atoning death, and resurrection of a God-man – was not universalist enough, and this charge effectively shaped also their critiques of Vaiṣṇavism – it was too bound up with the dense particularities of one conception of God, one mode of allegiance to a guru, and one form of ritual worship. In their Advaita-tinged theisms, the conception of God with a name and form – whether Christ or Kṛṣṇa – is viewed as a limited (and limiting) conception of the divine reality, and thus we find them repeatedly rejecting all notions of divine interventions, divine intermediaries, and divine representatives. On the entangled and contested religious landscapes of nineteenth-century Bengal, this was the work cut out for Christian missionaries and Vaiṣṇava intellectuals – to demonstrate, as much to Brahmos as to one another, that Christ and Kṛṣṇa respectively were not, in fact, sectarian or dogmatic or idolatrous or immoral conceptions. Rammohun’s central argument against certain socioreligious Hindu systems of his own times is driven by his antipathy towards ‘idolatry’ which he regarded as intellectually immature and the source of moral perversion. In his early work, the Tuḥfat al-Muwaḥḥidīn (‘Gift to the Monotheists’), written in 1803/4 in Persian with an Arabic preface, Rammohun mounts a scathing critique of ‘institutionalised religion’, where he attributes various forms of belief and practice which he regarded as irrational to the machinations of powerhungry priests who seek to maintain their hold over the common people by

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invoking supernatural intervention. He traced various social evils to the priesthood whom he charged with encouraging various kinds of image worship for pecuniary gains (Sarkar 1979:82). From 1815, after he settled down in Calcutta, he began to produce translations and commentaries in Bengali and English on the Upaniṣads and the Vedānta-sutras, in which his arguments against the worship of multiple deities are couched in the characteristic vocabularies of Śaṃkara’s Advaita Vedānta. His translation into Bengali of the Vedānta-sutras, namely, the Vedānta-grantha (1815), and his translations of five Upaniṣads – Kena (1816), Īśa (1816), Kaṭha (1817), Māṇḍukya (1817), and Muṇḍaka (1819) – significantly follow Śaṃkara’s commentaries. 1

The Advaitic Worship of Rammohun

In the Tuḥfat al-Muwaḥḥidīn, Rammohun’s critiques are directed not at Hindu image worship in particular but at the machineries of priestly religion which, he argues, lead to the diminution of the powers of human reasoning. He develops a form of rational theism centred around the worship of the one supreme being who is the creator and the governor of the world. All human beings have a ‘natural tendency’ to turn towards the one supreme reality, and the foundation of their religiosity is the belief in the existence of the soul and the reality of the afterlife where individuals will receive rewards or punishments for their earthly deeds. However, these two doctrines have become encumbered with numerous restrictions relating to eating and dining, purity and impurity, and so on (Roy 1884: 5). Furthermore, the true nature of things is overlaid by dogmatic statements which are generated by the leaders of religious systems who seek to perpetuate their own name and gain honour, and who invoke supernatural intervention to ensure that the common people submit to them. As a result, even if someone does seek to undertake a rational inquiry into their creedal systems, they think, because of the force of custom and association, that such an undertaking is a result of satanic inspiration and will lead them to utter destruction both in this world and in the next, and they desist at once from it. Because their subjectivities have been shaped during the impressionable stage of their childhood by their hearing about the supernatural deeds of their religious heroes and the salutary effects of their creedal beliefs, they are unable to reject their religious faith even if its statements are ‘obviously nonsensical and absurd’ (Roy 1884: 3). Notwithstanding this powerful formative influence of religious leaders, human beings retain, Rammohun argues, an innate faculty through which, without partiality and with a sense of justice, they are able to inquire into religious doctrines and seek truth. By thus freeing

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themselves from the restraints imposed by religious systems, they should turn to the supreme divinity who is the basis of the harmonious organisation of the universe and direct themselves to the welfare of society. According to Rammohun, the critical operations of such an unfettered reasoning would enable them to unearth the pure religion beyond creedal structures and ritual practices. For instance, to the claim that religious practices such as bathing in a river are efficacious only for the practitioners and not for the followers of other religions, Rammohun responds that if there were indeed real effects to such ‘imaginary things’, these effects would have been common to all human beings irrespective of their beliefs and habits. This is because even though the strength of an effect across individuals is dependent on their different capacities, it is not dependent on the beliefs that a particular individual might hold: ‘Do you not see that if a poison be taken by any one in the belief that it is a sweetmeat, it must produce its effects on the eater and kill him?’ (Roy 1884: 9). Again, if it is stated that religious life depends on faith and divine assistance and not on rational arguments, so that we should accept that it is not impossible that God has created the world out of nothingness, brought dead human beings to life, and so on, Rammohun responds that such a claim only indicates the possibility, and not the actual occurrence, of miraculous events. In constructing logical arguments, anyone who sought to prove impossible things could appeal to such reasoning, so that the very difference between ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility’ would dissolve (Roy 1884: 9–11). Rammohun’s critiques of the ‘supernaturalist’ dimensions of religion also shape his later controversialist exchanges with Christian missionaries who maintained the doctrines of the divinity of Christ and the atoning death of Christ, as well as with traditional Hindu pundits from groups such as the Vaiṣṇavas and the defenders of Hindu socioreligious orthodoxy (Ray 1976). A distinctive characteristic of his Bengali prose is its coruscating edge through which he seeks to cut through various attempted defences of the worship of images. For instance, after considering the view that before one can approach the king one has to first worship the doorman, so that we need images on our pathways of approaching Brahman too, he responds that while compared to the king, the doorman is indeed more readily accessible and proximate, the image of the omnipresent Brahman, which is a human artefact, can go out of existence and be removed from our grasp. Therefore, the image cannot, in fact, be regarded as more proximate (nikaṭastha) to us than the supreme self which is the inner ruler (antaryāmī) (Ghosh 1973 [henceforth RR], 8). Again, after considering the claim that though Brahman is indeed without form (mūrti), the omnipotent Brahman can become possessed of form, Rammohun responds that Brahman is indeed almighty in matters such as the production of

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the world, but Brahman does not have the power (śakti) to destroy Brahman’s own (formless) nature (svarūp), for whatever is susceptible to destruction cannot be Brahman (RR, 112). Rammohun declares that no finite and mutable form of the human imagination can be an adequate representation of the ineffable divine reality which is infinite and eternal. If it is claimed that the worship of images is enjoined on us because we find references to diverse forms of such worship in scriptures such as the Purāṇas and the Tantras, such descriptions should be seen as mere imaginary representations of Brahman which are only intended for the gratification of those with lesser qualifications (durbalādhikārīr manorañjaner nimitta) (RR, 5). That is, these scriptures declare that the supreme self is inaccessible to thought, and they present the worship of images only so that individuals who are incapable of hearing and thinking about matters relating to Brahman can keep the mind (citta) stabilised through these images. Therefore, those who are qualified for the worship of the supreme reality do not need to worship such imaginary (kālpanik) forms (RR, 74). The true object of worship is, in fact, the cause and the sustainer of this world which contains diverse products, which is more marvellous than a clock, and which is full of various living and inanimate bodies where not a single organ is unnecessary (RR, 353). In addition to image worship, Rammohun’s engagements with Hindu lifeworlds from around 1815 onwards are shaped by a crucial theme which would become a flashpoint of intense debate in the Brahmo Samaj in the 1850s – the scriptural authority of the Vedas which are regarded as infallible in traditional Hindu contexts. In his own commentaries on the Upaniṣads such as the Īśa, the Kena, and others, Rammohun is not quite a defender of ‘pure reason’, and he instead emphasises modes of reasoning which are in accordance with the Vedas (bedsammata). Therefore, what is opposed to the Vedas and is opposed to direct perception (sākṣāt pratyakṣer biruddha) cannot be accepted by individuals who have faith in the Vedas and who have sense organs. If it is claimed that in matters relating to God, reasoning (tarka) should not be applied, Rammohun responds that the specific style of reasoning which is prohibited in such cases is that which is opposed to the Vedas (RR, 163). In this connection, it is interesting to note, as S. Sarkar (1985:3) has pointed out, that while Rammohun had declared in the Tuḥfat that all religions contain falsehood, he did not in later years bring out Bengali or English editions of this text. Instead he seems to have defended a subtle intertwining of Vedic scriptural testimony and critical reasoning, which is reflected in his statement that ‘for those who have no faith in the authority of the Vedas, the explanations of the great sage [Vyāsa], the commentary of the teacher [Śaṃkara], and moreover the deliberations of the mind, both scripture (śāstra) and reason (yukti) are powerless’

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(RR, 68). Therefore, A. Datta (1988:99) has argued that Rammohun emphasised the vital interrelation between logic and religion, because logic in itself could lead an individual towards scepticism and uncertainty, while religion could become the domain of deception, so that ‘[r]ationalism and spiritualism must go hand in hand to lead us away from narrowness and on to the path of the greater good’. Rammohun’s own commentaries on the Upaniṣads reflect such a pattern of scripturally-guided reasoning: they are a blending of, on the one hand, his emphasis, through appeals to the authority of Śaṃkara, on the centrality of selfknowledge and, on the other hand, his creative departures on certain crucial themes from strict Advaita standpoints. The interiority of the supreme self to the human individual is often characterised by Rammohun in terms of some stock Advaitic allegorical tropes. Thus, he comments on Brahmasūtra 1.1.31 that the finite self ( jība), in the form of a superimposition (adhyāsa), has Brahman as its substratum, just as the illusory snake has the rope as its substratum, and in the absence of this rope there would be no experience of the snake (RR, 12). In his reading of Brahmasūtra 3.2.18, he argues that though Brahman is without any attributes, yet just as the sun is multiply reflected in the limiting adjuncts of different bodies of water, through māyā we apprehend Brahman as multiple (RR, 39). In his Vedāntasāra (1816), in which he presents the essence of various Upaniṣadic verses as pointing to the trans-worldly Brahman, he notes that Brahman, without a second, is the cause of the world, for whatever is characterised by name and form cannot be eternal and the cause of the world (RR, 63–64). Thus, articulating a famous Upaniṣadic analogy, he comments on Brahmasūtra 2.1.16 that before production, the world which is of the form of an effect (kāryarūp) was of the nature of Brahman, and after production too the world is not other (anya) to Brahman, just as a pot before its production is of the form of earth and after its production too is not other than earth (RR, 22). However, Rammohun’s markedly Advaitic terminologies are occasionally qualified by an emphasis on duality between the finite self and the ultimate reality (Biswas 1974). While Rammohun himself notes in some of his translations of the Upaniṣads that he follows the commentaries of Śaṃkara, D. Killingley has pointed out that Rammohun’s own commentaries occasionally diverge from Śaṃkara’s readings in three particular contexts. Firstly, Rammohun occasionally orients his discussion of the vidyās in the Upaniṣads towards his standpoint of the ‘rational worship of the God of nature’; secondly, unlike Śaṃkara’s emphasis on the itinerant renunciant, Rammohun emphasises the cultivation of virtues by the householder who is established in Brahman; and thirdly, Rammohun speaks of liberated individuals as worshipping God in a state of bliss (Killingley 1981: 154–55). Thus, in his commentary on Brahmasūtra 1.1.17,

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Rammohun notes crucially that for the self ( jība) there is the attainment of Brahman, which indicates that there is difference (bhed) between the self and Brahman (RR, 10). Even more clearly, he argues that there is a difference (bhed) between the finite self ( jība) and the supreme God (parameśvar) because the existence of the finite self depends on that of the supreme God, but the existence of the supreme God does not depend on that of the finite self. Further, attachment (anubandha), that is, love (prīti) for the supreme Lord (parameśvar) and the Lord’s people, and behaviour which is consistent with love – these two are, Rammohun asserts, the highest primary form of worship (upāsanā) (RR, 47–48). Thus, he concludes in his commentary on Brahmasūtra 4.1.12 that one should worship the self (ātman) till liberation is attained, and even the liberated individual ( jīvanmukta) will not abandon the worship of God (īśvar) after liberation (RR, 53). These liberated individuals, in an indivisible manner and as one, dwell with Brahman and enjoy bliss with Brahman (brahmer sahit aikyarūpe abasthiti ebaṃ ānanda bhog mukta sakale karen) (RR, 58). Rammohun’s variations on Advaita are thus clearly stamped with aspects of devotional theism, which probably reflect the religious atmosphere of his childhood upbringing (Collett 1900:4). The family of Ramakanta Roy, Rammohun’s father, was Vaiṣṇava, and it is said that as a child Rammohun himself would not even take a sip of water without first reciting the appropriate verse from the Bhāgavata-purāṇa (Singh 1958: 18–23). However, by the time he writes his ‘Reply to Utsavānanda’ in 1816, he was careful to steer his religious sensibilities away from ‘sectarian’ forms of Vaiṣṇava worship. A devout Vaiṣṇava pundit Utsavānanda had written in Sanskrit to the Atmiya Sabha of Rammohun, rejecting the view that Kṛṣṇa is equivalent to the other gods and asserting that Kṛṣṇa alone is Brahman. Rammohun responds with the figure of a seeker after the knowledge of Brahman who regards names and forms as false, and Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva as equal. Thereafter, a worshipper of Viṣṇu declares that Śiva, and the other gods who have qualities (saguṇa), cannot be equal to Kṛṣṇa, while a worshipper of Śiva appeals to various scriptures such as the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, and others to claim that it is Kṛṣṇa who is a devotee of Śiva. At this stage, a worshipper of the divine reality, Hari-Hara, is distressed by this dispute, and notes that the Vaiṣṇava and the Śaiva are dividing up Hari and Hara who are, in truth, the same divinity. The seeker after the truth of the self is delighted with these words, and declares to them that all names and forms are the effects of māyā, exist within space and time, are limited, and are contingent on the one true Being; and they are apprehended as real through the superimposition of reality on them (sadadhyāsena) (RR, 85–87). Rammohun goes on to note that while Utsavānanda had sought, through the force of etymological analysis, to demonstrate that Viṣṇu is truly

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Brahman, and superior to Brahmā and Śiva, worshippers of Śiva too can resort to such reasoning to demonstrate the superiority of Śiva. For if Vaiṣṇavas were to claim that there is scriptural unity between those Upaniṣads which specifically speak of Kṛṣṇa and the ten Upaniṣads, and thus all scriptural texts should be read as pointing to Viṣṇu, Śaivas could make an analogous exegetical claim with respect to Śiva, and the worshippers of Śakti, the divine feminine power, too could argue in this manner regarding the scriptural references to Śakti (RR, 97–98). Next, Rammohun develops a meticulous critique of the Vaiṣṇava claim that Kṛṣṇa has a form with qualities such as eternality, pervasiveness, and so on. He presents a dilemma: if this form (vigrah) is constituted of the five elements, it will be subject to increase and decrease; but if this form is not constituted of the five elements, it would be impossible to visualise it through the eyes, for entities which are distinct from these elements cannot be objects of vision. Rammohun notes that in response to this objection Vaiṣṇavas might reject scripture, perception (pratyakṣa), and inference based on perception, and claim that the form of Kṛṣṇa is not accessible to the physical eye, but the mind, when it is melted through intense devotion, is able to perceive the divine form. Rammohun remains unfazed by this Vaiṣṇava appeal to the supernatural and instead responds categorically that a form which has not been apprehended earlier through the physical senses cannot become expressed in the mind, either in a dream or in the waking state. For instance, one can indeed have a dream of a hare with horns; however, such dreams are possible only because a hare and horns have been seen previously. Again, if it is claimed that Kṛṣṇa possesses a diverse array of mutually contradictory (mitho virodhivicitraśaktayaḥ) powers, Rammohun responds that according to the Upaniṣads, such powers can be placed only in the supreme self which is pervasive and not in a limited form, such as Kṛṣṇa (RR, 103–104). A few years later, Rammohun returns in his Gosvāmīr Sahit Bicār (1818) to the critique, already developed in the ‘Reply to Utsavānanda’, of the view that in transcendental matters the perceptual experiences of ordinary people cannot be taken as decisive. In this response to eleven letters of a certain Gosvāmī, he declares that if perception (pratyakṣa), which is the basis of inference, is rejected all sources of truth would be undermined. In that case, the Vedas and the Purāṇas, which we perceive with our eyes and our ears, cannot be relied on, and all dharma would disappear completely. However, the propounders of new (nabīn) doctrines – that is, Vaiṣṇava teachings – tell people not to rely on the Vedas and their perceptual experiences, for if they were indeed to rely on the Vedas, they would not read Sanskrit books or Bengali poems which contradict the Vedas (bedbiruddha), and if they were indeed to rely on the evidence of their senses, they would not accept the claim that what is born

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can be eternal, what is unconscious can be conscious, and what is confined to a particular place can be omnipresent. This is why, Rammohun argues, the followers of these doctrines, who strive to promote their own teachings, seek to override the primacy of perceptual knowledge and the Vedas (RR, 156–57). Next, Rammohun turns to the question of the scriptural authority of the pivotal text through whose hermeneutic lens Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theologians seek to read other scriptures such as the Upaniṣads – the Bhāgavata-purāṇa. In this tradition, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is not only a revealed scripture but also the most authoritative commentary on the Brahmasūtras, and its authority cannot be superseded in cases of exegetical conflict since it is the supreme scriptural text (Chakravarti 1969: 11). Rammohun spells out a series of source-critical and historical considerations to rebut this Vaiṣṇava view of the exegetical primacy of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa. He argues that a verse in the Garūḍa-purāṇa – which declares that the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is the proper explanation of the Brahmasūtras – is, in fact, a recent fabrication of the Bengali Vaiṣṇavas. Moreover, some worshippers of the divine feminine (Śāktas) have inserted verses in the Skanda-purāṇa which declare that it is, in fact, the Kālikā-purāṇa which is truly the Bhāgavata-purāṇa as it speaks of the glory of the supreme goddess Kālikā. Thus, through such conflicting claims based on these diverse Purāṇas, all scriptural texts will cease to be reliable and dharma will be destroyed. Further, there is no aphorism in the Brahmasūtras which can be understood as referring to the forms of behaviour opposed to worldly living about which we read in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, such as Kṛṣṇa stealing curds and breaking pots, nor does any aphorism mention the name Kṛṣṇa or describe the glories of Kṛṣṇa. If it is claimed that some Vaiṣṇavas have minutely analysed the etymology of each word in the Brahmasūtras and demonstrated that this scripture refers to Kṛṣṇa and his sports such as the rāsa-dance, Rammohun responds that some Śaivas have explained it as referring to Śiva and some Śāktas have explained it as referring to Kālī. Moreover, those who have established philosophical worldviews (darśan) such as Gautama, Kaṇāda, and others, who were contemporaneous (samakālīn) with the composer of the Brahmasūtras and who were free from erroneous conceptions (bhramapramādarahit), do not speak of the beloved of the cowherd women, Kṛṣṇa, as the one Lord whose reality is established by the Brahmasūtras (RR, 160). Thus, Rammohun methodically cuts through dense layers of Vaiṣṇava scriptural exegeses and etymological explanations with patterns of logical reasoning and historical reconstruction, and argues that the Upaniṣads are to be properly understood through the prisms of Advaita and the dross of the Purāṇic materials has to be excised towards the recovery of a Vedāntic monotheism. The God Kṛṣṇa, in particular, is to be rejected as a thieving deity: the

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missionaries Joshua Marshman and William Carey note, in their ‘Periodical Account’ from 1816, that after narrating an incident from the accounts of Kṛṣṇa, Rammohun declared: ‘The sweeper of my house would not do such an act, and can I worship a God sunk lower than the man who washes my floors?’ (Collett 1900: 113–14). Rammohun himself was often subjected to severe criticism by Hindus from traditional standpoints for having rejected the Vaiṣṇava Hindu ways of his ancestors – the report of Marshman and Carey goes on to note: ‘He is said to be very moral; but is pronounced to be a most wicked man by the strict Hindoos’ (Collett 1900: 114). Indeed, Chakravarti (1985: 415) describes Rammohun’s rejection of Vaiṣṇavism as ‘a reaction to the harsh criticism of his way of life and his theories by the orthodox elements, who were supported by the Vaiṣṇavas’. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Rammohun’s critiques of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa and, in particular, the divine sports of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, would continue to reverberate down the decades in Brahmo circles. Thus, more than a hundred years later, we find Sitanath Tattvabhushan de-mythologising the figure of Kṛṣṇa by claiming that the Kṛṣṇa whom we encounter in the Ṛg Veda and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad was at first worshipped as a hero and a demigod, and was then fully deified in opposition to the Buddha. Even the Bhagavadgītā, Sitanath argues, presents Kṛṣṇa not as a divine being who appears at a specific time and place, but as the universal self which is free from all worldly limitations (Tattvabhushan 1944: 393–95). Such deflationary accounts of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism notwithstanding, for Rammohun, as much as for Sitanath, their theisms orientated to the one formless divinity were heavily stamped with devotional vocabularies. Rammohun’s interweaving of devotion to God with characteristic Advaita motifs is particularly visible in his Brahma-sangīts which are centred around the Vedāntic themes of the impermanence of the world, the formless divine reality as the eternal foundation of the transient world, and the soteriological significance of self-knowledge. We encounter in these songs repeated exhortations to turn away from the material imageries of the fleeting world and ascend spiritually towards Brahman, but not the ecstatic vocabularies of the God of love and the love of God that would later characterise the hymns of some of the followers of Keshub in the Brahmo Samaj. Ignorant of the cause, o mind, why think of a duality? Everything is produced from the being of the one (eker sattāẏ). Of the five elements, the five qualities, reason, intellect, and mind The one is the cause, the life of beings ( jīber jīban). Endowing the earth with smell water with taste

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wind with touch heat with radiance Placing the word in the emptiness, as the basis of the world pervading everything is the supreme being (nirañjan). RR, 345

Why such delusion (bhrānti), o mind? Turn inwards. The one you seek dwells in the interiority of all (sarbbāntare). Expressed in the heat of the sun and in the coolness of the moon Such are the ways in the world Expressed as the self in you (ātmārūpe) Pervading all beings. RR, 347

You think constantly of impermanent objects (anitya biṣaẏ) Even by mistake you do not consider death to be certain. As you think of worldly matters Desires increase At times you smile or lament, at times you are angry or satisfied. RR, 352

Whether in my own country (svadeśe) or in a foreign land (bideśe), Wherever I may be, I see you in your works and I pray to you. Your creations are infinite, in the bounds of space and time (deśbhede kālbhede) They testify every moment to your glory (mahimā) I perceive your power and I never remain alone (ekākī). RR, 352

The strikingly cosmopolitan notes of this hymn (RR, 352) – that whether at home or in the world, one is never alone for one is always with the supreme being – involve a creative reworking of the classical Advaita motif that by becoming grounded in the eternal Brahman one becomes spiritually at one with everyone and everything. We will continue to hear these notes resonating through the Brahmo decades – in Rajnarayan’s book The Hindu theist’s brotherly gift to English theists (1881), Pratap Chandra’s voyages to America (in 1883, 1893, and 1900), Sitanath’s Vedāntic reworkings of Hegelian motifs, Bipin

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Chandra’s reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sivanath’s vision of humanity as one family of brothers and sisters, and so on. 2

The Devotional Intensities of Debendranath

The historiography of the Brahmo Samaj has often highlighted the conceptualexperiential shifts between Rammohun’s Advaita-inflected commentaries, which proceed through the pathways of logical disputations, and Debendranath’s worshipful communion with the divine reality in the innermost self. Thus S. K. Das (1974: 87–88) points out that Rammohun’s songs do not contain specific references to religious experience, and unlike some of the later songs in the Brahmo Samaj under Debendranath, which are suffused with emotional intensity, they do not strike the note of prayer or dialogue between devotee and deity. N. Sen (1971: 193) writes in this vein that Rammohun’s religious consciousness was largely based on reason while Debendranath’s religious sensitivities proceeded from a mystical contemplation (maramī cintāprasūt). Debendranath’s biographer, A. Chakravarti (1916: 17–18) too argues that we find in Rammohun’s writings the sharpness and rigour of philosophical reasoning but not an aesthetic sensibility to the extent that we can discern in Debendranath’s autobiographical reflections and discussions of religious themes. Chakravarti presents Debendranath as steering a middle course between an Advaitic renunciation of the world and a passionate Vaiṣṇava immersion in the world: if at the moment of creating Debendranath’s mind, the creator had added a greater amount of rasa than knowledge ( jñāna), Debendranath would have become intoxicated by rasa in the manner of a Vaiṣṇava devotee; and if the creator had instead reduced the component of rasa and added more jñāna, Debendranath might have become an Advaita ascetic and completely detached from the world. However, the creator, in fact, created Debendranath with a perfect harmonization (sāmañjasye) of rasa and knowledge, and Debendranath remained established, in an unwavering manner, in union with Brahman (Chakravarti 1916: 18–19). In the closing years of his life, Sivanath reminisced about times he had spent in the company of the sagely Debendranath who was, Sivanath writes, also an aesthete who had a deep love of flowers, music, and poetry. Debendranath sought solitude where he would meditatively commune with the supreme spirit, so that a sense of the living presence of God became a habitual disposition of his life. Even at times when he was seriously ill, he would spend hours engaged in deep spiritual communion with his attention directed towards God (Sastri 1919: 139–43). He could meditatively ponder for hours on certain teachings of a religious teacher

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or text, till he was able to fathom their depths and their significance became clear to his ‘spiritual vision and he realized their importance in the presence of the Supreme Being’. His meditations provided food and strength for his soul, and illuminated his spiritual vision so vividly that his face would glow when reading certain scriptural passages (Sastri 1919: 147). On one occasion when he was expounding a passage of the Persian poet Hafiz to Sivanath, he rapturously exclaimed: ‘I am unconsciously Hafiz himself. This peculiar dress of mine I wear [so as] to be nearer to Hafiz’. On another occasion, when Sivanath offered his exposition of a spiritual statement, Debendranath joyfully clasped him and declared: ‘Whoever can say such a thing makes me his slave thereby’ (Sastri 1919: 148). Thus, Sivanath writes: ‘To him religion was a living reality. His spirit as naturally moved in it as birds fly in the air or as fishes move in the sea’ (Sastri 1919: 150). So sharp was the perception of this experiential divide between Rammohun and Debendranath for Rajnarayan that he was to write later in his preface to a translation of the Tuḥfat al-Muwaḥḥidīn: ‘It marks the period when he [Rammohun] had just emerged from the idolatry of his age but had not yet risen to the sublime Theism and Theistic Worship first proclaimed in the Trust-Deed of the Adi Brahmo Samaj’ (Roy 1884: i). More recently, C. Mackenzie Brown (2012: 101) has argued that Debendranath’s ‘heavy reliance on devotional intuition rather than on humankind’s rational abilities and intellectual knowledge … separates Debendranath from the deistic Vedānta of Rammohan Roy’. While these contrasts rightly pick out certain distinctive dimensions of the religious sensibilities of Rammohun and Debendranath, it is important not to exaggerate the shifts between Rammohun and Debendranath who infused new life into the Brahmo Samaj around 1843. As we have seen, the somewhat ‘deistic’ Rammohun too could, especially in his Brahma-sangīts, write effusively in lyrical registers about the continuing divine omnipresence in all dimensions of human existence, and, equally crucially, Debendranath himself would maintain a broadly Rammohun-stamped Advaita standpoint against the more devotionally charged sensibilities that began to appear in the Brahmo Samaj with figures such as Keshub, Bijoy Krishna, and others. Thus, Debendranath would have recoiled from the forthright declaration of Bijoy Krishna’s biographer, J. Maitra (1911:123) that the true guru is not merely a holy person in whom God is present but is the full divinity, and that without the mercy of the guru the worldly māyā to which living beings are bound cannot be destroyed. At the order of his own guru, Bijoy Krishna began to give initiation to his disciples, and by transmitting spiritual energy (śakti-sañcār) to them he would destroy their karmic bondage. Such guru-centric devotion was precisely one of the multiple dimensions of folk Vaiṣṇava religiosity that Debendranath’s Brahmo

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Samaj, following Rammohun’s spiritual visions, continued to critique vigorously in sermons, books, and occasional pamphlets. At one such address delivered on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Brahmo Samaj, Debendranath (Tagore 1864: 3) was to speak evocatively that at the time of Rammohun, the land of Bengal was a forest steeped in dense darkness and was ruled over by the demoniac forces of evil customs. Rammohun single-handedly struggled with thousands of enemies in that land of deep ignorance and sought to establish the Brahmo-dharma. After the departure of Rammohun for England in 1830, a Bengali pundit, Ramchandra Vidyabagish (1786–1845), kept the Brahmo Samaj alive by regularly giving the Brahmo sermon (byākhyān) at the weekly Wednesday service (Hatcher 1996: 207). After Debendranath started the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839, he appointed Vidyabagish as the preceptor (ācārya) at its second meeting. In 1842, he merged the Tattvabodhini Sabha with the Brahmo Samaj and a year later, on 23 December 1843, he and twenty other members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha were initiated by Vidyabagish into the Brahmo Samaj (Mukhopadhyay 1987). During this period, God was conceptualised as ‘formless, and of the nature of consciousness’ (īśvar nirākār caitanyasvarūp), which was an expression used by Debendranath in a lecture in 1843 (Niyogi and Mukhopadhyay 2017: 59). Throughout the splits that the Brahmo Samaj underwent – first, with Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India (1866) and then with the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj (1878) – Debendranath remained resolutely opposed to all forms of image worship, veneration of human gurus, adoration of descents of the divine reality (abatār), and so on. Thus, in a letter in 1861 to Rajnarayan, Debendranath writes that one of his daughters has been married in accordance with nonidolatrous Brahmo Samaj observances: ‘There is not even the scent of idolatry (pauttalikatār gandha-o) in my own family. However, all my relatives have abandoned me’ (Sastri n.d.: 33). During his childhood, Debendranath would see the śālagram stone of Viṣṇu being worshipped at home, every year he would be excited at the annual festival of the goddess Durgā, and on the way to school he would bow to the image of the goddess Siddheśvarī. However, on one occasion when he went to Rammohun’s home to invite Rammohun to the family Durgā-pūjā, Rammohun simply replied: ‘You have invited me to the worship?’ Debendranath would later recall that those words, in the form of a guru’s mantra, would gradually lead him to reject idolatry (Chakravarti 1916: 31). At the same time, Debendranath’s youthful iconoclastic reasoning did not take him in the sceptical direction of the students of Hindu College called Young Bengal who, under the influence of Henry Vivian Derozio (1808–1831), sharply rejected all forms of Hindu institutions, ritual cults, and devotional subjectivities. Derozio himself had studied at a school run by a Scotsman called David

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Drummond who, according to T. Edwards (1884:19), would not accept any statement unless it could be demonstrated with the certainty of a mathematical axiom. Derozio later established the Academic Association (1828) at Hindu College where some of his students entered into vigorous debates with one another on topics such as freewill, faith, the arguments for and against divine existence, priestcraft, and so on. Some of Derozio’s Hindu students rejected the sacred thread, and viewing the deities as mythical creations from ancient times, they repeated on occasions of worship passages from the Iliad rather than traditional prayers. However, Derozio left Hindu College four months after Debendranath joined it and Debendranath did not have any friends in the Derozian circle (Chakravarti 1916: 26). Thus, Debendranath, somewhat in the manner of Rammohun, was situated on a via media between the iconoclasm of Young Bengal and the traditional forms of ‘idolatrous’ Hindu lifeworlds. In the late 1840s, Debendranath and Rajnarayan collaborated to produce a Brahmo holy book, called the Brāhma-dharmaḥ, with quotations from classical texts such as the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata, the Manusmṛti, and so on. Around the time of composing the Brāhma-dharmaḥ, Debendranath had become dissatisfied with deistic forms of natural theology – he sought God not merely in the regular operations of natural phenomena but also in the affective depths of personal experience (Sen 2010: 49). The supreme Lord, Debendranath now believed, cannot be apprehended by the senses or designated by any words – only intuitive knowledge (ātma pratyaẏ-i) provides a proof (pramāṇ) for the existence of the deity (Tagore 1851: 26). These diverse theistic, deistic, agnostic, sceptical, and atheistic currents circulating through the bhadralok in the 1830s, the 1840s and the 1850s are reflected in a microcosm in the membership of the Tattavabodhini Sabha. The list of the members indicates that it was a confluence of three major intellectual streams – first, figures such as Debendranath, Rajnarayan, and others who were directly inspired by the thought of Rammohun, and most of whom had been initiated into the Brahmo-dharma; second, figures such as Ramtanu Lahiri, Kishorychand Mitra, and others who were members of Young Bengal; and third, figures such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and others who had not received initiation into the Brahmo-dharma and were also not members of Young Bengal, but had moved away from certain traditional beliefs and customs (Niyogi and Mukhopadhyay 2017: 8–9). Debendranath’s religious intensities gradually brought him into conflict with the rational humanism of Akshaykumar whom he had appointed as the editor of the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, the official publication of the Tattvabodhini Sabha. The very first issue of the journal declared that the Tattvabodhini Sabha had been established in 1839 to spread the supreme knowledge (bidyā) of Brahman

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which is propounded by the Vedānta and which is the highest dharma (1843: no. 1, 4). However, Debendranath and Akshaykumar had somewhat divergent understandings of the sources and the structures of this Vedāntic knowledge which was being put forward as the essence of all the Hindu scriptures. Thus, B. Hatcher (1996: 220) argues that Akshaykumar’s ‘erudition and his commitment to scientific rationalism offered a stark contrast to Debendranath’s spiritual orientation’. A concrete product of these scholastic dimensions of Akshaykumar’s life is his encyclopedic Bhāratvarṣīẏa Upāsak Saṃpradāẏ (1870–1883) in which he provides meticulous accounts of 99 Vaiṣṇava, 59 Śaiva, and 24 Śākta traditions. Debendranath and Akshaykumar have, in fact, been characterised as polar opposites (bhinna merur bāsindā) – one was a rationalist (yuktibādī) and had a scientific sensibility, and the other had a devotional and conservative cast of mind (Niyogi and Mukhopadhyay 2017: 72). Akshaykumar’s religious sensibilities were similar to those of Vidyasagar who was often regarded as an agnostic by his contemporaries. There are certain affinities between Vidyasagar and some other members of the Brahmo Samaj in the 1840s and the 1850s regarding their understandings of the human individual in the world, including ‘a belief in God as the creator and moral guardian of the universe; a respect for the ancient ideal of dharma; and an emphasis on sense-restraint and devoted effort’ (Hatcher 1996: 191). Hatcher notes that while Vidyasagar’s religiosity continues to be disputed, his worldview can be summarised in terms of the centrality of dharma which must be maintained even when everything else dissolves (Hatcher 1996: 273). A similar insistence on dharma can be discerned in the numerous writings of Akshaykumar who argued that the dharmic and the reasoning faculties of human beings, which are natural to them, are their greatest possession. Rejecting notions of supernatural intervention in the causal systems of the world, Akshaykumar regarded the natural laws that operate through the world as the supreme scriptural text (param śāstra) which is directly produced by God (Dutta 1851: 20). Therefore, the primary goal of all our reasoning and our dharmic faculties is to understand the intention (abhiprāẏ) of the world-ruler by studying such worldly phenomena (Dutta 1851: 96). Of all the figures whose worldviews we study in this book, Akshaykumar’s spiritual mentalités are the farthest removed from the types of Vaiṣṇava piety which characterise, with varied inflections, the writings of Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Pratap Chandra, Sivanath, and Sitanath. Akshaykumar’s writings on God and the natural world are clustered around three central themes: (a) by dutifully cultivating our God-given rational powers we become capable of discerning the footprints of the deity in natural phenomena, and we can develop modes of living which are conducive to the attainment of happiness in our individual lives and also in our social

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spheres; (b) there are no sharp discontinuities between, on the one hand, secular modes of learning in disciplines such as physics, chemistry, geology, and others and, on the other hand, dharmic instruction which we find in religious scriptures; and (c) because the operations of all reality are structured by the laws of the one God, it is erroneous to believe that the pursuit of our highest goal requires forms of world-renunciation. Firstly, God has granted us powers of reasoning so that we can understand our own nature and gain knowledge of our relations with the external world, and thus attain happiness. God has set up, with astonishing artifice (adbhūt kauśal), a relationship between our mental natures and the objects of the external world such that those actions of our lower dispositions which are in accordance with our reasoning and our dharmic faculties give us happiness, and those actions which are not in accordance with these capacities produce grief (Dutta 1851: 73). If we examine the world, we notice that all sentient and insentient things have specific natures, and are bound to one another through specific relations, and by understanding these relations we can apprehend the being of God who is indescribable, one without a second, beginningless, and the supreme cause. Through the proper cultivation, then, of our natural faculties we can live happily in the world, and by studying the incomparable artifice of the creator we experience incomparable joy with minds filled with love. As we become more educated and civilised, we do not view the objects of the world as assemblages of disconnected entities and we are not struck with fear on observing their great powers, for we understand that the world is a properly ordered machine and by following its principles in natural phenomena we can attain happiness (Dutta 1851: 9–11). Secondly, therefore, we should not regard ‘worldly’ learning and ‘religious’ dharma as mutually opposed: all forms of learning such as chemistry, physics, natural history, psychology, and ethics are truly the root of the knowledge of Brahman. Through such forms of learning, we understand that the laws which govern the world are the direct commandments (sākṣāt ājñā) of God; we comprehend the ineffable knowledge, power, and holy purpose of God; and we know that the true source of our happiness, health, and prosperity lies in our mental purification (citta-śuddhi), advancement of understanding ( jñānonnati), and religious progress (dharmabṛddhi) which result from following the natural laws. Therefore, the knowledge of Brahman should not be seen as discontinuous with modes of worldly learning; rather, the latter are individual chapters in the religious scriptures (dharma-śāstrer ek ek adhyāẏ-svarūp) and the former is the concluding chapter. Through the development of our reasoning powers (buddhibṛtti) we should study these chapters, and through the cultivation of our religious dispositions (dharmabṛtti) we should develop reverence and devotion towards

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them, for they comprise the religious scripture which is composed by God (parameśvar-praṇīt śāstra) (Dutta 1852: 153). Thus, all the laws which promote our physical health, mental well-being, and religious development are to be regarded equally with reverence and devotion, and they should be followed as we seek happiness in this world. Thirdly, God has created human beings with the capacity for happiness and granted them an elevated nature which is suitable for such happiness, and towards this end God has placed them under diverse types of natural laws (nānā prakār prākṛtik niẏamer adhīn) and enabled them to follow these laws. There is for us no other way to traverse the ocean of sorrow than by following the laws which govern the natural, physical, and mental realms – to follow them is indeed dharma and to transgress them is adharma. Therefore, those who instead renounce the world, seeking to attain God through spiritual practices such as meditation, make a grievous error; for our fulfilment lies in living in accordance with the rules which are established by the creator God (Dutta 1852: 165–66). Though all rules laid down by God are equally holy, those pertaining to our knowledge and dharma are superior to others, and so we should especially cultivate our mental and dharmic faculties in our quest for happiness. While the religious instructors of the country teach that it is sinful to remain engaged in worldly matters and that people should renounce the world, such teaching is, in fact, opposed to our nature (svabhāb-biruddh). All our mental dispositions are suitable for the stage of the householder, and a study of their natures and their operations reveals that we have been created to work for the welfare of the people. If indeed there are conflicts between religious teachings and the natural ordering of the world, such opposition (birodh) indicates that it is the former that are erroneous and have to be rejected (Dutta 1852: 154–56). In this resolute opposition to traditional modes of Hindu world-renunciation and asceticism, Akshaykumar was reiterating the world-affirmative stances of Rammohun, who had quoted, in his responses to a pundit, a verse from the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra (3.104) which he had translated as: ‘Those who are devoted to Brahman should do whatever leads to the welfare of the world – this is the eternal dharma’ (RR, 256). Rammohun writes in his outline of the characteristics of the Brahman-centred householder (brahmaniṣṭha gṛhasther lakṣaṇ) that the commentator Kullūka Bhaṭṭa has indicated, in his commentary on Manusmṛti 4.24, that the householders who are devoted to Brahman perceive with the eye of knowledge that all things, including the five great sacrifices, have Brahman as their basis. It is in this light that we should read Manusmṛti 12.92 which states that the wise abandon the practice of sacrificial rituals and dedicate themselves to the knowledge of the self, restraint of the senses, and study of the Vedas – this text does not indicate that individuals

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should abandon the social system of worldly duties (varṇāśrama-dharma) but rather highlights the necessity of self-knowledge, restraint, and scriptural study (RR, 331). In a similar vein, Akshaykumar argues that God has placed us, with our specific natures, in a beautifully ordered world which is orientated towards our happiness and, therefore, we should cultivate different forms of learning through which we understand the diverse laws which operate through the natural and the dharmic domains. These scientific pathways to the heart of God were first forged by Akshaykumar’s youthful mind which was driven by an intense thirst for knowledge relating to natural phenomena. Akshaykumar worked his way through school, where he was able to study only for around two and a half years because of severe financial hardship, with great industry and perseverance. As he learned more of geography and physics, he began to regard the descriptions of the natural world in the Purāṇas as imaginative and erroneous (Ray 1885: 20–21). He worked strenuously as the editor of the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā for twelve years between 1843 and 1855 – under him the journal was not limited to religious themes but also published topics relating to literature, science, history, and so on. His Padārthabidyā (1856), one of the first science textbooks in Bengali, covers a diverse range of topics such as the atomic structure of matter, gravitation, magnetic attraction, density of different substances, simple motion, curvilinear motion, action and reaction, centre of gravity, and others. As we have seen, according to Akshaykumar, a proper understanding of these natural entities, laws, and processes is as much an integral component of the religious life as the knowledge of dharmic pathways which is gained from religious texts (Sen 1971: 75–76). A pivotal moment in the history of the Brahmo Samaj was Akshaykumar’s declaration in 1850 that the Vedas do not constitute divine revelation. For Akshaykumar, the Vedas are not divinely revealed scriptures but are erroneous human products from ancient times when civilisation was not developed. Instead, we should regard the world of nature itself as a supreme scripture (śāstra) – whether in the form of the rays of light which reach the earth after several thousands of years or the extremely minute drops of blood which circulate through the human body – and the pure knowledge of these matters as our teacher (ācārya) (Chakravarti 1916:142–43). After he retired from the editorship of the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, he began to live in a house in a village where he installed portraits of Darwin and Newton, and he remarked to a neighbour that his house was being transformed into a heavenly place (debalok) (Ray 1885: 250–51). To return to Debendranath, we can discern both certain thematic overlaps with, and significant differences in style and orientation from, Akshaykumar’s understandings of the phenomenal world as reflecting the conscious design

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of the divine reality. In the introduction to Debendranath’s autobiography, S. N. Tagore writes that after reading the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff’s description in his India and Indian Missions about the members of the Brahmo Samaj as Vedantins who accept the infallibility of the Vedas, the Brahmos began to formally consider their position on this topic, when they realised that they were, in fact, divided. Akshaykumar, who was the ‘intellectual leader’ of the Samaj, refused to accept their infallibility. Finally, after discussion, Debendranath too rejected the notion that the Vedas were divinely inspired (Tagore and Devi 1909 [henceforth ADT]: iii). These points are highlighted by Debendranath in an address in 1867 – he declares that while the members of the Brahmo Samaj are the worshippers of Brahman, the supreme being, they are different from the members of religions which speak of a special revelation or which are based on specific rituals. They do not accept the necessity of any ‘mediators, symbols or idols’ in the worship of the divine, and their faith is based on ‘the fundamental truths of Religion, attested by Reason and Conscience …’ (ADT, 151–52). The rejection of the doctrine of the infallibility of the Vedas was maintained throughout the various splits that the Samaj underwent in subsequent decades, and the regularities of the world of nature and the intuition of a pure heart were instead put forward as the two sources of religious knowledge (Rambachan 1994: 262). Debendranath’s spirituality was based on the ‘direct communion’ of an individual with the supreme spirit – according to him, we do not need any intermediaries as we seek to hear the divine voice in the depths of conscience (ADT, ix–x). Thus, Debendranath declares that to see the manifestation of God in the external world is to see God from afar – but we should rather see God as present in our hearts and as near us (Tagore 1861: 16–17). In all his religious writings, Debendranath would resolutely hold on to Rammohun’s standpoint that God has no form or shape, for God is essentially knowledge, and this thesis is repeatedly hammered out also throughout the pages of the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā. The rational questing of Rammohun is evident in a sample of dense argumentation in an early volume of the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (1843: no. 3, 20), where in the format of objections and resolutions the author presents a disquisition on whether God has a body. One of the reasons put forward by an objector to the statement that God is without any form is that a formless God cannot create the world, for the creation (sṛṣṭi) of the world involves contact between limbs and inert materials. The defender of the claim that God is bodiless then presents a systematic argument which proceeds to the conclusion in the following manner: 1. The different components of a body such as hands and feet can be put together only by a conscious agent.

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Now, if God has a body, we would have to postulate a person other than God who has put together the limbs of God’s own body. In that case, we would trigger an infinite regress for we would have to postulate a series of persons where the antecedent person has constructed the body of the succeeding person in that series. 3. Therefore, we should conclude that God is completely without any limbs, and is eternal knowledge. 4. However, suppose we claim, in response, that the formless God has constructed God’s own body by making use of inert materials. Now, if the formless God – who is without limbs – can yet create the divine body which has limbs, then the formless God can also create the world. That is, the formless God does not need to have limbs to create the world. Therefore, the notion that God, who is formless, has created the world is not logically incoherent. At the same time, Debendranath’s God is a deeply compassionate and loving God, and a God who is intimately involved with humanity. He begins his Brāhmodharmer Mat o Biśvās with these sentences: ‘Regarding the existence of God it is not necessary at all to write many words. All individuals who possess understanding accept the divine existence. The existence of the world itself is vivid proof of the divine existence. In the world everything is properly ordered – everything is full of artfulness (kauśalmaẏ) … There is nothing which is not produced through intention or is fortuitous (ākasmik) … The will (ichhā) of the one supreme person whose desires are fulfilled and whose intention is holy is vividly expressed throughout the world’ (Tagore 1865: 1). As this opening reflection indicates, Debendranath’s writings often strike more intensely devotional notes than Akshaykumar’s meditative reflections on the intricate structures of the world as the divine handiwork. Thus, Debendranath writes in a letter in 1858 to Rajnarayan that during his travels through the mountains, he has seen beautiful flowers of diverse colours, on which he discerns the signature of the supreme divine person. If we take in our hands a fragrant and beautiful flower, and take with devotion the name of its creator, such an act is itself the worship (upāsanā) of God (Sastri n.d.: 66). A paradoxical trope which is common to various forms of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism centred around the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is that the supremely adorable God becomes willingly bound to the devotees through the soteriological attraction of their devotional love; and Debendranath often articulates this dialectical motif to speak of the God of love who waits upon us to return to God with our devotional love. His life-altering experience occurred at the age of eighteen, when his Vaiṣṇava grandmother, to whom he was deeply devoted, lay on her death-bed for three nights in a shed on the banks of the Ganges. As

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he sat on Nimtola Ghat on a moonlit night, and heard the chants to Lord Viṣṇu wafting in the wind to him, he experienced a ‘strange sense of the unreality of all things … I was as if no longer the same man … The coarse bamboo-mat on which I sat seemed to be my fitting seat, carpets and costly spreadings seemed hateful, in my mind was awakened a joy unfelt before’ (ADT, 3). He writes that until that moment he had lived in the midst of luxury, and had not searched for spiritual truths; yet, he could hardly contain the supreme joy (ānanda) that swept over him or speak about it to others as it could not be expressed through logical reasoning. The fact that he had received this spontaneous joy was for him proof of the divine existence, for God had sought him and given it to him in the fullness of time: ‘I was not prepared for it, whence then did I receive this joy?’ (ADT, 3–4). However, after the funeral, he was unable to recover this joy and instead a ‘deep gloom’ settled over him. Sitting on a tombstone in the middle of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, he would sing, ‘Vain oh! Vain is the light of day, without knowledge all is dark as night’ (ADT, 7). Somewhat in the manner of Akshaykumar, Debendranath gradually began to perceive a deep wisdom that runs through all cosmic phenomena such as the rising and the setting of the sun and the moon – these processes, he believed, are designed by a cosmic mind and driven by the ‘power of an intelligent being’ (ADT, 10). Around this time, he remembered Rammohun, in whose school he had studied as a child, and he resolved that he would not worship or bow to an image or accept invitations to attend devotional services (pūjā). However, he was distressed by the thought that some scriptural texts (śāstra) were full of idolatry (pauttalikatā), and that it was not possible to extract from them truths about the formless (nirākār) and immutable (nirbikār) divine reality (ADT, 12–14). As he remained in a state of despair, he found a page from a Sanskrit book which turned out to be from the Īśa Upaniṣad. A pundit explained to him the meaning of the phrase īśā-vāsyamidaṃ sarvam in it, and he felt that the Īśa Upaniṣad had satisfied his yearning to see God everywhere, for according to it, the whole world was indeed encompassed by God: ‘I got just what I wanted. I had never heard my most intimate thoughts expressed like this anywhere else’ (ADT, 15). He set up a society called the Tattvabodhini Sabha in October 1839, which was later amalgamated with the Brahmo Samaj. If the Samaj was opposed to idolatry, it also rejected Advaita Vedānta on the grounds that this system of thought and practice sought to establish an undifferentiated unity between Brahman and the finite self, for ‘[i]f the worshipper and the object of worship become one, then how can there be any worship?’ (ADT, 24). From this stage in the narrative of his religious development, Debendranath increasingly characterises the devotee and the deity as mutually bound together in companionship, where the devotee intensely

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yearns for a yet fuller presence of the deity always present in the innermost self of the devotee. He understood that to see the Lord (devatā) and stand in the presence of the Lord, to worship the Lord with the offering of his heartfelt devotion, and to sing the glories of the Lord, had been the intense longing that had filled him with pain, like an acute thirst when there is no water in sight. However, now that his yearnings had been fulfilled, his misery subsided, as he realised that the all-merciful Lord would not abandon a devoted worshipper and those who seek the Lord would find the Lord. Pondering on the Gāyatrī mantra, he understood that the Lord (īśvar) was not simply a passive witness but the indwelling spirit who constantly inspired his thoughts and actions. Thus ‘a deep and living connection’ was established between him and the Lord – whereas earlier he had bowed to the Lord from a distance, now he felt the divine presence within his heart. The Lord was his constant help (cirakāler sahāẏ) – when he had been wandering, sad and despondent, the Lord, indwelling him, had gradually opened his inner spiritual eye (ADT, 34–36). The Lord of the world-temple had also become the Lord of the temple of his heart (hṛdaẏ-mandir) from which he began to receive silent and deep dharmic teachings. He became a pilgrim on the way of love (prem-pather yātrī) – the Lord was the life of his life and the friend of his heart (hṛdaẏ-sakhā), and he could not pass even a moment without the divine presence. After finding the Lord, the craving (tṛṣṇā) that he had felt when seeking the Lord increased a hundred times, and the little that he could see of the divine and hear of the divine voice was not sufficient to satisfy his spiritual hunger: O my Lord! now that I have seen Thee, reveal Thyself to me more vividly. I have been blest by hearing the sound of Thy voice, pour out its sweet strains more and more honeyed. Let thy beauty appear before me under everchanging forms. Now Thou appearest to me and disappearest like a flash of lightning, I cannot retain my hold on Thee. Do Thou dwell for ever in my heart. ADT, 37

These themes recur throughout Debendranath’s subsequent writings, especially in the Brāhma-dharmaḥ; the Brāhmadharmer Byākhyān, which are sermons that he delivered at the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj between 1860 and 1861; and the Brāhmodharmer Mat o Biśvās. These writings are deeply suffused with emotional expressivities, as Debendranath speaks of the sweetness of the devotional love that binds together deity and devotee, while at the same time they nowhere depict God as having a human form and sporting with human beings on earth.

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First, Debendranath unambiguously rejects Advaitic teachings, much more emphatically than Rammohun, of an undifferentiated identity between humanity and divinity, and declares that the God of love actively seeks our loving response to God. God is not simply the ordainer of the structures of the cosmos, as in the case of the writings of Akshaykumar, but God is also the active lover who seeks us even as we remain indifferent to the divine call. Therefore, liberation (mukti) should not be understood as the dissolution of one’s individuality and becoming divine – true liberation is instead dependence (adhīnatā) on God and not dependence on the world. Our heartfelt desire (spṛhā), Debendranath asserts, is that we remain dependent on God, and we do not seek the form of liberation called nirbāṇ in which we are dissolved into the divinity (Tagore 1865: 92). Through the light of our love of God, we are able to apprehend God, so that true detachment (bairāgya) lies not in retreating to the forests and abandoning the world but in developing love (anurāg) of God. God alone is the one who inspires this love in us and God is its object (biṣaẏ); thus, when we hunger and thirst for God, it is God who is our food and drink (Tagore 1865: 30–32). In an Advaitic register, Debendranath does argue that only the eternal God (īśvar) is absolutely true, for God who is beyond all finite bounds is not subject to any transformation, and the transient world is true relative to God. At the same time, however, he states that the Brahmo-dharma does not agree with the view of the ‘Vedāntic pundits’ who claim that the world has no real existence (bāstabik sattā) – rather, we should say that through its basis in reality (satyer āśraẏe), the world has become expressed as real (Tagore 1865: 92–93). Even more: our greatest joy in this real world is in remaining subservient (adhīn) to God; our greatness (mahattva) is in becoming a servant (sebak) of God; and our greatest entitlement is that we serve God, worship God, and perform actions which are pleasing to God. It is God who gives us love and attracts our love, and by looking at us lovingly, God brings about our spiritual advancement, pulls us towards God, and floods us with joy. Even though we are insignificant (kṣudra) beings who are covered with imperfections, Debendranath marvels at the fact that the supreme God who is the king of kings is yet our friend – such is our great entitlement (adhikār) (Tagore 1861: 47–49). We might not turn our thoughts to God and pray to God, and yet God remains looking for an opportunity when we will give a place to God in our hearts, and God keeps the divine lap extended to everyone. The infinite spring of love can never dry up – the more we become capable of accepting love, the more God will give us love (Tagore 1861: 54–55). Second, Debendranath (1851: 26–27) declares that the Lord who is more intimate to us than everything else (sarbāpekṣā antaratar) is dearer to us than all worldly goods, and we should worship the Lord in the form of the dear (priẏa

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rūpe). The relation between the finite self and the supreme self is so intimate that there is not the slightest interval of space between them. Thus, the finite self and the supreme self remain together as mutual friends (ubhaẏei parasparer sakhā) – one is the supported and the other is the supporter, and one is the enjoyer of fruits and the other is the giver of fruits (Tagore 1861: 20–21). God is forever our means of subsistence (upajībikā) and our most intimate beloved (antaratam priẏatam), and our self remains in a living union ( jībita sambandha) with God (Tagore 1861: 63). God remains as the pilot of our boat on the turbulent waves of the world, our companion (saṅgī), and our witness, and works alongside us. God infuses strength into our hearts and by becoming strong with God’s strength we struggle in the world (Tagore 1861: 142). Thus, we pray to God and we weep, and we see that in God alone we should place our hope, our trust, and our reliance. Then we spontaneously pray to God: ‘Take everything from me – life, heart, mind’ (Tagore 1861: 107). If we can once, with the vision of knowledge and the vision of love ( jñān dṛṣṭite prem dṛṣṭite), look into the self, we receive the loving vision of God. If we look at God with loving eyes, we experience God’s great love, but if we look at God in a detached manner (udāsīn-bhābe), we do not perceive the divine love. Love is not complete (sampūrṇa) within oneself – love seeks another; thus, God’s love (prīti) for us attracts our own love (Tagore 1861: 26). As the pure sentiment of God becomes expressed in us, a rasa of holy bliss begins to circulate through us. Everyone is equally eligible to taste this divine bliss – God is our common good (sādhāraṇ samṛddhi) and, for each one of us, God is our individual wealth (nijasva dhan) (Tagore 1865: 15–16). Worldly pleasures cannot bring us true satisfaction for they are transient and extremely insignificant – God alone satisfies us and is our abode of peace. When our self becomes united in love with God, everything becomes nectarine (sudhāmaẏ), and the world assumes a new appearance in which nothing is unholy, for it is then seen to be the temple of God in which everything is filled with the divine being (Tagore 1861: 99–100). Third, therefore, Debendranath writes that in and through our worldly infirmities we should actively seek to become progressively more infused with the love of God. We should look for God in all worldly beauty – the splendour of the dawn and the evening, and the majesty of the moonlight. God cannot be properly known merely through the discussion of philosophical systems (darśan-śāstrer ālocanā) – the heart should feel a sincere restlessness to see God and to be with God. To such a simple heart which is full of the pure love of God, all delusions are dispelled and all truth becomes luminous. Through study we can become teachers and world-renowned pundits, through the discussion of scriptural texts we can become learned people, and through the power of the intellect we can become logicians, but to be near God we have to

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become as guileless (akapaṭ) as a child, for God is expressed only in a simple (saral) and holy heart. Thus, Debendranath declares that when we become God’s and God becomes ours, then God sits in our heart and is satisfied, and also satiates our entire heart (āmār samudaẏ hṛdaẏke saṃtṛpta karen) (Tagore 1861: 132–33). God is our very life, the giver of knowledge, and the dearest friend (param suhṛt) – it can never be desirable that we stay away from God and God remains far away from us (Tagore 1861: 11). Debendranath thus ends a sermon with a passionate exclamation: ‘How much longer do I have to wait for that day when I will be completely blissful in front of you and I will stay with you for eternity? O supreme self! I seek refuge at your feet. I have come to your presence not in search of wealth, name, and fame … I seek refuge in you so that you will take away my weakness, and deliver me from sin and impurity. O deliverer of the fallen (patita-pāban)! May I stay forever in your immortal dwelling – this is my wish, this is my hope. Fulfil my hope!’ (Tagore 1861: 38). 3

Christian Missionaries and Their Brahmo Interlocutors

The recurring trope of the dearly beloved God who is the ‘deliverer of the fallen’ – used here by a sagely Brahmo who was antagonistic to the ‘idolatry’ of Vaiṣṇavism – is also, of course, pivotal to the doctrinal systems of the Christan missionaries who lived and moved in the wider Bengali milieus of Brahmos and Vaiṣṇavas. As we study the dialectical engagements between Brahmos and Vaiṣṇavas in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is therefore important to highlight the point that these encounters took place against the backdrops of a missionary Christianity which was widely perceived as a ‘foreign’ intrusion into indigenous idioms. The opening salvos were fired by Rammohun who rejected the Christian doctrine of the substitutionary atonement on the grounds that it offends our moral intuitions and that it is unnecessary for salvation. Rammohun offered what is probably the first Biblically-informed Hindu critique of the doctrine of the atonement. According to Rammohun, who published in 1820 his Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, the foundations of the Christian religion are these: we express our love of God and our love of fellow-beings, and God is one and undivided in person. Jesus proclaimed the moral truths of love of God and love of neighbour, and dogmas relating to the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the vicarious atonement, and others are not indispensable for our salvation. The Precepts of Jesus was negatively reviewed by the Baptist missionary, Joshua Marshman who rejected Rammohun’s attempt to separate the moral teachings of Jesus from beliefs about incarnation, atoning death, and miracles. Rammohun followed with

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An Appeal to the Christian Public (1821), Second Appeal to the Christian Public (1821), and Final Appeal to the Christian Public (1823) to defend his views in the Precepts of Jesus against the critiques of Marshman (Killingley 1993: 138– 43). While from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, Rammohun was a Unitarian and not a Trinitarian, he did not hold that Jesus was merely a man – rather, Rammohun believed that God had exalted Jesus above all the creatures and all the prophets, and Jesus was the intercessor between God and humanity. Through his correspondences with some English Unitarians, Rammohun would have been familiar with the basic motifs of Unitarianism which emerges in the eighteenth century as a form of dissent which emphasises critical styles of reading the Bible, where such criticism involves, in particular, the rejection of the doctrines of the Trinity, the atoning death of Christ, and others. Reflecting Unitarian standpoints, Rammohun argued that the intercessory work of Jesus did not require the vicarious atoning death of Jesus for the sins of humanity – we receive forgiveness from God not because Christ died in our place but because we have experienced sincere contrition for our moral and spiritual transgressions. That is, Jesus is our redeemer not because he died ‘in our place’ as a propitiation for our sins, but because he taught us that through heartfelt repentance we receive forgiveness for our sins. Rammohun’s claim that the return of humanity to divinity requires not the atoning death of a divine mediator but genuine repentance is reiterated by Debendranath several decades later. To attain the supreme bliss which results from dwelling (sahabās) with God, who is the essence of holiness, the first step, Debendranath writes, is to make ourselves holy (pabitra) by moving away from the path of sin (pāp) and receiving the favour (prasannatā) of the supreme person (Tagore 1865: 17). As we thus cease from sinfulness and pursue holiness, the desire for God becomes more intense in us and when God satisfies this desire, we receive supreme bliss and become fulfilled. This is because God is not only a just king but is also our supreme compassionate father who seeks to bring about our blessedness. We are extremely weak beings, and when we fall away from the path of dharma, we should express genuine repentance to God who will give consolation to our penitent hearts (Tagore 1865: 21–23). As we experience pain at our sinfulness (pāpe tāpita haile), we should seek refuge at the feet of God with repentance and weeping (anutāp o aśrupāt), for God loves those who seek refuge (śaraṇāgat-baṯsal) and God will liberate them from their sins. If we thus become restless (byākul hai) for God and pray to God, if our hunger and thirst are satisfied by none other than God, we begin to perceive God everywhere, within ourselves and in the world outside. By purifying ourselves, by moving away from immersion in worldly goods, by opening up the doors of the heart to

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the presence of God, and by seeking God with great thirst, we see the appearance of God everywhere (Tagore 1861: 6–8). The initial polemical sparks between Rammohun and Marshman over the soteriological significance of Christ as the mediator between God and humanity became a raging fire towards the second half of the nineteenth century when a significant amount of missionary writing on the Hindu religious traditions revolved around the attempt to demonstrate that the salvation of the natives of Hindustan would be effected by Christ and not by Kṛṣṇa. For some Christian missionaries the weakest link in the Hindu religious armoury was precisely the figure of Kṛṣṇa, and the scriptural narratives of his antics, dalliances, and strategems as a child, young boy, and statesman were denounced as immoral, sensual, deceitful, and duplicitous (Haberman 1994). One hermeneutic move involved the claim that the similarities between the narratives of the nativity, divinity, and others of Kṛṣṇa and Christ demonstrate that the worship of the child-God Kṛṣṇa is a derivative form of Christian doctrine. In this vein, J. Kennedy argued that the figure of Kṛṣṇa was forged by some nomadic groups who were not indigenous to the subcontinent and whose worship had been coloured by ‘some tincture of Christianity’. After a detailed discussion of trade links between the subcontinent and Europe, and ‘syncretism’ in ancient religious traditions, he concludes: ‘The Christian stories of the Nativity passed readily into the medieval Buddhism of Central Asia; they are popular among Hindus of the present day, who know nothing else of Christianity; and reminiscences of the Christmas festival still linger among some of the Berber tribes of North Africa. It is no idle fancy, therefore, to suppose that the Northern nomads who roamed through the woods of Braj [in northern India] brought with them a child-god, a Christian legend, and a Christmas festival … The priests who accompanied the nomads would readily invent, or lend themselves to the invention [of,] a cult which promised them speedy advancement to the fullblown rank of Brāhman’ (Kennedy 1907: 989). Various nineteenth-century British observers of contemporary Hindu movements claimed to have discerned such Christian influences in the ‘reformism’ being developed by the Brahmo Samaj. For M. Monier-Williams (1891: 505), the missionary spirit demonstrated by some Brahmos – and in particular by Keshub – indicated a line of influence from Christian theological views to Hindu lifeworlds. A few decades later, J. N. Farquhar attributed the ‘neo-Kṛṣṇa’ movements among some western-educated Bengali Hindus to ‘a distinct liking for the Gospels and a craving for a perfect character such as Christ’s for daily contemplation and imitation’ which they had acquired in the colleges established by the Christian missionaries. Therefore, such Hindus seek to

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replace Christ with Kṛṣṇa in their worship and the Gospels with the Gītā as their scriptural text (Farquhar 1915: 295). Under the influence of Christianity, Hindus largely worship Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, and not the animal avatāras, and even though they put forward Kṛṣṇa as the spiritual substitute for Christ, they have to ‘whitewash his character’ as it appears in the epic narratives and the Purāṇas (Farquhar 1915: 440). For most of these western writers, the most damning aspect of Kṛṣṇa was his dalliances with the cowherd women. Thus, after an outline of Kṛṣṇa’s miraculous powers exhibited through his slaying of demons and protection of the people, Monier-Williams (1891:113) laments: ‘Yet in spite of these evidences of his supramundane powers, Kṛṣṇa was addicted to very mundane practices. He constantly sported with the Gopis or wives and daughters of the cowherds; on one occasion stealing their clothes when they were bathing and making them come to him naked’. Around this time, J. J. Lucas (1884: 5) constructs a dialogue between himself and a Hindu pundit and seeks to demonstrate that it is Christ and not Kṛṣṇa who is the true saviour of all humanity. After declaring that the child Kṛṣṇa was a lying thief, Lucas argues that the incident with the cowherd women in the river shows that ‘Kṛṣṇa was not holy. Surely such a one as Kṛṣṇa is worthy of punishment, and not of praise and worship’. Moreover, though the teaching of the Bible as a religious text was forbidden in the government schools, missionaries believed that the study of English literature, which was imbued with a Christian ethos, would lead to a moral regeneration of the Indians, remove some of the prejudices on the path of their conversion, and draw them towards Christianity. Thus, Christian sentiments and elements of Christian morality were claimed to be present in writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Addison, Adam Smith, and Locke, and it was hoped that because such texts of Christian England were a readily available archive of Christian values, they would also prove to be an effective means of communicating them to their students. Nevertheless, some missionaries themselves had misgivings about the effectiveness of these texts for this purpose, and one contemporary commentator pointed out that the mere study of facts about Christianity, far from producing any Christian sentiments in the students, ‘did no more to convert Hindu children to Christianity than the study of Greek and Roman classics at English schools and universities to convert British youth to pagans’ (Viswanathan 1989: 84). Against this polemic backdrop, Gauri Viswanathan has pointed to a tension in the Evangelicalism of British Christians such as Charles Grant between their belief that a consistent pursuing of ‘western empiricism’ would lead to a debunking of Hindu metaphysics and mythology while safeguarding the revealed tenets of their own Christian faith from empiricism’s central disciplines, namely, science and history. This

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tension ‘did not go unnoticed by colonial subjects … If Christianity were truly a religion based on reason, evidence and history as projected, many asked [in the course of college debates, essays, and literary contests at Hindu College], why did confirmation in that religion depend entirely on accepting two central doctrines [namely, divine revelation and God’s grace] that demanded faith rather than the exercise of reason?’ (Viswanathan 1989: 99). Thus, the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj such as Debendranath, once a student at Hindu College, found themselves entangled in a quadrangular contest between the Christian missionaries, the group centred around Keshub whose vocabulary was often strongly tinged with Christian notions of sin and repentance, and the ‘neo-Vaiṣṇavas’ who were beginning to retrieve a Kṛṣṇa who was different from the one who had been held up as the epitome of Hindu immorality. Regarding Keshub’s blendings of Christian vocabularies with traditional Hindu imageries, D. Kopf (1979: 273) has argued that Keshub was not aiming ‘to domesticate Christianity or Christianize Hinduism. Rather, he was searching for a new synthesis’. Thus, while Keshub argued that Christianity, and its founder Christ himself, had Oriental roots, he also sharply criticised the forms of British Christianity he encountered on the grounds that they were materialistic, ‘muscular’, bigoted, and ridden with sectarian conflict (Stevens 2018: 69–70). At a ‘Farewell Soiree’ organised for him on September 12, 1870 in London, Keshub argued that Christianity in England is characterised by three ‘great drawbacks’: firstly, it is splintered into numerous sects which are divided by mutual antagonism; secondly, it is ‘muscular and hard’ and is associated not with forgiveness of the enemy but with militaristic belligerence; and thirdly, it is driven by the concerns of the materialistic world and is focused not on meditative contemplation but on systems of rituals, dogmas, and propositions (Chatterji 1871: 486–88). Such lifeforms forget that the true Christ is not the physical Jesus who once lived on earth and who has been mistakenly deified by Christians, so that it is believed by them that the way to God is through the dogma of the atonement. Rather, Keshub declares, God is truly worshipped through the ‘spiritual Christ’ who is the spirit of God and not with any scriptures, doctrines, or priests (Chatterji 1871: 488–91). Nine years later, Keshub declares unequivocally towards the beginning of a public address: ‘I am not a Christian; none of the numerous sects into which the Church of Christ is divided would allow my creed to be identified with its own’ (Sen 1901: 359). Nevertheless, contemporary critics of Keshub such as Debendranath, Sivanath, and others often regarded him as seeking to incorporate Christian motifs into the Brahmo-dharma, and they instead sought to forge their own synthetic styles which they put forward as encompassing the spiritual aspirations of universal humanity. According to Ishan Chandra Basu (1902: 112), as Keshub’s

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Brahmo Samaj of India began to place a greater emphasis on the Bible, the Adi Brahmo Samaj sought to retain a national character. Thus, the question of which group was truly universal – the immediate followers of Rammohun such as Debendranath, the Brahmo disciples of Keshub, the devotees of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, or the Christian missionaries – became a site of intense contestation across various groups of Brahmos, as we will see in Chapters 4 and 5. During the 1840s, Debendranath and Akshaykumar were particularly disturbed by the spectacle of some young Hindus being turned towards Christianity by perhaps the most redoubtable Scottish Christian missionary based in Calcutta, Alexander Duff. One of Duff’s converts, Lal Behari Day (1824– 94), whose father was an ‘orthodox Hindu of the Vaishnava persuasion’ (1879: 38), reports that one day Duff asked the students in one of the lower classes if they knew a Bengali word that was similar in sound to the word for cow (goru), and one of them replied that it was ‘guru’. Thereupon, Duff was ‘quite delighted at the boy’s discovery, and asked us what use the guru was, and whether, on the whole, the goru was not more useful than the guru. He then left our class … leaving in our minds seeds of future thought and reflection. Such is my earliest recollection of Alexander Duff’ (1879: 50–51). Duff’s subtle hint was not lost on his Christian disciple who would later fulminate against the Vaiṣṇava practice of prostrating oneself before the guru and attending to the guru with ablutions, worship, and food as the ‘most degrading element’ in their faith, and a superstition even more degrading than the superstitions of ancient Greece and Rome (Day 1851: 193). Following Rammohun, Debendranath and Rajnarayan sought to defend Vedāntic doctrines against Duff’s attempts at conversion, partly by turning the tables on Christianity which was accused of anthropomorphism in its teachings about a God who inflicts punishment on human beings and undergoes suffering. They concluded in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā that Vedānta ‘conveys to our minds a far loftier, a more adequate, consistent, and ennobling idea’ of the divine attributes, by prescribing the worship of God who is ‘the Supreme Regulator of this boundless universe, and … the glorious and beneficent originator of all earthly good’ (1844: no. 14, 115). When Day declared that the Vaiṣṇavas are ‘idolaters’ and that like other Hindu traditions they ‘maintain that it is impossible for spirit, as such, to become the object of contemplation’ (Day 1851: 191), Brahmos, generally speaking, would have agreed with this Christian verdict on Vaiṣṇavism, though according to them, the proper destination of anti-idolatrous worship is not Christ but their own Brahmo-dharma. Indeed, Adi Brahmo objections to Keshub’s New Dispensation were largely targeted at its highly ‘anthropomorphic’ Christianised vocabularies, imageries, and ritualisms.

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From the time of Debendranath onwards, therefore, we find some Brahmos fighting on three fronts which dialectically shape their own standpoints through three patterns of negation: the Brahmo-dharma is not the alleged pantheism of Advaita Vedānta, the Brahmo-dharma is not Trinitarian Christianity structured by the doctrine of the (substitutionary) atonement, and the Brahmo-dharma is not Vaiṣṇava worship with its images, ritual systems, and adoration of the guru. Thus, Rajnarayan’s Hindu Dharmer Śreṣṭhatā (‘Superiority of the Hindu Dharma’, 1879) begins with responses to various Christian missionary critiques of Hinduism, defends the Brahmo-dharma as the quintessence of ancient Hindu wisdom, and ends with a rousing call to Hindus to maintain their independence in their customs, beliefs, and practices. First, it provides a long catalogue of western critiques of the Hindu dharma and systematically responds to them, before highlighting the respects in which the Hindu dharma is, in fact, superior to the other dharmas in the world; second, it indicates that the most excellent form of this Hindu dharma is the Brahmo-dharma which is, however, not a recent arrival for it is contained in the Upaniṣads; and third, it ends with a clarion call to Hindus to rise to the spiritual heights of the Upaniṣads and establish a glorious civilization on dharmik foundations. Therefore, Rajnarayan has to negotiate two distinct targets in different parts of the text – first, the non-Hindu dharmas such as Christianity over which the superiority of the Hindu dharma is to be established and second, Hindu traditions such as Advaita Vedānta which are to be distinguished from the Brahmo readings of the scriptures. As we will see in subsequent chapters, some of the contrasts that Rajnarayan sketches in Hindu Dharmer Śreṣṭhatā – the Hindu dharma is universal and does not exclude anyone, while Christianity is insular and centred around a messenger who mediates the distant divinity to human beings, and fails to include all individuals on its doctrinal horizons – constitute a leitmotif of Brahmo missionary preaching. 4

Conclusion

Sometime around the middle of the 1860s, with the emergence of Keshub as a charismatic leader, a powerful wave of Vaiṣṇava devotion characterised by high emotive intensity sweeps across sections of the Brahmo Samaj. However, as we have discussed, Debendranath’s vocabularies too were heavily suffused with the Vaiṣṇava-inflected themes of the futility of absorption in the structures of the transient world, the restless yearning for God who is our deepest friend, and the confession of sinfulness (pāp) before God. Thus, he urges his

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audience at a certain sermon to keep alight the love of God (iśvarānurāg) in their hearts in the midst of their worldly engagements and seek to become bound deeply with God (Tagore 1861: 4). God remains eager (byagra) to receive our love – God is waiting for the moment when we will willingly (āmrā āpnā haite) give to God our love, so that God will accept us with the divine embrace (Tagore 1861: 105). If we take but one step towards God, God takes a thousand steps towards us and embraces us; and if God receives from us even an atom of our love (kaṇā mātra prīti), God spreads the great divine love to us in a thousand forms (Tagore 1861: 123). When we rely on our own strength (bal) we have no hope of being delivered from our great distress but when we perceive the hand of God we become reassured. God does not disregard us because we have become lowly and impure, and even though we are not worthy (yogya), God’s love yet comes to us and showers nectar on us (Tagore 1861: 141). Debendranath’s vocabularies of love are in marked contrast to the somewhat scholastic tenor of the sermons of Vidyabagish who broadly maintained Rammohun’s Advaitic standpoints. In a sermon printed in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (1843: no. 1, 2) Vidyabagish thus argues that the world is an apparent transformation of, but is not distinct from (atirikta), the supreme Lord. Just as a white crystal is erroneously perceived as red because of a hibiscus flower placed near it, the limiting adjuncts of the world are superimposed, through ignorance (abidyā dvārā), on the qualityless Brahman. Therefore, worship is to be understood as the constant repetition of knowledge of Brahman, the true self. And yet, if bhakti thus glows more warmly in Debendranath than in Vidyabagish, it does not yet rise to the fiery intensities which it acquires in Keshub who claimed that he had been guided by divine inspiration (ādeś) in marrying off his fourteen-year old daughter to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, in violation of the Brahmo Marriage Act of 1872 whose passage he had himself supported. For many of his Brahmo critics, Keshub’s declaration that he was answerable to no human respondent was congruent with what they claimed to be his authoritarian styles of running the Brahmo Samaj of India. We thus see a fine-grained continuum on which Debendranath is located between Akshaykumar at one end and Keshub at the other. If he steers away from the standpoints of both Akshaykumar and Keshub, his understanding of God as love is also more full-bloodedly infused with Vaiṣṇava themes than that of Vidyabagish, as is evident from these words he wrote in a letter to his daughter Saudamini Debi: ‘Have you understood the fire of which I speak? That fire is faith in the living God ( jībanta īśvare biśvās) – the firm belief that blessedness lies in the worship of God’ (Sastri n.d.: 204). On the one hand, Debendranath was dismayed when Akshaykumar, Ananda Mohan Basu, and others, who had set up an Atmiya Sabha in 1852, sought, on one occasion, to settle debates

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about the nature of God through a show of hands (Niyogi and Mukhopadhyay 2017: 76). The following extracts from Keshub’s book of prayer indicate that Debendranath’s devotional sensibilities were far more congruent with those of Keshub than with those of Akshaykumar. LOVE I HUMBLY confess, O my God, that I have made a great mistake in my life. I have always believed that I should, and that I could, serve thee and the world conjointly. Alas! I now feel I have deceived myself. He who serves thee must renounce worldliness altogether, and love thee exclusively. Help me then, dear Saviour, to make thee the only object of my affection, the ever-shining and beloved necklace of my heart. sen 1878:1

RADICAL CURE PHYSICIAN, heal the maladies of my soul. I have tried the doctors and all the patent medicines of the world, but have found no benefit in them. Thou only canst heal me, and thy medicine alone can bring me relief. sen 1878:4

HUMILITY GREAT God, enable me to feel how small I am. In thy majestic presence I am but a worm crawling on the earth, a mere grain of sand. Let me hide myself in shame under an over-powering sense of my utter worthlessness. What am I God, before thee? I am as nothing. Lord, teach me humility. sen 1878:7

In his biography of Debendranath, Ishan Chandra Basu (1902:25) reflects this devotional strain when he writes that just as Bengalis who write school textbooks follow the style of Vidyasagar, and those who discuss natural phenomena follow the style of Akshaykumar, those who expound religious truths and describe the greatness of the love of God (īśvarer prem-māhātmya) have to follow the writings of Debendranath. On the other hand, Debendranath remained resolutely opposed to ritual forms of Vaiṣṇava worship and, in particular, to the doctrine of the divine abatārs. Bijoy Krishna had sent several questions to Debendranath, one of which related to the possibility that one could worship a holy individual as an abatār and that such worship, even though erroneous, could lead to the purification of mind. Debendranath replies in an

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article in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā in 1871 that even if some human beings have progressed through spiritual discipline they remain human beings, and their natures, dispositions, and subjectivities are similar to those of other human beings. The only difference is that in the case of holy people, their highest virtues have been properly cultivated in suitable circumstances whereas in the case of other people, these virtues remain undeveloped because of the lack of proper teaching and effort. Now, if the term ‘holy’ (sādhu) is taken in an absolute sense, only the supreme Brahman is holy, whereas if it is taken in a relative sense, all human beings are holy and unholy to varying degrees (Chakravarti 1916: 39–40). Debendranath’s Brahmo bhakti, then, remains broadly aligned with Rammohun’s diatribes against ‘idolatry’ even as it departs, much more markedly than Rammohun’s Vedānta-rooted monotheism, from the Advaita motif of non-dualism between deity and devotee. The Vaiṣṇava motifs of spiritual restlessness, yearning, and anguish recur through the numerous writings of Debendranath’s associate, Rajnarayan, who was to become the president of the Adi Brahmo Samaj.

chapter 3

Rajnarayan Basu: Between Religious Intuition and Ecstatic Vaiṣṇavism As we saw in the previous chapter, certain fault lines begin to appear on the landscapes of the Brahmo Samaj in Debendranath’s time – ranging from the intensely fervent devotionalism of Keshub to the more sceptical standpoints of figures such as Akshaykumar – even as Brahmo intellectuals are developing Rammohun’s critique of image worship in response to the diatribes of Christian missionaries. Against this sociocultural backdrop, Rajnarayan Basu is a highly significant figure who foregrounds, throughout his numerous tracts and sermons, an intensely devotional approach to God in the manner of Debendranath, while consistently rejecting certain forms of religious enthusiasm associated with Keshub and his followers. Debendranath writes in a letter in 1853 to his friend Rajnarayan that a lecture delivered by Rajnarayan at Medinipur displays his luminous knowledge, deep devotion, strong enthusiasm, and simple sentiment and yet, the members of the committee which select articles for publication in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā have not regarded it as eligible for publication. Some of the members are atheists (nāstik) and unless they are removed it will not be easy, he notes grimly, to spread the Brahmo-dharma. He concludes by assuring Rajnarayan, however, that the article will indeed be published in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (Sastri n.d.: 10–11). Debendranath’s reference to the presence of ‘atheists’ within the folds of the Brahmos is a pointer both to the deep affective bonds that tied together Debendranath and Rajnarayan throughout their long association, and to their types of religious sensibilities. Rajnarayan was the translator of the Upaniṣads into English for the Tattvabodhini Sabha, and he grew up in milieus broadly similar to those which had shaped Debendranath in his own childhood. He went through a tumultuous and highly Anglicized youth in the company of friends who belonged to the iconoclastic group of Young Bengal, and he even lost his fluency in his own Bengali (Kopf 1979: 167–82). At the time when he was studying in Hindu College, Rajnarayan became a Unitarian Christian after reading Rammohun’s Appeal to the Christian Public and the books of the American Unitarian W. E. Channing (1780–1842). Finding his classmate Gyanendramohan Tagore move towards the Trinitarian Christianity which he intensely disliked, Rajnarayan sought to provide evidences in favour of Islam.

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Thus, he began to learn Persian and read books relating to Islam, and in the process developed some measure of respect for Islam (Basu 1909: 39–40). Later, however, he joined the Brahmo Samaj in 1846 and remained highly critical of westernised Bengalis while, on a different front, he began to minimise the differences between the Brahmo-dharma and the Hindu dharma. Rajnarayan succeeded Debendranath as the president of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, the section that was averse to Keshub’s more Christianity-inflected Brahmo Samaj of India, and his Dharmatattvadīpikā (1866a; 1866b) contains several themes that reflect the Brahmo response to the Christian missionary critiques of Hindu worship of images. The true dharma, argues Rajnarayan, can be summarised in four propositions – the infinitude of God (īśvara), the Fatherhood of God, the freewill of human beings, and the love (prīti) of God. This perfect dharma is, in fact, the Brahmo-dharma which resides in the purity of the heart and is not encumbered by any specific scriptural text, ritual practice, place of worship, sacrificial offering, or clerical authority. Rajnarayan’s father, however, happened to accept the Advaita truths relating to the non-difference between the finite self and the supreme self, the dreamlike nature of the world, liberation as the dissolution of the individual, and so on. Rajnarayan notes in his autobiographical reflections that once he, his father, and Nandalal Basu, who was a devout Vaiṣṇava, were engaged in a discussion relating to liberation. As Nandalal was leaving, he said to Rajnarayan: ‘My child, do not accept your father’s teachings. Understand that it is better to eat sugar than to become sugar’ (Basu 1909: 41). Later Rajnarayan himself would reject aspects of Advaita teachings and argue, echoing Debendranath, that the spiritual self (ātmā) will continue on the path of gradual progress (unnati) in the afterlife – as a created substance (sṛṣṭa bastu) it can never become like its creator (Basu 1866a: 72). Many of the themes articulated by Debendranath – the nature of God as love, the intimate presence of God in the human self, and the cultivation of a vivid sense of dependence on God who is our true refuge – are also leitmotifs of Rajnarayan’s extensive writings, discourses, and addresses. Thus, Rajnarayan writes that God is of the nature of love (prītisvarūp) and continues to love us at every moment – the living God sustains us with food, develops our intelligence, and effects our spiritual growth. If devotees take but one step towards God, then God lovingly takes a hundred steps towards them (Basu 1866a: 49–50). They should cultivate the consciousness of dependence on a supernatural person, so that the worship of God (debopāsanā) follows naturally – then they would fear God and follow the commandments of God, and love God as their compassionate friend (karuṇāmaẏ suhṛt) (Basu 1866a: 55). God is the innermost reality (antarer antar), the breath of the breath, the life of life, and the self of the self (ātmār

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ātmā), and the finite self exists with God as its support (abalamban) and God as its foundation (īśvar ātmār pratiṣṭhā-bhūmi). As we thus understand that our existence is rooted in God who is our refuge, our sense of dependence on God and also our love of God become intensified. God, declares Rajnarayan in a striking phrase, is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves (tini āmār eto nikaṭ ye, āmi āmār tata nikaṭe nahi) (Basu 1870: 6–7). Even as Rajnarayan was offering these impassioned reflections on the relation between deity and devotee, a new type of devotional energy was being infused into the wider matrices of Brahmo life by a group of missionaries centred around Keshub. In Pratap Chandra’s narrative of this crucial turn, after Debendranath returned from a sojourn in the Himalayas, Debendranath found an ally in the young Keshub, who was then twenty-three years old, and began to lecture with great vitality: ‘To the vernal freshness of a soul which, after a long torpor, was thus reanimated, he added a maturity of wisdom and experience, together with a depth of devotion acquired in the ancient solitudes of the holy Himalayas’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 238). The missionaries of Keshub’s group were completely dedicated to propagating the Brahmo religion without any remuneration for their efforts, and Keshub himself gave up in 1861 his employment at the Bank of Bengal. He founded in 1860 a small society, later called the Sangat Sabha, where young people met for prayer and discussion of religious themes, and the intensity of their devotion seems to have alarmed their friends and relatives. The lives of Keshub’s missionaries were characterised by an ‘apostolic mission’, and while cultivating ascetic styles of living, they gave up everything for their organisation: ‘Their calling and their self-sacrifice made their faith intense, gave fervor to their devotions, moulded their characters, defined their relationships’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 244). These missionaries travelled to various places in the country with a ‘fierce and all-suffering zeal’ and brought new Samajes into being, kindled the enthusiasm of the members, and initiated reforms. Their lives were characterised by physical austerities, simple modes of living, long meditations, midnight vigils, and occasional periods of retiring from the world. Later, when Keshub’s New Dispensation was formed, it too was marked by such a strong sense of dependence on God’s providential support through periods of suffering, the notion of direct inspiration, the contemplation of prophets from different religions as exemplars, a search for a synthetic unity across religions, and missionary expeditions to different provinces (Mozoomdar 1882: 343–44). Rajnarayan was the leader of the Adi Brahmo Samaj after Debendranath, and his writings contain clear rejections of such Vaiṣṇava-shaped emphases on devotion, meditation, and renunciation in the wake of Keshub. Certain aspects of Rammohun’s Advaitic imprints are discernible in Rajnarayan’s firm

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rejection of ceremonialism, scripturalism, ritualism, and worship of deities in his delineation of seven characteristics of the Brahmo-dharma. First, he states that there are no specific rules with respect to nationality ( jāti) – just as the sun, the wind, and the clouds are produced by God for everyone, all human beings can be worshippers of the divine reality, Brahman. Second, there are no specific rules either with respect to time and place – wherever and whenever individuals cultivate undivided attention (ekāgratā), there and then they turn their minds to God. Third, there are also no specific rules with respect to scriptural texts – all statements which declare Brahman, irrespective of where one finds such texts, are to be respected. Though for Brahmos, their Brāhmadharma Grantha is a root text, the living dharma cannot be confined to any such book – the living dharma is that which remains forever alive in the human heart and becomes expressed in actions. Fourth, there is no dependence on rigorous asceticism – rather, as the self is purified by casting away its sinfulness, God becomes easily expressed in it (Basu 1861: 85–87). Fifth, there is no injunction to renounce the world – God has given us dispositions of friendliness, love, and so on which we should bring to fulfilment by overcoming our passions. Sixth, there is no association with external rituals which some people mistakenly confuse with the true dharma in which the lives of the worshippers of Brahman are structured by knowledge, meditation, devotional love, and altruism (paropakār). Seventh, there are no specific rules relating to pilgrimage sites for since God is omnipresent, there is, in fact, no place which is not a place of pilgrimage. The sky is the body of the blissful Brahman, the world is the temple (mandir) of Brahman, and the purified mind (biśuddha man) is the best pilgrimage site (tīrtha) for it is the dearest dwelling place of God (īśvarer priẏatam ābās). Eighth, echoing Debendranath’s response to Christian doctrinal understandings of the atonement, Rajnarayan argues that it is sincere repentance that constitutes atonement (anutāpa-i prāẏascitta) – if after committing reprehensible deeds through ignorance or delusion, people express repentance for them and do not perform them in the future, the compassionate Lord grants ease and health (laghutva o ārogya) to them who are tormented with the burden of sin (pāp-bhār prapīṛita) (Basu 1861: 87–88). As we will see in the following sections, five central themes run through Rajnarayan’s voluminous religious discourses and sermons, in crisscrossing and overlapping patterns: the centrality of a form of pre-rational intuitive knowledge in religious life; the cultivation of a reasoned understanding of the scriptural texts; the Brahmo-dharma as the essential religion of universal theism; the intensely devotional flavours of Brahmo theism; and the discernment of the divine presence in the natural world which is studied by the sciences. These themes are held together by a dialectical tension between, on the one

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hand, Rajnarayan’s affirmation of a pre-rational mode of discerning the divine presence which is characterised as supremely loving and compassionate and, on the other hand, his firm rejection of certain Vaiṣṇava-redolent effusive styles of responding to the divine reality. 1

Brahmo Religiosity between Reason and Revelation

After Debendranath, Rajnarayan is one of the first Brahmos to argue that our religious sensibilities are founded not on scriptural texts but on an intuitive mode of apprehending the divine reality. Rajnarayan declares in a lecture that Debendranath perceived the disagreement (anaikya) between, on the one hand, the Vedas and the Upaniṣads and, on the other hand, those truths which are the basis of all religions, which are naturally manifested in the hearts of all human beings, which are never extinguished from the mind, and which are established only through intuition (ekmātra ātma-pratyaẏ siddha). Thus, Debendranath concluded that these ancient scriptural texts cannot be the religious basis of the Brahmos (Basu 1861: 101). According to Debendranath, in the matter of accepting particular Vedic and Upaniṣadic passages, one has to rely on the ‘pure heart, filled with the light of intuitive knowledge’, and reject those texts which were not in accord with such a heart (Tagore and Devi 1909: 75). For instance, commenting on a verse from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad I.1.5, Debendranath argued that the ‘highest science’ is that through which God can be realised via intuition, and this knowledge of God is the crown of the inferior sciences such as astronomy, geology, medical science, philosophy, and so on. Rajnarayan developed a distinctive variation on this theme by claiming that just as our knowledge of external objects is not based on inference or reasoning, but is intuitive or instinctive to us, the knowledge that there exists something super-worldly too is an ‘original’ knowledge which is not based on our knowledge of worldly entities (Basu 1878: 2–4). Just as in the empirical sciences we obtain knowledge by reasoning on the basis of some intuitive truths which are not themselves disputed or questioned, likewise through a ‘hyperphysical’ intuition, we gain knowledge of the one God who is a ‘hyperphysical’ object of our cognition. Therefore, just as if we speak of visible objects to people who are born blind they would not understand us, if we speak of religious matters to people who are without the ‘faculty of hyperphysical perfection’ they would not understand us either (Basu 1878: 6–7). On this logical foundation of epistemic parity, Rajnarayan goes on to outline a series of statements that we arrive at through such intuitive powers of the mind. Thus, the mind intuitively perceives God as the first cause who is completely unlike any worldly

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cause. At the same time, not all God-talk can be established simply through such invocations of the ‘hyperphysical’ – rather, human reasoning has to be carefully applied to settle disputes relating to questions such as whether God has a body, form, passions, and so on. For instance, by reasoning with the notion received through a ‘hyperphysical’ intuition that God is the perfect spirit, we conclude rationally that God cannot have a body, form, passions, and so on because such attributes would limit the nature of God who has infinite power, wisdom, and goodness. Thus, our intuitive perception of God – which can be contaminated by feelings and the imagination – has to be properly regulated by reasoning, just as we arrive at the notion that the earth is in motion not through perception but through reasoning (Basu 1878: 12–13). To the objection that God, however, is supersensible and thus his proposed ‘Science of Religion’ is not truly a science, Rajnarayan responds that force – a quality of material objects – too cannot be apprehended by the senses. Again, to the objection that God is mysterious, Rajnarayan replies that various aspects of geometry, algebra, the physical sciences, and so on are also not properly understood by us and yet we do not deny the existence of the realities which these disciplines seek to comprehend (Basu 1878: 15–16). Such appeals to the intuitive or ‘hyperphysical’ dimension of the religious life could, however, place a Brahmo thinker such as Rajnarayan on somewhat shaky ground, since contemporaneous figures such as Keshub too would speak of an intuitive pathway towards more intense forms of devotionalism. From the standpoint of the Christian missionaries who preached Christ as the one true God whose existence was to be established not through the sentiments of the heart but through the rock-solid basis of divine revelation, Rajnarayan had to encounter a different type of objection. At one stage, his principal interlocutors were Christian missionaries who argued that such intuitions were not a secure basis on which to ground our knowledge of God. In his lecture ‘Defence of Brahmoism and the Brahmo Samaj’ (1863), later printed in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (1864: no. 258), Rajnarayan begins by lamenting that debates between Christian missionaries and leaders of the Brahmo Samaj have produced much bitterness: ‘The battle is growing thicker day by day …’ This animosity is a matter of sadness to the Brahmos who uphold the ‘catholic religion’, since both Christians and Brahmos believe in the one God of love. He notes that in offering his views on the doctrine of intuition, he will avoid the odium theologicum and that as he presents the views of Christian missionaries, he will not stoop to sarcasm or vituperative remarks. While Christian missionaries declare that intuition is not sufficient for us to learn about God, Rajnarayan argues that, in fact, the notion of a revelation presupposes that of a revealer and this revealer, in turn, has to be good, infallible, and holy. Since we are able to know all these

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truths about the nature of the divine reality even without a specific revelation, it is not necessary to insist on one special revelation given to the world through a specific mediator between God and humanity. Sketching a clear trajectory from the religious views of Rammohun to his own standpoints, Rajnarayan concludes that a ‘belief in the great truths of religion independently of an external revelation and on the principle that the reasonableness of a doctrine is the only test of its truth has been the chief characteristic of the religious opinions of the Samaj from the time of Ram Mohun Roy to the present’ (1864: no. 258, p. 166). At the same time, notwithstanding this appeal to a deeper truth beyond the doctrinal bounds of specific religious systems, Rajnarayan does not claim that religious texts are completely unnecessary – if the wise people from the past had not presented the results of their investigations into religious truths (dharmatattvānusandhān) in textual forms, we would have had to undertake great labours to understand those truths. However, we should remember that these texts are human compositions and given human imperfection we should not accept any of them as authoritative (āptabākya). We have to overcome any enslavement to scriptural texts (granther dāsatva), for the pathway to the supreme goal (param-puruṣārtha) lies beyond them (granthātīt). We have to acquire religious knowledge instead from the two great (mahaṯ) and highly sacred (param-pabitra) texts – our mental capacities and the natural world – and live in accordance with their teachings (upadeśānusāre). Even today individuals who meditate on God with a purified mind (biśuddhacitta) will see God, for God is sending us commandments through our intuitive beliefs (ātmapratyaẏ dvārā pratyādeś karitechen) and God is giving us religious instructions through our mental and religious instincts (Basu 1866a: 101–102). Therefore, if Rajnarayan would defend the ‘hyperphysical’ dimension of religiosity, he would also develop powerful critiques of the abandonment of human rational powers in responses to the divine reality. Proposing some analogies between science and religion, Rajnarayan does not hesitate to claim that there are axioms in religion as much as in other fields of human knowledge, and from these axioms a ‘system of truths’ will be deduced in a science of religion to be constructed by a Newton (Basu 1881: 26). Therefore, we should exercise our reason to test what is correct and what is incorrect in the statements of a religious teacher and not take their pronouncements as absolute truth: ‘The right of private judgment is the most glorious privilege of a Brahmo as compared with the followers of other religions’ (Basu 1869: 5–6). A primary reason why some people develop erroneous views in religious matters is precisely a complete lack of attention to reasoning (yukti), which is necessary if we wish to determine whether a particular intuitive belief is truly intuitive and

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is not overlaid with other beliefs. Also, errors emerge because in theological enquiries we refuse to accept the limitations of our intellect and instead seek to lift the veil which separates our understanding from the divine reality. There are various truths relating to the nature of God, the afterlife, and so on which we do not know and which we do not, in fact, even need to know for our salvation (Basu 1866a: 84–86). Another cause of error in religious matters is the use of analogy (upamā) derived from ancient philosophical texts and scholastic systems, which is not properly guided by intuitive belief and reason. Just as we have the analogy of the Lord, regarded as both the substantial cause and the efficient cause, producing the world in the manner of a spider producing threads from its body, we also have the analogy of the Lord, regarded as only the efficient cause, arranging the eternal atoms in the manner of a potter fashioning clay into pots. Again, while we have the analogy of finite selves dissolving into the supreme self in the manner of distinct rivers losing their independent existences as they flow into the sea, and thus attaining the liberation known as nirvāṇa, we have the other analogy of finite selves dwelling in the supreme self in the manner of different birds from different places sitting on a vast tree, and thus attaining the liberation known as sāyujya. Human beings develop their conceptions of God too by elaborating certain proposed similarities between humanity and God – thus, they believe that God has a physical body and a mind, and also a specific dwelling place with councillors. In this way, by casting away the supreme jewel which is the independence of a critical mind (maner svādhīnatā), they sell their reasoning capacities to those who claim that they have been sent by God to the world (Basu 1866a: 87–90). Pursuing the critical path of reason, then, Rajnarayan vigorously rearticulates the standpoints of Rammohun and Debendranath relating to putative manifestations of the divine reality in human forms and divine revelations in human history. The Brahmo-dharma will genuinely progress, he notes, if its followers will not maintain any association with idolatry, and if they go out to the villages and towns where by enduring harsh criticism they preach it, and by illuminating the minds of the people, they raze to the ground the forest of superstitions and false religion. Rajnarayan’s prose rises to an intensely lyrical pitch as he states that for enduring affliction their bodies will be as firm as steel, and for inspiring the people their minds will be like blazing fires – they are the true warriors (sūr) and the generals (senāpati) who will be put on a high pedestal among the Brahmos (Basu 1861: 105–106). Echoing some themes in Rammohun’s ‘Reply to Utsavānanda’ (RR, 103–104) that we discussed in Chapter 2, Rajnarayan argues in a categorical fashion that the revelation of God to one particular human being by assuming a form of light or some other form is not possible. There is nothing that can override its own nature

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(svabhāb) and just as God cannot transform a triangle into both a triangle and a circle at the same time, God cannot change the divine nature (svakīẏa sattāke) and assume a body or become visible at a specific place. Again, if we were to claim that God has revealed the true dharma in the heart of a specific individual, Rajnarayan responds that just as human beings are able, through their natural capacities (svābhābik kṣamatā), to fulfill their worldly needs in matters relating to happiness, civilization, learning, wealth, and so on, in the matters of religious knowledge too they have access to natural provision. This is because the nectar of the true dharma is incorporated within our human nature (mānab-prakṛtir antarbhūta), and we have to extract it through our native intelligence and reasoning. For instance, if we were to hear a divine message: ‘Hate God and all human beings’, we would reject that statement simply on the basis of our inner sense of this dharma, which indicates that this sense is a logically prior examiner of the statements which are said to have been revealed by God at specific conjunctures in human history. We see that wise people from different lands who are not acquainted with the religious teachings and the moral codes of religions based on divine revelations are yet able to arrive at those very doctrines; thus, we do not need specific revelations from God. Moreover, before we can accept the truth of a particular divine revelation (īśvar-pratyādeś), we would first have to accept certain truths about the existence of God who is ever truthful and utterly perfect, and from this notion of transcendental perfection we can rationally derive other religious truths (dharmatattva) about the nature of God (Basu 1866a: 94–97). In short, we should reject the claim that a certain religion is infallible (abhrānta) on the grounds that God has accomplished or will accomplish supernatural deeds through a human being by transgressing God’s own laws (svapratiṣṭhita niẏam bhaṅga kariẏā) (Basu 1866a: 100–101). These lines of critique, stemming from Rammohun and re-articulated by Rajnarayan, of Vaiṣṇava piety, can be summarised as follows. First, God (Brahman) is devoid of any human-shaped form, and since God is eternal, there can be no transformation in the inner being of God. Therefore, those who declare that God has somehow appeared in human form to them are making an incoherent claim. Second, to be able to view a certain event as a divine revelation, we need to possess certain criteria through which we can receive that revelation as divine and not merely as a human fabrication. Since these criteria are logically prior to the specific statements that are supposedly divinely revealed, religious truth cannot be exhaustively located in any particular text or connected to any particular founder. Such criteria belong to the conceptual repertoire of all individuals across particular religious traditions and constitute the fundamental dharma of humanity.

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And yet, by abandoning the powers of reasoning, human beings turn at times to holy figures to whom vast soteriological powers are attributed. Some such religious followers seek to establish that their religions are divinely revealed by pointing to supernatural deeds and prophetic utterances on the part of their founders. In the style of Rammohun’s critiques which we noted in Chapter 2, Rajnarayan meticulously develops a series of responses to reject such claims of revelation beyond the bounds of human rationality. He declares that such supernatural phenomena are simply impossible (alaukik ghaṭanā asambhab). We have often met people who have narrated the astonishing deeds (āścarya kriẏā) supposedly performed by holy individuals, and have declared to us that they have themselves directly witnessed these deeds. However, subsequent investigations have shown their claims to be unsubstantiated or deceitful. More fundamentally, the world runs on invariant laws which are the laws of God and nothing happens which is not included within those very divine laws. The events which seem supernatural to us today are, in truth, also encompassed by some law which is yet unknown to us. Therefore, even the astonishing deeds which are said to have been performed by religious founders should not be attributed to any putative divine powers (aiśī kṣamatā) (Basu 1866a: 98–99). Rajnarayan aims these rational critiques at forms of Vaiṣṇava worship, in particular, which relate to the veneration of gurus and abatārs of the divine reality. We should not think that salvation is effected entirely through divine mercy or devotional love (bhakti) – God has created us as free beings and God requires us to observe spiritual discipline before God helps us. God is present to all human beings, and even if some particular individuals have certain extraordinary qualities, they do not thereby become divine (Basu 1869: 2–4). We should remember, Rajnarayan writes in a clear theocentric vein, that it is God who is ‘the soul of the soul’, and is our sole redeemer and saviour. We should indeed revere those teachers who show us the way to God, but we should not forget that their finite powers are derived from and upheld by God, and that they are not themselves divine (Basu 1869: 6–7). 2

Brahmo Theism and the ‘Essential Religion’

One dimension of Vaiṣṇavism that Rajnarayan particularly rejects is its ‘excessive’ emotional intensity, unlike the Brahmo-dharma which he presents as the essential religion which harmonises, among other polarities, the demands of scriptural revelation and human rational capacities. Brahmoism is the religion of harmony and it seeks the proper regulation of all our human dispositions, feelings, and capacities – thus, it rejects both passionate frenzy and inactive

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quietism, rigorous asceticism and sensual worldliness, pure rationality and unreflective faith, and so on. The law of harmony is, in fact, the test through which we can decide whether or not a specific teaching is to be incorporated into the lifeworlds of Brahmoism (Basu 1869: 9–10). Thus, the Brahmo-dharma is established through subtle philosophical reasoning and is also in conformity with the sentiments of the heart, so that whether one is a scholar or an illiterate person, it has a simplicity which is accessible to everyone. More extensively, the Brahmo-dharma harmonises intuitive beliefs (ātmapratyaẏ) with scientific truths; poetic sentiments relating to the love of God, the presence of the divine friend in the heart, and others with logical reasoning; ancient religious truths with contemporary religious truths; and so on. The Brahmo-dharma is extremely elevated because it teaches us that we should dedicate ourselves to God who is infinite, that the finite self (ātmā) will continue to progress spiritually, and that our knowledge of God and our love of God will continue to increase (Basu 1866b: 107–109). The harmony of this Brahmo-dharma is, in truth, the most developed and truest form of religion, namely, theism, which is the consciousness of our ‘absolute dependence’ on a perfect being and the existence of a state of perfect happiness (Basu 1881: 5). The twelve doctrines of theism are: the completely natural origin of religious knowledge; the existence of God; the infinity of God; God is the divine father, mother, and friend; God’s nearness to us; the free will of human beings; the love of God and doing what God loves; the existence of a future state; the distribution of rewards and punishments in the future state; heaven is the consciousness of self-satisfaction in virtue and hell is the consciousness of remorse; divine punishment has a remedial function; and the eternal progress of the human soul (Basu 1881: 14–15). These theistic doctrines form the core of the ‘essential religion’ which consists of the love of God and the love of humanity, and are to be distinguished from the inessential husks comprising doctrinal systems which have generated bigotry, warfare, and persecution. We often enter into heated disputes over specific doctrines which we, swayed by ‘sectarian prejudice, partiality and passion’, regard as essential to our salvation. We forget then that we are fallible human beings whose beliefs are subject to change across our lifetimes, and we overlook the fact that people even within our own religious community do not hold exactly the same views (Basu 1869: 1–5). The truly pious individuals across the world, however, are the members of this essential religion of humanity and while they belong to specific religious traditions, they are the true servants of God who ‘form an ideal universal church …’ (Basu 1869:8). In the writings of Rajnarayan we thus hear the notes of a ‘universal religion’ which continue to be struck by later Brahmo figures such as Pratap Chandra: at

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the core of this religion lies not dogmatic formulations, ritual practices, or institutional norms but a God-rooted and a humanity-oriented form of life. Viewing religion through this universalist prism, Rajnarayan both de-mythologises and re-mythologises the customary trappings of religious systems. Since the inner heart of the worshipper in this religious form is always dedicated to God, all days, he writes, are holy days (puṇya dibas) to them. Again, there is no necessity of priests (dharmajājak), for holy individuals are their own clergy, or of divinely appointed individuals, for the purified mind itself is the messenger of God. Here the restraint of the lower passions is the true asceticism (tapasyā), the overcoming of egoity is the true sacrifice (balidān), and altruism is the true sacrificial ritual. In short, the essence of this religious teaching is – ‘Be good and do good to others’ (Basu 1866a: 106). We should not, however, seek to remove the differences that actually exist across the religions in the world, which different people follow in accordance with their own convictions. The garden of religions, Rajnarayan writes in a poetic register, contains various kinds of fragrant flowers but the flower of theism is the most fragrant of them all, and even as we preach the truth of our own religion through argument and persuasion, we should also rejoice in the forms of truth which are present in the other religions (Basu 1869: 8–9). Thus, while all religions are diverse pathways which ultimately lead up to the essential religion, and help us in varying degrees to strengthen our love of God and our love of humanity, theism, with its teachings relating to God, the afterlife, and morality, is the ‘truest religion’ and the most straightforward path to salvation. Therefore, the ‘dearly beloved Theism’ should be preached by presenting its inner beauty and not by becoming hostile to the followers of other religions, which is why, Rajnarayan notes, polemical literature on Hindu idolatry and Christianity, which was common in the ‘infancy’ of Brahmoism and of Hindu theism, is not being published (Basu 1885:10). Such a universal theism, Pratap Chandra would write around this time, is the New Dispensation announced by Keshub which will include previous dispensations and harmonize all human truth, even as it takes on specific forms across the world (Mozoomdar 1882: 182). Some thirty years later, Ishan Chandra Basu would write again in these terms, though to defend the universalism not of Keshub’s New Dispensation but Rajnarayan’s Adi Brahmo Samaj. Ishan Chandra argues that the Brahmo-dharma is the blossoming (parisphuraṇa) of the dharma which has been established by the Brāhmaṇas of the Vedic age, the composers of treatises such as Manu and Vyāsa, the royal sages such as Janaka, the devotees such as Nārada, and various sagely individuals and teachers to the present times. By removing all conflicts, the Brahmo Samaj emerges from this root dharma and invites all human beings to worship the one supreme divinity

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(Basu 1914: 1–2). Therefore, the Brahmo Samaj is beyond all disputes and does not regard anyone as a competitor or a rival – it only urges people to overcome adharma to strengthen dharma and to dispel ignorance to strengthen knowledge (Basu 1914: 5–6). The essential religion, is, then, the religion of harmony and, as we will see in later chapters, this equivalence is repeatedly enunciated by various other figures such as Bijoy Krishna from Vaiṣṇava-inflected standpoints; Sivanath from the social reformist perspectives of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj; Bankim from the historicist landscapes of textual reconstruction; and Keshub himself. The evocative phraseology of Keshub’s famous address ‘Philosophy and Madness in Religion’ (1877) suggests that Keshub would have been familiar with Rajnarayan-styled associations of the heart of religiosity with the quest for harmony. In this address, Keshub declares that he seeks to harmonize the pulls of madness, whose vocabularies are emotively charged, warm, and fervent, and the demands of philosophical reasoning, which is prosaic, cold, and exact. He will attempt to configure an ‘eclecticism’ which is not a haphazard assortment of theological statements but the ‘deep spiritual assimilation of all forms of truths and goodness in life’ (Sen 1901: 284). Indicating that by ‘madness’ he refers to a glowing enthusiasm and a deep faith that draw us away from rational ways of living in the world, he notes that the difference between philosophy and such madness is that between ‘cold dialectics and fiery earnestness, between the logical deductions of the human understanding and the living force of inspiration, such as that which cometh direct from heaven’. Yet, philosophy and madness can be reconciled if philosophy becomes ‘more enthusiastic and mad than it at present is’ in spiritual matters and traditional forms of madness in religious life are combined with science and philosophy (Sen 1901: 286–87). Keshub claims that we are ‘thoroughly assured’ by philosophy that God is as real as the human soul and the material world, and we should seek God madly in all our temporal existence. At the same time, he clarifies that he does not ask people to go thirsting after God alone by forgetting the everyday concerns of the world, and that he is opposed to the ‘exclusive religious frenzy which hates the world as altogether unreal, and ignores self as fiction, and gives itself up to dream and delusion’ (Sen 1901: 293–94). We should instead aspire after the ‘golden harmony of life’ in which an intensely felt and unwavering consciousness of the divine reality runs through all our worldly activities as well as our spiritual life. Such an intensity can be cultivated by the habitual practice which the sages refer to as meditation and which philosophers call attention, namely, fixing the mental gaze wholeheartedly on God. Through such active and unflickering concentration, one discerns the invisible God with a spiritual perception just as the eyes see material objects. We can then become aware in

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all aspects of our everyday life the all-encompassing and thrilling presence of God – the one who is true, good, and beautiful: ‘Realize that presence vividly, and you are convinced that it is not a dry, but a sweet presence’ (Sen 1901: 299). By thus beholding the supreme beauty of the divine reality, the enraptured devotee is ‘immersed in the joy and madness of communion’ and cannot be distracted by any worldly goods, and in this complete attachment to the divine beauty lies the harmony of madness and philosophy. Philosophy only tells us that God is not any less real than the human soul and the material world, but madness converts this rational belief into a ‘vivid perception’ of God such that we speak to God, we live in God, and we enjoy the presence of God. Through an ‘inspired madness’ of this nature, the devotees of God speak warmly in poetic language and the entire natural world becomes for them a beautiful paradisiacal garden which is imbued with divine radiance (Sen 1901: 301). Keshub declares that he is therefore opposed to the strands of Hinduism and Buddhism which have promoted ‘quietism’ by asking people to withdraw into the meditative silences of their inner selves and forget the world around them – the meditation and the madness that he defends should be reinforced by philosophy and science so that individuals do not become hermits and devotees who have lapsed into a dreamy mysticism. By becoming fortified with meditative training, individuals should return to the hustle and bustle of the quotidian world, and see the divine presence within its systems (Sen 1901: 306–307). Philosophy takes us, at best, to that stage of evolution where we are able to use our reasoning powers to overcome our animal natures, and madness takes us to the yet higher stage where the human soul is regenerated through the divine presence. Through such infusion of divine holiness into our being, we will ascend from our humanity to the ‘life divine’ (Sen 1901: 313–14). 3

The Devotional Affectivities of Brahmo Theism

Across the cognitive, experiential, and institutional spaces of the Brahmo Samaj, then, a crucial debate revolved around competing visions of the harmonisation of polarities between reason and revelation, logic and emotion, and serene contemplation and social action – or, to use Keshub’s own terms, between philosophy and madness. Rajnarayan’s Brahmo trajectories through these milieus are deeply infused with the themes of the God of love and the love of God, even though he carefully distantiates the theism of the Brahmo-dharma from the emotive intensities of Vaiṣṇavism, and studiously avoids the vocabularies of God-intoxication freely employed by figures such as Bijoy Krishna, Keshub, and others. Rajnarayan’s robustly theistic vocabularies

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are pivoted around three central motifs: first, the world is rooted in, suffused with, and enveloped by the eternal God who is love and who is infinitely more lovable than worldly loves; second, those individuals whose existence becomes permeated by the supreme love of God blissfully perceive the divine presence in all places and at all times; and third, by moving away from our sensory immersion in the mutable and impermanent world which gives us only limited joy, we should actively cultivate devotional forms of God-centredness. Such motifs would be densely woven in traditional Vaiṣṇava contexts into rich ontological, ritual, and institutional matrices pivoted on the love of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, though in Rajnarayan’s Brahmo prose the divinity is not named as such. Rajnarayan writes that God is the supreme object of all our human affectivities and only in God, who draws us with the power of love, can they be satisfied. Our love (prīti) therefore does not reach its true fulfilment in any worldly entity which is why it naturally flows towards the one who is beyond all change, who is complete and pure, and who is superior to everything else. As we reflect on the eternal Lord who is the basis of our existence, our friend, our supreme benefactor, the fulfiller of our needs, and of the nature of love (premasvarūp), our mind progressively flows towards the Lord. We should therefore never forget that supremely more lovable than worldly entities is the one who is our supreme friend (param bandhu), who is an infinite ocean of beauty, and who is our supreme end (Basu 1861: 22–23). Because at the root of all our thoughts, words, and activities lies love, it is they who are able to orient their worldly loves towards the true object of love (prītir prakṛta biṣaẏer prati), namely, God, who become truly happy. The insignificant and transient objects of the world, in contrast, do not give us lasting joy – we should turn to God with whom we are eternally bound and who is ever our most own (ātmīẏa). God is as delightful (sukhada) as play is to a child, wealth to a miser, food to the hungry, cool water to the thirsty, and the green colour to the eye (Basu 1866b: 34–37). Echoing several layers of medieval Hindu sensibilities about the sheer transience of the world, Rajnarayan declares at an address to the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj in 1846 that as we meditate on the impermanence of human existence, our blood dries up, and we become stupefied and overwhelmed with grief. The only medicine (auṣadh) for such mortal thoughts is the love of God, for those who regard all worldly entities as impermanent and truly love God are never immersed in suffering and fear. Those who have known God and are strengthened with the love of God will also console others immersed in suffering by telling them that they should direct their love to, and place their trust in, the God who is beyond all change, impermanence, and destruction, and from whom they can receive supreme bliss and protection from worldly dangers (Basu 1861: 34–40).

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As is evident from these statements taken from Rajnarayan’s speeches, compiled in the volume Rājnārāẏaṇ Basur Baktṛtā, and from his more systematic presentation of theological standpoints in Dharmatattvadīpikā, a characteristic mark of his prose writings is the richly metaphorical vocabulary with which he reworks classical Vaiṣṇava materials relating to the imperfection of the world and the final destination which is transcendentally perfect. Thus, he states that just as weary travellers in a desert are able to disregard their present affliction if they know that they are moving towards a garden full of beautiful trees and cool water, individuals who know Brahman do not regard their suffering in the world as suffering since they know that there exists an eternal abode (nityadhām) which is full of bliss (Basu 1861: 42). Echoing traditional Vaiṣṇava vocabularies of the humanity of God, Rajnarayan writes that God is our father – the life of our life and the source of all our blessedness, and it through the grace (prasād) of God that we have received our body and mind, intelligence, strength, and religious existence (dharma). God is also our mother who looks after us with great care and assists us in the development of our physical and religious capacities. And God is our dear friend (suhṛt), our deepest well-wisher, and our greatest help – just as we become joyful in the company of a friend, we become supremely joyful by dwelling with God as we purify our lives. God is indeed our dearly beloved – just as we love an object which is beautiful, we feel love for God and we are attracted to God who is supreme beauty (saundarẏa) (Basu 1866b: 27–28). Therefore, as Rajnarayan states in an address to the Allahabad Brahmo Samaj in 1868, when we are able to directly perceive (sākṣāt pratyakṣa) God in the manner of a friend who stands in front of us, when God’s vision falls on us, when we open our inner door and speak with God, and when we forget the world as we taste the divine nectar, nothing on this earth can compare to our enjoyment (Basu 1870: 24–25). The Caitanya Vaiṣṇava traditions, as we have seen in Chapter 1, speak with precisely these vocabularies about the cowherd women (gopīs) as the supreme lovers whose hearts are inundated with selfless love for their beloved Kṛṣṇa. For Rajnarayan, the love (prīti) of God permeates the world and, more fundamentally, has created the world, and through this love the world is protected. God has created living beings to spread the divine joy and continues to lovingly protect everyone in the manner of a mother (Basu 1870: 11). True love of God is selfless trust in God – when we are immersed in the worship of God, we do not pray to God for anything other than God and we are full of thirst for God. Such lovers of God have dedicated their minds to God who is the refuge of all – they move day and night in the presence of their beloved (priẏatam) God, they are ever eager to speak of God, and even grave worldly dangers cannot dislocate them from their beloved God. Their purified love also becomes expressed

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throughout the world, and the company of such holy people (sādhusaṅga) who constantly speak about God makes firm our own love of God and leads us to supremely sweet and illimitable happiness (Basu 1861: 23–24). Shifting into more poetically charged registers, Rajnarayan goes on to declare that these lovers of God see everything in this world lovingly as the product of their God who is of the nature of love (prītisvarūp) – the sunlight, the moonlight, the wind, and the melodious singing of birds bring a delight to their hearts that others cannot understand. They have an assurance that their omniscient Lord who is their friend and their refuge will never forget them, and will protect them forever. They hope that they will experience ineffable bliss in the spring of liberation (mokṣa) after the winter of worldly transmigration (saṃsāra), and when they hear statements about mokṣa they feel as if they are someone in a foreign land who has heard a strain from home or has smelt in a foreign garden a flower from home (Basu 1861: 25–26). They are joyous in speaking about God, their beloved friend, at all times and in meditating on God with undivided attention (ananyamanā haiẏā); they become overjoyed in perceiving the wisdom, strength, and compassion of their beloved God (priẏatam parameśvar) in all things; they intensely yearn at all times for an ever more complete dwelling with God (sampūrṇa sahabās); they rely utterly, through all their worldly joys and their worldly afflictions, on God who is their supreme father and their supreme mother; and they dedicate themselves thoroughly to God and overcome their egoism (Basu 1866b: 38–41). Developing one of his many analogies of divine intimacy, Rajnarayan declares in an address to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1853 that just as fish cannot survive without water for water is, as it were, their very life, the worshippers of the Lord too cannot survive without speaking of the Lord and singing the glories of the Lord. Their minds are ever thirsty to attain their supremely beloved Lord and they await that day with great longing (byākulatā). They begin to practise savouring the rasa of divine love, they regard the perfection of such relishing (prīti-ras sampūrṇa pān karā) as their supreme joy, and they remain gladdened by the hope that just as their knowledge will be developed through all eternity, their love too will be gradually intensified and will give them great joy (Basu 1861: 84). At the same time, Rajnarayan reminds his readers and audiences that they are yet to reach the spiritual summit of the unalloyed love of God, and exhorts them to turn away from their ephemeral loves in the impermanent world to the unwavering object of supreme love, God. If we see a beautiful object (sundar bastu) we develop at once a great love towards it – yet we are unable to love the one who is expressed in the beauty of all beautiful objects and are instead drawn to worldly entities which are impermanent. However, those who love the supreme Lord are not satisfied by anything else and by

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abandoning everything else they remain happy through the direct perception of their beloved Lord (priẏatamer sākṣātkāre ānandita thāken) (Basu 1861: 5–6). Highlighting the Vaiṣṇava dialectic of the supreme sovereignty of God and the sweet accessibility of God, Rajnarayan declares at an address to the Bhowanipore Brahmo Samaj in 1865 that God, who is the king of the three worlds, whose command all celestial bodies follow, and who is the supreme self, is also bound to us through a relation of the greatest intimacy (nikaṭatam sambandha). Unlike other religions which declare that we need the assistance of a specific individual to draw near to God, the Brahmo-dharma states that as we become free from sinfulness (pāp haite mukta), God who is the innermost substance in us becomes expressed in us. Yet, our great misfortune is that while we are thus surrounded by an ocean of immortality, we are unable to drink from it (Basu 1870: 2–3). Those who trust in the supremely perfect Lord, however, know that the pleasures of the world are fleeting, regard the Lord alone as real, and directly see the Lord as ever-present to them (Basu 1861: 10). Therefore, they are blessed for whom God is their truly beloved, and who have dedicated their lives to the love of God who is the life of their life and to the performance of activities which are dear to God (priẏakārya sādhane) (Basu 1866b: 38). These metaphors of divine intimacy, sweetness, and accessibility go hand in hand with Rajnarayan’s repeated cautionary reminders that individuals stray away from the pathways of God because of their sinful entanglements in worldly concerns. Reflecting the Vedāntic theme that the essential self (ātman) is not intrinsically corrupted during its transmigratory pilgrimage through the world, he writes that holiness is the natural state of the mind and sinfulness is its distorted form (pūṇyai maner prakṛtābasthā, pāpai maner bikṛtābasthā). However, just as through wholesome diet and regular exercise, we can become free from severe physical illness, likewise through detachment, practice, and the company of holy people we can become free from the illness of sin (pāprog). We should be diligent in becoming holy and not be indifferent in cultivating holiness for time flies away and death is imminent – indeed, we should vow this very day that we will become free from enslavement to sin (pāper dāsatva haite) (Basu 1861: 27–28). When God becomes expressed in our minds like a lightning flash we are flooded with an indescribable joy and we wish we could savour such joy day and night, and yet our impurity prevents us from enjoying such bliss. While we often wish that we would become earnest travellers on the pathway to God, we fall away from God through our enslavement to sinful intentions (pāp matir baśatāpanna haiẏā) (Basu 1870: 107–108). At one place in the Dharmatattvadīpikā, Rajanarayan outlines an entire range of impediments

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(pratibandhak) on this pathway of the cultivation of dharma, such as an extreme love of worldly living where we forget the insignificance of human existence, a dispassion towards worldly living where we develop an indifference to the fulfilment of our duties, an addiction to sensual pleasures and forms of recreation, anger, egoism, love of wealth, love of fame, a pedantic attachment to scholarship which takes us away from God, pleasure derived from external religious ceremonies, pride in our spiritual progress (dhārmikābhimān) which makes us look down upon others, and so on (Basu 1866b: 59–68). We should therefore guard dharma through the following means – analysis (bicār) of what we should do and what we should not do, restraint of the mind, careful evaluation of the day’s activities at the end of the day, regular practice (abhyās), the company of holy people, repentance for sins committed (pāper janya anutāp), meditation on one’s death (mṛtyusmaraṇ), prayer to God for strength in religious matters, fear of causing God’s displeasure (aprasannatār bhaẏ), and the hope of the supreme bliss which is the attainment of God (bhūmānander pratyāśa) (Basu 1866b: 70–79). In other words, the spiritual life, according to Rajnarayan, consists of a proper re-ordering of our loves where the temporal is to be loved in relation to the eternal, and this process demands a spiritual purgation. The control of the senses and the formation of character are painful in the beginning, but they gradually become natural (sahaj) to us and also give rise to great happiness. If sinful individuals can but once perceive the joyful divine reality, they at once begin to move away from sin, as they are drawn towards the beautiful (ramaṇīẏa) substance of dharma (Basu 1861: 18). And yet, we should not sink into despair (nairāśya) even if we fail again and again on the pathway of spiritual progress, and we should instead continually renew our efforts. We are intrinsically feeble beings (kṣīṇ jība) and we should constantly pray to God to give us strength for our religious advancement. Relying on the supreme mother who looks after us just as a human mother exerts greater efforts for her weak child, we should seek refuge at the feet of God, and God will gradually make us eligible (upayukta) for dwelling with God and give us a place in the divine heart (Basu 1866b: 68–69). God becomes revealed to us and looks graciously at us if we remain pure but remains hidden from us if we are immersed in sinfulness, so that our prayer to God should be: ‘O Lord, you are self-expressed (svaprakāś) – become expressed unto me. When I do not see your gracious face, I experience unbearable torment, everything becomes steeped in darkness, everything feels insipid (nīras), and I feel overburdened. But o life of my life! when I gaze on your joyous face (prafulla badan abalokan kari) which enthuses me, the whole world assumes an astonishingly joyful form …’ (Basu 1866b: 75). Such a process of reformation into the

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love of God is not restricted to a worldly pilgrimage; rather, according to the Brahmo-dharma, there is no time when we shall definitively attain the totality of knowledge, dharma, and happiness – there will be no cessation to the progress of the ātmā and we will continually keep on moving from one state to another yet superior state (uṯkṛṣṭatar abasthā) (Basu 1866b: 81). We will not be able to exhaust the infinite reality of God in the hereafter; rather, we will continue to progress spiritually as companions and followers (sahacar anucar haiẏā) of God, and we will live blissfully in the presence of God (Basu 1866b: 94–95). In this way, the Brahmo-dharma seeks to bring about a complete fulfilment of our devotional dispositions by orienting them towards the sinless, pure, and perfect divine reality, and of our love by intensifying it towards our one truly beloved (ekmātra param premāspad) God and towards all beings in the world (Basu 1866b: 86). Many of these motifs – the nature of God as love, the divine intimacy, and the spiritual purgation of the worldly self – are tightly woven together in an address of Rajnarayan to the Adi Brahmo Samaj in 1865. He states that we are travellers who are journeying towards the abode of immortality (amṛtniketaner yātrī), and as dharma calls out to us to move towards this destination, we become restless. As we continue to travel, we should remember that our association with this world is temporary, and therefore we should not become overly attached to anything that we find on the way. Our true friend (prakṛta bandhu), our true father, and our true mother is the Lord alone and as we journey onwards we should constantly keep in mind the vision of the beautiful city (manohar purī) that lies ahead of us (Basu 1870: 29–30). Just as travellers to sites of pilgrimage (tīrtha) patiently endure numerous afflictions, we too should remain patient on the way, bearing in mind that God, the divine mother (param mātā), is waiting for us. As we approach our destination God will lift us up with extended hands, wipe away our tears, and grant us the great happiness of the abode of immortality. As we see from afar the light of this abode, all our suffering fades away, and we move towards the land where there is no disease and no sorrow – there is only eternal joy (nitya ānanda) (Basu 1870: 31–32). Densely interknitting these metaphors of pilgrimage into a crescendo, Rajnarayan concludes his speech thus: ‘O supreme self! The only resource for our life’s journey! Our all! We seek refuge at your feet, and fearing for our lives we call out to you in distress. We are overwhelmed by numerous afflictions on the journey through the world – look graciously at us so that we can endure all our suffering. O pole star in the ocean of life! If we do not receive your light we lose everything. May you never move away from our vision’ (Basu 1870: 32–33).

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Brahmo Adoration of the Supremely Beautiful Lord

Even in these lyrical invocations of the God who is our steadfast companion, parent, and lover, Rajnarayan remains firmly rooted to the iconoclastic trajectories of Rammohun and Debendranath who categorically rejected Vaiṣṇava ‘idolatry’ and does not identify God with a specific form such as Kṛṣṇa. Indeed, in an address to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1853, Rajnarayan declares that Rammohun sought to liberate his people from the prison of a false religion (ayukta kalpita dharmer kārāgār haite) and the darkness of ignorance into which they were steeped – they had sought to worship the indivisible and all-pervasive divinity in a limited form, and they regarded external rituals as the highest form of religion (Basu 1861: 81–82). Rajnarayan also reworks and extends certain aspects of the ‘theology of nature’ articulated in their own ways by Rammohun and Debendranath, and argues that the world is like a vast book where God’s creations and God’s indescribable wisdom, infinite power, and immeasurable compassion are displayed to human beings. Through God’s ineffable power, God holds together and regulates a world with numerous celestial bodies, forces, elements, seasons, and animate and inanimate beings of varying sizes. While some people regard it as burdensome to think of the Lord even for a moment, in truth, if we hold a fragrant flower in our hand and take the name of its creator with devotion (sraṣṭār nām bhaktir sahit), we are already worshipping the Lord. Those who can thus see the signs of God’s power and mercy in all directions, and are filled with gratitude and wonder, know the great joy that lies in the worship of the Lord. They have the Lord, the king of kings, as their friend and even when they are surrounded by miseries they remain content through dwelling with their beloved (priẏatamer sahabāse santuṣṭa thāken) (Basu 1861: 8–9). In an address to the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj in 1849, Rajnarayan speaks of the indescribable joy that individuals receive on discerning the wisdom, power, and mercy (karuṇā) of the Lord as they study the vast universe which the Lord has produced with inscrutable artfulness. With astonishing power which is beyond our human comprehension, the Lord has produced innumerable worlds which continue to be governed by laws that the Lord established at the time of creation (Basu 1861: 14–15). For Rajnarayan, since all these beauties of the world point beyond themselves to their omniscient and omnipotent producer, their enjoyment itself becomes an occasion of devotional worship. For the worshippers of Brahman, then, the world which is full of beautiful sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes is to be enjoyed by establishing our worldly loves in the love of God. As we enjoy the objects created by God which give us happiness, such occasions become the most suitable

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times (praśasta samaẏ) for our worship of God. We then experience joy in the winds of spring, a beautiful garden, and the light of the full moon in the infinite sky, and in this way we are filled with gratitude and we worship God (Basu 1861: 88–89). In these writings and addresses of Rajnarayan, we hear echoes of Akshaykumar’s natural theology – for instance, Rajnarayan declares that the immeasurable glory (mahimā) of God is expressed throughout the worlds in numerous forms of beings, ranging from gigantic elephants to tiny insects. Therefore, through diverse forms of learning (bidyā) – zoology, botany, physiology, geology, and astronomy – we should seek to understand the divine glory, for it is God who is the true object of our learning and to discern the divine imprints everywhere through such learning is a form of worship (upāsanā) of God (Basu 1870: 41–47). Speaking more lyrically, Rajnarayan laments in an address to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1859 that if while we are standing in a beautiful garden or gazing at the nectarine moonlit sky we do not think of God and in springtime we do not savour the fragrance of God, all these worldly entities become futile (bṛthā) since we are then unable to experience their true beauty (śobhā) and sweetness (mādhurya) (Basu 1870: 69–70). In truth, in the enchanting springtime we can clearly perceive God’s loving face in the world. Those who have heard the cry of the cuckoo in springtime can never believe that God is a cruel demon. God is the generator of the rasa of love and the font of joy, and the supreme friend of our life – therefore, those who have obtained the inestimable wealth of God do not pray for anything else, for they remain absorbed in savouring the nectarine love of God (prītisudhā pāne sarbadā nimagna thāken) (Basu 1870: 76). Shifting into more markedly emotive keys than those which we usually encounter in Akshaykumar’s writings, Rajnarayan declares in an address to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1864 that there is no limit to the beauty of the one who is the creator of the beauty of springtime and the beauty of friendliness – those who have gazed on this immaculate beauty are unable to turn away their eyes. This beautiful God gradually becomes expressed to the mental vision of those who are restless (byākul) to view the divine beauty and pray to God, and as they move into old age, their joy only becomes deeper for in their hearts reside an eternal youth and an eternal spring (Basu 1870: 83–84). If we are thus able to cultivate the love of God and perform actions which are pleasing to God, our hearts become more nectarine (madhumaẏ) than the flowers of spring; our faces are illuminated by a beauty (saundarya) greater than that of springtime; and the joyful waves of the clearness of the self (ātma-prasāder hillol), more gladdening than beautiful breezes, will constantly circulate through our hearts (Basu 1870: 86).

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Conclusion

For Rajnarayan, the Brahmo-dharma is the religious pathway which harmonises multiple polarities. After the formation of Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India, Rajnarayan notes in a speech to the Allahabad Brahmo Samaj in 1868 that the Brahmo-dharma is based on the harmony (sāmañjasya) between intuitive belief (ātmapratyaẏ) and reasoning (buddhi), knowledge and devotion, peace (śānti) and enthusiasm (uṯsāh), worldly living and worship of God, and reverence to guru and independent living. In the initial stages of the preaching of the Brahmo-dharma, knowledge was particularly emphasised and gradually devotional love began to circulate through the Samaj. At the moment, however, the feelings of love have developed into an unrestrained form and culminated in the worship of the guru. He cautions his audience to seek a proper harmony of knowledge and devotion: if devotion is not guided by knowledge it leads to forms of idolatry such as the worship of the guru, whereas if dharma is exclusively focused on knowledge it becomes tasteless (nīras) and rigid (kaṭhin) (Basu 1870: 37–38). Rajnarayan’s claim that the Brahmo Samaj was initially characterised more by knowledge than by devotion reflects wider shifts in Bengali Hindu religious landscapes during the 1860s and the 1870s, as intensely affective modes of approaching the divine reality are cultivated not only by Keshub and his followers but also, as we have seen, by Debendranath and by Rajnarayan. The Haribhaktipradayini Sabha, established in 1852 in Calcutta, was perhaps the first association of lay Vaiṣṇavas and it was followed by the Sri Caitanya Sabha in Calcutta in 1861. Several premodern Caitanya Vaiṣṇava scriptures were also being published and widely distributed through the press – R. Chakravarti (1985: 393) estimates that around ‘fifty important Vaiṣṇava works’ were published in Calcutta between 1815 and 1899. The first Vaiṣṇava weekly, the Bhāgavatasamācāra, appears in 1831, followed by another weekly in 1835, and between 1846 and 1861 roughly another four journals were published (Chakravarti 1985: 393–94). Against this backdrop of thriving Vaiṣṇava cultures, Rajnarayan concludes an address to the Medinipur Brahmo Samaj in 1865 with a prayer which is heavily inflected with traditional Vaiṣṇava themes: ‘Lord! How can we be delivered from our distress? We have no means other than you. You are an ocean of compassion; make our self unimpaired (ātmāke prakṛtistha kara). May we become fulfilled by always perceiving you in the abode of the heart’ (Basu 1870: 10). At the same time, however, Rajnarayan’s devotional worship always carefully steers away from the perceived ‘excesses’ of ecstatically flavoured Vaiṣṇavisms. There are multiple figures of Kṛṣṇa across the Hindu

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scriptural traditions – Kṛṣṇa as the supreme guru in the Bhagavadgītā, Kṛṣṇa as the somewhat devious statesman in the Mahābhārata, and Kṛṣṇa as the elusive Lord who lovingly sports with his pining devotees in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa. Of these modalities, Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas highlight the third as the soteriologically most effective form of apprehending the divine presence, and it is precisely the third which is rejected by Rajnarayan as the proper pathway to the divine reality. Thus, he notes that the ancient sages of the land worshipped God in a peaceful form (śānta rūpe) – they were not delirious (unmatta), and their love (prīti) was profound (pragāṛh) and mature (paripakka). This is because God is of the nature of peace (śāntasvarūp), and if the true end of dharma is to conform our nature to God, we should worship God in a peaceful form even as we savour God’s intense sweetness (Basu 1870: 91–92). Rajnarayan could have had in mind Bijoy Krishna, at one point an associate of Keshub, whose spiritual trajectory drew him away from the Brahmo Samaj of India towards the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, and then to heavily Vaiṣṇava-formed modes of devotion, so much so that in the estimate of some of his followers, Bijoy Krishna was a Caitanya redivivus.

chapter 4

Bijoy Krishna Goswami: Between Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism and Brahmo Universalism In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, we have studied the writings of some key Brahmo figures who veer away from full-blooded Vaiṣṇavism even as some of the symbolic materials of Vaiṣṇavism become imprinted on their vocabularies of affectivity. In the life and writings of Bijoy Krishna, we encounter a Brahmo who, so to speak, tests the limits of how deep one can venture into Bengali Vaiṣṇava territories while retaining institutional affiliations to the Brahmo Samaj. Bijoy Krishna occupies a somewhat hybrid location on the religious spectra of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism and Brahmo Samaj – he readily incorporates some stock Vaiṣṇava imageries but, in contrast to his Brahmo contemporaries who usually regarded such imageries as idolatrous, he argues that precisely such rejection indicates that their Brahmo-dharma is not sufficiently universalist. In the preface to a hagiographic account of the life of Bijoy Krishna, Jagadbandhu Maitra writes that we can discern two dimensions in the life of an abatār or a holy person – in one aspect, they live as worldly human beings and in another aspect, they perform supernatural deeds. Thus, we read in texts such as the Rāmāyaṇa, the Srīmad-bhāgavata, the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta, the Bible, and so on that figures such as Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Caitanya, Jesus, and others were not born in the manner of ordinary human beings. However, westerneducated people, he complains, refuse to accept the very possibility of supernatural phenomena and reject them as imaginary constructions which are utterly false. The education they receive in western philosophy and science has no place for anything beyond the material world, and thus they have no understanding of spiritual practice and the grace of the divine reality without which no knowledge of the transcendental world can be gained (Maitra 1911: xxxvi). It is not reasonable, Maitra goes on to argue, to reject the possibility of abatārs and great holy people who perform otherworldly deeds simply because we cannot understand them with our finite intellects – rather, we should accept the teachings of those who, with the grace of God (bhagavaṯ-kṛpāẏ) and of holy individuals, have gained some understanding of the spiritual world (Maitra 1911: xxxvi–xxxvii). Such an individual was Bijoy Krishna who, in the manner of holy people, descended to earth at the command (ādeś) of God to reduce its weight of sin, to impart the knowledge of truth (tattva-jñān) to ignorant humanity, and to show the true path to people who have strayed away from the

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path of dharma (Maitra 1911: xxxviii). Maitra thus presents Bijoy Krishna, the God-man, as someone who lived in two states – in the state of being Brahman he was omniscient, while in the state of being human he lived as an ordinary individual. Aligning Bijoy Krishna with the paradigms of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, Maitra writes that he would dance precisely in the manner of Caitanya, as described in the narratives of the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta. And as he would dance, rapt in the love of God and intoxicated in the ecstasy of mahābhāb, the place would become transformed into a divine realm and inundated with powerful streams of love and devotion, and gods and sages too would go there to participate. On watching him dance in ecstasy, devotion would arise in the minds of even great unbelievers (ghor pāṣaṇḍer moneo) (Maitra 1911: xlviii). Maitra’s account indicates at once the great conceptual-experiential distance we have travelled from Rammohun, Debendranath, and Rajnarayan who would have balked at the forthright claim that a particular human being has incarnated on earth the fullness of the divine reality, and also the clear identification of this individual with the motifs of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism. Even as various groups such as Christian missionaries, and the Brahmo Samaj itself, were routinely berating Vaiṣṇavism with various charges such as idolatrous ritualism, excessive adoration of the guru, illicit sexualities, unruly devotional ecstasies (Day 1851: 191–98) and so on, it was by no means a spent force – some prominent royal families such as the kings of Bishnupur were Vaiṣṇavas and patronised Vaiṣṇava institutions, and some well-known Hindu households of Calcutta such as the Sens of Garifa (to which Keshub belonged), the Tagores of Pathuriaghata, and others were Vaiṣṇava (Bhatia 2017: 23–27). While some of the Vaiṣṇava religious institutions (śrīpāṭ) had indeed ‘fallen upon hard times’ around the middle of the nineteenth century, others were flourishing in the second half of that century as monastic centres (Bhatia 2017: 73–74). In travelogues published in 1869, B. Chunder (1869: 35–36), himself from a Vaiṣṇava household, was to write: ‘One-fifth of the population of Bengal are now followers of [Caitanya]. Nearly all the opulent families of Calcutta belong to his sect’. It was from around the 1870s that various Bengali intellectuals began to give addresses and write books about the literatures, rituals, pilgrimage places, and so on of Vaiṣṇavism (Chakravarti 1985: 404–407). Even more precisely, L.B. Day estimated in 1851 that there were eight million followers of Caitanya, and noted that there was ‘scarcely a village in Bengal, in which is not to be found a follower of [Caitanya]’ (1851: 171). However, unearthing Bijoy Krishna’s own understanding of key Vaiṣṇava motifs such as the soteriological significance of the worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, and of the guru – such as himself – involves a somewhat delicate hermeneutic operation. Unlike Rammohun, Debendranath, and Rajnarayan, Bijoy Krishna

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did not leave behind an extensive body of writings, and his religious views have to be pieced together from his two relatively small volumes Brahmasamājer barttamān abasthā ebaṃ āmār jībane brahmasamājer parīkṣita biṣaẏ (1872) and Yog-Sādhan (1886) (partly translated in Appendix D), and reconstructed from biographical accounts, such as Maitra’s, which are often shot through with hagiographic motifs. Maitra himself points to the diverse ways in which Bijoy Krishna was received in his lifetime when he writes that some people regarded Bijoy Krishna as a devotee of God, others as a holy person who was perfected in yoga, and others as an abatār (Maitra 1911: ixl). Thus, on the one hand, we have Kuladananda Brahmachari who spent some time in the company of Bijoy Krishna, and wrote a highly effusive account in his diaries which were published in five volumes. Kuladananda records at several places his own sense of wretchedness, inability to systematically undertake spiritual discipline, pain in moments of doubt, and frustration at the aridity that he occasionally experiences, and also his wonder that he has received initiation from his divine guru who continues to shelter him through the travails of the world. In one place, Kuladananda states unequivocally that the guru is not a human being but God, so that the worship (pūjā) of the guru is indeed the worship of God. Just as although the fire is present everywhere, one has to collect it in a lamp and other places, the omnipresent God too has to be worshipped in the manifestation as the power of consciousness (ciṯ śaktir prakāś) in the guru (Brahmachari 1895: vol. 3, 28–29). In Kuladananda’s accounts we read about Bijoy Krishna’s ecstatic dances, the devotional frenzy of his disciples at congregational singing (saṃkīrtan), various miraculous manifestations of his divine powers, his catholic outlook towards diverse forms of spirituality, his ascetic regime, his great love of animals, the soteriological significance of the true guru (sadguru), the methodical undertaking of spiritual discipline, the yogic powers and the supernatural feats of numerous great holy devotees (mahātmās), and so on. In this vein, Maitra writes that the childhood years of Bijoy Krishna were marked by uncommon qualities similar to those which we see in Kṛṣṇa, Caitanya, and other great people. Even as a child, he was truthful, just, devoted to dharma, kind, and simple. He could not bear to see anyone suffering – his heart would melt and he would be reduced to tears on such occasions. He was energetic, fearless, and independent-minded, and he would courageously oppose any oppression unjustly inflicted on others (Maitra 1911: 21). On the other hand, Bipin Chandra, who received initiation from Bijoy Krishna in 1895, argued in somewhat more sober tones that his guru did not, in fact, claim to possess any supernatural powers nor did he seek to set himself up as a saviour. Equally crucially, according to Bipin Chandra, Bijoy Krishna did not depart from the fundamental teachings of the Brahmo Samaj. At the initiation, Bijoy Krishna

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gave him a mantra which Bijoy Krishna asked him to repeat along with the breathing exercise of prāṇāyām. Bipin Chandra notes that in this initiation there was no element that was opposed to his own Brahmo convictions – his guru did not demand that he should surrender his ‘reason or conscience or will’ or that he should regard his guru as a possessor of supernatural power or authority (Pal 1932: 501). These diametrically opposed readings of Bijoy Krishna – one presenting him as an abatār of the divine reality and the other claiming that he remained a human guru – are reflections of Bijoy Krishna’s own multi-dimensional spiritual life which was shaped initially by the sagely Debendranath and later by the more emotionally charged Keshub. A key question that split apart the Brahmo Samaj in the 1860s related to the bounds – scriptural, social, religious, institutional, and national – of the Brahmo-dharma. While the old guard comprising Debendranath, Rajnarayan, and others tended to view the Brahmo Samaj primarily as a religious gathering, and were somewhat cautious about promoting socially interventionist projects, the younger group centred around Keshub pushed forward a more radical program of social transformation involving, in particular, the rejection of all markers of caste identity. With Keshub as minister from 1862 onwards, the Samaj gradually becomes a movement centred around three foci: social reform directed at the eradication of caste and the education of women; the cultivation of deep personal piety and the worship of God; and the preaching of Brahmoism as a universal religion (Mullick 2010:32). Thus, at the time of his initiation into the Brahmo Samaj, Bijoy Krishna renounced his sacred thread, regarding it as a sign of caste distinction ( jātibhed) which he did not accept (Maitra 1911: 55). A constant theme running through Bijoy Krishna’s early life, in fact, is that true adherence to the principles of the Brahmo Samaj requires the Brahmin members of the Samaj to give up their sacred thread, which he viewed as a marker of idolatry (Goswami 1872: 26). As Bipin Chandra would note later, those who became Brahmos would be torn apart from their loved and dear ones, and as they would be socially ostracised the everyday services of barbers, washermen, and others would also be denied to them; however, ‘the generation to which Bijaykrishna belonged gladly faced all these persecutions for conscience sake, and indeed found a pleasure and peace in braving these privations and sufferings which nothing else could give’ (Pal 1932: 477). Again, while the scriptural core of the Brahmo-dharma of Rammohun, Debendranath, and Rajnarayan was constituted by the Upaniṣads, Keshub and his followers began to search for spiritual truths from across the religious traditions of the world. Thus, Keshub once declared: ‘I value and accept truth in all sects and in all scriptures, and am above the sin of sectarianism … I always cultivate the eclectic religion of the New Dispensation’ (Basu 1940:

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488). Strictly speaking, the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, which regularly featured the writings of Debendranath and Rajnarayan, was not exclusively devoted to Vedic texts either, and several western figures such as Victor Cousin, Jules Simon, William Elery Channing, Francis William Newman, James Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe, and others were often quoted extensively. Regarding the ‘Hindoo aspect’ of the Samaj, Rajnarayan cautiously remarks in an address in 1863, later published in the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (1864: no. 258, 166), that whatever in Sanskrit texts is not opposed to ‘the true religion and to right reason’ is accepted by the Samaj, and protests that the ‘Brahmos cannot be blamed for displaying a certain degree of conservatism in the work of reformation’. Moreover, while Brahmos regard their faith as the purest form of Hinduism, Rajnarayan affirms that as members of the ‘universal religion’ they do not deny their indebtedness to Christianity. Nevertheless, from this time onwards, the detractors of Debendranath – the head of the Adi Brahmo Samaj – often present the viewpoints of the older generation as narrowly nationalistic, parochial, and ethnocentric and their own visions as more truly internationalist, universalist, and egalitarian. Thus, as Bijoy Krishna begins to interrogate the claim, put forward by the immediate followers of Rammohun such as Debendranath, that the Brahmo-dharma is universally accessible he accepts a vast pantheon of religious figures such as Kṛṣṇa, Rāma, Caitanya, and others who become the principal actors in a religious history of salvation which encapsulates all humanity. As we will see, Bijoy Krishna, who was born into a Vaiṣṇava family, entered the Brahmo Samaj as a young student at Calcutta, later moved away from some aspects of the Brahmo-dharma on the grounds that it was too sectarian, and developed a highly devotionally charged style of spiritual practice which was distinctly inflected with elements of Vaiṣṇavism. 1

The Vaiṣṇava Pathways of Brahmo Devotion

A study of Bijoy Krishna’s own writings which are interspersed with autobiographical reflections and also some biographical accounts of his life indicates that the ‘historical Bijoy Krishna’ inhabited some hybrid Brahmo-Vaiṣṇava standpoints. In his account of Bijoy Krishna’s early life and childhood, Maitra writes that he was born on the full moon night in the month of Śrāvan into a family which traced its lineage to Advaitācārya, an associate of Caitanya. His Vaiṣṇava father Ananda Chandra Goswami was well-versed in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa and was deeply devoted to the family deity, Śyām-Sundar, for whom he would cook the purest food. His mother Swarnamayi Debi was full of love and kindness towards the poor, and she would often feed them at

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home. She would feel distressed if she learnt about the afflictions of someone and would not rest until she had succeeded in removing them. After receiving some instruction in a Sanskrit ṭol, Bijoy Krishna moved to Calcutta where he joined the Sanskrit College. Around this time, he was influenced by Śaṃkara’s Advaitic reading of the Brahmasūtras and became a sincere follower of this tradition which claims that the world is, metaphysically speaking, insubstantial (māyābādī). He abandoned all forms of worship, and the devotion that he had developed towards the dharma of his Vaiṣṇava forefathers too dried up under the influence of māyābād (Maitra 1911: 44–45). Around this time, he met three holy individuals who were deeply devoted to the Lord and who sought to draw him away from his attachment to Advaita. They told him that one cannot find peace other than by worshipping God and that devotion to God is the sole means for dissolving the sufferings of the world. Sensing that he was moving away from Advaita, they asked him to attend the meetings of the Calcutta Brahmo Samaj (Maitra 1911: 47–48). The next crucial point on this spiritual trajectory is Bijoy Krishna’s encounter with Debendranath himself – after listening to a sermon given by Debendranath on the wretchedness of the sinner and the great mercy of the Lord, Bijoy Krishna felt that devotional sentiments were reawakened in his heart. He became restless, thinking of the Lord whom he had not worshipped for some time, and as he prayed he threw himself at the feet of the Lord and begged the Lord to protect him. After praying thus, his heart became greatly peaceful and he felt that it was the merciful Lord who had brought him into the Brahmo Samaj to deliver him. He began to pray every day and speak to the Lord in solitude about matters relating to dharma, and he noted his thoughts in a book. He showed this book to Keshub and he was overjoyed when Keshub approved its contents (Goswami 1872: 7–8). As he thus prayed to the Lord who is the protector of those without protection (anāther nāth), he experienced a deep peace, and he felt that it was the Lord who had inspired Debendranath to deliver a heart-touching address. He accepted Debendranath as the leader and the guru of his religious life, and began to attend the meetings of the Brahmo Samaj regularly (Maitra 1911: 51). Under the leadership of Keshub, the other important figure in his religious development, Bijoy Krishna began to move deeper into Vaiṣṇava territory, albeit initially within the institutional bounds of the Brahmo Samaj. With Keshub, he introduced congregational singing (kīrtan), accompanied by drums and cymbals, into the Brahmo Samaj. B. B. Dhar indicates 8 October 1867 as the precise date when under Keshub and Bijoy Krishna saṃkīrtan was started in the Brahmo Samaj. Bijoy Krishna himself wrote two songs, one of which was strongly resonant with the Vaiṣṇava motif of the Lord’s mercy:

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The deliverer of the fallen (patitapāban), the life of the devotee, the saviour of all (akhiltāraṇ) – Sing everyone! By taking the name the heart will be soothed By taking the name the sinner (pāpī) will be delivered Such a name you will not find anywhere else. dhar 1910: 126

Bijoy Krishna began to actively preach the Brahmo-dharma in Dhaka and in various other places of east Bengal such as Barishal, Noakhali, and Sylhet. People were moved by his fiery speeches, burning enthusiasm, sincere religious devotion, holy living, and intense detachment from the world, and they joined the Brahmo-dharma in large numbers. As several members of the upper classes thus began to join the Brahmo Samaj, the orthodox Hindu sections were agitated and they published a weekly newspaper called the Hindu-Hitaisini where the Brahmos were reviled (Maitra 1911: 63–66). After the formation of Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India, Bijoy Krishna joined it and again threw himself vigorously into the propagation of the Brahmo-dharma under its aegis. However, certain incidents in 1868 sparked off vigorous debates across Brahmo milieus relating to the devotional place of ‘human-worship’ (narapūjā) in Brahmo life. Keshub had gone to Munger where some of his Brahmo devotees seemingly revered him as an abatār and fell at his feet, begged him for liberation (mukti) with folded hands, and declared that he was the full divinity (svayam bhagavān). Bijoy Krishna and some other Brahmos were intensely agitated and they wrote to Keshub that such actions were in opposition to the dharma of the Brahmo Samaj, while Keshub simply responded that he would not interfere with the free choices of other human beings (Maitra 1911: 72). Later, Bijoy Krishna published a long letter in 1869 in which he stated that after reflecting on the ways of expressing devotion on the part of Keshub’s followers, he has concluded that the fault lies not in their beliefs but in the excessive manner of their actions and words. He does not think that any of them actually worship a human being or offer prayers to a human being as an intermediary between God and humanity, or regard Keshub as anyone other than an elder brother in a wider family of devotees and a supremely helpful friend. Moreover, Keshub himself, Bijoy Krishna continues, is not desirous of the type of devotion which has been offered to him and is not responsible for the ways in which some followers have viewed him – his only fault is that he has not immediately prohibited such modes of showing reverence to him. The devotion directed to Keshub should, in fact, be extended to all brothers who are worthy of reverence, for it

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is the natural duty (svabhābsiddha kārya) of human beings to revere holy individuals (Maitra 1911: 75–76). These cognitive-experiential fault lines within the worlds of the Brahmo Samaj – including the circle of the followers of Keshub – would soon appear, as we will see, also within the group that gathered around Bijoy Krishna and venerated him as their guru. For if Bijoy Krishna had received new spiritual life in the devotional spaces of the Brahmo-dharma, the Brahmo Samaj was not quite his ultimate point of arrival. He writes in his Yog-Sādhan that the thirst of his heart (prāṇer pipāsā) was not satiated, for he felt that he had not truly worshipped in the depths of his heart the God who is dearest to his life (prāṇer priẏatam debatāke). While he would often experience at times of worship the living presence of God, and his heart would then be full of joy, hope, and peace, such moments would not last for long and he would suffer intensely when he would again feel separated from God (Goswami 1886: 5–6). Around 1878, his spiritual insight, he writes, became more acute and he realised that even after a lot of thinking and talking about religion, worship, meditation, and so on, his spiritual condition had yet remained lowly (hīn) and deplorable (śocanīẏa). He began to ask: ‘Where is the foundation of dharma? How do I gain certainty? Is there no completely safe place?’ He moved from one community to another such as the Kartābhajās, the Aghorīs, the Kāpālikas, the devotees of Rāma, the Śāktas, the Vaiṣṇavas, the Bāuls, the Muslim fakirs, and the Buddhist yogis but none of them were able to satisfy his heart’s thirst (Goswami 1886: 6–7). Around this time, he met an ascetic to whom he confided that he had not found peace in his heart and the ascetic was surprised to learn that he did not have a guru. The ascetic told him that without a guru he would not be able to progress in his religious life and pointed out that even Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, and other abatārs had a guru. Finally, after meeting various individuals including a Buddhist yogi near Darjeeling and an ascetic on the banks of the Narmada, Bijoy Krishna received initiation in 1883 from a certain guru on the top of a hill near Gaya, who gave him instructions regarding spiritual discipline (Maitra 1911: 105–107). Thus, while during the years when he was institutionally affiliated to the Brahmo Samaj, Bijoy Krishna did not believe that it was necessary to receive initiation from a sadguru for spiritual progress, he later claimed that it was essential to have received initiation from a guru if one sought to attain Brahman. The guru is the one who would make manifest in the heart of an individual the dharma which is, in truth, not a method or a teaching but the supreme power of God. This sadguru, Maitra adds, is not merely a holy person in whom God is present but the full divinity, and without the mercy of the sadguru the māyā to which living beings are bound cannot be destroyed. Those who because of great fortune are able to meet their sadguru

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become released from the bondage of karma and māyā, and attain God. At the order of his own guru, Bijoy Krishna too began to give initiation to his disciples and by transmitting spiritual energy (śakti-sañcār) to them he would destroy their karmic bondage to the world (Maitra 1911: 123). 2

The Brahmo Universalism of Vaiṣṇava Devotion

The narrative of the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ presented above – sketched from materials outlined in Bijoy Krishna’s Brahmasamājer barttamān abasthā (1872) and Yog-Sādhan (1886) and in biographical accounts such as Maitra’s – indicates that Bijoy Krishna began to move beyond the institutional boundaries of the Brahmo Samaj and deep into those terrains of Bengali folk religiosity which Rammohun, Debendranath, and Rajnarayan would associate with ‘idolatrous’ beliefs and practices. Highlighting the point that as a guru Bijoy Krishna would initiate disciples from across religious boundaries, his biographers often claim that the Brahmos of his time had not cultivated such a true universalism. Bijoy Krishna did not remain bound to the dharma of Debendranath and others – he received religious instruction from different groups and practised different types of spiritual disciplines. He freely welcomed holy individuals from Śākta, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Baul, Christian, Muslim, and other communities and with deep reverence he mixed on friendly terms with them. Some of these themes are reflected in his Yog-Sādhan which is presented in the form of questions and answers, and in which he seeks to clarify his own standpoints relating to the religious life. He writes that by the term ‘yoga’ he means the union (milan) between the finite self ( jībātmā) and the supreme self, and not the dissolution of the finite self through unification (ekībhūta haiẏā) with the supreme self. Through this union, the knowledge, love, and will of the finite self attain a kinship and equality of nature (ekajātīẏatā bā saha-dharmitā) with the infinity of the supreme self (Goswami 1886:1). This power of yoga is latent in all human beings, but we have to seek the assistance of an awakened individual for its awakening and development (Goswami 1886: 10). Indeed, if we had to follow the path of yoga entirely through our own efforts, it is doubtful whether any householder would have ever reached the state of perfection. Fortunately, some perfected individuals (siddha mahātmā) have travelled to different lands and sought to teach people who are thirsty to receive instruction about spiritual practice. Just as school children are able to learn the propositions of Euclid within a short time without having to discover them all over again, through the spiritual assistance of such holy individuals some householders too have reached fulfilment (Goswami 1886:19–20). Crucially, all individuals – rich and

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poor, learned and illiterate, men and women, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Brahmos, and others – are capable of undertaking spiritual practice (sādhan) if they are not satisfied with their way of living, yearn actively (byākul han) to attain the state of yoga, and strive to follow the rules relating to the practice (Goswami 1886:13). At the same time, Bijoy Krishna is insistent that he has not moved away from the Brahmo-dharma – whatever is truthful is the Brahmo-dharma, and to the extent that individuals follow the path of truth they are followers of the Brahmo-dharma. Writing in the wake of Keshub’s New Dispensation, Bijoy Krishna seeks to deflect the charges of idolatry, incarnationalism, guruworship, and social quietism from the forms of spiritual discipline into which he was initiating his own disciples. Thus, he writes that he rejects abatarbād which is the worship of a created thing, animate being, or human being as the omnipotent God who controls the universe. He also rejects gurubād which is the view that imperfect human beings, and their teachings and texts, are infallible (abhrānta). He does not accept the form of gurubād in which people accept the teachings of another individual even when they conflict with their own intelligence (Goswami 1886:20–21). Nor should one regard the practitioners of yoga as merely a group of mendicants who are slothful, introspective, and averse to the world. If we were to spend a week in the presence of a true yogi, we would know that they are truly altruistic, they are concerned with the welfare of the world, and they undertake great sacrifices to alleviate the sufferings of the world and bring joy to the world. Such were the ancient sages who were poets, philosophers, supervisors of political affairs, and so on, and yet, Bijoy Krishna laments, the notions of yoga, asceticism, and sloth have become synonymous in the minds of people (Goswami 1886: 28–29). Because of such views, Maitra indicates, Bijoy Krishna generated the opposition of Brahmos who regarded their own dharma as the sole dharma which could grant liberation to individuals, and all other dharmas in the world as false and erroneous. However, Bijoy Krishna had found the infinite (ananta) and the unfettered dharma of God who is infinite and boundless, which is why he could not remain within the narrow bounds of the Brahmo-dharma (Maitra 1911: 137–38). At the command of his guru, Bijoy Krishna read medieval texts such as the Vicārasāgara and the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and practised forms of yoga, and later he began to undertake spiritual practices under a banyan tree in a secluded place in the village of Gendaria near Dhaka. His guru also asked him to take part in a Tantric ritual, indicating to him that Tantra was misunderstood by the common people as a set of degenerate practices while it was, in fact, a holy bridge to liberation. Later in his life, Bijoy Krishna would refer to his participation in the ritual and argue that such rites, if performed in

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accordance with the scriptures, can lead human beings to liberation (Maitra 1911: 116–120). On another occasion, when he travelled with a friend to a hill to meet some holy individuals (mahāpuruṣ), they saw that a devotee of the goddess was standing on the way and this devotee began to throw lumps of earth at them. They both went up to him and falling down at his feet, they asked him to have mercy on them. The devotee ultimately took them to meet three other holy individuals who lived on the hill. One of them told Bijoy Krishna that the dharma is truly one, though the pathways to approach the dharma are multiple. Depending on the pathway which is initially adopted individuals follow different modes of living. Among them, one was a devotee of Rāma, another was a follower of Nānak, and the third was a Kāpālika, while he was himself an Aghorī. They informed Bijoy Krishna that they had once had disagreements with one another; however, after they arrived at the destination, which is the house of truth, they realised that they are at the same place and they subsequently overcame all sense of distinction (Maitra 1911: 109–10). Another crucial moment on these spiritual trajectories of Bijoy Krishna’s Brahmo universalism was his return, through Brahmo routes, to the Vaiṣṇava roots of his family. At the time when the Brahmo Samaj was riven with debates surrounding the figure of Keshub, Bijoy Krishna went to his village where he was introduced by Harimohan Pramanik to the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta. Though Harimohan was himself a devout Vaiṣṇava, he was beyond any sectarian feelings (sāmpradāẏik bhāb) and he regarded himself, a worshipper of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, also as a seeker of the knowledge of Brahman (brahmajñānī). Bijoy Krishna indicates that he initially found the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta somewhat difficult to understand; however, gradually he began to grasp its nectarine truths and as he read about Caitanya’s humble devotion, love, yearning for God, vision of God, and elevated spirituality he sensed the utter lowliness of his own life ( jībaner sampūrṇa hīnatā). He understood clearly that the true spiritual resource is not the externality of religious ceremonies but the feet of the merciful Lord who grants fearlessness. His heart was then scorched by an unbearable sense of repentance and he lamented: ‘Alas! What have I been doing all this while? Not for a day in my life have I undertaken spiritual practice, what will be my refuge?’ (Goswami 1872: 35–36). From the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta, he understood the significance of ‘causeless devotion’ (ahaitukī bhakti) – true devotion is that which is not effected through one’s own good works (sādhukārya) but is graciously given by the merciful Lord (daẏāmaẏ īśvar kṛpā kariẏā): ‘If I pray with intense yearning (ekānta byākul haiẏā) for devotion, the merciful Lord will never refuse me’ (Goswami 1872: 37–38). Recapitulating some of these themes and placing them in the longue durée of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, Maitra writes that Bijoy Krishna was born at a time when

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the Vaiṣṇava dharma had undergone a spiritual degeneration. The Vaiṣṇavas intensely despised people who did not belong to their fold, and regarded them as untouchable and fallen beings. They did not respect individuals who did not bear Vaiṣṇava insignia such as a mark on the forehead and a garland, even if such individuals were devotees of God. They did not have reverence for the Hari-Hara form of the divine reality or for the goddess Jagadambā. Maitra introduces Bijoy Krishna as the sadguru who emerges in such an age of decline to show people who were desirous of liberation the true path which leads to God (Maitra 1911: 8–9). Maitra even presents his entry into the Brahmo-dharma as providentially arranged by Kṛṣṇa. He reports that once when Bijoy Krishna had gone home, the family deity Śyām-Sundar appeared before him and asked him if he would go to the temple. Bijoy Krishna demurred, indicating that he had become a Brahmo, but Śyām-Sundar spoke to him with a smile: ‘You are indeed a Brahmo, and there is nothing wrong about that. For it is I who have made you a Brahmo’ (Maitra 1911: 73). His Vaiṣṇava-inflected Brahmo bhakti would later be clearly expressed in a devotional song which he would sing every evening at the ashram at Gendaria: Take the name of Hari every day, nothing compares to the name of Hari. If the worldly senses could bring happiness, a merchant would not become a fakir. With the name, Ajāmil went to heaven And the messengers of death could not touch him. With the name, great sinners are delivered The greatness of the name is immeasurable. (With the name Jagāi and Mādhāi were delivered, Rūp and Sanātan became fakirs.) maitra 1911: 239

At this ashram, the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta and the hymns and sermons of the Sikh gurus from the Guru Granth Sahib were regularly read (Brahmachari 1895: vol. 3, 5). Bijoy Krishna inscribed the mantra, Om Śrī-kṛṣṇa-caitanyāya namaḥ, on the outer side of the northern wall of his hut and he wrote the following statements on the inner side: 1. A day such as this will not remain. 2. Do not speak highly of yourself. 3. Do not speak ill of others. 4. The highest dharma is nonviolence. 5. Be merciful towards all beings. 6. Have faith in the scriptures and holy individuals.

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Reject as poison whatever is not in harmony with the scriptures and the conduct of holy individuals. There is no enemy greater than pride. brahmachari 1895: vol. 1, 107

Thus, Bijoy Krishna’s iterations of the Vaiṣṇava dharma drew on certain stock Vaiṣṇava concepts, affectivities, and practices even as they went beyond its ‘sectarian’ bounds to include people from all dharmic pathways. According to Maitra, Bijoy Krishna’s spiritual discipline was simple and did not involve the slightest form of painful practice (kṛcchrasādhaner leśmātrao). He would ask disciples to mutter the name given by him with every breath, whilst also practising breath control through prāṇāyām and kumbhaka. Further, they would have to abstain from eating meat and all forms of intoxication, perform daily the five sacrifices, and so on. He would not, however, interfere with their freedom in religious matters in giving them initiation – whether they were Hindu, Muslim, or Christian they could all continue to adhere to the religious beliefs (dharmabiśvās) of their own community while they also accepted the spiritual discipline that he would give them (sādhangrahaṇ karite pāriten). He would say that just as God has given water, air, and sunlight to all human beings, the spiritual means through which they can attain God is equally generous (udār) and there can be no sectarianism (sāmpradāẏikatā) on this pathway (Maitra 1911: 124–25). Presenting Bijoy Krishna as a religious universalist in unequivocal terms, Maitra writes that a dharma which declares itself to be the only true dharma, such that through it alone liberation is attainable, is not the true and non-sectarian dharma. In truth, all the dharmas in the world which are based on scriptural revelation are diverse ways of reaching the one divine reality. Though as long as people continue to follow these different pathways, the world is marked by conflict, once they arrive at the common destination all such discord passes away. After his spiritual attainment, Bijoy Krishna too understood that Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and others are following different pathways which lead to God. Those who have realised, through the mercy of God, the truth of the spiritual world in this manner have moved beyond all forms of doctrinal disputes and sectarianisms, and they have lovingly embraced the followers of all religious pathways as their own (Maitra 1911: 136). In the understanding of divine revelation, too, Bijoy Krishna seems to have returned to some traditional Vaiṣṇava understandings of scripture. Reflecting the debates in the Brahmo Samaj over scriptural revelation that we indicated in Chapter 2, Maitra writes that the Brahmos reject the scriptures on the grounds that they are composed by imperfect human beings who are prone to error, and are therefore a mixture of truthful and untruthful elements. Those

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scriptural elements which are in accordance with a pure heart, illuminated with intuitive knowledge, are instead to be accepted and the others are to be rejected. However, Maitra develops a sophisticated epistemological critique of this Brahmo notion and argues that the Brahmos themselves cannot claim that intuitive knowledge (sahaj-jñān) is beyond error (abhrānta) since such knowledge is, after all, the knowledge of imperfect human beings. The Brahmos reject whatever scriptural text is not in accordance with their own reasoning (bibek) but they do not understand that this style of reasoning itself is shaped by specific presuppositions (saṃskār). For instance, the reasoning of an Aghor-panthī or a Kāpālika is not congruent with that of a Vaiṣṇava, just as the reasoning of a Hindu is different from that of a Christian. Bijoy Krishna believed, with his spiritual knowledge, that human intelligence and human intuitive knowledge can never be the true foundation of dharma because they are full of error and misconception – scripture alone is truthful and without any fault. Thus, the Brahmo-dharma is without a stable foundation which can only be supplied by religious texts such as the Vedas, the Bible, and so on. (Maitra 1911: 138–39). More pointedly, Maitra concludes that a dharma which is not based on scriptural revelation is not only groundless (bhittihīn) but also it cannot connect human beings with God, and it becomes as lifeless as the collection of scriptural quotations in the Brahmo compilation called the Brāhma-dharmaḥ (Maitra 1911:140). Bijoy Krishna therefore believed that the Brahmo-dharma was an imaginative product of human beings (manuṣyer mangaṛā) and scriptural texts such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Purāṇas, and others alone are truthful (Maitra 1911: 142). The charge that the Brahmo-dharma was merely a human conceptual fiction because it was not rooted in divine revelation takes us back to the vexed theme of the relation between reason and revelation which we have been pursuing from Chapter 2. Rammohun’s own standpoint was that reason has to be shaped by scriptural visions and reason cannot be set up as an independent epistemic arbiter or assessor of scriptural truth. Keshub’s departure from this position is clear in his terse answer to the question as to why Brahmos reject the possibility of a scriptural revelation: ‘Because revelation is subjective, not objective’ (Sen 1892:139). What Keshub means by subjectivity here is the capacity of intuition through which human beings can access supersensible truths, which he seeks to establish by summoning a long list of western defenders such as Aristotle, Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart, Victor Cousin, and others. All truth in philosophical matters is developed through the intuitive consciousness of the mind and all error in our understanding of the world, morality, and religion is attributable to departures from such consciousness. Keshub concludes that ‘the history of philosophy bears irrefragable

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testimony to the truth that the doctrine of intuition is an abiding fact amidst the ever-shifting opinions and the endless controversies of Sensationalism, Idealism, Mysticism, and Scepticism’ (Sen 1892: 105). 3

Between the Brahmos and the Vaiṣṇavas

Keshub’s appeal to intuition as the sheet anchor in the turbulent waters of conflicting worldviews also appeared in his controversial claim to have received direct inspiration (ādeś) during the marriage of his daughter to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. Bijoy Krishna moved away from Keshub’s Samaj, claiming that Keshub was behaving in an authoritarian manner, and he joined the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. However, Bijoy Krishna’s religious universalism, which was pivoted around his role as a Brahmo guru who would initiate even people given to ‘idolatrous’ modes of worship, aroused the indignation of certain groups within the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. Maitra notes that during the time when Bijoy Krishna was in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, he would worship at the altar in Calcutta or Dhaka with vocabularies highly charged with Vaiṣṇava piety. The devotees would become submerged in waves of devotion and weep impassionedly, and their hearts would melt. At the time of congregational singing, Bijoy Krishna would utter the name of the Lord, dance wildly, and become rapt in devotional ecstasy (mahābhāb), and this emotion would be transmitted to the devotees who too would become maddened. On one occasion, he declared from the altar (bedī) that on that day the gods had come down to meet human beings and together they would worship the supreme Brahman. An electric current swept through the inner being of all the devotees who became restless and began to weep (Maitra 1911:127–28). The Brahmos in Dhaka began to oppose Bijoy Krishna and levelled a series of charges against him – he would undertake spiritual practices in secrecy with his disciples; he was surrounded by devotees from all communities and some of them would use intoxicants; his disciples would sing songs with idolatrous elements dedicated to the divine sports of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, and so on (Maitra 1911:168–69). Two Brahmos wrote letters to the executive committee of the Brahmo Samaj urging that Bijoy Krishna should be removed from the post of preacher because he participated in forms of idolatry and the worship of a human being which were opposed to the Brahmo-dharma. Nabakanta Chatterjee noted in his letter (1887) that the disciples of Bijoy Krishna fall at his feet and in his absence bow to his seat; idolatrous songs involving the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa are sung; Bijoy Krishna himself claims that without the assistance of a guru there is no religious life; and Bijoy Krishna does not

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denounce idolatrous forms of worship but indeed declares that through the practice of yoga all individuals will realise the truth, irrespective of their pathway of dharma. Reflecting the equivalence that we encountered in Chapter 3, between the Brahmo Samaj and the quest for harmony, Chatterjee argues that the Brahmo-dharma is not a dharma of ascetics and world-renouncers; rather, it has emerged for the elevation of humanity in all fields such as spiritual, moral, social, political and so on. Bijoy Krishna’s standpoint was, from Chatterjee’s perspective, not universal but insular while the Brahmo-dharma, Chatterjee declares, ‘is not a parochial dharma confined to one place. Without the harmonisation of knowledge, love, and observance (anuṣṭhān), one does not have a completely ideal dharma’ (Maitra 1911: 172). A special committee was formed, consisting of figures such as Ananda Mohan Bose, Sivanath Sastri and others, to look into the charges levelled against Bijoy Krishna and they concluded that the spiritual discipline that he was imparting to people was opposed to the form of worship taught by the Brahmo Samaj. Unlike the truths of the Brahmo Samaj which are broadcast publicly, the teachings relating to muttering the name of God, prāṇāyām, and transmission of the guru’s energy (śaktisañcār) are accessible only to his own disciples. An esoteric group would thus be created within the Brahmo Samaj, leading to the stifling of fraternal sentiments among the members. Again, though he claims that no human being is the true guru, for the supreme Lord alone is the true guru, his disciples yet believe that falling at his feet and putting the dust of his feet on their heads are spiritually efficacious (ādhyātmik upakār haẏ). Such actions, the committee claimed, are intensely opposed to the Brahmo-dharma and are tantamount to the worship of a human being (narapūjā). Again, he keeps images of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, and though he provides a spiritualist interpretation of these images such worship has already produced great harm (aniṣṭa) among the Vaiṣṇavas and should therefore be discarded completely. Moreover, he argues that the divine reality can be called with different names such as Kālī, Durgā, and others but these forms are intertwined with idolatry (pauttalikatā) and are to be rejected by the Brahmos. He also claims that holy people who have moved on to the hereafter visit him, and that living sages too visit him in their subtle bodies and through yogic power in their physical bodies – through the doorway of such beliefs various prejudices (kusaṃskār) can enter the Brahmo Samaj (Maitra 1911: 145–46). In his reply, Bijoy Krishna provides a series of responses to these charges of esotericism, idolatry, and incorporation of Vaiṣṇava elements. He notes that the spiritual discipline which he offers to his disciples is entirely an inner matter, which is why it is not performed publicly in the presence of those who will not understand its deeper truth. Nor does he follow the teachings of any

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particular community – he imparts the spiritual means (sādhanā) to any individual who has an inner spiritual thirst (āntarik byākulatā), irrespective of whether they are Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, Śākta, Brahmin, Śūdra, Christian, Muslim, or Brahmo. Although a yogic power is latent in all human beings, it is necessary to have an enlightened human being who will awaken this power in them. Next, regarding the spectre of human-worship, he argues that the state of an individual who wishes to fall at the feet of another is marked by humility and thus he does not prohibit this practice. If others fall at his feet, he utters, ‘glory to guru, glory to guru’, for such obeisance is due only to God. Individuals can call out to the divine reality with varied names such as Kālī, Durgā, and others, though he has not himself used them during worship in the Brahmo Samaj. Regarding the crucial question of the use of Vaiṣṇava motifs, he argues that there is no religious emotion (bhāb) which is as helpful as that centred around Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa to dharma and the path of yoga. Here Rādhā symbolises the devotee and Kṛṣṇa is the Lord who is to be worshipped. He too has tried to cultivate this emotion, and sung songs about Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa with those individuals who find this emotion helpful for their own spiritual development. However, he asserts that he has not used the names of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa during worship at the Brahmo Samaj. In conclusion, he writes that his inner connection to the Brahmo Samaj remains unbroken, though he will not act as a member of the Samaj in matters of religious propagation (dharmapracār). He will yet continue to preach the ‘universal Brahmo-dharma’ which is the dharma of the one supreme Lord and which has no grouping (dal) or community (sampradāẏ) (Maitra 1911: 147–49). For Bijoy Krishna, then, the calling on the Lord with the names of different deities can be spiritually efficacious for specific individuals, whereas for Brahmos such as Nabakanta Chatterjee and Sivanath Sastri such experiential and ritual modalities would introduce into the Brahmo Samaj precisely the ‘idolatrous’ Vaiṣṇavism that the Brahmo Samaj had rejected. One recurring motif in Bijoy Krishna’s responses to such Brahmos is the relocation of the Brahmo-dharma within more expansive categories so that it would represent the dharma of all religious communities. His Brahmo universalism is expressed tersely in a letter written in 1886 to the members of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj: ‘Whatever is true is indeed the Brahmo-dharma. The Brahmo-dharma is a universal dharma without any factionalism. Therefore, wherever he finds truth and whatever he regards as true, he accepts it. Yet the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj is anxious that my actions will cause them harm. Therefore, to keep my friends in the Samaj happy I am dissociating myself from it in all external ways. I am the servant of the servant (dāsānudās) of every Samaj – the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Nababidhan Samaj, Adi Samaj, Hindu Samaj, Christian Samaj,

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and Muslim Samaj. I do not belong to any community (sampradāẏ), yet every community is mine …’ To allay the doctrinal concerns of Brahmo orthodoxy, Bijoy Krishna affirms that the creator of the world is of the nature of reality, knowledge, infinity, bliss, and peace, and is undying, eternal, and one without a second – the supreme Lord is unlike any created entity and cannot be compared to any such entity (Maitra 1911: 149). At the same time, he declares that whatever be the name which is used to call upon the Lord – Brahman, Kṛṣṇa, Kālī, and others – if that name is uttered with sincere devotion it is spiritually efficacious. The Buddha, Jesus, Caitanya, and others can thus be objects of our devotion but the supreme Lord alone is our guru, and the belief that a particular human being is divine or an abatār of the divine leads us away from truth (Maitra 1911: 151). On the fundamental question of ‘idolatry’ itself, Maitra presents Bijoy Krishna’s developed viewpoint on the thesis that God is formless not as the claim that God does not have any form whatsoever but that God does not have a particular material form. Thus, Maitra writes that the Brahmos do not understand that just as God is omnipresent in the entire universe God is also present in individual substances as their specific controllers in the form of deities. They are mistaken in thinking that the divine has no intrinsic form (svarūp-bigrah) for the scriptures clearly state that the divine has the form of saccidānanda, which is the form in which the divine is graciously revealed to the devotee. Therefore, the proper way to understand the scriptural statement that Brahman is formless (nirākār), Maitra argues, is that the divine reality does not have a form or a body which is constituted of natural elements (Maitra 1911: 140). 4

Goswami as Caitanya Redivivus

From this stage in the hagiography, Maitra begins to depict the outlines of Bijoy Krishna’s religiosity even more clearly as conforming to the devotional ecstasies of the archetypal Caitanya. After he moved away from the Brahmo Samaj, he participated in the dhulat festival in Santipur on the birth anniversary of Advaitācārya, when Vaiṣṇavas joyously sprinkle dust on one another. He became completely rapt in the joy of congregational singing, and in great ecstasy (mahābhāb) he began to dance around wildly and loudly take the name of the Lord Hari. In his sketches of these incidents, Maitra carefully juxtaposes the details against the classic descriptions of Caitanya and his ecstatic followers. He writes that the Vaiṣṇavas saw with their own eyes the reenactment of the congregational singing which they had only read about in the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta and they were astonished. A group of devotees went

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out singing to the main streets of Dhaka on the last day of the dhulat, and the sound of drums and cymbals, and the name of the Lord Hari, echoed throughout the skies. The entire city began to wobble with the name of the Lord, and people became intoxicated on the name and lost consciousness. A young boy, in particular, became completely delirious and giving up food and sleep, he set out in the manner of a madman (pāgaler nyāẏ) to the streets, taking the name of the Lord (Maitra 1911: 179–80). On another occasion, when Bijoy Krishna was eating at noon in the company of a few disciples, he became absorbed in ecstasy and cried out that Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Durgā, and other deities were eating with him and he invited his disciples to partake of his own meal. As they began to eat from the same leaf, a stream of bliss flowed through them and they became intoxicated with waves of ecstasy. They became restless and eagerly consumed the sanctified food (prasād), while some smeared the food on themselves and others rolled on the ground (Maitra 1911: 190). When Bijoy Krishna went to the Star Theatre in Calcutta to watch a re-enactment of the life of Caitanya, those around him seem to have viewed him as the Caitanya of their own times. Maitra writes that Bijoy Krishna became maddened with ecstasy (bhābe matta) and started dancing wildly, and his spiritual energy began to circulate through the actors and the audience who too became intoxicated (unmatta). They began to sing loudly the name of the Lord, and their singing resounded throughout the theatre which became transformed into a divine stage. At the end of the play, the director of the theatre told Bijoy Krishna that he had only read in books that four hundred years ago, powerful waves of congregational singing had flowed through the land of Bharat, and now he has seen with his own eyes that divine spectacle (Maitra 1911: 198). However, true to his spiritual egalitarianism, it seems that Bijoy Krishna was overpowered by the sense of the divine presence not only of Kṛṣṇa but also of Śiva. Maitra writes that once Bijoy Krishna went to the Viśvanāth temple in Benares, where the atmosphere was sanctified with the sweet recitation of scriptural verses and the beating of drums. As he steadily gazed on the beautifully adorned form of Viśvanāth, he went into samādhi and became as still as a pillar, while streams of tears flowed down from his eyes (Maitra 1911: 201). Thus, Maitra’s presentation of the life and teachings of Bijoy Krishna conforms to the view that he outlines in the preface of his book – holy individuals are the mediating bridge between this world and the spiritual realm, and with the help of this bridge those who are desirous of liberation (mumukṣu) can easily move to the other world. A deep veil stands between the two worlds and prevents human beings from understanding the matters of the spiritual world; however, such a veil does not exist for holy individuals for whom all

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spiritual matters are as transparently clear as a fruit on the palm of their hands. They can travel to the spiritual domain in their subtle bodies and thus they can easily take travellers on the pathway of dharma to that realm (Maitra 1911: xxxviii). While Bijoy Krishna does not depict himself with these imageries – in his autobiographically slanted Brahmasamājer barttamān abasthā (1872) and in his more didactically structured Yog-Sādhan (1886) – as the Caitanya who has returned to the land of Bengal, some of his writings strike the distinctively Vaiṣṇava notes of being passively directed, and even directly operated, by the divine Lord. Thus, regarding his role as a preacher of the message of the Brahmo Samaj, he writes: I am a lowly preacher (adham pracārak) of the Brahmo-dharma. I have not taken the vow of preaching with the expectation of fame or glory. There is in the depths of my ātmā an astonishing power but this power is not mine and is not subject to my control, and often there is no correspondence between it and my own wishes. This power operates me (paricālana kare) as if I were a blind man and I cannot say where it will take me to in the future. It orders me (ādeś kare) to always strive for the well-being of the world. Indeed, it instigates me to act in accordance with the will of God and also makes me restless (byākul kare) to work for the uplift of my ātmā. So clear and intelligible is its command (ādeś) that I cannot forget it or refuse it. It is truly this power that has compelled me (bādhya kariẏāche) to take the name of a preacher. I always instruct my mind thus: ‘Do you not know that you are extremely impure and wretched? Why do you make so bold as to take on the great responsibility of a preacher?’ The very next moment the power surfaces in my heart and says to me: ‘Move ahead’. I believe that the command of this power is the word of God (īśvarer bākya) and the life of the preacher. dhar 1910: 88

Bijoy Krishna further writes that the true devotees of the Lord do not hold on to an independent existence (astitva), for they have nothing that they can truly call their own. The sense that ‘I am an agent, I am a knower’ itself passes away in them and only the sense that ‘I am a servant of the Lord’ remains, for the whole world operates at the command of the Lord (Dhar 1910: 383). Reflecting on his youth, Bijoy Krishna would later note: ‘Whatever needs to be done is accomplished through the will of God (bhagavadicchā). We should truly be like children over whom the mother always keeps watch. As I look back at my life, I see that I have not done anything through my own deliberations (icchā pūrbak

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bhābiẏā cintiẏā). I went to study at a ṭol, became an orthodox Hindu, suddenly entered Sanskrit College, and unawares became a follower of Advaita Vedānta. Then I joined the Brahmo Samaj, preached the Brahmo-dharma, practised medicine, and after several turns I have arrived at my present condition’ (Dhar 1910: 394–95) 5

Conclusion

The clash between Bijoy Krishna and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in Dhaka was over whether ritual practices relating to worshipping deities, receiving initiation from a guru, and so on were compatible with the dharma of Brahmo spirituality. These practices would have run headlong into the self-understanding of Rajnarayan as a Brahmo, who was to remain with Debendranath’s Adi Brahmo Samaj and who declared in unequivocal terms in an address in 1863 that ‘a belief in the great truths of religion independently of an external revelation and on the principle that the reasonableness of a doctrine is the only test of its truth has been the chief characteristic of the religious opinions of the Samaj from the time of Ram Mohun Roy to the present’ (Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, 1864: no. 258, 166). As we have seen, the executive committee at Dhaka too rejected certain standpoints of Bijoy Krishna relating to the necessity of the guru and the help given by the guru in the life of devotion, and the use of the images of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in religious worship. The limits of Brahmo universalism and Bijoy Krishna’s reworking of its contours become clear in an exchange of letters between him and Debendranath, whom he continued to respect deeply even after he joined Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India. In the opening letter in 1887, Debendranath outlines, with a pained tone, some of the views and practices which have been attributed to Bijoy Krishna – falling down at the feet of holy people is a spiritual means; initiation is given by Bijoy Krishna through the transmission of spiritual energy (śaktisañcār) to individuals who are opposed to the Brahmo-dharma and who practise idolatrous forms of worship; one does not first have to give up idolatry but one can realise the truth by sincerely pursuing the pathway of dharma; the perfected yogis can travel through their subtle bodies, and so on (Maitra 1911: 174–75). Debendranath affirms that the Brahmo-dharma is the eternal truth which does not undergo any variation or transformation – it is as radiant as the sun and as profound as the ocean, and it is full of sweetness and life. Bijoy Krishna writes in his reply that he too follows the pathway indicated by the ancient seers which has led many holy individuals to spiritual fulfilment. However, there are various means towards establishing the mind firmly

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in Brahman and one should adopt the means that is fruitful. He does not claim that his own method is the only way, but it has helped him to attain spiritual union with Brahman and is thus for him a great treasure. He does not regard it as necessary that people who worship with images (sākāropāsak) should reject such worship at the very beginning of their spiritual development – in fact, such a demand might not be intelligible to them and might do them more harm than good. The ancient sages too, Bijoy Krishna points out, have laid down different spiritual means which are in accordance with the different grades of eligibility (adhikārbhed) of people (Maitra 1911:176). Debendranath writes in his reply to Bijoy Krishna’s response that while it is indeed necessary to have a wise guru if one is to gain knowledge of Brahman, actions such as falling at the feet of a guru have no spiritual significance and cannot be regarded as a spiritual means. The main goal in preaching the Brahmo-dharma is to lead the worshippers of images towards the worship of the formless Brahman and to instruct them about the errors of their ways. Bijoy Krishna should not claim that people can practise with simplicity their own modes of worship and they will attain the truth eventually, for such worship will only reinforce their habitual styles of worshipping gods and goddesses (Maitra 1911: 177). While Bijoy Krishna’s reply, if there was one, to this second letter of Debendranath is not recorded by Maitra, it is possible that Debendranath was particularly dismayed by some of Bijoy Krishna’s declarations such as the following, for they would have reminded him of Keshub’s devotional effusiveness: O Lord of the poor, friend of the poor! I do not know anything else but that I am wretched among human beings (narādham); I am ignorant, stupid, and you, o Lord, are supremely merciful; you are the wealth of the destitute … You are the wealth of my heart, I seek refuge in you. dhar 1910: 385

As we have seen in Chapter 2, however, Debendranath himself often articulated such notions of loving servitude to the Lord in his sermons and writings, and so it would seem that the real sticking point was not so much the vocabulary of devotion itself but Bijoy Krishna’s explicit use of the ‘idolatrous’ names and forms of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism. Bijoy Krishna, on his part, continued to argue that his way of preaching was not opposed to the universal Brahmo-dharma, and he would carefully qualify his teachings about the devotional love of the Lord. He notes that mere dancing, jumping, crying, and merrymaking should not confused with devotional ecstasy (bhāb), for the scriptures declare that with the development of bhāb in individuals the following conditions are seen – they are patient and forgiving in all situations,

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they remain engaged in some work which leads to the well-being of the ātmā, they remain unattached in all matters, they are completely devoid of egoism, they have a firm confidence (dṛḍha biśvās) about receiving the grace of God and achieving their desired goal, they are always inclined to sing the praises of God, and they are full of love for the places where God resides (Brahmachari 1895: vol. 3, 138–39). True devotional love can be said to have arisen when we abandon all sense of being autonomous agents and we understand that we are completely moved by the divine reality: ‘We have to check again and again whether we are truly attracted to the Lord. Let the Lord be the fishing rod and we should be fish – the Lord will catch us and we would be caught. If we are not caught by the Lord, we have no other deliverance (ār upāẏ nāi) … After a lot of examination, I saw that I am insubstantial (asār), and my Lord, the friend of the poor (dīnabandhu), is everything’ (Dhar 1910: 384). Such effusive Vaiṣṇava-styled expressions of lament, self-abasement, and utter reliance on the Lord’s spiritual control would have been viewed with suspicion, or even distaste, by his contemporary Sitanath, whose Brahmo pathways of devotional love were somewhat more rigorously structured by meticulous philosophical examinations of the categories of being, self-consciousness, and God.

chapter 5

Sitanath Tattvabhushan and Bipin Chandra Pal: Between Hegelian Universalism and Vaiṣṇava Devotionalism In Sitanath and Bipin Chandra, who were once classmates, we arrive at two individuals from the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj who are not as well-known as the other Brahmos studied in this book, but who are both highly significantly figures whose writings are shaped by a dense intertwining of European worldviews, Brahmo emphases on individuality, and devotional subjectivities. Both Sitanath and Bipin Chandra heavily reworked Hegelian vocabularies in developing their styles of devotionalism, but while Sitanath was wary of naming the divinity as Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa, Bipin Chandra (a disciple of Bijoy Krishna) more readily invoked the divine couple as the God of supreme love. Even a glance at the list of volumes that Sitanath read and worked with across his life would indicate that he was one of the most prodigiously learned Brahmos of his times. Sitanath’s library included the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, the commentaries of Śaṃkara on the Brahma-sūtras, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, Jīva Goswamī’s Tattvasandarbha, and the works of Herbert Spencer, James Martineau, William Hamilton, Robert Flint, John Stuart Mill, Henry Mansel, Bishop Berkeley, Georg Friedrich Hegel, Edward Caird, Bernard Bosanquet, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Hill Green, Dean Inge, Francis Herbert Bradley, Oliver Lodge, Lord Haldane, and Josiah Royce (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 45). From these readings Sitanath systematically worked out a devotional theism which is based on the foundational idea that in and through the finite world we are able to discern the spiritual reality of the infinite. He argues that when we perceive a finite object such as a book we know that it is encompassed by infinite space, and when we cognise a specific temporal event we know that it is encompassed by infinite time. From this basic premise, Sitanath concludes that though we directly perceive specific objects in space and time, we indirectly discern the eternal, unlimited, and indivisible ātmā as the basis of infinite space and infinite time. In this way the infinite is present within us – the finite and the infinite, and the finite self and Brahman remain as different and nondifferent (bhedābhed). Just as in all our knowledge, the knowledge of Brahman is thus directly expressed, in all our loves too the love of Brahman is directly expressed. Though this truth about the God of love and the love of God is present in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka

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Upaniṣad and the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad, it is clearly expressed in Vaiṣṇava religious literature. However, the Vaiṣṇava texts, Sitanath laments, are also covered with various mythical elements which have to be removed so that we can properly understand their spiritual truths. Therefore, the Brahmo-dharma of the future will incorporate the luminous knowledge of the Upaniṣads, the tender and sweet devotional love of Vaiṣṇavism, and the devotional service of Christianity, where the first is the proper foundation of the second and the third (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 223–25). Sitanath’s careful scriptural ordering – first the foundation of the Upaniṣads, and then their articulations in Vaiṣṇavism and Christianity – reflects his membership of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj from the 1880s, where he is battling, on one front, the devotional ecstasies of figures such as Bijoy Krishna and Keshub and, on another front, the proclamations of the Christian missionaries. His Brahmo via media is somewhat analogous to the pathways of Debendranath and Rajnarayan which we have explored in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, though Sitanath himself believed that these figures had failed to provide a sufficiently robust philosophical basis for the Brahmo-dharma. Sitanath complains that the religious life in the early decades of the Brahmo Samaj was shaped too much by vague talk of intuitive knowledge (in the style of, for instance, Debendranath and Rajnarayan) or by appeals to the absolute authority of a charismatic figure (in the style of, for instance, Keshub). Thus, Sitanath laments that the utterances, in particular, of Debendranath and Keshub are received by many Brahmos as divine pronouncements and no effort is undertaken to critically study the great questions of religion (Tattvabhushan 1909:58). Against this institutional backdrop, Sitanath’s project is to demonstrate that Brahmo principles can stand up to rigorous philosophical inquiry and form a consistent conceptual system. Rejecting the attempts to base Brahmo religiosity on intuitions or claims of self-evidence, Sitanath instead believed that a theistic worldview should be founded on self-knowledge (Kopf 1979: 81). Thus, Sitanath, who was elected President of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in 1926 and 1927, goes on to elaborate, through his vast readings of philosophical works from eastern and western intellectual horizons, a highly variegated Brahmo theism which is founded on the Upaniṣads, inflected by the thought of Hegel, and infused with the devotional love expressed in Vaiṣṇava texts. As Sitanath puts it, the faith of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj would be an ‘argumentative form’ of theism which, he adds, has ‘a distinct tendency to Monism’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 33). The monism, as we will see, would reject crudely dualistic pictures of God and the world as two dichotomous categories which are merely externally related while, at the same time, it would also steer away from Śaṃkara’s form of undifferentiated nonduality between the divine self and the human self.

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Sitanath’s claim, in effect, in his substantial philosophical tomes, The Philosophy of Brahmaism (1909) and Brahmajijnasa: Or An Inquiry into the Philosophical Basis of Theism (1916), and in his critical reflections on Vaiṣṇavism, Krishna and the Puranas (1926) and Krishna and the Gita (1944), is that he has developed a ‘theistic monism’ where rational enquiry, knowledge, and devotion are deeply correlated, unified, and intertwined as spirals on the religious pathway. The impress of Hegel’s religious philosophy, and of Hegelianisms as mediated to him by British Idealists such as Bradley and Green, are evident in his discussions, in Brahmajijnasa (1916) and Lectures On The Theism of the Upanishads And Other Subjects (1921), of motifs such as the unity-in-difference of subject and object in knowledge, the divine personality, and the reconciliation of monism and pluralism. Thus, he notes that in the theological work of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj ‘our debt to Hegel and his English and American followers has been freely and frequently acknowledged, though we have also paid the due share of honour to the philosophy of our own country’ (Tattvabhushan 1921: 148). At the same time, Sitanath is not a passive acolyte of Hegel and he does not hesitate to critique the master for having misunderstood the religion of the Upaniṣads as ‘mere Pantheism’ (Tattvabhushan 1921: 147). Instead, in Sitanath’s rational religion shaped by the Upaniṣads and aspects of western philosophical thought, the finite is to be viewed as an essential moment in the infinite who is the ever-active God of love and holiness. Here, reflective faith will be distinguished – as it is not, according to Sitanath, in forms of Vaiṣṇava piety – from effusive styles of unreasoned emotion. A common style of rejecting the claims of reason in some such devotional circles, he notes, was to argue that what one system-builder has established through rational means can be dismantled by another. In response, Sitanath declares that the progress of knowledge is based on the fact that there are laws of thought and rules of valid syllogistic arguments which are binding on all individuals (Tattvabhushan 1909: 60). For an example of the viewpoint that Sitanath is criticising here, consider the argument of Bhaktivinoda Thakur that according to Caitanya, our rational capacities cannot approach the divine reality: ‘[Yukti] as he styles reason, is quite incompetent in such a matter’ (Datta 1896: 23). In contrast, Sitanath develops a standpoint which is, he notes, a form of metaphysical idealism which has affinities with Vedāntic philosophy and also with Hegelian Christianity, and is based on the view that all theological questions are ultimately metaphysical topics and can be properly answered only through strict philosophical inquiry. Such a metaphysical system would incorporate the highest elements of ancient and modern thought, and constitute ‘the soundest basis for a religion’ which, on the one hand, rejects appeals to prophets and scriptures, and, on the other

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hand, seeks the unification of thought, feeling, and action (Tattvabhushan 1909: 37–38). In the theological writings of Sitanath, we return to the familiar grounds of Brahmo rationalism, articulated in different ways by figures such as Rammohun, Debendranath, Akshaykumar, and others, which seeks to cut through dense layers of beliefs and practices relating to scriptural revelations, gurus, and forms of ritual worship. Thus, Sitanath argues that if we were to accept a scripture or a prophet as divinely sent, we would need to have a significant body of knowledge which is independent of that particular scripture or prophet – for instance, we should know that God exists and is omniscient and omnibenevolent, that human beings have the capacity for receiving such revelations directly from God, that others have the capacity for understanding what the prophets have declared, and so on. Since reason is able to apprehend such truths, we may presume that it is also able to grasp other truths of religion without having to rely on an external revelation, especially since various truths which were historically supposed to lie beyond the reach of reason have now entered into its domain. Moreover, there can be no divine revelation unless human beings have a certain power of understanding which can apprehend such a revelation, and this power is common both to inspired prophets and to other human beings. Therefore, the prophets have received their revelations through natural human capacities, and we too should accept their statements not on the basis of their external authority but by using our own powers of seeing, hearing, and understanding (Tattvabhushan 1909: 52–54). Sitanath cautions his readers that though the Brahmo Samaj has rejected this supernaturalist understanding of revelation, it persists in a subtle form in, for instance, the views of Pratap Chandra and his followers who represent reason as an unreliable guide in religious matters, and faith as the only pathway to truth. Noting that such Brahmos repudiate the methods of science and philosophy, and claim that a ‘spiritual sense’ or ‘inspiration’ gives us immediate access to divine truths, Sitanath argues that all human faculties – whether reason or faith – are fallible, and unless their deliverances are properly tested through scientific canons they cannot produce any objective truth (Tattvabhushan 1909: 54–56). 1

Sitanath and the ‘Intuitions’ of Brahmo Devotion

According to Sitanath, key figures in the Brahmo Samaj who accepted the power of intuition to reveal truths relating to God did not develop philosophical analyses to demonstrate its universality and irresistibility. They lived in the age of the childhood of the Samaj which was governed by an attitude of

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trust and was driven by a spiritual quest, and a critical spirit had not yet been awakened (Tattvabhushan 1909: 19–21). Furthermore, their notion of intuitive knowledge was based on a dualistic understanding of the relation between God and humanity which cannot, however, be the proper foundation of yoga – since God is the support of everything, infinite, and the one without a second there is nothing that is independent (svatantra) of God and to see God is to see everything indivisibly in association with God in the light of spiritual knowledge. The members of the Brahmo Samaj of India, on their part, have based everything on faith and are satisfied merely with faith (biśvās niẏei). Though faith can indeed lead to pure love and devotion, and even the aspiration for yoga, it cannot, however, place yoga on a firm conceptual basis (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 214–15). Sitanath argues that such styles of preaching Brahmoism by appealing to intuitions which are supposed to be beyond examination or to unreasoning faith in a specific leader should be discarded and Brahmoism should instead be rigorously defended through universal reason – more specifically, through a mode of scientific thinking which does not accept any statement without careful inquiry, and of philosophy which unifies all knowledge and which is ‘the only final authority on religious as well as other matters’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 26–27). The defenders of such an intellectual turn in the Brahmo Samaj should seek to provide rational evidences of Brahmoism which will stand the test of scientific and philosophical enquiry, rather than simply appeal to a subjective faith as the foundation of Brahmoism (Tattvabhushan 1909: 34–35). Sitanath could have been aware that in response to Keshub’s claims about intuitive knowledge as the basis of the religion of the Brahmos, the Reverend S. Dyson had outlined as many as sixty questions (Sen 1892: 124–35). Therefore, Sitanath devotes a significant amount of philosophical attention to the doctrine of intuitive knowledge which was articulated, as we have seen in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, also by Debendranath and Rajnarayan. He declares that there is, in fact, no ‘royal road to true religion’ called the intuitive faculty for it can be as unreliable a guide as our everyday cognitive powers. Individuals who have moved beyond a stage of uncritical reception should not rely on supernaturally inspired prophets or divinely revealed scriptures – their thought should be utterly free ‘from the trammels of all powers external to itself’. While they should certainly study the works of their ancestors and their contemporaries, they should ultimately ‘regard themselves as a law unto themselves’, for they are rational beings who will not be swayed by the pronouncements of prophets, scriptures, or voices of the majority (Tattvabhushan 1909: 61–63). Therefore, critiquing the notion that religious truth which is supernaturally revealed is free from all error, on the grounds that the fallibility of the human mind is counteracted by the ‘divine influx’, Sitanath argues that such religious

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inspiration is not an infallible means of communicating truth and the conditions for the reception of spiritual truth are similar to those for the reception of truth in other human domains. If the conditions are favourable spiritual truth is revealed as clearly as the truths of natural science, but if they are not favourable spiritual truth becomes mixed with erroneous elements, so that scriptural texts cannot be regarded as infallible. We should therefore read scriptures in the ‘same liberal and yet reverent manner’ in which we read good literary texts, keeping in mind that the supreme divinity who had inspired the authors of the scriptures is also assisting us in comprehending their meanings and taking us to truth (Tattvabhushan 1898: 28–30). Thus, Sitanath carries on into the twentieth century the Brahmo trajectory – which we have been tracing in previous chapters – of the rejection of appeals to miraculous interventions in natural causality and descents of divinity into particular intermediaries who are said to be specially gifted with spiritual powers. Though Sitanath argues in this manner that the doctrine of intuition is defective in the specific formulations given to it by Debendranath and Keshub, he notes that it yet remains ‘substantially true’. He disagrees with the fundamental view that we have distinct faculties such as sense-perception, logical understanding, spiritual intuition, and so on for knowing different types of objects. Rather, ‘the act of knowing is indivisible’ and the mind, which is a unity, also has one undivided power of knowing (Tattvabhushan 1909: 69–70). Clarifying the nature of intuition, he notes three characteristics which it is supposed to have – universality, spontaneity, and self-evidence – and indicates why we cannot readily move from our intuitions to reality. Regarding the first, the mere universality of a belief does not demonstrate its objective validity – just as the belief in the reality of demons and witches was once almost universal, it is possible that some beliefs which are almost universally held today will later be shown to be false. Secondly, a belief which is said to arise spontaneously in us and is not the conclusion of a chain of reasoning cannot be entirely trustworthy, for often a belief whose source is forgotten and which is transmitted to us can maintain such a strong hold on us that we regard it as indisputable. Thirdly, self-evidence is largely a subjective matter, so that what appears to be self-evident to one individual may not appear as such to another (Tattvabhushan 1909: 74–79). 2

Between the Brahman of Vedānta and the Absolute of Hegel

Having thus critiqued the notion of intuitive knowledge, a central concern of Sitanath’s The Philosophy of Brahmaism (1909) is to argue that self-consciousness

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is the basis of all our worldly knowledge, for the self is known to be the knower along with every object that the self knows. Sitanath’s philosophical pathway, which moves from self-consciousness to the God of love, is structured by five clusters of interrelated theses. The God to whom Sitanath points, with dense patterns of Hegel-inflected argumentation across his philosophical writings, is not some abstract notion but, as it turns out, is characterised by the loving nature of the God of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism – though, to be sure, Sitanath does not name his God as Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa. Firstly, the self which perceives and reasons is logically prior to the processes of perception and reasoning, and all objects of thinking, perceiving, and imagining too are related to this self which is their subject. While it is true that in our unreflective moments we do not directly entertain the proposition ‘I know’, we yet know implicitly that we are related to the objects of knowledge as their subject, so that ‘[a]ll knowledge … contains, either explicitly or implicitly, the knowledge of the self as the subject or knower’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 97). Even if we were to claim that there are things out there which exist unknown to us, that is, unrelated to us as knowers, it is we who are thus re-presenting them, so that the claim that things can exist without any relation whatsoever to the self is, Sitanath concludes, a conceptual contradiction (Tattvabhushan 1909:102–103). He also rejects the view of naturalism that there is an unknowable something called insentient matter which is the cause of our sensations, by arguing that we do not have to appeal to such an extra-mental substance to explain the origination of our sensations – it is the conscious self which is the cause and the support of our sensations (Tattvabhushan 1916: 58–73). In no case do we apprehend a ‘mere object’ which is an alien reality entirely unrelated to the knowing subject; rather, in all our perceptions, ‘the whole concrete reality known is a subject-object or an indivisible Spirit which distinguishes itself from the object and at the same time comprehends it within its sphere of consciousness’. When we know objects, we know this Spirit which is both in us and in the objects, which is both subjective and objective, and which is both our self and the self of the world. Though we thus know, in truth, the Spirit even in direct perception we do not, however, properly re-cognise the Spirit because our wrong understanding of objects – as unrelated to a knowing self – obscures our grasp of the reality of the Spirit. As these misunderstandings are removed through proper philosophical knowledge, the Spirit becomes manifested as the subject-object in every instance of perceptual knowledge (Tattvabhushan 1909: 105–106). Secondly, the omnipresence of the Spirit is further indicated by the fact that the finite self which distinguishes one spatial object from another, and one temporal event from another, cannot itself be limited within spatial and

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temporal boundaries. The external relations such as here and there imply the non-spatiality of the all-comprehending Spirit which holds together all the diverse and discrete spatial entities, and the external relations such as before and after imply the eternal Spirit which stands above the passage of temporal events. Just as the Spirit could not know space and spatial relations if it were itself another spatial entity, the Spirit could not be a knower of events if it were itself another fleeting temporal event (Tattvabhushan 1909: 108–12). In every act of knowledge, then, the Spirit manifests itself as our finite self which is necessarily related to the known objects, and this Spirit itself is the absolute knowledge ( jñāna) which is not subject to any transformation. Our forms of empirical knowledge, which come into being and pass away, have as their basis this Spirit which is both the self of the world and our innermost self (Tattvabhushan 1909: 114–16). However, in our everyday knowledge, we identify ourselves exclusively with our finite instruments of knowing, such as the senses and the understanding, and as a result we are unable to apprehend the Spirit which is the basis both of our acts of knowing and of the natural world that we seek to know. The individual self and the natural world, which are related as subject and object, should be properly understood as incorporated in, and also transcended by, the indivisible Spirit, for our knowledge of spatio-temporal entities is grounded in our knowledge of a non-spatial and timeless reality which is the innermost self of everything. In other words, the self that we regard as our own has two aspects which are distinct though they are inseparable – the universal and the individual. The universal self is the support of the universe and the individual self is the self-consciousness which is the basis of our knowledge of finite objects (Tattvabhushan 1916: 86–87). Thirdly, drawing together our discussion in the previous two paragraphs, we conclude that knowledge is to be understood as the concrete reality of two interrelated moments of unity and difference – self-consciousness and objectconsciousness. Therefore, the subjective idealist who speaks of a ‘knowledge without objects’ makes an error which is the mirror-opposite of that of the naturalist who postulates an ‘unknowable object’ (Tattvabhushan 1916: 100– 102). In other words, although the mind and the world do not exist independently of the Spirit, they ‘are not denied a real and distinct place therein’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 151–52). While self-consciousness is the necessary basis of specific forms of object-consciousness, this self-consciousness itself cannot be manifested without the constant accompaniment of specific forms of object-consciousness. That is, the self must know itself to be the knower in every instance of its knowledge, and it can know itself to be the knower only if it knows something which it can distinguish from itself. Therefore, Sitanath rejects J. S. Mill’s sensationalism which states that the entities which we

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perceive are merely series of fleeting sensations and are composed of aggregates of possible sensations. Nearer at home, Sitanath also rejects the Advaita claim which he reads as the thesis that the finite world is utterly unreal: rather, we should view, he writes, the world as a reality which is dependent on God. The creation of this real world is the mystery that the timeless, omniscient, and infinite reality is somehow manifested as temporal, ignorant, and finite individuals (Tattvabhushan 1916: 141–45). The Absolute, properly understood, is not that which is utterly beyond all differences but that which supports objects, events, and limits, and is also distinct from the finite entities which really exist. The true relation between the finite self and the infinite self is therefore neither a pure dualism nor a pure monism but a unity-in-difference, where the finite self knows that the supreme self of infinite knowledge, love, and holiness is present within it, worships the supreme self with love, and prays to the supreme self, while striving every day for a deeper spiritual union (Tattvabhushan 1916: 163). Fourthly, according to this idealism which is shaped by the motif of unityin-difference, while God is the very life of the worshipper into whose heart God infuses spiritual elements such as faith, love, and humility, the worshipper remains distinct from the infinitely perfect God, so that in the act of worship ‘unity and difference are wonderfully blended’ (Tattvabhushan 1916: 165–66). The finite consciousness of the individual is a real manifestation of the eternal consciousness, and its difference from the infinite consciousness is as true as its unity with it. If we are thus able to see the natural world not as a domain which is independent of mind but as the manifestation of Spirit, the laws of science such as causality too are viewed as the laws of thought, which is why they cannot not be invariable. By reflecting properly, in the light of philosophical understanding, on this uniformity of nature, scientific agnosticism or atheism, declares Sitanath, ‘unavoidably becomes theistic’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 128). In this manner, an analysis of our beliefs relating to the world, humanity, and a moral order would ‘necessarily imply a belief in an infinite and perfect Being’. All our cognitive processes and our experiences point to an omniscient spirit who is the basis of everything, and who is infinite life and infinite love. Such a conceptual exploration would indicate that in knowing ourselves and in knowing the world, we directly know God, even if we do not properly recognise God (Tattvabhushan 1909: 84–85). Though our individual lives indeed have a finite beginning, in the sense that a specific series of events was initiated, this series, and also the events preceding this series, are held together in the unity of consciousness of the eternal God. Sitanath therefore invites the reader to reflect on the great truth that we embody in our finite existence – namely, the support of all creation who is being studied by science in the wider world ‘is manifest

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here as the maker of this small drama of my life’ (Tattvabhushan 1916: 128–29). In contrast, materialism ultimately leads to forms of scepticism and agnosticism, and the only remedy is a form of idealism which holds that though the material world is distinct from mind, it is merely an abstraction when considered without relation to any mind. Fifthly, moving into more exegetical terrain, the idealist position which has been outlined in this manner also provides a clue to a proper understanding of the Upaniṣads. Sitanath argues that we should distinguish between two notions of difference – one which is opposed to unity and the other which is necessarily related to unity. Some of the expounders of the Upaniṣads have rejected a popular dualism where subject and object are viewed as independently existing entities; however, they have also mistakenly sought to remove all difference whatsoever by claiming that the difference between subject and object is an illusion and is not present in the universal self. The idealism presented in the Upaniṣads should, however, be understood as an Absolute Idealism in which subject and object, and the individual and the universal, are related as distinct from, and also as one with, each other (Tattvabhushan 1921: 34). It is also a mistake to think that the notion of love is absent from the Upaniṣads, for these texts tell us that for those who discern the universal self in everything the entire world becomes dear, and that whatever is dear to us is dear because of the universal self in them. This love should not be misunderstood as the love of an abstract unity which is utterly devoid of differentiations, where the cultivation of such love would imply forms of world-renunciation (Tattvabhushan 1921: 89–94). In truth, we should love the universal self not only in our own person but also in all fellow-beings who are near to us and also far away from us (Tattvabhushan 1921: 101). 3

From the Upaniṣads towards Kṛṣṇa

Through these rather dense meditations, at the confluences of the Upaniṣads and Hegel, on self-consciousness as related to object-consciousness, which are grounded in and are yet distinct from the universal Spirit, Sitanath thus arrives at the summit of devotional love, which he argues is the true fulfilment of the philosophical quest. The Brahmo quest for harmonization, which we have discussed in Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, again appears here, as Sitanath argues in his rational reconstruction of Brahmo bhakti that philosophical enquiries have no value unless they are directed at an understanding of the love of God. Thus, he notes: ‘A consciousness of the love of God is at once the strength and the sweetness of the religious life. If a philosophy of religion stops

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short of placing this truth on a firm, unassailable basis, it does not deserve the name of philosophy’ (Tattvabhushan 1909: 191). At the same time, such a theistic view is to be distinguished, as we have seen, from the ‘popular dualism’ which views God, the mind, and the natural world as three separate entities. While forms of dualism are accepted by a great majority of the members of the Brahmo Samaj, true Brahmoism is the form of monism which states that to know the natural world is to know it as one with the divine reality, and to know the self is to know it as one with the supreme self. The infinite reality includes within its being the natural world and the finite selves which are correlated in unity and in difference (Tattvabhushan 1909: 148–50). Therefore, it is incorrect to think that the scriptures speak of liberation in terms of the annihilation of the self; rather, according to both the Upaniṣads and the Brahmasūtras, ‘the state of final deliverance is one of fundamental unity with a relative difference, and not of absolute, undifferenced unity with the Supreme’ (Tattvabhushan 1898: 131). This standpoint of difference and non-difference (bhedābheda) is, indeed, the central teaching of the Bhagavadgītā which avoids two erroneous positions – first, dualism where we have an unknown God who becomes to the worshipper a finite being with superhuman powers, and second, pure monism where the aspirant is ultimately unreal and there is no room for spiritual development (Tattvabhushan 1944: 249–50). Given his own standpoint which he depicts as difference and non-difference (bhedābheda), it is not surprising that Sitanath sympathises with Caitanya and his followers in their rejection of an Advaitic māyāvāda. According to the theological stalwarts of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, the Lord is both different and non-different (bhedābheda) from the world, and this relation is inconceivable (acintya) because it cannot be adequately explained in terms of the relation between a whole and its parts, a substance and its attributes, or an ordinary object and its power (Kapoor 2008: 155). Broadly following this Vaiṣṇava notion, Sitanath writes that he seeks a monism which is ‘interested not in denying the reality of [an empirical] world, but in showing its relativity to and dependence on the Infinite and the Absolute’ (Tattvabhushan 1912: 144). However, Sitanath also cautions us that an opposition to Advaita should not lead us to an uncritical faith but should help us to rationally construct a ‘truer and more comprehensive philosophy of life, in all its varied phrases …’ (Tattvabhushan 1909:164). The ‘Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa cult’ of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, Sitanath claims, lacks serious philosophical grounding and is also rendered defective by sensuous, immoral, and idolatrous elements. We have to understand true religion as a relation between human beings who are only relatively good and the supremely good divine reality – if the monists such as the followers of Śaṃkara err in dissolving the finite into the infinite, the Vaiṣṇavites ‘virtually deny the Perfect

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by obliterating all moral distinctions whatever and representing the Absolute as incessantly thirsting after enjoyment’ (Tattvabhushan 1926:109). Moreover, the principal reason for the revitalisation of the Vaiṣṇava scriptures among the educated people is precisely the lack of a critical approach to scripture, so that various events centred around the life of Kṛṣṇa are presented as historical. The fires of historical criticism, Sitanath argues, will burn away the impurities which encrust the form of the mythical (paurāṇik) Kṛṣṇa, so that the spiritual (ādhyātmik) Kṛṣṇa will shine forth clearly. Sitanath doubts that there was a historical Kṛṣṇa who gave instructions to a historical Arjuna on the battlefield – rather, we should understand that Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa, as the finite self and the supreme self, are present in every human person and there the dialogue of the Bhagavadgītā goes on at all times (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 187–89). For Sitanath, the spectres of Vaiṣṇavism are reminiscent of the religious sensibilities of Keshub under whose influence devotional worship included congregational singing (saṃkīrtan) of the glories of God. He notes that Keshub and his followers revitalised the familial and the social systems of the Brahmo Samaj with their fervent repentance (tībra anutāp), earnest prayer (byākul prārthanā), and luminous reasoning. Keshub initiated a new devotional form which was based on the experience (anubhūti) of the nature of Brahman as active love, and delivered enthusiastic sermons about the love of God which generated a storm of sentiment (bhāber jhaṛ) among the listeners. However, during this revolutionary transformation, when aspects of Vaiṣṇava devotion entered Brahmo modes of worship, the members were devoid of a philosophical and a historical consciousness. As a result, some Brahmos who were unable to distinguish between the essence of dharma and the inessential elements became Vaiṣṇava, and even among some of the rest there remains a dangerous (bipadjanak) inclination towards Vaiṣṇavism. We again hear in Sitanath the critiques levelled by the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj against Bijoy Krishna which we studied in Chapter 4, as he laments that in the case of some Brahmos the introspective sense of the presence of the impurity of sin (pāper malinatā) and the darkness of unbelief (abiśvāser andhakār), and also the shining examples of some holy individuals, have led them to revere an intermediary (madhyabarttī) between God and humanity who they believe would lead them onwards on the spiritual path. Such a conviction in the soteriological significance of an intermediary, who is directly inspired by God and on whose knowledge and faith they can rely, is difficult to uproot in the absence of a direct (sākṣāt) knowledge of Brahman. This spiritual danger remains present, even if in a hidden manner, and emerges wherever we see a blind reliance on a specific leader or an unreflective acceptance of the prevalent views (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 205–208). In contrast, the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Sitanath declares, is based on the

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faith that every man and every woman is the manifestation and the eternal sport of the living God ( jībanta īśvarer ābirbhāb o nityalīlāte biśvās), and this belief cannot be rejected for forms of authoritarianism in the name of any kind of spirituality (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 210–11). Reflective of the type of spiritual autocracy that Sitanath had in mind would have been Keshub’s declaration in 1879 that people who claim that he has been driven by his own imaginative fancies should know that ‘to protest against the cause I uphold is to protest against the dispensations of God Almighty, the God of all Truth and Holiness’ (Sen 1901: 352). According to Sitanath, such Brahmo tendencies of reliance on Keshub-like figures in the spiritual life can be avoided through a proper reading of the ancient scriptures so that we understand that they do not point to the soteriological necessity of intermediaries between God and humanity. He argues that the Bhagavadgītā does not present Kṛṣṇa as a divine being who appears in a specific time and place – rather, by following the Upanisads, we should understand Kṛṣṇa as the universal self free from all worldly limitations (Tattvabhushan 1944 395). The concept of a special incarnation which states that the divinity is perfectly expressed in a particular human being is, in fact, a departure from the teaching of the Upaniṣads that the supreme reality is universally present in, and is the eternal ground of, all things. Sitanath argues that such an Upaniṣad-shaped Hindu theism is the highest stage of spiritual development, which is based not on the authority of scriptural texts or intermediaries but on the vision of the indivisible divinity in which finite and infinite are inseparable (Tattvabhushan 1898: 14–16). 4

The Vaiṣṇava Devotion of a Hegelian Brahmo

If Sitanath thus arrived, through complex philosophical routes, at a devotional theism, his childhood roots lay in a devotional family which was centred around the worship of the image of Caitanya, congregational singing, the chariot festival, and so on (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 3–4). He became an active follower of Keshub, and the teachings and the forms of worship developed by Keshub deeply influenced him. Thus, an entry in his diary from 1874 reads: ‘I live, who am I? God is my life, God sustains me through God’s love, because of God I continue to live. All my activities are of God, I am of God, the sole aim of my life is God, my entire life is dedicated to God … When I have the conviction that “I am”, I will have a direct faith in the existence of God (īśvarer astitver pratyakṣa biśvās haibe)’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 24). Four years later, he laments: ‘My heart has not approached you after becoming purified by the tears of

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repentance – thus it remains so dry and lifeless. When will my worldliness go away, my heart become drawn powerfully to you in love, my entire life become purified? As long as I am near you, I shall taste heaven, my heart will remain tender … Lord, can you not bring it about that I never become detached (bichhinna) from you? Make my heart simple through love – otherwise, of what use are external means? Protect me from the dryness and the madness of the world. Take me to a completely new world; may I fulfil my life with sentiments of devotion, dependence, and service in my heart’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 34). In 1899, Sitanath gently chides himself for his absorption in the philosophical quest for God: ‘The urgent need of bhakti sometimes presses upon my soul … The tenor of my life has been, for the last few years, too much speculative’. A few years later, he writes in 1906 that monism has had a ‘dazzling effect’ on him, and he is now beginning to see that for the sustenance of the religious life he needs to emphasise more clearly the difference between God and humanity (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 79). This devotional accent on the pathway to God is clearly highlighted in an evocative prayer which he records on 27 February 1937: ‘The world does not give me happiness. My happiness lies only in experiencing your love (tomār premānubhab-i). Without that experience I am unhappy … That your children will know you, will look towards you in response to your loving glance, will laugh in response to your loving laughter – you keep on waiting for that auspicious moment’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 143). Sitanath’s crisscrossing intellectual trajectories across the philosophical territories of monisms, dualisms, and idealisms – both Indic and western, and both Upaniṣadic and Hegelian – are highlighted by him in the preface to his book Brahmasadhan, which was published in 1916. He indicates that his system has as its foundation, the ‘Monodualistic Theism’ of the Upaniṣads which is partly modified by Hegel’s idealism as it has been interpreted by his English followers; as its superstructure, the active form of bhakti taught by Keshub; and as its entrance, the notion of karma which is ‘essentially the Christian ideal of perfection’ though it is corrected by the teachings of the Bhagavadgītā and the self-realisation of the western idealists. Perhaps with one eye on the raging debates, which we have indicated in previous chapters, over whether the Brahmo Samaj is ‘parochial’ or ‘universalist’, Sitanath adds a terse note: ‘The author does not care whether the system set forth here be called national or eclectic’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 94). Sitanath was himself aware that his Brahmoism was regarded by some of his contemporaries as heterodox, though he believed that it was ‘really the most orthodox form of Hinduism  …’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 152). Something of the complex entanglements of Sitanath’s philosophical trajectories is indicated by his statement in the preface to his Philosophy of Brahmaism that if his metaphysical views ‘ally him to Hegelianism and partly

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to the school of Sankara’, his views on the hereafter and the love of God ‘clearly distinguish his position from these schools and show his affinity’ to Rāmānuja and Vaiṣṇavism (Tattvabhushan 1909: vii). Throughout his moments of doubt, uncertainty, and darkness, Sitanath sought to develop a pathway to God which would be philosophically rigorous and based on independent thinking, for he believed that if religious faith were not based on knowledge and clarified through logical reasoning, it would be shaken by doubt and be transformed into unbelief. 5

The Brahmo Samaj and Its Philosophical Foundations

In Sitanath’s philosophical reflections, which are produced from the 1890s at the dynamic intersections of intellectual currents derived from the Upaniṣads and British Hegelianisms, we have a Brahmo Samaj which has become highly self-reflexively aware of its premodern roots and its diverse contemporary routes. Sitanath argues that the form of service used in the Brahmo Samaj at the time of Rammohun was devoid of emotive dimensions because their members had moved away from the worship of images, which is why their liturgy was simple and elementary. Because Vaiṣṇavism is associated with the worship of images and incarnations of the divine reality, they avoided any connection with Vaiṣṇava systems (Tattvabhushan 1909: 245). However, the appeal to religious intuitions and the emergence of devotional affectivities through Keshub, in a later stage, have not yet become stabilised in the lifeworlds of the Brahmos, which is why he seeks to provide a philosophical basis for the faith of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. In the existential trajectory which led Bipin Chandra towards the Brahmo Samaj, and then to receiving initiation from Bijoy Krishna, we discern certain socioreligious junctures which are similar to those we noticed in Sitanath. For instance, both came from devout Hindu backgrounds and both broke away from their familial contexts on the crucial question of caste. In his autobiographical reflections, Bipin Chandra writes that from around the age of twelve he actively participated in the worship of the goddess Durgā, with the recitation of mantras and the sacrificial offerings of goats (Pal 1932: 91–98). After his mother’s death, he performed the funerary śrādh ceremonies on the banks of the Ganges, and for almost a year he also performed the monthly śrādh under the supervision of a priest. However, towards the end of that year, and before the first anniversary of her death, he abandoned his traditional beliefs, which was the ‘first cause of open rupture’ between him and his father (Pal 1932: 165–66). When he came to Calcutta in 1874 from Sylhet, he was

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initially repelled by the Brahmo Samaj of Keshub with its ‘excessive and abnormal religiosity’ which was centred around talk of sin and salvation, and prayer and worship (Pal 1932: 227). He was instead drawn to Sivanath whose views had ‘a stronger note of rationalism than the prevailing Brahmo doctrines’ and were infused with the spirit of freedom, individualism, and social work (Pal 1932: 235). The freedom in the Brahmoism of Sivanath was, in Bipin Chandra’s estimate, more extensive than in the Brahmoism of Keshub – while the latter was largely concerned with religious life, the former included the extension of liberties to women and the end of political subjugation (Pal 1932: 239). Sometime around 1877, he was initiated into a small group under Sivanath, and they resolved to fight against their sensual appetites and also social evils such as caste, seclusion of women, and ritual ceremonialism. Although this group died out after the formation of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in 1878, he gradually became an anusthanic Brahmo who sought to regulate all aspects of his living in accordance with ‘the Brahmo ideals of rationalism and freedom’ (Pal 1932: 244–45). When Bipin Chandra openly rejected all caste restrictions after he joined the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, his father excommunicated and disowned him. Thus, he had become an apostate in the eyes of his father: ‘I would never have done this at the call of any sectarian religion or theology. It was the fuller idea of freedom of our small group that led me to repudiate ancient caste and customs’ (Pal 1932: 249). If Bipin Chandra was drawn in this manner to the themes of social reform and rationalism in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, he also seems to have remained deeply rooted in certain traditional forms of devotional experience. His lecture on Keshub at Keshub’s death anniversary on January 8, 1892 was received enthusiastically by Keshub’s supporters and the official paper of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj had to produce an article with the title: ‘A Much-needed Disclaimer’. He writes that after his address was published in the Indian Mirror, a journal started by Keshub, he began to read Keshub’s works and was surprised to see that in parts of his own address he had unwittingly used the words of Keshub. He writes that he found this experience ‘mystic’ – almost as if the spirit of the departed Keshub had inspired those portions. He notes: ‘I do not think I have any mystic element in my composition. I am, if anything, a stern rationalist. Yet I have had experiences that could hardly be explained by ordinary reason. These experiences helped to confirm my conviction that there was a Higher Power that constantly watched over us’ (Pal 1932: 457). He believed that through the influence of Keshub, and more particularly that of Bijoy Krishna, the Brahmo Samaj was recovering some of the higher ideals of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism which most people, who were unaware of its social egalitarianism and humanism, would associate merely with forms of

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sensualism (Pal 1932: 181–82). He presents the Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas as divided into two groups in Bengal – the first accepts Caitanya’s religious message but ignores his teachings relating to social democracy, and continues to follow Brahmanical prescriptive norms, while the second are the ‘caste Vaiṣṇavas’ who follow Caitanya’s message of social freedom, and as they stand outside the spectrum of caste they are regarded almost as untouchables by the upper castes (Pal 1932: 270). Against this backdrop, Bipin Chandra proceeds to present Vaiṣṇavism, in vocabularies deeply infused with evolutionary notions and Hegelianism, as the ideal religion. He writes that there is an idea of cosmic perfection which underpins, as a ‘regulative ideal’, the progressive and the rational evolution of the universe, and this idea is contained in a cosmic person. This supreme conscious personality is Viṣṇu such that the universe has its being as the object of divine knowledge and divine love (Pal 1939: 45–46). The evolutionary processes taking place in the world point to a perfect and eternally realised order which is being revealed in time and space, and which is present in the eternal consciousness of the supremely personal divine reality of the Lord. Reworking some traditional philosophical-theological concepts into Hegelian vocabularies, Bipin Chandra writes that according to Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, God as the knower, the enjoyer, and the agent is called puruṣa and the object of God’s knowing, enjoying, and willing is called prakṛti. Here puruṣa and prakṛti are not two independent entities but constitute the same being which is selfdifferentiated for the creative play (līlā) of the Lord (Pal 1933:10). Further, the foundational concept of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism is that this play is an eternal series of differentiations and re-integrations – prakṛti becomes separated from puruṣa and is in the process of becoming united again with puruṣa. Thus, all the worldly realities which constitute prakṛti have two aspects – the ‘eternally realised’ aspect of perfection in the eternal being of God and the ‘progressively realising’ aspect of temporal entities which are moving from imperfection towards perfection. Therefore, the entities of the world and social relations are not an illusion or a dream but are eternally real in the eternal being of God who is not an abstraction but the concrete universal (Pal 1933: 12–14). In line with this rejection of an Advaita position, Bipin Chandra argues that the unity of Brahman is not an undifferentiated unity but a self-differentiated unity, so that both unity and differentiation are real in Brahman. We may use Hegelian language, he notes, to say that God, the Absolute, differentiates Godself from Godself to return to Godself to be Godself. The world-process itself is not illusory, he emphasises, though its reality is derived from the reality of God (Pal 1939: 61–62). Again, transposing classical Vaiṣṇava concepts into Hegelian registers, he writes that the separation of Godself from Godself is the

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‘descent’ of God into the world, namely, the avatāra who is the objectification of God while the becoming perfect of the avatāra, who is the differentiated self of God, in and through the world, is the re-turn of Godself to Godself. Reflecting the theology of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theologian Jīva Gosvāmin, he argues that Brahman is the aspect of the Absolute which is expressed in cosmic phenomena, Paramātman is the aspect of the Absolute which is expressed in our cognitive, emotional, and volitional life, and Bhagavān is the Absolute who holds together the outer cosmic order and the inner spiritual order (Pal 1939: 95–99). Thus, Bhagavān is the highest category in the Vaiṣṇava religious understanding, and is the full and perfect person in whom ‘the process of the eternal self-differentiation of the Absolute is completed’ (Pal 1939: 99–100). Through this self-differentiation, the Absolute becomes its own object of knowledge and love, and this process is completed in the supremely personal reality who is Bhagavān. Both Brahman, which is the synthesis of our experiences of the external cosmic order, and Paramātman, which is the synthesis of our experiences of the inner spiritual order, are abstractions and it is in Bhagavān, who is the ‘Absolute Personality’, that we are able to understand the truth of selfdependent divine personality (Pal 1939:103). For Bipin Chandra, this divine reality of the transcendentally perfect Bhagavān is the telos of humanity on its evolutionary march towards spiritual fulfilment. While we are imperfect human beings who are developing from weakness to strength, ignorance to knowledge, and selfishness to love, we have perfect and eternally realised archetypes beyond our earthly habitations within which we are involved in evolutionary progress towards our spiritual fulfilment in Bhagavān. In the being of the fully personal God, there is an eternally perfect relationality of social order which is composed of innumerable forms of prakṛti, so that the love and the service which we experience imperfectly on earth have their eternal archetypes in God. We have in the ideal social order of that celestial Vṛndāvana the perfect humanity with perfect social life and relations which are governed by the law of selfless love (Pal 1933: 15–17). Bipin Chandra thus presents the mutuality of God and humanity with the terminologies of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism where the supreme summit of devotion is the ‘reciprocal love’ between the Lord and the devotee, who is a power of the Lord, such that each member ‘of the loving relation feels spiritually deficient and void without the other and finds [its] fulfilment only in the other’ (Chakravarti 1969: 196). This summit is the rāgātmikā-bhakti which binds the residents of Vṛndāvana to Kṛṣṇa: the residents are the powers (śaktis) whose love for Kṛṣṇa is spontaneous and whose self-effacing love serves as the transcendental model for the rāgānuga-bhakti which is being cultivated by devotees on earth. For the cultivation of such rāgānuga-bhakti, a devotee

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vicariously participates in the mood (bhāva) of a particular attendant (parikara) of Kṛṣṇa, by adopting the dress (veśa) and the habit (svabhāva) of that dear one. By thus keeping in mind the transcendental sport (līlā) of Vṛndāvana, the devotee imaginatively constructs oneself as the beloved of Kṛṣṇa and vicariously experiences the sentiments of the eternal attendant for Kṛṣṇa (Chakravarti 1969: 214–15). Transposing these motifs into a contemporary idiom, Bipin Chandra writes that when he observes celestial and terrestrial phenomena, the modes of existence in the animal kingdom, the natural beauty of the earth, and the worlds of human sociality, he discerns, in and through their imperfections, the eternally realised perfect forms which exist in the being of the Absolute and which are the true significance, goal, and fulfilment of our finite lives (Pal 1939: 170–74). As he withdraws into his inner self, away from the outer world and his social relations, he is drawn through an ‘irresistible logic’ to understand that behind his progressively developing personality lies an eternally perfect personality which is an eternal element of God’s thought, love, and will. In that perfect form, he has been, he writes, ‘a resident and a subject’ of the divine kingdom in which dwell, in their perfected forms, all his earthly relations (Pal 1939: 174–75). Therefore, regarding the highly volatile theme of ‘idolatry’ itself, Bipin Chandra argues that the ultimate reality is not formless or nirākar but has a spiritual form (chidākar). It is a mistake to think that whatever has form is material, and thus conclude that if God is without material form, God is utterly formless. This is because the real meaning of ‘form’ is anything which differentiates one entity from another; thus, we can speak of different immaterial thought-forms which are organised into words. In the context of the worship of the divine reality too, ‘form’, properly understood, refers to the aspect of differentiation between the worshipper and the worshipped (Pal 1933: 22–23). With these Hegelian rereadings of Vaiṣṇava theology, Bipin Chandra seeks to respond to the wider Brahmo and British critiques of Vaiṣṇavism as debased religiosity which we have discussed in the previous chapters. Representative of such critiques is J. Talboys Wheeler’s narrative of decline from Caitanya to the present: while Caitanya was an egalitarian social reformer, the gosains or the gurus who initiate the lay followers in the present day ‘receive little respect excepting from Hindoo females, who must be regarded as the main preservers of the superstitious ideas and usages amongst the more enlightened Hindoo community’ (Chunder 1869: xvi). Even more emphatically, a few years later, the Christian missionary George Gogerly (1871: 314–15) drew a direct causal link between the thieving character of the natives and the deceitful nature of the deities whom they worship. Pointing out that ‘Kristno’ was worshipped as the ‘butter thief’, he concludes: ‘The whole history of this famous god is one of

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lust, robbery, deceit, and murder … Hindooism, in a word, panders to the vilest passions of corrupt human nature, and degrades man below the level of the beasts’. Regarding such presentations of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism as superstitious sensuality and odious passion, Bipin Chandra argues that they are based on an ignorance of its deeper theology and aesthetics which direct us towards the supremely personal supersensuous God through sensuous forms of beauty (Pal 1933: 64–65). Re-envisioning this Vaiṣṇavism through Hegelian lenses, he states that the Lord is a self-differentiated unity and is striving for re-integration within the divine existence by leading the world of imperfection towards perfection. This divine ‘passion’ has as its worldly correlate the human desire for love which is the root of bhakti, a deep yearning for union with the Lord. Therefore, the devotees live in the constant consciousness of the presence of God in all things, and all their activities are directed not by self-regarding impulses but by a desire to fulfil the divine will, so that they seek to joyously imitate the divine sport in their own lives (Pal 1933: 53–56). The primal couple Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā themselves are to be understood through Hegelian concepts: Kṛṣṇa is puruṣa and Rādhā is prakṛti where they are not, in truth, two but one, though not in an undifferentiated unity but in a unity which encompasses an eternal process of self-differentiation. Through the Vaiṣṇava lyrics which are part of this form of religious devotion and which are centred around the sentiment of love (mādhurya-rasa), the devotees seek to ‘realise vicariously the supreme love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa …’ (Pal 1933: 73). Because their senses are purified in their spontaneous devotion to the Lord, who is supremely beautiful as the embodiment of all the rasas (nikhilarasāmṛtamūrti), they are able to discern the supersensuous divine reality within sensuous forms (Pal 1933: 95–96). Bipin Chandra argues that even in the deepest union there is present the agony of separation and he translates a Bengali lyric: ‘None has seen or heard of such attachment! Their souls are knit together by themselves. Locked in each other’s embrace they weep at the thought of separation. They die if they cannot see each other for half a moment’ (Pal 1933: 100). The spiritually refined Vaiṣṇavas are they who are able to read these lyrics as symbolic depictions of the relationship between the finite self and the supreme self, which assist in the cultivation of the supreme form of rāgānuga-bhakti, and not as merely sensual descriptions (Pal 1933: 101). 6

Conclusion

As members of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Sitanath and Bipin Chandra represent the wings of the Brahmos which were associated with radicalism,

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rationalistic styles of reading scriptural texts, and social egalitarianism. Further, as we have seen, both of them could employ vocabularies which were dense interweavings of Vedāntic concepts and Hegelian notions. Thus, Bipin Chandra argues that ‘whatever exists must exist in some consciousness which knows that it exists. This universe must, therefore, exist in Universal Consciousness’ (Pal 1939: 168). Again, he writes: ‘I have not seen God or Brahman. Yet I believe that God or Brahman exists because I find it impossible to discover any basis of my own rational, emotional and volitional life except on the hypothesis of the existence of an Absolute Will’ (Pal 1939: 170). Such a devotional faith, philosophically reconstructed through exegeses of the Upaniṣads and readings of Hegel, is reflected also in Sitanath’s statement from his forty-fifth birthday: ‘The spirit I call mine is the Universal Spirit itself – without beginning, without end. It has assumed this body as it has millions of others, and as it will in the infinite future … This life, though a small wave of the infinite ocean, is filled by the Infinite, contains nothing but the Infinite, and is guided every moment by infinite wisdom, power and goodness … The Spirit is fulfilling itself – through what seems follies and failures as well as through wisdom and success. In every moment of life, it is the Infinite Spirit that is working in me, as it is working in the world’ (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 75). Notwithstanding these philosophical affinities, however, unlike Sitanath who remained sharply critical of the ‘excesses’ of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, Bipin Chandra sought to highlight the allegorical interpretations of the divine lovegames of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. According to his reading of the religious history of Bengal, the message of Caitanya was corrupted by his followers, who even sought to align it with the monism of Śaṃkara’s Vedānta. A revival of the message was initiated through the movement of Rammohun, though Rammohun possessed, Bipin Chandra laments, little understanding of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, and, in fact, had a ‘strong prejudice’ against the viewpoints and the traditions of the Vaiṣṇava Goswamis. Moreover, Rammohun’s revised formulation of Śaṃkara’s monism could not satisfy the spiritual needs of the members of the Brahmo Samaj who sought a form of devotion which could be accommodated within Brahmo theology (Pal 1933: 141–42). This devotional form, Bipin Chandra declares, is the Vaiṣṇava worship of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa which he has sought to resituate within Brahmo universes through his discipleship to Bijoy Krishna. He argues, as we have seen, that our imperfect human body has as its ‘regulative ideal’ a perfect and eternally realised spiritual form, and it is in the light of this ideal that we make aesthetic judgements about different human forms. This perfect human form is, in fact, the spiritual form of Kṛṣṇa and is not subject to any change or decay (Pal 1933: 28–29). Therefore, the true significance of asceticism is not the eradication of human desires but their proper

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regulation and spiritualisation through self-control, which leads us to the realisation of the bliss of the Lord ‘in and through our relations of love and service’ (Pal 1933: 34). A somewhat different temperament marks Sivanath who, according to Bipin Chandra himself, was shaped by his English education and aspects of western socialism, and whose socioreligious sensibilities were characterised by a strong sense of independence and a powerful love of humanity. Before he became a leader of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Sivanath’s life was directed more by social reform than by religious devotion. He viewed spiritual exercises such as Brahmo forms of worship through the lens of logical reasoning and was not hospitable to the otherworldly dimensions of the religious life (Pal 1916:187–88). As we will see in the next chapter, Sivanath too struggled throughout his Brahmo career to carve out a distinctive spiritual pathway which would harmonise devotional piety and social reform, and the meditative quest for Brahman and the impassioned search for the divine beloved.

chapter 6

Sivanath Sastri and Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar: Between the Social Gospel and Brahmo Devotionalism Sivanath, a friend and associate of both Sitanath and Bipin Chandra, once lamented that some of his contemporaries lacked the courage to independently think and undertake courses of action, and therefore they have bound themselves, in the name of dharma, to certain holy individuals. Properly understood, however, the Brahmo Samaj is in the hands of God alone who has set on fire its members so that they can each shine brightly in a democratic association (sādhāraṇtantra) (Sastri 1903: 232). Therefore, the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, in Sivanath’s socioreligious vision, would seek to direct the spiritual instincts of people towards philanthropy, promote a sense of independence in worldly and in spiritual matters, and bring about the moral regeneration of the world. The different dimensions of social reform such as the abolition of caste distinctions, the education of women, and so on would be integral components of the work of the ‘theistic church’ of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. In Sivanath, we thus have another Brahmo who embodies a spectrum of religious subjectivities, ranging from Rammohun’s Unitarian-shaped emphases on social reform to Keshub’s styles of devotional intensity. Throughout his Brahmo career, he seems to have inhabited this dense affective-conceptual continuum where he vigorously championed a Brahmo social gospel directed to the poor and the oppressed, and also declared that the essence of the spiritual life is the cultivation of a loving communion with the supreme divinity who is infinite wisdom and love. (See Appendix E.) Sivanath would often criticise the religious quest of traditional forms of Hinduism which were directed at, he argued, subjective bliss and not the active service of humanity, leading to an immersion in human sentiment and a disregard of philanthropy and social reform. Unlike Bijoy Krishna and Sitanath, Sivanath came from a Śākta family, and till around 1867 he was not sympathetic to the forms of congregational singing associated with the Keshub group within the Brahmo Samaj. However, on the occasion of the first sankīrtan in Calcutta in that year, Sivanath had gone to the house of Keshub where he encountered Bijoy Krishna, with whom he had once studied in Sanskrit College, and he remained at the celebration till ten at night (Sarkar 1929: 13–14). Next year in 1869, the temple of Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India was inaugurated, and Sivanath was one of those who

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were received into the new organisation. However, even before he turned towards Keshub, he had begun to read, in around 1865 or 1866, the American Unitarian Theodore Parker’s Ten Sermons and Prayers which brought, as he notes in his autobiography, new vitality to his religious existence. Every night he would write a prayer in a notebook and go to sleep after reciting it, and during the day he would turn his thoughts towards God for around ten to fifteen minutes. He notes that as he began to pray in this manner, he experienced strength in his moments of weakness and he sincerely wished to follow the commandments of the God who dwells in the heart (Sastri 1918: 104–105). As he read Parker’s prayers which were full of sentiment and hope, he felt in his heart of hearts that God would not abandon him on the grounds that he was a sinner. He began to feel that a prayer that stems from a restless yearning (byākul prārthanā) would not be fruitless – he had himself received divine inspiration (preraṇā) and he was filled with joy (Sastri 1918: 107–108). If his spiritual life was thus beginning to be shaped by devotional affectivities, Sivanath also belonged, along with Keshub, Bijoy Krishna, Bipin Chandra, and some others, to the younger generation of Brahmos who were anxious for concrete social transformation, a fundamental index of which was to be the unequivocal rejection of the Brahmanical sacred thread. After joining the Brahmo Samaj, Sivanath too gave up his sacred thread and his father expelled him from his house – he would not, in fact, see his father again for around twenty years (Sarkar 1929: 16). He then became actively involved in Keshub’s social reform movements and wrote for Keshub’s pice paper, Sulabh Samachar. At this juncture of Sivanath’s autobiography, we begin to hear once again about the quest for the harmonization of polar existential impulses which we have encountered in Debendranath, Keshub, Rajnarayan, Bijoy Krishna, and Sitanath – this time from an individual with a strong socially activist orientation who is seeking the depths of the spiritual life. Thus, Sivanath writes that though he was more interested in ‘Practical Religion’ than in ‘Theology’, he was disheartened to think that he was unable to restrain his dispositions and orient them towards spiritual advancement. He read the biographies of renowned individuals and he was gladdened to read about how they had struggled through adverse conditions to reach their goals, and he saw their lives as illustrations of the realities of human effort and divine grace (Sastri 1918: 139–40). When he decided to give up the sacred thread and encountered strong opposition from his parents, he experienced an intense inner conflict between filial love and his Brahmo conviction. His health began to decline and he threw himself at the feet of God, considering God as his sole refuge (ananyagati haiẏā). Abandoning his own reasoning and sense of agency (bicār o kartṛtva), he said to God in prayer again and again, ‘You do with me whatever you will’. And as

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he prayed thus, in a few days he experienced a wonderful transformation – all his fears disappeared, and he experienced a great strength and enthusiasm (Sastri 1918: 152). Given this intensely introspective and devotional temperament, and also his commitment to ‘Practical Religion’, it is not surprising that Sivanath developed a deep friendship with Keshub, to the extent that an acquaintance once remarked that he possessed a key to Keshub’s mind (Sastri 1918: 160). However, he later became concerned that Keshub’s declaration that all his deeds were direct commandments of God (īśvarādeś) and everyone else should view them in that light would destroy people’s freedom of thought (cintār svādhīnatā) (Sastri 1918: 181). After he moved into the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, he would criticise the notion of divine dispensation, according to which a special form of divine action is directed towards the salvation of humanity through the appearance of a great individual – namely, Keshub – in the stream of human history; the dispensation itself is to be understood through Keshub’s teachings; and any criticism directed at the preachings of Keshub who is thus specially inspired by God is to be regarded as a rejection of the dispensation of God (Sastri 1881: 37–38). These principles of the divine dispensation amount, he wrote, to an exaltation of scriptural authority over individual independence. Whereas the voice of such authority demands that we first believe so that knowledge is added to our faith, the proper voice of Brahmo independence should instead declare: ‘First add knowledge, and then let me see if I can believe’. Therefore, while religious faiths are built on the foundations of supernaturalism and authority, the Brahmo Samaj instead seeks to establish the religious life on the ‘pure basis of naturalism and independence’ (Sastri 1881: 38). He cautions his readers that once people extinguish the candle of free inquiry, which is lit by God, they sink into the moral degeneracy and corruption which have characterised the ages of superstition in which human thought was fettered (Sastri 1881: 39–40). On a more positive note, however, he writes that we are now living in a new age which is characterised by the universality of religious instincts across the one vast family of humanity united under God; the independence of religious individuals from external rituals, scriptures, and teachers; the emergence of a spiritual sense of surrendering oneself (ātmasamarpaṇ-mūlak ādhyātmik bhāb) to truth, which is regarded as the essence of religion; and the love of humanity (mānab-hitaiṣaṇā) (Sastri 1903: 170–78). With Sivanath, then, we return to the motif highlighted by numerous other Brahmo figures – the Brahmo Samaj stands for a deep harmony between knowledge and devotion, spiritual practice and social activism, and logical reasoning and devotional affectivity. In his lectures delivered to the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj on the occasion of Maghotsav, the main festival celebrated on 11 Magh

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in the Bengali calendar, Sivanath depicts with evocative metaphors the great depths of the divine love, while he also cautions his audiences about the dangers of authoritarian rule in the religious life. ln his address in 1884, he declares that the Brahmo-dharma is based on the harmony between knowledge, devotion, and action. We are not satisfied by knowing God as the essence of the world and the supreme power – our hearts want something more. We are not content to know God as pure being either – we want the supreme person full of love (premamaẏ puruṣ) with whom we are deeply bound. Our human loves reach their true fulfilment when they become united with the divine love that lies hidden in the world and when that divine love controls our love (sei prem āmāder premke cālita kare). Echoing a classic Vaiṣṇava motif that true freedom is, paradoxically, a form of bondage to the love of God, Sivanath states that while all forms of worldly subservience produce misery, enslavement to the love of God (īśvar-prem) leads to great joy. Just as the fish are completely free (sampūrṇa svādhīn) as they move within water, the lovers of God who joyfully seek to fulfil the divine will too are, in fact, completely free (Sastri 1903: 2–4). He strikes these notes of harmony in an address twenty years later in 1904, and argues that in contrast to certain religious ideas which draw us away from the world, projecting it as a realm of misery, the dharma of religious devotion urges us to cultivate our natural dispositions, such as our aesthetic enjoyment of natural beauty, and unites us with the world and with our fellow human beings (Sastri 1903: 201–202). Therefore, any religious system, including the Brahmo Samaj itself, should not be based on attitudes of rejection, negation or destruction, where the others are viewed as full of evil superstitions, idolatry, and so on. Such negative dispositions, which generate egoism, should instead be replaced by a positive love of God who is the source of unity (Sastri 1903: 193–98). Therefore, what the Brahmos should really consider is not whether they have abandoned and rejected Hindu social systems (samāj), their own relations, and their parents but whether they have dedicated themselves and their love to God, and seek to sit at the feet of God. The love (prīti) that Ramchandra Vidyabagish had for Rammohun sustained the Brahmo Samaj after Rammohun had left, and this thread of love later also bound together Debendranath, Keshub, and Keshub’s followers. The Brahmo Samaj was established, Sivanath declares, not through assemblies or resolutions but through the threads of love and reverence by which the love of one heart (ek hṛdaẏer prem) and the restlessness of one soul (ek prāṇer byākulatā) were thus transmitted to others (Sastri 1903:205–206). Indeed, the Brahmo-dharma declares that this entire world, which is full of our virtues and vices, and our joys and sorrows, is the site of the sport (līlāsthal) of God who is expressed in our hearts and our homes, and in every moment. All of us, even if we are great sinners,

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remain lovingly bound to the supremely compassionate God who has given us the great title (adhikār) of being the children and the followers of God (Sastri 1903: 226–28). Therefore, even as Sivanath highlights the significance of social work in the milieus of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, he also seeks to fend off the criticism that they have become devoid of spiritual intensity. He writes that the teachings of the Brahmo Samaj should not be confused with a form of ‘cold deism’ or the vague notion of a distant source of energy from which everything emerges, for the Brahmo Samaj is grounded in a belief in the ultimate reality who is expressing the divine purpose throughout human history and has taught humanity through the sages of different lands (Sastri 1910:71). The ‘theistic Church’ of the Brahmo Samaj has been brought into existence through the providential care of a wise and merciful supreme being at a time when the old certainties are crumbling down, and the people are increasingly turning to secularism, unbelief, and the pursuit of materialistic ends (Sastri 1910: 7–8). The Church believes in a supreme divinity who is wisdom and love, the freedom of the individual, and the power of love and prayer with which we turn to the divine reality who alone can give us genuine satisfaction (Sastri 1910: 15–16). He writes that through habitual loving communion with God who is our refuge and by whom we are sustained, we would find ineffable joy, tranquility, solace, peace, and strength in the midst of worldly turmoil, and as we become strengthened and rise above our sinfulness towards what is good, true, and holy, we gain an inner conviction in the immortality of the soul. We then believe that having enjoyed the divine presence in this life, we will continue to remain bound to God in loving communion after death (Sastri 1910: 47–49). 1

The Social Orientations of Brahmo Devotion

Therefore, Sivanath repeatedly emphasises that the dharma, properly understood, is not the property of a specific individual but is founded in human nature. The basic truth of dharma and the aspiration for dharma are universal, though the specific manifestations of dharma among the different peoples of the world are different. In Sivanath’s Brahmo universalist vision, all humanity is one vast family of brothers and sisters, God is their divine father, the world is their residence, and human society is the wide field of dharma (Sastri 1903: 43). Configuring a complex tapestry of some Upaniṣadic and Hegelian viewpoints similar to that which we have seen in the writings of Sitanath, Sivanath argues that just as in the act of apprehending a physical object, we implicitly

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apprehend also its spatial background, in knowing ourselves to be finite we also implicitly receive the notion of the infinite reality as the background in which we dwell. Even though this spiritual faculty may lie dormant in some individuals or groups of people it can be awakened and strengthened, in the manner of the cultivation of a sense of beauty or the love of fellow-beings which is natural, instinctive, and common to all (Sastri 1910: 34–35). Therefore, if anyone has the right to declare that they are entitled to (adhikārī) all religions, all knowledge, and all civilisations, it is the Brahmo Samaj alone – the Brahmos alone have that catholic (udār), elevated (mahaṯ), and universal (biśvajanīn) dharma where people can accept as their own the holy individuals of all peoples, all times, and all countries (Sastri 1903: 66). Developing an argument whose intellectual ancestry stretches as far back as Rammohun, Sivanath writes that while different sects across the world have developed distinctive religious beliefs and practices, which are marked by their historical circumstances and cultural environments, they mistakenly project their particular traditions as universally valid principles and claim that these were revealed unto them through the special revelation of the supreme divinity. All these sects have indeed grasped significant elements relating to religious belief, and their error lies only in claiming that their particular standpoint is the only truth and contemptuously denouncing the views of others (Sastri 1910: 21–22). We should instead, Sivanath writes, highlight the truly universal dimensions of religion and not accentuate those sectarian aspects which are merely local, national, or individual and which relate to modes of ritual, ceremony, and organisation. Thus, even though people in Europe and India will have distinctive styles of worshipping the divine reality – whether contemplatively meditating on the divine spirit in human interiority or perceiving the divine providential control over human history or discerning the divine presence in the beauties of nature – they can agree that these diverse modes of religious expression are based on the fundamental truth of a natural and universal theism (Sastri 1910: 23–25). Recapitulating the ‘theology of nature’ motif which we have encountered in Rajnarayan, Sitanath, and others, where divine action is to be seen in terms not of miraculous interventions in the natural continuum but precisely of the maintenance of this continuum, for Sivanath too the universalist theism propounded by the Brahmo Samaj would not be based on appeals to miraculous revelations given to specific individuals and infallible scriptural authorities. Thus, Sivanath declares that we should not attribute supernatural powers to individuals whom we regard as having been sent by God for it is the natural domain itself, regulated by laws day and night, which is the field of the sport (līlā)

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of God (Sastri 1903: 56–57). It is indeed by keeping intact our independence in such worldly matters that God fulfils the divine purposes through them, and in this manner God is assisting us also in our religious life. Returning to this theme in 1898, Sivanath argues that a religious association (dharmasamāj), guru or preceptor, or text cannot be the direct meaning of the term dharma, for these are the encasements which protect and sustain dharma (Sastri 1903: 94). Even though these external coverings are vital for the survival of dharma, some people mistakenly regard them as the essence of dharma, so that they think that the Brahmos, because they do not revere certain gurus or scriptures, are atheists (nāstik) (Sastri 1903: 94–99). In truth, however, Sivanath declares, bringing together the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘social’ poles of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, the Brahmo-dharma is constituted by the love of God and service to humanity (īśvar prīti o nara sebā). Wherever and in whatever time human beings seek to know God with a sincere mind and a restless heart (byākul prāṇe), God becomes revealed to them then and there. Since God and the whole family of humanity are bound together in one thread (ek sūtre), to become part of this family and become united with it in love and will is dharma (Sastri 1903: 124). Therefore, like his contemporaries in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj such as Sitanath, Sivanath too seeks to steer a via media between Advaita-styled forms of monasticism and effusively devotional forms of Vaiṣṇavism. He argues that Advaita mistakenly leads us to reject our human nature and our social existence, which are seen as domains of misery. He presents the following historical typology of the relation between spirituality and sociality – in ancient times it was believed that religious development is not possible within social worlds, in the middle ages it was claimed that even within social contexts it is possible to cultivate dharma, but finally in the new age it is being said that the development of dharma takes place precisely within society (samāje thākiẏāi dharma haẏ) (Sastri 1903: 179–80). Sivanath laments that because of the influence of the ‘anti-social philosophy’ of a form of Vedānta, which claims that the world is an illusion and should be renounced, people mistakenly think that pure theism is opposed to social development. However, the ‘theistic church’ of the Brahmo Samaj rejects this ‘sombre and gloomy view of life’ and teaches that the supreme divinity has placed human beings in the moral domain structured by relations of love which are sacred (Sastri 1910: 50–51). While under the influence of forms of asceticism, the noble instincts of human nature are exterminated, social ties are uprooted, the sacred duties of the world are disregarded, and the physical body is tortured and mutilated as acts which are viewed as a form of service to God, according to the Brahmo Samaj, the world is not a delusion, snare, or dungeon into which the soul is cast as a punishment

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but is indeed a preparatory stage on which the soul goes through a period of moral and spiritual education (Sastri 1881: 65). 2

The Universal Devotion of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj

Another via media that Sivanath seeks to forge is between two great errors that, according to him, characterise Hindu religious groups – mysticism in the subjective dimensions of the spiritual life and formalism in the objective expressions of spirituality. As a result of this disjunction, people regard religion as disconnected from everyday existence and seek forms of piety which are not associated with social reform and philanthropy, and their social relations too are not spiritualised by religious faith. The members of the Brahmo Samaj are largely Hindus, and among them the ‘devoutly disposed … as a general rule, are deeply imbued with these mystic and ritualistic notions of piety’. Writing around the time of the New Dispensation, Sivanath argues that since Keshub himself was surrounded by such Brahmos, he was subtly influenced by their notions of piety and when he became, in their estimate, a great saint and devotee he moved away from the original teachings of the Brahmo Samaj. As a result, Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj is characterised not by social reform but by an ‘exuberant growth’ of diverse mystical and ritual forms such as prayer meetings, singing, dancing, donning the dress of mendicants, mental pilgrimages, and so on. He writes in a cautionary tone that even some members of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj who were earlier members of Keshub’s party are not entirely ‘free from these erroneous conceptions’ (Sastri 1881: 61–62). Sivanath writes that according to the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, the best antidote to such styles of mysticism is active philanthropy and the best antidote to asceticism or formalism is the sanctification of everyday social relations in the world (Sastri 1881: 98). The rejection of such world-renunciatory stances is embodied in the very life of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj which is constituted as a family of the worshippers of God and as a commonwealth where each individual, under the influence of divine grace, has a light which is kindled by God. These individual lights have to be gathered to attain the fullness of light, and their communal voice and conscience will act as a check on the corruptibility of the leaders. They are tied to one another through mutual sympathy for they know that they are ‘equally entitled to exercise their rights’ in the family of God to which they belong (Sastri 1881: 83). This Sadharan Brahmo Samaj has been called into existence by God to establish truth; defend human freedom; preach pure spiritual

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worship; save the Brahmo Samaj from the errors of mysticism, priestly power, and ritualism; and work towards the establishment of a common humanity. Therefore, it is shaped by four spiritual principles which every member has to accept: belief in the existence of an infinite creator God, belief in the immortality of the soul, belief in the duty and necessity of the spiritual worship of God, and disbelief in infallible books or individuals as necessary means of salvation (Sastri 1881: 89–90). In the light of these principles, Sivanath charged that Keshub sought to run the Brahmo Samaj as a spiritual aristocracy in which a few individuals would lead others who were not sufficiently instructed in religious matters, and Keshub viewed himself as a minister who was appointed by God and who was therefore infallible in his religious pronouncements which should be accepted by his followers trustfully and without any criticism (Sastri 1881: 77–80). Nor did his New Dispensation have a constitutional church, and its organisations and operations were based on the ‘inspired authority’ of one individual who would not accept any form of dissent (Sastri 1881: 82–83). From his standpoints between the authoritarian demands and the emotional intensities of Keshub, on the one hand, and the forms of everyday living which are not enlivened by spiritual principles, on the other hand, Sivanath invokes the divine presence in the world, both in the interiority of the devotee and in the institutions of the social realm. According to Sivanath, the faith of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj has four characteristics – its immediacy, that is, freedom all doctrines of mediation between God and humanity; its independence from the restrictions of infallible scriptural texts or individuals; its catholicity, that is, wide sympathy for truth wherever it is found; and its spirituality, that is, freedom from external rituals and ceremonies (Sastri 1881: 98). This list illuminates, once again, Sivanath’s opposition to the claims of individuals such as Keshub to be intermediaries between God and humanity, and also to forms of spirituality which are divorced from programmes directed at social reform. As Kopf has argued, ‘Sastri represented a generation of Brahmos profoundly influenced by British and American Unitarianism. But it was not so much the Jesus-centered Unitarian gospel, with its stress on the ethical and historic Christ that moved Sastri and his friends, as it was the social reformist programs of Unitarianism, which championed the oppressed and provided material means to alleviate their poverty and degradation’ (Kopf 1979: 27). At the same time, in a manner characteristic of many of the Brahmos whom we have studied in previous chapters, Sivanath’s religious life too was marked by deep devotional intensities. His autobiography indicates that he was devoted to his younger sister and he was touched by the plight of child-widows. Throughout his travels to preach the Brahmo-dharma in different parts of northern, western, and southern India, he relied entirely on the financial support of his friends, and

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on occasions of dire need when he received assistance unexpectedly, he attributed such help to divine providential care. In short, then, Sivanath sought to forge another Brahmo-shaped via media with the devotional vocabularies and the social concerns of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. Sivanath was responsive to the critique that its ‘natural and universal Theism’, which is not based on appeals to miraculous revelations, cannot provide secure foundations on which to build a thriving religious culture that would be characterised by love and faith. Such a vague theism would only culminate, so went the criticism, in modes of agnosticism with notions of a distant and indifferent divinity (Sastri 1910: 1–3). At the same time, he also lamented that a ‘spirit of active philanthropy’ is not, in fact, a predominant aspect of the life of the Samaj. He notes that though the ‘theistic church’ of the Brahmo Samaj should actively work in social fields, it is claimed by some critics that the piety of its members is ‘more mystical and sentimental than practical’. If this analysis is correct, it is possible, Sivanath argues, that the Brahmo Samaj has been influenced by the notions and the devotional experiences of the bhakti traditions (Sastri 1910: 60). Even as Sivanath therefore remained wary of the ‘excessive’ energies of bhakti, his own spiritual being was deeply infused with devotional fervour. On a certain occasion, when he went to a village to conduct Brahmo services, it turned out that at the order of the zamindar the villagers refused to sell anything to them. A few days later, when Sivanath organised a congregational saṃkīrtan, initially the doors remain closed and nobody could be seen on the roads. Finally, the singers arrived at a crossroad and he asked his group to sing more enthusiastically. A door opened, a few individuals emerged, and gradually a crowd gathered around the singers (Sastri 1918: 333–35). This devotional note is also struck by H. C. Sarkar in the conclusion of his biography of Sivanath: ‘The most prominent feature in the life of Pandit Sivanath Sastri was love. From childhood his entire career was marked by an abounding love. The affection he poured so freely to his little sister in his childhood flowed in diverse directions as he grew in years till it culminated in a steady love of God, the Bhakti of later years, which sweetened his whole life’ (Sarkar 1929: 82). 3

The New Dispensation and Brahmo Rationalism

The crucial disjunctures highlighted in Pratap Chandra’s narrative of the Brahmo Samaj are markedly different from those we find in the narrative accounts of Brahmo life sketched by Debendranath, Rajnarayan, and – his near contemporary – Sivanath. While in the latter, the irruption of Vaiṣṇavism is

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largely regarded as a regressive moment or even as a fall in the spiritual trajectory of the Brahmo Samaj, for Pratap Chandra it is precisely the infusion of Vaiṣṇava life-forms, under God’s providential care, that has raised Brahmo life to new heights. Pratap Chandra, who was a distant relative of Keshub, joined the Brahmo Samaj in 1858 and was one of the early followers who accepted the leadership of Keshub. He strikes the familiar Brahmo note of harmony when he writes that we need a reconciliation of theology and philosophy, ethics and spirituality, faith and science, and of the multiple religions with their prophets, scriptures, and ceremonies (Mozoomdar 1882: 346–47). Such a grand harmonisation was effected, according to Pratap Chandra, by the New Dispensation and had not been accomplished by the earlier stalwarts of the Brahmo Samaj. He argues that Rammohun’s ‘ratiocinative mind’ was directed primarily to the eradication of idolatry and polytheism, and while his simple hymns are cautionary reminders against vanity, they are not devotional exercises. Debendranath, in contrast, had a ‘warm emotional nature’ and his joining the Brahmo Samaj around 1839 led to the ‘first devotional revival’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 189–90). After he returned from the Himalayas in 1858, he found an ally in Keshub and soon a new mode of spiritual intensity emerged, leading to the ‘second devotional revival’ in the Brahmo Samaj. However, Debendranath’s sermons – even though they were full of poetic imagery and were rooted in his contemplation of natural beauty – did not properly recognise the significance of sin and the sinner’s need for salvation (Mozoomdar 1882: 192–96). Keshub’s religious life, in contrast, was guided from the beginning by a habit of daily prayer in which he spontaneously appealed to God for ‘protection against sin and falsehood’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 196). From September 1867, the time of the third revival and also the initiation of a new movement, hymns began to be sung in the services of the Brahmo Samaj and these were tender expressions of humility, dependence on God, acute suffering, repentance, and consciousness of one’s sinfulness. As these Brahmos moved onwards through great difficulties, they began to experience the providential mercifulness of God, and they rejoiced with ‘gratitude and lowliness of spirit’ while incessantly praying and singing the praises of God: ‘And those who bitterly wept erewhile, who were so full of darkness, unholiness, and untruth, that hope had nearly left their hearts; if such forlorn sinners find the direct Dispensation of God to give them salvation and peace, have they not cause for grateful rejoicing?’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 220). Thus, there started from November 1867 ‘the great devotional or Bhakti movement’ of the Brahmo Samaj, in the form of devotional festivals or Brahmotsub from six in the morning to ten at night, which included singing, street processions, expositions of scriptures, sermons, and intervals of silent meditation. Seeking to defend Keshub against the charges of ‘man-worship’ which were

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raised at the ‘devotional revivals’ held in Mungher, Pratap Chandra writes that the Brahmos were full of love and humility to one another and also to Keshub. Therefore, their expression of affection should be regarded as ‘a necessary consequence of the devotional excitement’, for the love of God fills one with the love of fellow-beings (Mozoomdar 1882: 220–22). Earlier, he writes, the Brahmo Samaj, a group of learned and sophisticated individuals, was stamped by a ‘cold colourless rationalism’ and iconoclastic modes of denouncing sectarian affiliations, while the Vaiṣṇavas, who came from the lower social classes and had not received modern education, were known for their intense styles of devotional ecstasy which would at times lead to loss of consciousness. The Brahmo Samaj somehow adopted, although not without some resistance, these demotic forms of Vaiṣṇava worship, including musical instruments such as the khol and the kartal: ‘In fact the Brahmo Somaj seemed to incorporate into itself the entire spirit of Vaishnavism’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 224). Thus, as S. Mullick (2010:39) has noted more recently, ‘Vaiṣṇava devotionalism was held in low esteem by respectable Bengali society and the credit for re-introducing it goes, ironically enough, to the new type of rational, English-educated Bengali Brahmos’. For Pratap Chandra, then, the new devotional movement in the Brahmo Samaj – starting from 1867 – was being driven by an interfusion of forms of Vaiṣṇava piety into the ‘rationalistic’ structures of the Brahmo Samaj. Against the backdrop of this narrative, his writings are held together by a dialectic that runs together, on the one hand, his argument that Keshub’s New Dispensation stands opposed to merely rationalistic approaches to the divine reality such as those of Rammohun and, on the other hand, his response to the charge that the New Dispensation is overly suffused with sentimentalism. One can discern in these writings five interrelated sets of arguments, shaped by terms which are strongly reminiscent of Keshub’s own vocabularies, which seek to defend, and promote, the New Dispensation’s turn to the devotional. First, for the Brahmos, God is the living, dynamic reality who is present with human beings in their life experiences and who speaks to them in their moments of distress, and is not simply the cosmic agent in distant historical events. Therefore, to fail to perceive the divine presence guiding them through all the moments of their lives, and claim that God cannot provide ‘living, real, and ready inspiration, is one step removed from utter atheism’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 363). Pratap Chandra seeks to refute the view that the ‘theological eclecticism’ of the Brahmo Samaj has an abstract set of beliefs which are too colourless and insipid to provide anything substantial for the religious life of the people (Mozoomdar 1882: 90). Indeed, he writes that the Brahmo theist would perceive the divine love everywhere: ‘Talk of love to God! Is it not a rapture, an ecstatic excitement, an utter inebriation to love God? Coldness of heart means

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death to the theist. Piety is a holy frenzy. There can be no love of God if it is not an all-devouring enthusiasm’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 11). Unlike deism, which is a religion of the intellect, views the divine reality through abstract conceptions and rationalistic speculations, and has no genuine space for prayer, worship, and faith, the Brahmo Samaj is based on a faith which is ‘real, living, and fiery’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 5). Therefore, at the heart of its life lies not speculations about the nature of the cosmos or humanity or critiques of other creeds, but a ‘persistent cultivation of devotional feelings’ which has been observed especially since 1865 (Mozoomdar 1882: 92). Such an active style of cultivation of the sense of the presence of God is reflected in the following three extracts from Pratap Chandra’s own collection of intensely meditative reflections, Heart Beats: ‘There is no real religion without miracles. Until the impossible becomes possible, and the so-called unnatural an undoubted fact, nature will not rise above itself and the Divine will never be proved’ (Mozoomdar 1894: 64); ‘At every turn of thought I behold thy unspeakable face … I never knew thou wert so near, so true, so dear, so absolutely mine. I now most humbly supplicate, teach me to hide myself in thee as thou hidest in me’ (Mozoomdar 1894:91); and ‘To live on the earth and do every duty here, but like a being of another world, is the great object of my life’ (Mozoomdar 1894: 111). Second, Pratap Chandra also maintains the ‘orthodox’ Brahmo standpoint – upheld by Rammohun, Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Sitanath, and others – of the rejection of intermediaries between God and humanity. At one place in his narrative, he writes that our sense of dependence on the source of being, life, and goodness can be obliterated if it is overburdened with the theological doctrines of particular denominations so that we then view God ‘through the mouldy medium of ancient dispensations, and endless mediators’. The most vital element of Brahmo spirituality, he emphasises, is the ‘direct and distinct realisation of, and perfect self-immersion in, the supreme fact of Divine presence and blessedness’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 107). As the human soul seeks life and receives divine influences certain notions and experiences are left behind, and these become crystallised through repeated occurrence into specific shapes. Such realities are received inwardly, and when they are expressed in words they form the doctrines of religion (Mozoomdar 1882: 111). Through the God-vision and the God-consciousness that it seeks, Brahmo theism therefore points to the divine being who is the life of the world, the indwelling sustainer of individuals, and the inspirer of human beings through revelations in specific historical periods. However, God cannot be apprehended purely through intellectual exercises without a sense of wonder at the infinity of God and humility at one’s unworthiness to approach God. As we understand the limits of our intellectual powers, we see that the divine nature and the relation between

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divinity and humanity are supersensible matters which can only be discerned through the higher faculty of faith. Such a ‘strong godly intellect’ knows that God lies beyond the reach of everyday knowledge, and through prayer it seeks divine guidance on the path of salvation (Mozoomdar 1882: 7–8). Therefore, if it can be demonstrated that a created object has been worshipped in place of the creator, or an external symbolic form has been regarded as sacred, or a worldly entity has been accorded divine honour, such practices are indeed to be rejected. However, no such descriptions apply, Pratap Chandra contends, to the ritualism of the New Dispensation itself so that the ‘clamour raised against the so-called ceremonialism of the day is a mere howl of ignorance’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 390). Third, conversely, moving closer to Keshub’s position on the soteriological significance of prophetic vision, Pratap Chandra writes that the Brahmo Samaj is not susceptible to the criticism that its faith is a ‘natural religion’ which is dependent entirely on human reason and conscience, for it accepts with deep faith the guidance of the great inspired teachers who have in different historical epochs announced new dispensations for the salvation of humanity. These teachers convey to humanity certain truths which could not be gained otherwise, and their recipients ‘carry with them the unmistakable credentials of a Divine commission’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 82–83). As the breath of the Holy Spirit pervades the individual, all the faculties are elevated so that one can see and hear what is usually unseen and unheard. According to the doctrine of adesh or divine inspiration, one thus receives the gift of prophetic vision and the gift of prophetic commandments. Pratap Chandra hastens to add that these prophets are not anything ‘other than human’ – however, they are the supreme exemplars of humanity, spiritual heroism, sanctity, love, forgiveness, and wisdom, and thus they are the objects of our deepest reverence (Mozoomdar 1882: 368– 70). This subtle interweaving of a Keshub-styled emphasis on divinely inspired individuals with an older strain of Rammohun-shaped rejection of intermediaries is evident in Pratap Chandra’s statement that the New Dispensation believes that certain individuals are more clearly inspired than others to carry out the divine purpose, even though it rejects the notion of mediation and believes in an ‘immediate spiritual vision’ of divine perfection which is known as worship (Mozoomdar 1882: 183). These prophetic individuals provide us with guidance in our quest for God and we should constantly commune with them in our devotional prayers: ‘All genuine spiritual life is the resurrection of the prophets’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 372). Therefore, he characterises as ‘shallow and thoughtless’ those individuals in the Brahmo Samaj who summarily reject the notion that certain human beings can mediate the divine influence to the world. He clarifies, again, that he does

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not argue that salvation is necessarily dependent on the presence of such an intermediary – however exalted – between God and humanity; however, at the heart of great spiritual and moral revolutions lies not abstract teachings but living witnesses to the truth (Mozoomdar 1882: 103). Acknowledging that the acceptance of intermediaries has generated great evils in the spiritual life, he writes that we should understand that the true messengers from God are not those who ask us to receive what they have to give to us but those who actively strive to draw us directly towards the presence of God, so that we may enter into an immediate and personal communion with God. There our intellectual and volitional powers are held in abeyance and we become ‘the free but passive recipient of supreme blessedness, which exceeds all ordinary endeavours and hopes quite unspeakably’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 105). Through these argumentative pathways, Pratap Chandra arrives at the conclusion that the New Dispensation has not diluted but has, in fact, reinforced the spiritual existence of its followers. Their devotional fervour has not weakened their moral sensibilities but has strengthened them, and their lives of individual simplicity, austerity, and self-discipline have elevated their character. While some worshippers who follow antiquated creeds and speculative intellectualisms feel secure within certain prescribed styles of morality, ‘strong, real moral energy, admittedly liable to abuse and misdirection, proves at least an abundance of spiritual vitality that might be utilised under proper guidance to serve some of the noblest purposes of human existence’. Again, Pratap Chandra acknowledges that some of the ‘sacred enthusiasts’ whom we encounter in the history of the world have directed the healthy and the harmonious powers of human nature towards the development of aberrant systems of thought and practice which, though attractive in the beginning, are short-lived. At the same time, he writes that under the active guidance of certain individuals, such energetic action can transfigure the lives of vast numbers of human beings at critical junctures in their history (Mozoomdar 1882: 99–101). Fourth, Pratap Chandra defends some of Keshub’s provocative teachings about the necessity of rituals, the motherhood of divinity, divine inspiration, and the divine intimacy in the human individual. He writes that while the use of symbols, rituals, and ceremonies in religious contexts can lead to errors, without such external expressions the religious life becomes a cold abstraction and shivers in the ‘pale polar light of isolated thought’. Under the New Dispensation, however, religion has vigorously stepped into the warmth of day and has developed rituals as part of its vital growth (Mozoomdar 1882: 389). Describing religion as an ‘irrepressible instinct’ in human beings, he writes that it is concretely expressed in various systems of beliefs, ceremonies, and authorities, and is formulated through ideas relating to God, immortality, and

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duty. The basis of religion comprises certain convictions which can at times remain greatly undeveloped, and it is to the ‘common ground’ of these latent sentiments, which are shared across humanity, that religious teaching has to appeal (Mozoomdar 1882: 68–69). These primary religious instincts which are spiritual potencies are not, however, expressed to the same degree in all human beings – they need factors such as external aids, experience, education, and so on for their proper development (Mozoomdar 1882: 70). For instance, while it is true that terms such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ do not properly apply to the divine reality, the relation of motherhood expresses our consciousness of the divine goodness which sustains us and of the tender love on which we constantly depend in our worldly existence (Mozoomdar 1882: 394–96). Indeed, the perfection of religious existence is the simplicity of a child: ‘True spirituality matures into the quiet sweetness and affectionate dependence of the tender child’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 395). In thus calling out to God as our mother in heaven, we are thinking of the divine reality who forgives us in our sinfulness, loves us even in our rebellion, tenderly melts our hardness of heart, and helps us through all our worldly afflictions. Pratap Chandra concludes this strand of reflection in these terms: ‘God as Mother shall rule in our hearts, in our homes, and in our church, drawing men and women together as one holy family. This is the faith of advanced Theism’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 401). It is, of course, precisely such ‘inspired’ utterances that had generated certain Brahmo critiques of the irrationality and the sentimentalism of the New Dispensation. Some twenty-five years after the publication of Pratap Chandra’s The Faith and Progress of the Brahmo Somaj (1882), Kanshi Ram was still using the vocabulary of ‘holy madness’ and declaring that he has witnessed, and also participated in, the spiritual inebriation inaugurated by the New Dispensation through which abstract doctrines have been transformed into a ‘religion of madness’ by the wine of divine love. The New Dispensation has fed many with spiritual bread and carried shipwrecked sailors across the turbulent seas of worldliness to the safe haven of salvation (Ram 1906: 6–7). To the charges that such followers of the New Dispensation have strayed away from the Brahmo path, Pratap Chandra responds that if certain individuals claim that they have learnt from God about the divine purposes and the divine will and that they speak with divine authority, they are immediately put down as mad, the whole world becomes their enemy, and they are denounced as blasphemers and breakers of the peace. This is because people like to keep their God at a safe distance from their everyday lives so that there is no interruption to their ways of living, and they cannot bear the ‘language of genuine faith and inspiration’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 405–406). The Brahmo Samaj too, Pratap Chandra writes, had adopted for a while such principles of ‘religious respectability’ till some

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of the members began to feel that they were being directly inspired by God and started using terms denoting the divine intimacy which gave offence to others. The New Dispensation continues to develop the language of religious devotion with an intensity which is not to be found in the other styles of ‘the old Sanscrit, and the cold English’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 406–407). In terms which echo some of Keshub’s sermons, Pratap Chandra writes that within the religious milieus of the New Dispensation, prayer is not a dreary activity but is the very life of the soul. An individual’s true prayer is not characterised by rituals, recitations, or intonations but is a deep sigh, without sound or shape, which is poured out to the divine reality: ‘Our wants are deeper, our sorrows are more secret than we know. Only the Spirit that searcheth the heart knoweth them’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 364–65). Fifth, building on Keshub’s claim to have founded a truly universal Church of humanity, Pratap Chandra repeatedly insists that the New Dispensation is not a mere human organisation but is a direct product of divine inspiration which will reconcile all the dispensations of truth across humanity. Thus, he declares in resounding notes: ‘We are prepared to give reasons for our faith. It is not true because we believe in it, but because it is true therefore do we believe in it’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 356). Describing the New Dispensation as the healing medicine which has been dispensed by God to humanity, in periods when people have called out to God from within the depths of their suffering, he insists that it is ‘a Revelation and not a theology’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 352–53). We should not think that the Brahmo Samaj is engaged in an enterprise of saving the people of the country merely by setting up a ‘spiritual eclecticism’; rather, it is through the divine will that the origination and the culmination of the religious destiny of humanity is being effected (Mozoomdar 1882: 148). Therefore, the New Dispensation is the religion of India and of the whole world, and all those who seek the unity of humanity, salvation, and eternal life will accept the faith and the spirit which the merciful God is pouring into its development (Mozoomdar 1880: 27). In this vein, Pratap Chandra writes that while his heart truly belongs to the community of the New Dispensation, he loves people from all religious traditions – Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, and also members of the Adi Brahmo Samaj and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. And yet, indicating his beleaguered position on the religious landscapes of the Bengal of his times, he writes that he is hated by Hindus because he loves Muslims and Christians, and he is distrusted by the wider Brahmo Samaj because of his devotion to the New Dispensation. Thus, he concludes on a strongly devotional note that he belongs to ‘nobody, though everybody is mine. But I belong to thee, as thou belongest to me. I am drifting away in the stormy sea of life, the winds and the

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currents take me to the unknown. Lord, by thy breath still the waters, and take me home’ (Mozoomdar 1894: 120). 4

Conclusion

In responding to the critiques of devotional expression as modes of sentimentalism which are not intellectually coherent, Pratap Chandra notes that this criticism is, in fact, opposed to the more common charge that the Brahmo religion is ‘a system of dry rationalism’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 94). In the wake of the New Dispensation, this observation reflects the dynamic locations of some Brahmos at the crisscrossing and somewhat turbulent intersections between the motif of ‘reason within the bounds of revelation’ and the motif of ‘revelation within the bounds of reason’. The developmental narrative of the Brahmo Samaj – from the ‘dry’ and ‘cold’ rationalism of Rammohun to the ‘heartfelt’ and ‘warm’ devotionalism of Keshub – has to be defended, once again, on the contested site of Brahmo harmony, and we find Pratap Chandra writing forcefully that ‘[n]othing can so powerfully refine and elevate human motives, intensify the necessity of self-purification and self-devotedness, open the inward eye to the most subtle and secret deficiencies of the heart, quicken the perception of others’ needs, and unlock the sources of the deepest sympathies, as the cleansing, transforming currents of religious emotion rightly excited and rightly directed’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 97). For Sivanath, in contrast, individuals who inhabit the spiritual milieus of the New Dispensation have failed precisely in cultivating such a proper state of excitation and have not received a proper direction, for these milieus are populated by the notions of divine inspiration, human intermediaries, and ritualised worship. Thus, once when Sivanath was engaged in a discussion with a member of the Arya Samaj who had argued that human religious existence cannot be founded on something as erroneous (bhrāntiśīl) as the intellect, he replied that even if we accept the Vedas as infallible, we would need interpreters too who would have to be established as infallible, for we see that commentators such as Sayana and Dayananda Saraswati have provided divergent readings of these texts. As a result, Sivanath concludes, we cannot go beyond our fallible human intellects (Sastri 1918: 260–61). Sivanath’s friend and associate in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Sitanath, presents an equally stringent critique of the notion that special revelations are vouchsafed to particular individuals. In a lecture on the ‘spiritual history’ (ādhyātmik itibṛtta) of the Brahmo Samaj, Sitanath says that he does not agree with the view that history

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is the biography of great individuals. While he does revere holy individuals (mahāpuruṣ), their high aspirations and ideals have to be understood as the common property (sādhāraṇ sampatti) of their neighbouring people. The only difference between these holy individuals and ordinary people is that what the latter feel only indistinctly, or what they are unable to express clearly even if they feel it distinctly, the former experience clearly and speak of it in a way that captivates people’s minds. Therefore, it is not the case that our leaders have pulled us away and we have followed them blindly; rather, they are our leaders in the sense that they have been able to express clearly the faith and the ideals of our own hearts (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 195–96). An even more radical emphasis on the limits of human reason in accessing divine matters recurs throughout the prose writings of Sivanath’s contemporary, Bankim Chandra, who articulates various patterns of historical and rational arguments to isolate the ‘positive’ from the ‘mythical’ dimensions of Hindu religiosity. Thus, in one essay, after noting that traditional Hindus would claim that the ancient sages would travel to heaven and speak to the gods, and the gods too would come down to earth to meet human beings, Bankim simply indicates that he will not discuss such views on the grounds that the majority of his readers would not accept them (Bagal 1973: 787). With the forthrightness of an Akshaykumar, Bankim argues that the Vedas themselves are merely human compositions, and the other Hindu scriptural texts too are not transcendental revelations but historical products.

chapter 7

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Between Brahmo Rationalities and Vaiṣṇava Affectivities In Bankim’s extensive writings on social and religious themes, we encounter a wide range of perspectives which are positioned at complex angles to the viewpoints of both the Brahmos and the Vaiṣṇavas of his time. On the one hand, we discern numerous strands of de-mythologisation in Bankim’s naturalistic accounts of the origin, significance, and telos of various types of traditional Hindu beliefs and practices. After Akshaykumar, Bankim was a major writer of essays on scientific themes such as the number of stars in the sky, aerial travel, the lunar landscape, and so on, and these were collected into a volume entitled Bijñān-rahasya (1875). In his exegetical comments on texts such as the Bhagavadgītā and the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, Bankim routinely presents divine action in terms not of miraculous interventions in the causal matrices of the empirical world but of modes of divine agency which operate within and through everyday patterns of causation. His naturalistic readings of the origins of human religiosity stand in clear contrast to, for instance, Pratap Chandra’s claim that the New Dispensation is not the construction of human beings and that we can discern in its origin, growth, and increasing influence the divine providential hand (Mozoomdar 1913: 27–28). On the other hand, Bankim does not quite wish to go the full length of a sceptical or non-theistic worldview, and rule out the existence of God and the providential rule of God from the moral universe. He argues that the highest form of worship cannot be the intellectual worship of one great principle which runs through the natural world but which cannot be loved or set up as an ideal for individual existence – rather, it is the worship of a personal deity with moral attributes. In these writings, we begin to hear some Vaiṣṇava notes of the active cultivation of devotional affectivities towards the supremely lovable God, though Bankim does not, any more than Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Sitanath, and Sivanath, move down the effusive pathways of devotional love towards the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa beloved of his Bengali Vaiṣṇava contemporaries. And yet, as we will see, Bankim is far more sympathetic to the figure of Kṛṣṇa than many of his Brahmos contemporaries, even as he shares their historicist attitudes to the divinities of the Hindu pantheon. Though he was initially influenced by certain aspects of Auguste Comte’s Positivism, he later rejected it on the grounds that it was godless, and from around 1880 onwards he began to

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retrieve the Kṛṣṇa of the Purāṇas who had been denounced by Brahmo iconoclasm (Sen 2008: 91). According to one of his biographers, the young Bankim had been an atheist but began to turn towards religious matters at the age of forty (Chattopadhyay 1911: 328–29). This turn to religiosity notwithstanding, in his essays on religious topics, Bankim remains agnostic, critical, or sceptical about various traditional claims relating to the nature of the divine reality. In his Letters on Hinduism (before 1885), Kṛṣṇacaritra (1886/1892), and the commentary on the Bhagavadgītā (1886–1888), we see Bankim rejecting certain accounts of the life of Kṛṣṇa while also critiquing, from within his colonial milieus, western representations of Hindu divinities (Harder 2001: vii). On the one hand, Bankim declares, much more forthrightly than the Brahmos whom we have encountered, that he accepts the divinity of Kṛṣṇa – even more, he notes that his western education has only intensified this belief (Bagal 1973 [BR2]:  406). The Buddha and Christ are, according to Bankim, the highest among human beings (manuṣyaśreṣṭha) but they cannot be the ideal (ādarśa) for a Hindu – the perfect ideal of humanity is Kṛṣṇa alone for Hindus (BR2, 515– 16). On the other hand, Bankim often shifts into a de-mythologizing gear and argues that there is little of historical value in the Vṛndāvana narratives in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa which are replete with supernatural events. From them, we can learn, at the most, that Kṛṣṇa was a beautiful child who was dear to everyone and that as a strong young man he lovingly protected the cowherds. Again, we cannot accept the historicity of the narrative of Kṛṣṇa slaying Kaṃsa, for in this case we would have to accept various supernatural (atiprakṛta) events such as the sage Nārada informing Kaṃsa that Kṛṣṇa is a son of Vasudeva and two small boys killing a king in a royal assembly (BR2, 476–77). 1

Religion as Revelation and Religion as Historical Construct

Both these threads – devotion and de-mythologisation – are dialectically intertwined in Bankim’s preface to his commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, where he notes that the ‘educated’ classes of Bengalis have been raised on the western way of thinking which is completely distinct from the Indian way of thinking, so that they would not understand the teachings of the ancient pundits if these were simply translated into Bengali. Therefore, if Bankim himself is to succeed in reaching out to these classes, he has to adopt western methods and use western ideas, and he has indeed written his commentary in this style. While he has paid attention to the commentarial work of traditional figures such as Śaṃkara, Ānandagiri, Śrīdhara, Rāmānuja, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, Viśvanātha Cakravartī, and others, an individual who is acquainted with

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western literature, science, and philosophy cannot follow these ancients in every manner. He cannot sympathise, he writes, with those who claim that everything declared by the pundits of the country in former times is correct and that whatever is stated by westerners about the principles of the physical world is incorrect (BR 2, 680–81). Thus, as we will see, Bankim’s hermeneutic pathways through traditional Hindu lifeworlds involve, in the words of A. P. Sen (2008:19), the forging of a middle path between ‘an uncritical acceptance of Westernization and a xenophobic rejection of all that was not Indian’. First, Bankim views several Hindu forms of religiosity through the prisms of naturalistic explanations, and seeks to retrieve Hindu rational modes of thinking from classical texts and thinkers. Thus, he argues that the characteristic feature of both Hindu dharma and Buddhist dharma, namely, detachment from worldly happiness (aihik sukhe nispṛhatā) is explicable in terms of the intense heat in the country, so that the people are averse to labour, and have consequently become habitually slothful and indifferent (BR2, 302). In this vein, Bankim argues that some festivals in the Hindu calendar are of recent origin, and some of them initially did not have a specifically religious significance but had their roots in agricultural or astronomical cycles (BR3, 92). He praises the intellectual sophistication of Nyāya philosophy which he thinks could have demolished the mass of Bengali superstition, though he notes that its complex jargon remained largely inaccessible to the common people and its ‘inherent rationalism’ remained the exclusive preserve of its professors (BR3, 99). The ‘wise scepticism’ of the Sāṃkhya philosophy too could have contributed to Hindu progress but it is ultimately a mass of error which is based on the acceptance of the Vedas as setting down the authoritative limits within which human thought can operate (BR3, 126). More generally speaking, Bankim argues that the classical Hindu way of investigating natural phenomena was deeply flawed because instead of proceeding through observation and experiment, it simply spun out inferences through the deductive method. Thus, whereas European scientists such as Toricelli and Pascal carried out experiments to demonstrate that the atmosphere had weight, a Hindu philosopher would have simply declared this thesis in an aphoristic sūtra without carrying out any quantitative measurements or experimentations (BR3, 146–47). Bankim’s general refusal to invoke supernaturalist beings, agencies, and processes is clear in various short essays where he provides meticulous accounts of classical Hindu lifeworlds while he himself remains noncommittal with respect to their underlying ontologies. In his Sāṃkhya-darśan (1879), he sketches a full spectrum of twenty-three positions regarding the origin of the Vedas, ranging from the standpoint of the Vedas themselves to the claims found in the Mahābhārata, and in the Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, and Vaiśeṣika schools.

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He notes, in particular, that there are certain scriptures such as the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā, and the Bhāgavata-purāṇa which indicate that the Vedas are not the superior pathway to the divine reality. He concludes his discussion by acknowledging that he has indeed not provided any definite answer to the question, ‘Why should one accept the Vedas?’ He wishes to leave the matter to those who are capable of discussing such questions – he has only sought to present to his readers the views taken by pundits in the past (BR2, 234). An important corollary of such attempts to unearth the natural origins of religious motifs is that socioreligious reform is driven primarily not by scriptural proof-texting but by sociological shifts in sensibilities. Bankim begins an article on Vidyasagar’s opposition to polygamy by noting that he is, in fact, not sufficiently versed in the scriptural texts to determine whether Vidyasagar has succeeded in refuting the views of his opponents on strictly scriptural grounds (BR2, 314). In any case, while he himself agrees that polygamy is an immoral custom (kuprathā), he is doubtful that demonstrating its lack of scriptural grounding will contribute towards its eradication. He notes that certain social observances are prevalent among Bengalis because of the force of popular custom (lokācār) even if they are opposed to the scriptures (śāstrabiruddh); and conversely, if social observances were opposed to popular custom, they would not endure even if they were in accordance with the scriptures. Crucially, even those who support Vidyasagar’s views have not, by and large, instituted the remarriage of widows in their families because they agree with its textual basis (BR2, 315–16). Bankim is happy to note that the practice is gradually disappearing and he argues that with the spread of education it will completely vanish from the country (BR2, 318). This logic of social transformation is evident in Bankim’s letter to Binoy Krishna Deb on 27 July 1892, where Bankim writes that regarding sea travel to foreign lands he does not believe that social reform (samāj saṃskār) can be effected by quoting scripture for Bengali society is governed not by scriptural texts but by local and popular custom. Because such reform is to be carried out not through scriptural quotations but through transformations in our understanding of dharma, before enquiring into whether sea travel is in accordance with the dharma-śāstras we should rather ask whether it is permitted by dharma. The criterion of dharma is not conformity to the dharma-śāstras – because sea travel is beneficial to the people (lokahitakar) it is approved by the Hindu dharma, whatever may be the declarations of the dharma-śāstras (BR2, 925–27). At the same time, Bankim emphatically steers away from the Orientalist scholarship of his times which often represented the history of India as a mass of intellectual errors, irrational viewpoints, and hidebound customs. He asks his contemporaries to be careful so that they do not go down the way of some

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western scholars and treat every scriptural text which cannot be accommodated to their own understanding as false or erroneous. They should revere the inherited resources from the past if they are to rise high in the future – they should not seek, in the manner of these western thinkers, to erase the existence of national resources which have withstood the rise and the fall of empires across thousands of years (BR3, 164–65). Thus, he claims that the notion of unconditionality, which we find in J. S. Mill’s definition of causation, can also be found in the Nyāya philosophers who had stated that a cause is the invariable antecedent of that which is not obtained without it. The superior forms of Hindu thought accept this law of causation which is also the basis, Bankim claims, of the European recognition of the sovereignty of law, and these forms rule out theological concepts relating to divine intervention, special providence, miracles, and an initial creative act (BR3, 147–48). The crucial problem here is the reconciliation of unalterable law with the possibility of divine intervention, and Bankim argues that the ancient Brahmin theologians had grappled with the problem which also trouble Christian theologians. Further, both arrived at the same solution which is that when God intervenes in the natural domain God does not suspend divine laws but works through secondary causes, so that God controls ‘one set of laws by the operation of another set’. In the Indian case, we find divinities such as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa too delivering the world from evil by working through human means and in human ways, so that no natural laws are violated (BR3, 252). The general hermeneutic principle governing such readings, which, as we will see, is crucial to Bankim’s retrieval of an ideal Kṛṣṇa from the scriptures, is that whatever is supernatural (atiprakṛta) or non-natural (anaisargik) is not credible, for such phenomena can later be shown to be incorporated within natural laws of which we are yet unaware. Even if we have directly perceived such phenomena, we should not accept their reality, for it is more likely that our sense-perception is erroneous than a violation of natural law (prākṛtik niẏamlaṅghan) has actually taken place (BR2, 430–31). This cautious mixture of, on the one hand, a critique of traditional religious explanations and, on the other hand, a rationally reconstructed Hindu mode of religiosity structures Bankim’s essay ‘Vedic Literature’ (1894), where he argues that while European scholars regard the hymns (sūktas) of the Ṛg Veda as the products of a polytheistic people, who deified and worshipped natural entities, Indian commentators, starting from Yaska, have viewed them as celebrating the power of the one great source of all worldly phenomena. There are numerous texts in the Ṛg Veda which, in fact, orient ‘nature worship’ towards a monotheism. Some of these hymns originated as ballads or lyrical poems, and after they lost their secular character they were placed alongside other

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sūktas which are distinctively theological (BR3, 153–54). Turning next to the crucial theme that the Vedas are authorless (apauruṣeya) which, as we saw in Chapter 2, was rejected by Debendranath, Akshaykumar, and others sometime around 1850, Bankim argues that the hymns are to be understood as the compositions, on various theological and secular themes, of the ancient sages who were inspired individuals (BR3, 155–57). While some Indian scholars claim that these sages were omniscient individuals who were familiar with modern scientific discoveries, Bankim remains unpersuaded by such statements. He argues that the sages were, in fact, largely unaware of the physical processes through which rain is produced or combustion takes place, and they only sought to praise the divine reality as the giver of rain, and as the producer of solar, atmospheric, and terrestrial fire (BR3, 159). At the same time, Bankim insists that the Ṛg Veda should be an object of reverence and study for ‘every true Hindu’ (BR3, 157). They should study the Vedas with a critical spirit – they should not accept the claim of a pundit that the Vedas are eternal unless they can find some evidence in the Vedas that they have existed eternally, or the view of a western scholar such as Max Müller that the Vedas are simply a series of solar myths until they have convinced themselves that the Vedas allow only this explanation. Therefore, while they should accept the help of Indian scholars and western Orientalists in their Vedic investigations, they should examine their conclusions properly through their own rational powers: ‘Prefer thoughtfulness even when it leads to error, to intellectual imbecility’ (BR3, 161). In short, then, Hinduism needs a reconfiguration in which delusions, superstitions, and absurdities – which are the dense encrustations of the ages – have to be excised, so that we obtain a new Hinduism which is ‘reformed, regenerated and purified’. The fundamental truths of Hinduism are applicable for all times and these are the truths that must be maintained as we remove, without becoming overwhelmed by the weight of ancient authorities, the unnecessary appendages which have become harmful corruptions in the present social circumstances (BR3, 235–36). Bankim writes approvingly that in recent times the educated Bengalis are beginning to discuss religious matters and are becoming reverential towards religion, for there is no progress without the revival (punarjīban) of the national religion. However, he cautions his readers that a lot that goes by the name of Hindu dharma is merely an aggregate of behavioural regulations, and adds that the traditionalist type of Hindu dharma that Pundit Sasadhar Tarkachudamani is propagating would not flourish (BR2, 776). He argues that not everything that is contained in a scripture such as the Manusaṃhitā is dharma, for there is much in these texts which relates simply to social custom. The real substance (prakṛta marma) and the essence of Hindu

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dharma is to be retrieved by discarding impure local customs which masquerade as Hindu dharma and elements which are merely fictional or poetry or archaeology or pseudo-science or history. The dharma is that which leads to the proper progress (unnati) of humanity on all fronts – physical, mental, and social. The essence of all dharmas comprises truths relating to such progress and it is in Hindu dharma that we find the real completion (prakṛta sampūrṇatā) of such truths (BR2, 777–78). Such a refined Hinduism, from which noxious elements are removed, will promote the education of all humanity, and will be the basis of the individual and the social existence of Hindus in an ‘age of progress’. However, for reforming Hinduism, we do not have to return, in the manner of Dayanand Saraswati, to the ancient templates that were suitable for people who lived three millennia ago because these may not be suitable for their descendants (BR3, 235–36). Second, Bankim’s understanding of religion is structured by a dialectical tension between on the one hand, a rejection of the conceptual, experiential, and institutional apparatus associated with religious traditions and, on the other hand, an affirmation of the existence of the supremely personal divine reality and the divine providental control over the world. He writes that he himself believes in the existence of the ‘Great Author of Nature’ and in the providential care exercised by the creator over the world. If a Positivist were to claim that the belief in a personal God is simply a mythical tale, Bankim replies that he regards such worship as ‘the highest perfection of religion’, for only a personal God constitutes ‘the highest and most perfect ideal of the Good, the Beautiful and the True’ (BR3, 237–38). In fact, a religion which does not recognise the ideal of the perfectly personal being cannot be a perfect religion; again, a religion cannot be perfect if it does not include the perfection of moral feelings towards fellow human beings. Further, a religion cannot be perfect if it does not include nature worship, for history demonstrates that such religions promote bigotry, cruelty, and fanaticism. Hinduism alone contains all three elements, declares Bankim, and is thus the perfect religion (BR3, 264–65). Hindus, by and large, he notes, worship such a personal God and terms such as īśvara, parameśvara, and others are used by them ‘to denote not the philosophic conception of a pantheistic God, but a Personal Ruler of the universe, and the supreme Disposer of all things’ (BR3, 269). Returning to this theme in the Dharmatattva, Bankim writes that dharma does not reach its fulfilment in the concept of the qualityless divine reality of Advaita or Herbert Spencer’s ‘Inscrutable power in Nature’, for such a deity is merely a philosophical or scientific notion. The worship (upāsanā) of the personal God, which is described in the Purāṇas and the historical narrations (itihāsas), and in the Bible, is the true basis of dharma (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 18).

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At the same time, Bankim is hesitant to connect the devotional worship of a personal deity too tightly with specific sets of beliefs and practices. Bankim writes in his Cittaśuddhi (1885) that the essence (sār) of Hindu dharma lies not in matters relating to the worship of the divine through forms or as formless, monotheism or polytheism, duality (dvaita) or nonduality (advaita), the pathway of action (karma) or the pathway of devotion (bhakti), and so on, but in the purification of the mind. This purification is, in fact, the essence of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and even the atheistic religion of Comte, and those who have attained such purification are the superior types of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Positivists. One principal characteristic of such purification is control over the senses (indriẏa saṃyam), not indeed by exterminating the senses but by developing detachment towards them. This control is therefore to be attained not through undertaking ascetic penances in the forests but precisely by remaining on the field of karma in the world, while struggling to gain control over the senses by living in the proximity of sense-objects. An even greater obstacle, however, on the pathway of such purification is a self-centred attitude which seeks one’s own wealth, fame, and prosperity. Therefore, we should cultivate an altruism (parārthaparatā) where we seek the happiness of others just as we seek our own happiness and we do not regard the other as different (bhinna) from us, so that by gradually forgetting our own concerns we become absorbed in the welfare of others and our self (ātmā) expands to become universally pervasive. An even more significant characteristic of this purification of the mind than concern for others is an intense devotion (gāṛh bhakti) towards the one who is the source of all purity, who is intrinsically pure, and without whose mercy (anukampā) there is no purification. Such devotion is the root of the purification of the mind and of dharma. Thus, the essential teaching of Hindu dharma is the inner peace (hṛdaẏe śānti) that arises from sense-control, love of humanity (manuṣye prīti), and devotion to God (BR2, 259–61). Bankim’s affirmations of the existence of the supremely personal divine reality and the cruciality of devotional love, which also steer away from specific doctrinal beliefs and ritual forms, are repeated in his reflections, from scientific perspectives, on the three Hindu deities, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śivā (Trideb Sambandhe Bigyānśāstra Ki Bale, 1875). Here the argument shifts between sympathetic presentations of traditional Hindu accounts of the nature of divinity and sharp reminders that these accounts cannot be established scientifically. Bankim notes that if one looks at the world through the naturalistic viewpoints of Mill and Darwin, it is not implausible that the creator of the world, the preserver of the world, and the destroyer of the world are three distinct conscious principles. This conclusion provides the natural foundation (naisargik

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bhitti) for the Hindu belief in the triad of Brahmā as creator (sraṣṭā), Viṣṇu as preserver (pātā), and Śiva as destroyer (harttā). Having thus set up some broad correlations on naturalistic grounds, Bankim shifts dialectical gears and proceeds to argue that he does not wish to claim that the ancient scriptural texts arrived at the conception of the divine triad specifically through such scientific considerations, nor has he himself argued that the existence of this triad can be scientifically established. Moreover, science teaches us that production, preservation, and destruction are subject to the same set of laws and thus we cannot demonstrate the existence of three distinct conscious agents (BR2, 279–80). Bankim concludes this reflection by noting that science has demonstrated the existence of an infinite, inconceivable, and incomprehensible power (śakti) which pervades everything, which is the cause of everything (sakaler kāraṇ), and which is the inner self (antarātmāsvarūp) of the external world, and he offers his obeisance towards that great force (BR2, 280). Third, just as properly understood, Hindu life-worlds do not involve supernaturalistic interventions, they are also distinct from modes of world negation, ascetic denial, and cosmic pessimism. As A. Ray (1986:42) has noted in this connection, ‘The Hinduism which Bankim taught embraced the whole of human life – a synthesis of enjoyment and renunciation’. This synthesis clearly appears in Bankim’s Vaiṣṇava-flavoured readings of Hindu religiosity in which he presents, in vocabularies reminiscent of the writings of Bipin Chandra, the Sāṃkhya duality of puruṣa and prakṛti in terms of the divine pair of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. The Sāṃkhya view that all human existence is suffering, so that liberation lies in the complete dissociation of the soul from nature, ‘strikes at the root of all true religion’ (BR3, 246). While Sāṃkhya philosophy thus regards the highest goal of human existence as the complete separation of puruṣa and prakṛti, the legends of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa instead present Rādhā as prakṛti and Kṛṣṇa as puruṣa and declare that the supreme bliss of human life lies, in fact, in their union. Thus, some Hindus have rejected the ‘gloomy pessimism’ of the Sāṃkhya philosophers because they perceive that in this union ‘lies the source of all beauty, all truth, and all love’ (BR3, 215). Bankim’s rejection of forms of world-negation is clearly argued out also in his Manuṣyatva Ki? (1877), where he states that even if it is claimed that the purpose of this life is to perform karma which will generate happiness in the hereafter, we do not know, in fact, what kinds of karma these should be and the existence itself of the hereafter lacks proof. However, if there is indeed a hereafter and this life is a testing-ground where we train ourselves for the afterlife, we need not assume that there is a discontinuity between actions which generate auspiciousness on earth and actions which would be auspiciousness-producing in heaven. He concludes this meditation with the claim that the purpose of human existence

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is the proper cultivation (anuśīlan), complete expression, and suitable elevation and purification of all mental dispositions (mānasik bṛtti) (BR2, 375). 2

Bankim and the Ideal Kṛṣṇa of Vaiṣṇavism

The three dimensions of Bankim’s religiosity highlighted above also crucially shape his retrievals of a Vaiṣṇavism where he carefully excises from traditional Vaiṣṇava systems the aspects which were often regarded by his contemporaries as degenerate, excessive, and supernaturalistic. Echoing contemporary Brahmo critiques of the Purāṇas and the historical narrations (itihāsas), Bankim argues that they present the gods as possessing astonishing characteristics – some are arrogant, some are egoistic, some are greedy, and all of them are greatly sinful and weak. The worship of such deities can only lead to great sin (mahāpāp) and the deterioration of mental powers, and such worship cannot be the Hindu dharma whose revival (punarjīban) is being sought (BR2, 787). The revitalised Hindu dharma, it turns out, will be shaped by certain Vaiṣṇava elements which have first been passed through historicist and rational sieves. Presenting what he regards as the true meaning of the pivotal text, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, Bankim argues that the esoteric truths of Sāṃkhya have been made accessible and pleasing to the general people by the composer of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, by presenting Kṛṣṇa as puruṣa and Rādhā as prakṛti. The deeper significance (gurḥ tātparya) of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, then, is the association (saṃyog) between puruṣa and prakṛti, which is followed by their disassociation (viyog) and finally liberation (mukti). Such symbolism (rūpak) was, however, lost in the poetry of Jayadeva (c. 1200 CE), who was writing at a time when the vigorous and politically astute people had become luxurious, sensual, weak, and inactive. Thus, Jayadeva’s poem Gīta-govinda, which is an expression of his social settings, presents Kṛṣṇa as a young connoisseur of rasa who has an enchanting form and in these poems the light of majesty (gaurab), which illuminates the character of Kṛṣṇa in the Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, has become dimmed (BR2, 905). Pursuing this ideal Kṛṣṇa of the Mahābhārata, Bankim quotes from scriptures such as the Viṣṇu-purāṇa, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, and others, and also draws on astronomical calculations relating to the precession of the equinoxes, the chronology of kings such as Chandragupta Maurya, and so on to arrive at 1430 BCE as the date of the composition of the Mahābhārata (BR2, 414–16). At the same time, he rebuts the claims of some European scholars that the Pāṇḍavas of the epic were not historical figures or that Kṛṣṇa was a later interpolation into the epic, by pointing to their occurrence in various other texts such as the grammarian Panini’s

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sūtras, the Ṛg Veda, the Upaniṣads, and so on (BR2, 417–24). The Kṛṣṇa whom Bankim wishes to foreground in this manner was indeed an abatār of God but he performed all his actions through natural human powers which were in accordance with the dharma of human beings. Bankim’s quest for the ‘original’ Mahābhārata is shaped by his presupposition that the text contains elements which are mythical, improbable, and unhistorical, and this combination of historical elements with imaginative interpolations has taken place partly because of the oral transmissions of the narrative (BR2, 411–12). Bankim argues that there are three layers in the epic: the first layer is an original skeleton with the narratives of the Pāṇḍavas and some details relating to Kṛṣṇa, and the second layer, which contains some philosophical truths relating to transcendental matters, is a subsequent addition to the former. While in the first, Kṛṣṇa is not clearly identified as an abatār of God and does not perform any supernatural deeds, in the second, Kṛṣṇa is worshipped as an abatār and Kṛṣṇa himself declares his divinity. The third layer is composed of later insertions across several centuries by various individuals for the education of the common people (BR2, 428–29). Bankim methodically applies this hermeneutic rule – what is more historical is what is original and what is more supernatural is what has been interpolated – across the Vaiṣṇava scriptures. He argues that to the extent that a text has derivative (amaulik) and supernatural (anaisargik) elements, it is to that extent modern (ādhunik), so that we can establish the following sequence of priority and posteriority (paurbbāparya): the first layer of the Mahābhārata, the fifth section of the Viṣṇu-purāṇa, the Harivaṃśa, and the Bhāgavata-purāṇa (BR2, 446). Thus, the elaborations in texts such as the Bhāgavata-purāṇa of Kṛṣṇa’s supernatural deeds are to be rejected as latter-day interpolations. Returning to his theme that the notion of supernaturalistic interventions in the causal systems of the world should not be associated with Hindu thought, Bankim argues that Kṛṣṇa in his human form did not perform any deeds through divine powers or by violating natural laws (naisargik niẏamer bilaṅghan dvārā), and such supernaturalistic descriptions are to be understood as interpolations which were added to the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas (BR2, 435). Even if we accept that Kṛṣṇa is an abatār, we still have reason not to accept as real the supernatural deeds that he is said to have performed through his divine powers. This is because if he indeed performed such deeds, his assumption of a human body would be otiose – the omnipotent God who produces and dissolves the world with the divine will could have also destroyed demons and delivered humans even without descending to earth (BR2, 430–31). More crucially, God is born in a human form for the purpose of imparting teachings to humanity, which is why an abatār will only accomplish what is humanly possible and through the

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exercise of human power. If an abatār were instead to employ divine powers, such an abatār cannot be an ideal (ādarśa) to be emulated by human beings who do not possess such powers (BR2, 507). Using this hermeneutic lens, Bankim systematically de-mythologises and re-mythologises various incidents relating to Kṛṣṇa across the Purāṇic narratives. The narratives of the child Kṛṣṇa slaying demons such as Bakāsura and Aghāsura are to be rejected because they do not appear in the Mahābhārata or the Viṣṇu-purāṇa. Again, the story of Kṛṣṇa vanquishing the poisonous serpent in the Yamunā by dancing on its hoods is to be read not as a literal event but as a metaphor (rūpak) – the Yamunā symbolises the flow of time with terrifying vortices in which lie hidden the extremely venomous serpent-like enemies of human beings, and these enemies are crushed by the lotus-feet of the merciful Lord (BR2, 450–52). Again, the narrative of Kṛṣṇa obtaining the Syāmantaka gem is not historical, though it does indicate his sense of justice, selflessness, truthfulness, and competence (BR2, 488). Likewise, while the narrative that Kṛṣṇa held aloft the Govardhan hill for seven days and saved the cowherds from the rains unleashed by Indra is to be removed as a non-natural elaboration, we should accept the deeper significance contained in the narrative – though the omnipotent and omnipresent God can indeed be worshipped in terms of distinct powers such as the wind, the fire, and so on, it is more in accordance with dharma that we assist human beings than we pay respect to inert entities such as the rain. However, if it is claimed that this Govardhan narrative shows that Kṛṣṇa lifts up the mountain as the divine sport (līlā), Bankim retorts that he fails to understand why Kṛṣṇa should undertake such an operation when simply through his will Kṛṣṇa could have dispersed all the clouds and cleared up the skies (BR2, 452–53). Throughout his retrievals of an ideal Kṛṣṇa in this manner, Bankim continues to respond to the critiques of Kṛṣṇa as a crafty, immoral, and degenerate thief. He is aware that for such critics, the episodes surrounding the cowherd women constitute the principal taint in the character of Kṛṣṇa. He quotes extensively from the Viṣṇu-purāṇa and the Harivaṃśa, and argues that terms such as rāsa and rati are to be properly understood in terms of the dance through which the devotees of Kṛṣṇa worship him (BR2, 453–62) The fictional elaboration (upanyās) of Kṛṣṇa stealing the clothes of the cowherd women too is to be understood in a spiritual sense – those who are devoted to Kṛṣṇa should offer everything of their being to him (BR2, 462–63). More categorically, he argues that at no place in the Mahābhārata does Kṛṣṇa enter a battle for a purpose other than the fulfilment of dharma (BR2, 495). Even though he acknowledges that the narrative of Kṛṣṇa asking Arjuna to abduct his sister

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Subhadrā belongs to the first layer of the Mahābhārata and thus cannot be discarded as a subsequent interpolation, he argues that in this abduction there was no harm done to Subhadrā herself, her family, or her wider society (BR2, 498–504). Moreover, he laments that Yudhisthira himself viewed Kṛṣṇa as devoid of passion and anger, truthful, and free from all defects, while present-day critics regard him as a rake, a butter-thief, a liar, and so on (BR2, 509). Thus, in Kṛṣṇa, Bankim concludes, we find the perfect exemplar for Hindus as he is an individual who has completely and harmoniously developed all human capacities. While Christ would neither have been able to rule over a kingdom nor have wished to lead his people to independence from Roman oppression, Kṛṣṇa was a superior statesman who entered the battlefield for the sake of dharma (BR2, 516–17). Echoing the viewpoints of Bijoy Krishna and Bipin Chandra, Bankim writes that this ideal path of the worship of Kṛṣṇa is not for those people who do not have purity of mind (citta śuddhi) – they have not cultivated the knowledge-gathering faculties and thus they mistakenly view the deeds of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in terms of sensual pleasures. God is infinitely beautiful (ananta saundaryamaẏ), and the infinite divine qualities and their collective beauty are beyond our comprehension. Therefore, we cannot know God merely through our knowledge-gathering faculties such as intelligence (buddhi) or faculties of action such as devotion without the cultivation also of the aesthetic faculties (cittarañjinībṛittigulir) which enable us to appreciate the beauty of God. This is why the narration of the sports of the young Kṛṣṇa is an aspect of modern (ādhunik) Vaiṣṇava worship (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 147). The rāslīlā that is celebrated in such worship is, in truth, not an obscene affair but was originally a form of worship involving the perfect cultivation (caram anuśīlan) of the aesthetic faculties by orientating them towards God. The women would worship the infinite beauty of Kṛṣṇa and become immersed in Kṛṣṇa, as devotion would be produced in their minds by the full moon of autumn, the swirling waters of the Yamunā, the fragrant woods of Vṛndāvana, and the world-enchanting flute of Kṛṣṇa. He reminds his readers that while greatly wise people have failed to realise the unity between the finite self and the supreme self, the illiterate cowherd women gained this knowledge of nondifference (abhedjñān) through their love of the beautiful God (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956:148). These varying images of Kṛṣṇa are highlighted in a dialogue that Bankim constructs between a master and a disciple, where the master begins by saying that he would initiate the disciple into the worship of Kṛṣṇa, who surpasses all other exemplary human beings in the religious history of the world.

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Disciple: What? Kṛṣṇa! Master: You are agitated because the only Kṛṣṇa you know of is the one in Jayadeva or in the popular theatre (yātrā) – though even the significance of that you do not understand completely. And then, of the Kṛṣṇa who possesses all divine qualities you do not know anything at all. All his physical faculties have attained an all-rounded development and given him immeasurable beauty and strength; his mental faculties are perfected in this manner and he possesses superhuman learning, education, strength, and knowledge; and through the perfection of his love he is devoted to the welfare of all humanity bandopadhyay and das 1956: 20

The Kṛṣṇa who emerges from these reconstructions is largely human – and yet more than merely human for Kṛṣṇa is, after all, an abatār. Arguing against the viewpoint that the divine reality is utterly undifferentiated, and thus there cannot be a divine abatār, Bankim notes that we do not have any mental capacities through which we can grasp the notion of a qualityless divine reality, while we can indeed speak of the divine reality as producer, preserver, and deliverer. The aim of the abatār is therefore to provide human beings with the perfect exemplar (ādarśa) of the all-rounded expression, culmination, harmonisation, and fulfilment of all human powers through action. A qualityless divine reality is bodiless and devoid of bodily powers, and infinite, whereas we are bodily and finite beings, and thus the former cannot set forth the ideal forms of action that we should pursue on the pathway of dharma (BR2, 432–33). All these arguments lead up to the conclusion of Kṛṣṇacaritra which is that in Kṛṣṇa we witness the expression everywhere and at all times of all noble qualities – Kṛṣṇa is invincible, pure, holy, loving, merciful, dutiful, learned in the Vedas, a statesman, a philanthropist, just, forgiving, impartial, and selfless (BR2, 583). Even more widely, Bankim develops his historicising arguments to emphasise the primacy of devotional love in Hindu universes. He argues that the Vedic people did not in the beginning have a proper understanding of God, and they attributed consciousness to insentient natural substances and forces. With the development of their understanding, they were able to see that the sky, the wind, the clouds, and the fire are all subject to the same inviolable rule of one controller (BR2, 815). However, the belief that there is one creator God underlying all worldly phenomena co-existed with the belief that these deities have been employed by God for protecting the people. With a further advancement of knowledge, the worshippers understood these deities not as independent beings but simply as expressions of divine power, so that Indra, Vāyu, and Sūrya were regarded by them as different names of the one God. The highest

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development of Vedic dharma is found in the Upaniṣads, where the gods have been cast away and all worship is directed towards the blissful Brahman. However, Bankim argues that the dharma of the Upaniṣads – though extremely pure – is yet incomplete. The completeness of Hindu dharma is found, in fact, in the treatises on devotion (bhakti) such as the Bhagavadgītā where devotion is added to the worship of the divine reality envisioned as saccidānanda (BR2, 816). By the time Bankim wrote his Dharmatattva (1888), which is structured as a series of dialogues between a master and a disciple, he clearly believed that the basis of a revitalised Hindu dharma would be not the Upaniṣads, as was the case with Brahmos such as Debendranath, Rajnarayan, and Sitanath, but the Purāṇas which, he argued, had set up a Hindu dharma in which the worship of reality (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda) is abundantly present, and the aspect of ānanda is particularly expressed. This Purāṇic dharma was fit, in Bankim’s estimate, to become a national dharma, and this dharma which is complete in all respects (sarbāṅgasampanna) has not been dislodged by any half-developed foreign dharma (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 146). In terminologies of complete existential commitment to the active and adorable God which are strongly resonant with Vaiṣṇava texts, the master says that devotion is the state where all the human faculties are turned towards God (īśvarmukhī) and become subordinate to God (īśvarānubartinī) – the faculties of acquiring knowledge are dedicated to an inquiry into the nature of God, the faculties of action are offered to God, the aesthetic faculties (cittarañjinī) perceive God’s beauty, and the bodily faculties are employed in carrying out God’s work and following God’s will (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 65–66). Thus, Bankim’s Kṛṣṇacaritra, written around the same time as Dharmatattva, has been characterised as a ‘neo-Puranic work’ which tries to retrieve a Purāṇic figure against the backdrop of religious cultures such as Brahmo iconoclasm and styles of Vedānta which had rejected appeals to the Purāṇas (Sen 2008: 91). 3

Between Science and Self

A characteristic dialectic that runs through these writings is that certain aspects of scripture cannot be accepted in the light of science, while science itself should not be given the final word on spiritual matters which are beyond its epistemic reach. The motifs relating to the reconstruction of a humanly ideal Kṛṣṇa through the rejection of supernaturalistic elements form crisscrossing argumentative patterns through Bankim’s commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. Bankim argues that it is doubtful that the discussion between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna actually took place on the battlefield at a time when two

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armies were about to attack each other. While the dharma declared by the Lord is indeed recorded in the Gītā, another person, and not the Lord himself, wrote the Gītā. Moreover, we cannot believe that every word recorded in the Gītā was, in fact, uttered by the Lord – rather, it is possible that in various places the author has expressed their own views (nijer mat) through the mouth of the Lord. If nevertheless some readers maintain that the Gītā was composed by the sage Vyāsa, who was omniscient and infallible (abhrānta) through the force of yoga, so that we cannot raise doubts about the authorship of the Gītā, Bankim notes bluntly that his commentary has not been written for such readers (BR2, 693). Continuing to read scripture through scientific lenses, Bankim indicates that because the supernatural eye which was granted to Saṃjaya, the minister of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, is a supernatural (anaisargik) phenomenon, he does not ask his readers to believe in it, for it is not connected at all with the dharma expounded in the Gītā (BR2, 682). Again, in response to Gītā 3.10, which states that Prajāpati created the creatures along with the sacrifice (yajña), Bankim argues that the majority of his readers will assert that they do not believe in the creation of creatures, or that the Vedas are eternal or superhuman or contemporaneous with the creation, or that Prajāpati delivered a speech about the creatures. He writes that there is, in fact, no need to believe these statements and he himself does not accept them to be true (BR2, 750). Moreover, even if certain verses were indeed spoken by the Lord, it is not necessary that they should be compatible with twentieth-century science. Kṛṣṇa performed worldly deeds in accordance with human power and without using divine power, and because he was living in a human form three thousand years ago, he could not possibly have possessed scientific knowledge far ahead of his own times. Kṛṣṇa spoke in a language which would have been intelligible to the people of his own times, and it is the job of commentators to reinterpret the divine statements so that they are suitable for people in a more advanced state of knowledge (BR2, 753). Bankim writes with these de-mythologising vocabularies in a dialectical exchange relating to the worship of deities (debapūjā) where he notes, as a particular defence of this worship, the claim that the devotees receive good food at such worship. Bankim responds caustically that it is not the case that those who do not worship deities do not get to eat good food – in fact, the English sahibs who do not worship any Hindu images eat better food than the Hindus. He continues in an acerbic tone that it is not the case that whatever good food Bengali worshippers eat is first offered to the gods, for some sincere devotees offer such bad food to Kṛṣṇa that it would drive away even ghosts and departed spirits. Another defence of this worship is that through faith (biśvās) in the deity, diseases are cured – Bankim responds wryly that if the number

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of trustworthy doctors increases, the deities would lose their elevated status. Moreover, the worship of deities cannot be defended on the grounds that it constitutes social cohesiveness among the people and thus generates social stability. Bankim argues that the people of Bengal are being stifled by outdated forms of social unity, and if the worship of gods is indeed the main thread of social systems, it is better to cut it and start building a new society. Devotion to the gods is only one foundation of dharma, and even if this foundation is removed, there are other foundations which we should seek to establish through public education and superior moral instruction (BR2, 894). More fundamentally, the dharma of the worship of God through images is opposed to a scientific mentality, for people would then give the same response to every question, ‘The gods have done it’, and there would be no development of understanding (BR2, 895). Even in the vital matter of dietary habits, the final court of appeal is not, as is the case in traditional Hindu life-worlds, the socio-moral prescriptions and prohibitions of the Dharmaśāstras, but scientific considerations. In the Dharmatattva, the master argues that whether or not meat and fish are harmful for health is a matter that is to be settled by the scientist and not by the theologian (dharmabettā). While the prohibition in the scriptures against such consumption is based on the love (prīti) of all beings which is the essence of Hindu dharma, if scientists can establish that not eating meat and fish prevents the proper development of the physical faculties, so that we would have an excess of love which upsets the harmony of all the faculties, the eating of meat and fish would be permitted. The entire matter therefore rests on science and the preacher of dharma should not seek to take on the role of the scientist (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 50). Once again, these invocations of the epistemic authority of science are not meant to dismantle the cognitive foundations of belief in the spiritual world: science cannot prove the existence even of a particle of dust, Bankim claims, and it is therefore not surprising that science does not demonstrate the reality of the ātman. Bankim argues that the ātman has not been directly perceived by anyone and thus there can be no inferential knowledge about the ātman. Moreover, we do not have perceptual knowledge about an entity other than the ātman from which can infer the existence of the ātman. However, although scientific proofs do not lead us to the ātman, science does not succeed in yielding knowledge about the ātman because science cannot go that far in accessing that which is inaccessible to proof (pramāṇer aprāpya). Those who have found God in their hearts will not need any scientific proof about the ātman, for if the faculties of the mind are adequately purified (samucit mārjjita) knowledge regarding the ātman becomes self-established (svataḥsiddha). These devotees do not need arguments from petty philosophical treatises to accept

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the independence and the indestructibility of the ātman: for them it is sufficient that God exists and that God has declared that God is the supreme self (paramātman) and is present among all living beings. Therefore, we should not resort to imperfect science to ridicule the notion of the ātman, for while the ātman might be beyond (atīt) the reach of science, the ātman is not opposed to science (BR2, 699–701). Again, though he himself believes in the afterlife because there are proofs (pramāṇ) of its reality, Bankim writes that he does not wish to discuss them because there are various unresolved disputes relating to them among modern (ādhunik) scientists. In any case, it is not necessary to settle these debates for it is sufficient that an individual becomes holy (pabitra), pure in mind (śuddhacitta), and pious (dharmātmā), and even if they do not believe in the afterlife this world itself would then become like heaven (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 35–36). Forging such exegetical pathways also through the Bhagavadgītā, Bankim critiques certain Brahmo positions relating to ‘idolatry’ and also supports the Brahmo-resonant stances of world-affirmation. The scriptural foundation of the Bhagavadgītā provides Bankim with the tools for the form of religious humanism that he develops in the Dharmatattva, according to which the essence of Hindu dharma is a form of culture (anuśīlan) which is the basis of the four stations of life (āśram), and of the diverse vows, austerities, and rituals of Hindu life (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 5). First, Bankim argues that there is indeed the worship (upāsanā) of deities with form in Hindu dharma though Hindus, unless they are utterly ignorant or uneducated, do not imagine that the image (pratimā) is God or that God has a definite shape. The British, and their pupils, namely, the new (nabya) Indians, are angry with such idol-worshippers and their worship is put forward as the cause of the decline of the Hindus. However, the God who is omniscient and present in everything accepts all forms of worship. Since devotion (bhakti) is the essence of worship, the devotional worship of those who worship corporeal forms is acceptable (grāhya) to God whereas the worship without devotion of those who worship incorporeal forms is not acceptable to God (BR2, 715–16). In the Dharmatattva, however, we encounter a more critical and Brahmo-aligned view of image worship: the master argues that for those who possess universal love (prīti) and knowledge of the divine, the worship of images is superfluous. However, till such knowledge has been acquired, a worldly individual may engage in the worship of images (pratimā), since it is a means to the gradual (kramaśaḥ) purification of the mind (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 109). Second, Bankim argues that texts such as Gītā 2.55 do not praise the ascetic way of life, but rather indicate that the obstacle to the enjoyment of pleasure in the world is the intensity (prābalya) of desire and the senses. Therefore, when these are

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controlled there is no hindrance, and the world is transformed into a holy and pleasurable field of action (BR2, 741). Once again, we encounter Kṛṣṇa as the supreme ideal for Hindus on their paths of world-affirmation: in his commentary on Gītā 4.9, Bankim writes that knowing in truth the human birth and death of the Lord leads to liberation, because the Lord assumes a human body to show the ideal of humanity, and the ideal human being is the ideal agent (karmī) whose actions the practitioner of karma-yoga can seek to understand (BR2, 768). These historical studies and exegetical explorations of the Bhagavadgītā are also the site on which Bankim constructs his visions of religious universalism. He presents the performance of action without desire, along with the control of the senses and the dedication of the mind to God, as the essence of Hindu dharma, and states that this complete dharma is accessible to all human beings and is the only catholic religion (BR2, 746). The classical notion of fulfilling the socioreligious duties that pertain to one’s social group (svadharma) too should not be understood as specifically tied to the fourfold varṇa scheme of ancient India, as it was by thinkers such as Śaṃkara. This is because we cannot claim that God has created millions of human beings – who are not Hindus – without any svadharma: it cannot be the case that the dharma has been proclaimed only for Hindus, for the foreigners (mlechha) too are the children of God whose dharma cannot be narrow-minded (anudār). Properly understood, therefore, svadharma is the dharma that has to do with the cultivation of the humanity of an individual, namely, the mental and the physical faculties (BR2, 693–94). In this way, we should understand that there are five classes in every society relating to education, war, industry, agriculture, and service, and whichever burden an individual chooses to carry is their duty and their svadharma – this, Bankim declares, is the liberal (udār) explanation of the notion of svadharma. The Lord cannot intend that the dharma is tied down to one set of social conditions and is inoperative in altered circumstances – rather, as customs change over time, newer interpretations of the dharma have to be developed which suit the different social setting (BR2, 695). This universalism is spelt out even more clearly in Bankim’s commentary on Gītā 4.11 where he argues that all forms of worship – whether one worships the formless or the formed, the one Lord or multiple deities, ghosts, the world of the forefathers, the animate, the inanimate, humans, animals or rocks – are acceptable to God. Therefore, there are, in truth, no differences relating to dharma in the world – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, worshippers of multiple deities, and others all worship the one God and follow the path of God. Neither those who speak of Brahman nor the worshippers of a piece of stone know the proper form of God (īśvarsvarūp) and whichever mode of approaching God is sincere leads us to God. Bankim

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declares that the dharma which is proclaimed by this verse is the only unsectarian (asāmpradāẏik) dharma in the world and is the true Hindu dharma which is more generous (udār) than any other dharma (BR2, 769–70). 4

Conclusion

Bankim’s writings on socioreligious motifs indicate both certain powerful resonances with the viewpoints of his Brahmo and Vaiṣṇava contemporaries, and also certain sharp divergences from them. Bankim is quite aware of his ‘modernist’ locations where he has to work with contemporary scientific vocabularies in discussing a classical scriptural text. He himself actively encouraged the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science which was established by Mahendra Lal Sarkar in 1876 and he was also a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1863 and 1867 (Sen 2008: 42). Often, his exegetical comments are ironic, caustic, and wry, and reflect these social locations – for instance, after pointing to several passages of Śaṃkara’s commentary on Gītā 2.16, Bankim simply notes: ‘Śaṃkarācārya was a world-conquering pundit, and this philosophical analysis is indeed suitable for him. However, it does not fit easily with western education of the nineteenth century. Whether you regard happiness and suffering as sat [real] or as asat [unreal], they do exist’ (BR2, 713). Rigorously applying historicist tools to the scriptures, he de-mythologises various traditional viewpoints: for instance, in the declarations of the Vedas that Indra slayed demons such as Vṛtra, the demons are to be understood as natural processes which are obstacles to the production of rain (BR2, 790); all the eighteen Purāṇas could not have been composed by a single individual because numerous contradictions can be found across them (BR2, 437); and the narrative of the slaying of the demon Bānāsura cannot be accepted because it is full of astonishing events of a supernatural type (BR2, 485). Again, after arguing that the main truth (pradhān tattva) not only of Hindu dharma but also of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and all other dharmas is the belief in the ātman which is distinct from the body and which is indestructible (abināśī), Bankim notes that the main opponents of this view are the scientists. Though he himself believes that the epistemic reach of dharma is greater than that of science (bijñān), he is aware that he is writing for educated Bengalis who regard science with deep devotion, which is why he has to consider the arguments of science against the concept of the ātman (BR2, 696). If in such texts Bankim is aligned with the historicist, argumentative, and somewhat iconoclastic stances of Brahmos such as Rajnarayan, Sitanath, Sivanath, and others, he is also more deeply engaged than them in retrieving Kṛṣṇa from premodern

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layers of Vaiṣṇava cosmology and mythic narratives. Though he accepts Kṛṣṇa as a divine being, he largely presents Kṛṣṇa as the ideal human being – his Kṛṣṇa is well-versed in the Vedas and trained in the art of war, proficient in physical exercise, and a supreme statesman. Crucially, he notes that the Upaniṣads or the five rāsapañcādhyāya chapters of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa do not mention Rādhā, and she appears only in the Brahmavaivarta-purāṇa and the poems of Jayadeva (BR2, 467). Given these dynamic locations on the socioreligious landscapes of his Bengal, it is not surprising that Bankim has been understood from diverse perspectives (Chatterjee 1994). In his projects configured against colonial backdrops, and especially his writings about Hindu dharma which are pivoted on the Bhagavadgītā as the essence of religion, one clearly discerns his ‘tendency towards cultural self-assertion’ (Harder 2001: vii). Thus, he writes that even though he does not regard any scripture as divinely revealed, the Hindu dharma is the highest among all the other dharmas. Indeed, since the time of Rammohun, it has been established that the Hindu dharma has a natural basis and though it is not founded on divine revelation, its truth (yāthārthya) and superiority (śreṣṭhatā) can be accepted (BR2, 792). Thus, while the views of Herbert Spencer and Spinoza are similar in some respects to Vedāntic thought, rather than reject Vedānta from Hinduism one should instead regard them as ‘European Hindus’ and as members of the wider Hindu community – it is indeed a mark of the greatness (śreṣṭhatā) of Hinduism that Europe is able to grasp some aspects of its essential teachings (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956: 23). Even more clearly, in the Dharmatattva, the master notes that the dharma of Comte, which is atheistic (nirīśvar), is merely a method of performing rituals. The western doctrine remains undeveloped whereas Hindus are great devotees and their teachings regarding culture (anuśīlantattva) are dedicated to the lotus-feet of the Lord of the world (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956:6). Thus, after the master has presented an outline of the understandings of ‘religion’ developed by thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Mill, Comte, and others, and noted that just as one individual cannot see the whole world the totality of dharma too cannot be grasped by an individual’s intelligence, the master declares that if the dharma has been expressed anywhere in its fullness it is by Kṛṣṇa, the abatār of God, in the Bhagavadgītā (Bandopadhyay and Das 1956:160).

chapter 8

Competing Visions of Hindu Universalism We have been following, over the last seven chapters, the intellectual trajectories of several Brahmo thinkers whose sermons, discourses, and writings are often heavily infused with Vaiṣṇava idioms even though, with the exceptions of Bijoy Krishna and Bipin Chandra, they desist from explicitly invoking the name of the beloved Lord of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa. These religious pathways on the terrains of colonial Bengal were shaped partly by wider socio-political pressures on the Bengali intelligentsia and members of the middle classes. By the end of the eighteenth century, a number of Bengalis, drawn from various castes, had risen to positions of affluence through their association with the British in trade, government, and education. With their new wealth, they built mansions which they filled with western imports, and also built temples and became patrons of Brahmin priests. Till around 1850, Indians held up to one-third of the shares in joint-stock companies between British and Indian merchants directed towards coal mining, steamboat services, and railroad building. However, the 1850s was a ‘transitional period that marked both the beginning of purposeful economic imperialism and the end of over 150 years of Bengali-British business collaboration’ (King 1975:27). Some scholars have noted a concurrent shift from notions of liberal reform in the first half of the nineteenth century to the emergence of subjectivities and institutions more aligned with traditionalist Hindu cultures in the 1870s and the 1880s (Sartori 2008). As we have seen, it is precisely in these decades that Bijoy Krishna and Bipin Chandra move into the Vaiṣṇava landscapes of Bengal, and Bankim Chandra too begins to retrieve an ideal Kṛṣṇa from the Purāṇic materials. Debendranath’s early biographer, A. Chakravarti even dates the beginning of the decline of the Brahmo Samaj to 1872, the year of the Brahmo Marriage Act which stated that those Brahmos who sought to marry according to its provisions would have to declare that they were not Hindus. Concurrently with this decline, we see, Chakravarti writes, the renewal (punarutthān) of Hindu dharma on various fronts such as Sasadhar Tarkachudamani’s scientific explanations of Hindu themes, Bijoy Krishna’s non-sectarian Vaiṣṇava devotionalism and emphasis on the spiritual significance of the guru, and the harmonisation of all religions in Ramakrishna and Vivekananda (Chakravarti 1916: 29–30).

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It is noteworthy in this connection that between 1870 and 1900 there were more than ninety journals and organisations relating to Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal (Dasa 1999: 7) – in addition to Christian missionaries, Vaiṣṇavas were clearly a significant socioreligious other of the Brahmos in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chakravarti (1985: 403) argues that during these three decades, ‘the Hindu intelligentsia of Bengal felt a deep urge to rediscover the Vaiṣṇava culture of Bengal. They unearthed a great mass of materials hitherto unknown’. These members of the bhadralok sought to revitalise a Vaiṣṇavism rooted in the figure of Caitanya which would remove the accumulated dross of the centuries – adoration of the guru, sexual immorality, low-caste constitution, obscene literature, and lack of theological reflection – for which Vaiṣṇavism had been berated by Christian missionaries, Brahmo intellectuals, and various other groups, and normalise Vaiṣṇavism as respectable. Defenders of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism too could invoke the vocabularies of reformism to present their guru from Nadiya as a God-intoxicated individual who was deeply committed to purging social evils. Thus, B. Chunder writes in his travelogues published in 1869: ‘Regarded by his adversaries as a heresiarch, worshipped by his followers as an incarnation, he is now truly appreciated by the discerning generations of the nineteenth century as a Reformer’ (Chunder 1869: 29). In fact, through the nineteenth century, Caitanya was recuperated through a series of ‘modern enframements: as a religious reformer, a preacher and a teacher, a local hero, and an inspiration for the flourishing of indigenous literary cultures of Bengal’ (Bhatia 2017: 162). In the biographical account of Sishir Kumar Ghosh, for instance, Caitanya emerges as a charismatic individual who breaks down hierarchical caste boundaries and also religious divides, invites all individuals to the worship of the one true Lord, compassionately wins over sinners and turns them around to the Lord, and brings people together in ecstatic waves of devotional love. Fully conscious that this Caitanya was being retrieved and reinvigorated in the thick of Christian and Brahmo critiques, Sishir Kumar, who had once been a member of Keshub’s Brahmo Samaj of India, writes (1897: vii): ‘We have no desire to wrest a Christian from the bosom of Christ in order to transfer him to that of [Caitanya]. Our object is to preserve the kingdom of Christ and not destroy it  … This much, however, we claim for [Caitanya] that he had to address himself to a more advanced audience than the Prophet of Judea had to do’. In 1898, with the support of Sishir Kumar, the Gauranga Samaj was established which sought to actively propagate the teachings of Caitanya by setting up branches in different towns of Bengal Presidency, organising public speeches, publishing and distributing books on Caitanya in Bengali and in English, and organising the celebration of Caitanya’s birth anniversary as a public ceremony in Calcutta in 1899 (Bhatia 2017: 146–51). Around

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twenty years later, another key figure who accumulated a significant amount of premodern Vaiṣṇava material, D. C. Sen, addresses the charge of a European critic, ‘When all possible allowances have been made, it is difficult to acquit Chaitanya of the charge of being lacking in sanity and poise’ (Sen 1922: 266), by vigorously detailing the high spiritual ideal of the relationship of conjugal love between God and humanity, Caitanya’s love of humanity and the lower castes, Caitanya’s charge to his followers to propagate his teachings and work towards social reform, Caitanya’s vast scholarship, and so on. A key debate across these Brahmo and Vaiṣṇava worldviews was, therefore, over religious universalism – each group claimed to have configured a ‘catholic’ way of being-in-the-world which embodied the spiritual essence of the historically shaped religious standpoints of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and others across the world. As the decades of the first half of the twentieth century roll on and nationalisms begin to emerge in Bengal, the religious landscapes of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism are projected as distinctively ‘Bengali’ vernacularized, egalitarian, and progressive horizons (Chakravarti 1985: 424–25). Even as several types of religious universalisms were being envisioned, these decades from the 1870s onward witnessed the gradual entrenchment of British racialised and imperial hierarchies. The Viceroyalty of Ripon (1880–1884) was driven by programmes of liberal reform which would appeal to Indian educated groups but the failure of his enterprise indicated that his efforts were not more than ‘a stormy interlude in the era of paternalism which had swept over India since the Mutiny’ (Metcalf 1956:287). The intellectual projects that we have sketched in previous chapters were initiated within post-1857 Bengali milieus which begin to be increasingly structured by forms of difference, both in Orientalist imaginations and in British administrative liberalism (Sharpe 1993). The British constructions of Indian otherness were ridden with inner tensions: on the one hand, by rigidly fixing the natives in their volatility, passivity, and backwardness the British sought to justify their civilizing mission, but this very ascription of primitive irrationality to the natives was also an expression of the British disquietude that they would lurk at the peripheries as an ever-present source of sinister forces. Nevertheless, the hope that Indians would be transformed into ‘English liberals’ remained a powerful undercurrent as the British sought to negotiate the tension between, on the one hand, the legitimizations of British rule as a civilizing force over a people variously depicted as static, effeminate, deceitful, caste-bound, and superstition-ridden and, on the other hand, the recognition of the natives as the inheritors of rich traditions which had endured into the timeless present or as the subjects capable of receiving western education and thereby proceeding through a period of tutelage to self-government. As B. Parry has noted: ‘From the pedestal of a predominantly

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Protestant middle-class ethic, with its belief in work, restraint and order, the British looked down on the codes and habits of Indians as aberrations from a human norm which they defined in terms of their own standards … They saw in India vestiges of a primordial, dark and instinctual past which their own society had left behind in its evolution to civilization, as well as intimations of spiritual experiences more inclusive and transcendent than any known to the West, and which in their bewilderment they included as part of India’s mystery’ (Parry 1998: 31). British Victorian liberals, from various social and political backgrounds, were united in their desire to shake off the burden of the past which they associated with priestcraft and aristocracy, and they instead emphasised the virtues of self-reliance and self-determination, insisting that all human beings enjoy an equal footing in their capacity as autonomous rational beings. The process, however, of implanting such liberal views on Indian soil was shot through with inner tensions: if liberalism back at home possessed strong universalist implications, it had to be accommodated to the legitimizations of British rule as a civilizing force that would extricate the Indians from their depths of depravity and raise them to the level of self-government in the future. These contradictions between an implicit affirmation of similarity and a declaration of radical difference reached a breaking point during the fiery controversies over the Ilbert Bill during 1882–83 which proposed to give Indian magistrates the right to try British subjects. As T. R. Metcalf writes: ‘On the one side were ideals dear to the heart of liberals: equality before the law, and the transformative power of education … on the other side stood the bill’s opponents, who insisted on the essential difference of race, and argued for a legal system that would accommodate that difference. One was a vision of eventual “sameness”, the other of enduring “difference”’ (Metcalf 1994: 203–204). Another integral religious variable shaping these milieus, where Brahmos were envisioning a spiritual ‘sameness’ even as colonially-instituted ‘difference’ was being reinforced more firmly, was the circulation of Unitarian themes: some Unitarians in London and Boston regarded Rammohun himself, after the publication of his Precepts and his debates with Joshua Marshman, as a Unitarian Christian, and the Unitarian writings of Francis Newman (1805–1897) and Theodore Parker (1810–1860) played a pivotal role in highlighting the significance of the intuition in spiritual life to Brahmos (Lavan 1977). Rammohun had attained a celebrity status during his visit to England (1830–33), and he met with several prominent politicians, intellectuals, and Unitarian leaders (Zastoupil 2010). Unitarian women such as Sophia Dobson Collett (1822–1894) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) were read enthusiastically by Brahmos, and Collett herself initially wrote positive appraisals of Keshub’s religious thought and social work before denouncing him as a

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madman in the 1880s. Opposed to both the Brahmos and the Unitarians in the English-speaking circles of Calcutta were the mainstream Christians for whom these religious expressions were, at best, penultimate pointers to the fullness of Trinitarian Christianity. In 1883, referring to the contemporary ‘Theistic movements’ such as the Brahmo Samaj, Sir Richard Temple declared: ‘It is for you, my Christian brethren, to exert yourselves to attract that movement in the direction of Christianity. There is difficulty in attracting it, because these people have considerable intellect. They are not easily reasoned with … They must be convinced by the power of Christian argument, and, we should say, by the still greater power of Divine grace’ (Temple 1883: 163). In the same year, however, the Reverend Job Paul was less sanguine about the conversion to Christianity of its members: ‘That the movement has much good in it cannot be disputed  … But if I am questioned as to the attitude of the Brahmo Samaj towards Christianity, I am bound to answer that, it seems to me to stand in opposition, and to present a hindrance to the progress of the Gospel  …’ (Quoted in Mathew 1988: 88). In the first volume of his autobiographical reflections, the poet Nabinchandra Sen (1847–1909) vividly sketches some of these religious contours with these words: ‘I came to Calcutta. The city of Calcutta was then reeling under the impact of the newly-established Brahmo-dharma of Rammohun Roy. The leader of this movement was, at one end, the young Keshub Chandra and at another end, the Christian Lal Behari … The supremely wise Rammohun Roy established Brahmo-dharma as the real Hindu dharma which is based on the Vedas and the Upaniṣads, and in this way he defended the land by blocking the waves of Christianity’ (Sen 1912: 158). 1

The Brahmo Quest for Harmony and the Religions of the World

Against the backdrops of these colonial presences, transnational circulations, and interreligious dialectics the Brahmo motto, as we have seen throughout the previous chapters, remains ‘harmony’: each of the different formations within the Brahmo Samaj – the Adi Brahmo Samaj of Debendranath and Rajnarayan, the Brahmo Samaj of India of Keshub and his followers, and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj of Sitanath and Sivanath – claimed to have found the perfect harmony of different sets of contrary existential, social, and institutional impulses. One primary dimension of this ‘harmony’ was the correlation of the two notions of divinity common to Vedāntic debates: the divine reality as devoid of all categories, classifications, and conceptualisations (nirguṇa) and the divine reality as supremely personal (saguṇa). In this respect, Brahmo writers were anteceded by premodern bhakti poets in whose compositions the

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distinctions between nirguṇa Brahman and saguṇa Brahman were often fuzzy. According to C. Vaudeville (1999: 250), the Jñāneśvarī (c. 1290 CE), Jñānadeva’s commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, presents a hybrid form of Vaiṣṇava-Śaiva devotion where the question is left open as to whose divine name – Viṣṇu or Śiva – is to be taken in meditative remembrance (smaraṇa). Therefore, the usual divisions of medieval poet-saints into two groups – Rāma or Kṛṣṇa bhaktas and holy figures (sants) from nirguṇī perspectives – can obscure certain crisscrossing overlaps across the groups, and we should rather regard these influential poets as ranging over a spectrum and not clustered around specific doctrinal groups (Hawley 1984: 124). Such intersections are especially clear in the case of Tulsīdās (c. 1600 CE) who is often presented as an artist whose great skill lay in the harmonisation (samanvaya) of various divides such as jñāna and bhakti, nirguṇa and saguṇa conceptions of the deity, and so on (Pathak 1964: 112). While Rāma in the Rāmacaritamānasa of Tulsīdās is not simply an avatāra of Viṣṇu, but is the supreme Godhead, and is thus presented in several verses as superior to Śiva and Brahmā, Rāma is also depicted in other verses as possessing a devotional attitude to Śiva whom he reverentially worships. According to R. Bharadwaj (1979: 31–32), Tulsīdās does not regard Rāma, the son of Daśaratha, as metaphysically lower than nirguṇa Brahman because while the concepts of saguṇa and nirguṇa are contradictory from our human perspectives, they ‘supplement each other as necessary qualifications’ of divine perfection which transcends finite logical constraints. On these premodern trails, Brahmos generally argued that God is not nirguṇa in the metaphysically austere Advaita sense where no human categorisations whatsoever can be directed to the divine reality but God is not saguṇa either in the forms that are ritually, conceptually, and experientially integrated into Vaiṣṇava worldviews. As different groups of Brahmos sought to move towards the goal of the ‘harmony’ of different notions of divinity, not only between nirguṇa and saguṇa but also across the religions of the world, they often became entangled in protracted debates, with one group charging that the others had moved too far in one direction or the other. As Keshub sought, through the 1870s, to harmonise social reform with devotional intensity and, more broadly, ‘western’ activism with ‘eastern’ contemplation, the Brahmo life-worlds were split asunder with vicious accusations, recriminations, and counter-attacks. Keshub found himself increasingly isolated from some Brahmo groups even as he began to announce the arrival of the New Dispensation for all humanity in and through him. Keshub resigned from his position as a clerk in the Bank of Bengal to become a Brahmo missionary in June 1861, intending henceforth to rely only on divine providence for his subsistence. From June 1860, he began to publish a series of articles under the heading Tracts for the Times, where he

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argued that Brahmoism is based on intuition and is a non-sectarian system of belief that seeks to bring together all humanity in bonds of love. There are no references to Hinduism but one encounters western thinkers such as Aristotle, Locke, Hamilton, Shaftesbury, Hume, Reid, Coleridge, Cousin, and others (Borthwick 1977: 28). For one of Keshub’s sharpest critics, Dwijendranath Tagore, it was precisely this absence of Indic references that was the weakest dimension of Keshub’s movement. Dwijendranath frequently contributed to the National Paper which sought to draw Hindus away from Keshub, and arguing that progress was to be achieved through the development of national character and not its replacement with foreign cultures, he attacked Keshub’s universalism as ‘a masquerade for European Christianity’ (Kopf 1979: 182–84). Thus, we find a somewhat beleaguered Keshub reflecting on his self in 1881: ‘My motives and reasoning, my philosophy and logic I myself comprehend not, how can others understand them? I am a puzzle to my ownself; to others a hopeless puzzle’ (Bhattacharji 1903: 248). While Keshub’s New Dispensation was proclaimed as truly universal in its reach as it would bring together all previous dispensations of God to humanity, Keshub also sought to nationalise certain devotional experiences. Thus, in February 1876 he initiated a spiritual discipline on the basis of the four traditional pathways of yoga, bhakti, jñāna, and sevā, and in 1877 he assigned the study of four religious traditions, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam to four disciples – Gour Govind Roy, Aghore Nath Gupta, Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar, and Girish Chunder Sen, respectively. This spiritual egalitarianism would have been a concrete enactment of Keshub’s declaration: ‘the spirit of sectarianism is hostile to religion, and methinks religion and universal love are so vitally connected with each other that the former cannot exist without the latter’ (Sen 1892: 51). The universalising mission of Keshub’s Brahmo faith was carried forward by Pratap Chandra who visited America in 1883, 1893, and 1900, and is enunciated in the address given by him at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893: ‘Thus by insight into the immanence of God’s spirit in nature, thus by introspection into the fullness of the Divine presence in the heart, thus by rapturous and loving worship, and thus by renunciation and self-surrender, Asia has learned and taught wisdom, practiced and preached contemplation, laid down the rules of worship, and glorified the righteousness of God’ (Seager 1993: 448). Brahmos such as Bipin Chandra sought to pursue these universalist trajectories by explicitly naming the ‘Divine presence’ invoked by Pratap Chandra as that of the Lord Kṛṣṇa, even though they were aware that it was precisely Kṛṣṇa who was being condemned by various Brahmos, Christian missionaries, and other groups as a crafty, devious, and immoral deity. Thus, in presenting Kṛṣṇa as ‘the soul of India’ in one of his earliest books, Bipin Chandra indicates at

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the outset that he can be accused of ‘sectarian prepossessions’, to which he responds by arguing that ‘Kṛṣṇa is not presented here as a sectarian Ideal; but as the Principle and Personality in and through whom, as in the past so also in the present and even in the future, the great Indian Synthesis was, is being, and will be worked’ (Pal 1911: i–ii). In his Hegel-shaped synthetic reworkings of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, Kṛṣṇa is the supremely personal divine reality who realises the divine personality through ‘an eternal process of self-differentiation’. This process is the eternal sport (nitya-līlā) of Kṛṣṇa where Rādhā is the eternally differentiated self of Kṛṣṇa, such that Rādhā is neither absolutely different from nor absolutely identical with Kṛṣṇa. This relation of inconceivable difference in identity and identity in difference is called acintyabhedābheda (Pal 1911: 278– 79). Having thus announced his doctrinal affiliation with Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, whose conceptual core is often presented as acintyabhedābheda, he also seeks to ward off some of the standard Brahmo objections against the worship of Kṛṣṇa as idolatrous, quietistic, and immoral. Thus, he writes that when Vaiṣṇavas attribute ‘form’ (rūpa) to Kṛṣṇa they do not have in mind a material shape but Kṛṣṇa’s supersensuous expression which can only be apprehended through the purification of the inner spiritual eye (Pal 1911: 292). Moreover, in their ways of living, Vaiṣṇavas would avoid the errors of both renunciatory styles of religion and materialistic ways of living in the world, by spiritualising their social life and sense-based activities. This is because for pious Vaiṣṇavas, their bodies are ultimately Kṛṣṇa’s, so that the service of their body is, truly speaking, service rendered to Kṛṣṇa (Pal 1911: 303). Equally crucially, they seek not to become themselves partners of the eternal divine sport (līlā) between Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā but to become a witness of this sport (Pal 1911: 310). For Bipin Chandra, it was his own guru, Bijoy Krishna who had shown him the path to becoming a Vaiṣṇava lover of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa even as he lived and moved within Brahmo circles. Bipin Chandra writes that Bijoy Krishna had condemned all appeals to supernaturalism in the form of ‘signs and wonders’ as impediments to spiritual progress and the attainment of true love and faith, and embodied the ancient spiritual truths of the land: ‘Many an English-educated Indian, who, in the name of science and reason, had at one time dismissed his national scriptures as fanciful and false, got back the lost faith, by coming in contact with this holy man, and by thus seeing these old records verified in his life and character’ (Pal 1911: 55–56). As we have seen in previous chapters, the conceptual tension between the categories of reason (refracted through European scientific paradigms) and revelation (often understood in terms of ‘intuitive’ experiences or sentiments of the heart) that Bipin Chandra indicates here runs throughout the writings of some of the key figures in the Brahmo Samaj and also its historiographical

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literatures. Thus, Sen writes that while Rammohun’s religious consciousness was largely based on reason and his writings on religious themes are full of logical disputations, Debendranath’s religious sensitivities proceeded from a mystical contemplation (maramī cintāprasūt) (Sen 1971: 193–95). Akshaykumar too is often presented in oppositional terms to Debendranath – the former as a rational humanist who sought divinity primarily in everyday natural processes and the latter as a spiritual aspirant who sought to approach the divine reality through the sentiments of the heart. In the 1860s, Keshub imbibed deeply from these Brahmo milieus: we find a repeated emphasis on inwardness in the spiritual life and we also hear about the urgency of social reform. At the same time, it is vital not to set up sharp existential disjunctions between figures such as Rammohun, Debendranath, Keshub and others. While Keshub’s religiosity is often marked with the notes of self-abasement, interiority, and divine accessibility, such themes are not entirely absent from the sermons of Debendranath and other figures in the Adi Brahmo Samaj. Thus, Becharam Chattopadhyay, who was an important figure in the Adi Brahmo Samaj and was deeply loved by Debendranath (Sastri n.d.: 129–32), asks God in an address: ‘O most intimate beloved (antaratam priẏatam) God! What do we have which is dearer to us than you?’ (Chattopadhyay 1865:1). Throughout his addresses one encounters strongly Vaiṣṇava-resonant motifs such as the natural and irresistible thirst of humanity for the compassionate God, the intimate bond between God and humanity, and God as the true fulfilment of all our human loves. These notes are clearly struck in the conclusion to an address: ‘O supreme self! Instigate our hunger for love and strengthen our desire to drink the pure nectar of your love (prīti-sudhā) … O refuge of those without refuge! Inspire in all our hearts an inescapable yearning (anibārya byākulatā) for you. May we be unable to remain calm (susthir) in any condition in the world without you. At home and in the world (gṛhe bāhire), in our own land and in a foreign land, night and day – may we remain restless (asthir) for you alone. May the tongue of our minds, like the cātak bird, keep on calling out to you alone in every condition – this is our heartfelt prayer’ (Chattopadhyay 1865: 67–68). Becharam declares that like someone who is in a state of life imprisonment or is exiled from home, we cannot find happiness through our bondage to finite worldly goods, for then we remain far from God who is our true homeland (prakṛta svadeś) and the abode of peace (śānti niketan). Just as when diseased people move to a salubrious region, they recover their health and their limbs gradually start regaining their strength, when we who have become deformed through sin move to a holy place, through the mercy of God and through drinking the nectarine love (prīti pīẏūṣ pān kariẏā) of God, we regain our true nature. By entering the Brahmo Samaj individuals indeed undergo a transformation – earlier they had forgotten

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God in their quest for impermanent worldly joys, and now they are restless (byākul) to attain the supreme person and are thirsty to enjoy even a drop of the bliss of God (brahmānanda) (Chattopadhyay 1865: 70–73). Thus, Becharam invokes God with these lyrically charged terms: ‘O supreme self! How can I speak of your immeasurable compassion on us? You have transformed our broken and deformed selves by showering on us thousands of streams of nectarine love – though you are the king of kings, yet you are expressed in the heart of this orphan and you have dispelled the darkness of grief … Your compassion is truly our means of subsistence (upajībikā), your grace (prasād-i) is truly our everything (sarbasva)’ (Chattopadhyay 1865: 74). Around fourteen years later, Keshub, though otherwise institutionally opposed to Becharam, was speaking in such impassioned tones about the God of love and the love of God, and his own wretched condition in the world. In his address ‘Am I an Inspired Prophet?’ (1879) Keshub argues that God is not a mere theological proposition but a living presence, and God speaks to him with the assurance that he should have no worldly cares and surrender himself entirely to God. With one eye on a standard Brahmo critique of religious intermediaries, Keshub claims that he is not a prophetic figure and that he is, in fact, an unholy individual with impurity, iniquity, and wickedness sewn into his being – he is to be counted not among the saints but among the sinners of the world (Sen 1901: 332). It is as a sinner, then, that he throws himself at the feet of the holy prophets of the world and yet what is distinctive about his religious life is that God has directly spoken to him, and continues to draw him away from his worldliness and guide him through his life. Through such divine influence, he is completely sold over to God: ‘I had to make an unconditional surrender of myself, and become a vassal’ (Sen 1901: 338). In this state when he was enslaved to God, his own self was reduced to nothing and he was cast into the deep darkness of despair. His only strength and protection were faith and prayer through which he conversed with God. Slowly, over months and years, God’s mercy came to him, taking away his great sorrow and bringing him peace, rest, and joy. Thus, if on occasion he is able to speak eloquently with ‘burning words of truth’, it is indeed God who is speaking through his tongue, and therefore it is God to whom he gives honour and glory (Sen 1901: 340–42). The split between Debendranath and Keshub, then, was primarily related not to their devotional affectivities or vocabularies but to their varying degrees of emphasis on the extent and the pace of socioreligious reform that they felt was necessary in their social contexts. Chakravarti presents it as a conflict between the ancients and the moderns, where the former regarded their religious and social lives as distinct from each other – they usually cultivated knowledge and devotion in an inward manner, without seeking to transform social

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practices and customs. The moderns, in contrast, believed that the elderly Brahmos, who did not actively seek to uproot the social distinctions of caste, were not pursuing the dharma truthfully (Chakravarti 1916: 273). Therefore, as they began to take over the reins of control all social concerns – education of the people, education of women, social reform, and others – became matters relating to dharma (Chakravarti 1916: 284). However, although Debendranath was temperamentally a conservative, he was, in fact, favourably disposed to the social reformism of Keshub and his associates. An inter-caste marriage had been performed under the auspices of the Brahmo Samaj in 1862, and in 1863 he had written in a letter to Rajnarayan that exchanges (ādān pradān) between Brahmins and Shudras are permissible. At the same time, he believed that the Brahmo-dharma was the elevated form of Hindu dharma, and Brahmos should seek to refine Hindu dharma from within and not completely dissociate themselves from the wider contexts of Hindu society (Chakravarti 1916: 292–95). Hindu social institutions, norms, and customs have to be reformed in accordance with sensibilities which have been inherited from the past and it was the role of the Brahmo-dharma, as a natural development out of Hindu dharma, to purify these Hindu milieus. An entire array of other Brahmos argue, in this fashion, that the Brahmo Samaj is the true harmoniser of all the religions of the world, and it has evolved out of, and thus remains continuous with, its Hindu roots. Thus, Rajnarayan argues that the Brahmo-dharma, which is the essential part (sārbhāg) of Hindu dharma, seeks to establish and propagate the essential religion. It avoids religious disputations, and instead instructs people about the love of God and the performance of activities which are pleasing to God. By accepting the elements of truth which are present in all religions and by demonstrating their deeper unity, it strives to promote love among their followers (Basu 1885a: 7–9). Some decades later, Sitanath would repeat this theme in his claim that though the Brahmo-dharma is new, it is not opposed to Hindu dharma, for it is a new form (nabya ākār) of Hindu dharma. Though the Brahmo-dharma is universal (biśvajanīn) it is primarily a product of Hindu civilization and spiritual discipline, and thus there is no deep conflict between the two designations of ‘Brahmo’ and ‘Hindu’. And yet, Sitanath notes, though the Brahmos belong to the Hindu people, they hold on to the name ‘Brahmo’ to distinguish themselves from Hindus who worship God in an idolatrous fashion (Mukhopadhyay 1959: 183–84). Sivanath, Sitanath’s friend, argues in this vein that the Brahmo-dharma points to the essence (sārtattva) that underpins all the religions of the world. Through the spiritual and the universal sentiments of the Brahmo-dharma, we understand that there is no true conflict among the beliefs and the ways of

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worship of different devotees, if we distinguish between what is essential and what is not essential (Sastri 1903: 105–106). 2

The Reconstructions of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism

However, as we have seen, it was precisely the claim of ‘universality’ that became a site of active contestation between Brahmos from the Adi Brahmo Samaj and Brahmos with Vaiṣṇava subjectivities such as Bijoy Krishna. In his own understanding, Bijoy Krishna had not moved away from the Brahmo-dharma – he declared that whatever is truthful is the Brahmo-dharma and to the extent that individuals follow the path of truth they are followers of the Brahmo-dharma (Goswami 1886: 4). Thus, he declares in a lecture in 1872 that the Brahmo-dharma alone is the complete dharma, and because whatever truth we find in another dharma is an aspect of the Brahmo-dharma, a Brahmo is able to accept truth from all other dharmas (Dhar 1910: 165). However, matters on the ground did not always proceed according to the stated vision. In the 1850s and the 1860s many young men who had renounced orthodox styles of Hinduism and moved into Brahmoism were excommunicated by their families, and they often joined the Brahmo Niketan set up by Keshub in 1871 to provide them with a sanctuary. In the run-up to the Brahmo Marriage Bill, which was enacted by the government in 1872, orthodox Hindus argued that Brahmos were an integral part of Hindu social spaces, to which Pratap Chandra replied that while nationally and socially Brahmos regarded themselves as Hindus in matters of ethics, belief, and social practice, they were Brahmos and not Hindus, for they did not accept the infallibility of the Vedas, the incarnations of Viṣṇu, and so on (Kopf 1979: 104). Some of Pratap Chandra’s contemporaries were Vaiṣṇava figures who were vigorously defending styles of traditional Hinduism grounded precisely on the markers that he had rejected – the Vedas and the worship of Viṣṇu. Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda (1838–1914), who was not directly affiliated to the Brahmo Samaj, was developing a form of Vaiṣṇava devotion that was rooted in premodern Caitanya Vaiṣṇava templates. Bhaktivinoda was acquainted with contemporaries such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Satyendranath Tagore (1842–1923), and Keshub; and had studied the works of a diverse range of European philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Babbington Macaulay, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, Kant, Goethe, Hume, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Theodore Parker, and John Henry Newman (Sardella 2013: 58–60). Bhaktivinoda grew up in a Śākta family in rural Bengal, received an English education in Calcutta,

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and retired as a district sub-magistrate in the British Indian administration. He began to move towards Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism in his late twenties, and produced several books in Bengali, Sanskrit, and English on various themes relating to Vaiṣṇava theology (Dasa 1999:3). Through his friend Dwijendranath Tagore, he encountered the philosophical teachings of the Brahmo Samaj, though he gradually moved away from them: ‘Their belief in one God was good and for a while I accepted their philosophy, but in the end the theology and the worship of the Brahmos had no appeal for me’. Under the guidance of the Reverend Charles Dall, an American Unitarian, who arrived in Calcutta in June 1855, Bhaktivinoda began to study the Bible, and also Unitarian writers such as William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker (Dasa 1999: 57–58). At the age of twenty-three, he started working in a school in Midnapore where Rajnarayan was the headmaster, and he notes that the relations between the Hindus and the Brahmos were turbulent: ‘In those days I was with the Hindus. I had decided that the philosophy of the Brahmos was incomplete … I felt that the real taste of worship is devotion and unfortunately the Brahmos lacked this taste’ (Dasa 1999: 63). In the early 1870s when he lived in Puri, he met with various Vaiṣṇava ascetics, and read texts such as Jīva Gosvāmī’s Sat-sandarbha, Baladeva’s commentary on the Vedānta-sūtra, and Rūpa Gosvāmī’s Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu (Dasa 1999: 78). He was initiated by his dīkṣā guru Bipin Bihari Goswami (1850– 1919) in 1880 and received the title ‘Bhaktivinoda’ six years later. From around 1885, he organised a form of preaching called nām-haṭṭa where congregational groups of singers of kīrtan would travel from village to village, and by the end of the century he had established more than five hundred associations for organising such meetings (Dasa 1999: 113–15). Bhaktivinoda’s claim that he found Brahmo theology and styles of worship too insipid for his spiritual tastes echoes Pratap Chandra’s comment that the charge commonly levelled against the Brahmo religion is that it is ‘a system of dry rationalism’ (Mozoomdar 1882: 94). In a lecture delivered at Dinajpur in 1869, ‘The Bhagavata: Its Philosophy, Ethics, and Theology’, Bhaktivinoda pushes this critique further and also responds to the Brahmo charges that we have been exploring in this book. Bhaktivinoda laments that even a highly educated individual such as Rammohun who had studied the texts of Śaṃkara, the Qur’an, and the Bible had not paused to read the Bhāgavata-purāṇa. The book had, in fact, ‘suffered alike from shallow critics both Indian and outlandish. That book has been accursed and denounced by a great number of our young countrymen, who have scarcely read its contents and pondered over the philosophy on which it is founded. It is owing mostly to their imbibing an unfounded prejudice against it when they were in school’. He notes that when he was a student in college, he too had strongly disliked the book which ‘looked like a repository of wicked and stupid ideas, scarcely adapted to the

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nineteenth century … With us then a volume of Channing, Parker, Emerson or Newman had more weight than the whole lot of Vaiṣṇava works’ (Dasa 1999: 262). Indeed, if a European who has recently arrived in India were to enquire about the Bhāgavata, one individual, Bhaktivinoda laments, would say that it ‘contains a jargon of unintelligible and savage literature’ of those who smear earth or sandal on their noses and wear beads; another would report that it is the Sanskrit text used by the Goswamis, who are like the Popes in Italy, and who give mantras to people and pardon their sins after receiving some payment; and a member of Young Bengal would describe it as a book ‘containing an account of the life of Kṛṣṇa, who was an ambitious and immoral man!’ (Dasa 1999: 265). Shifting to a more vigorous defence of the Bhāgavata, Bhaktivinoda states that it teaches us the three truths which constitute Caitanya’s ‘absolute religion’ of humanity – the relation between God and humanity (sambandha), the duty of human beings to be loving servants of God (abhidheya), and spiritual progress (prayojana) (Dasa 1999: 258). Bhaktivinoda states emphatically that the Bhāgavata is a spiritual text and its examples, which are drawn from the material world, are to be understood as oriented to the spiritual domain: ‘The voluminous Bhagavata is nothing more than a full illustration of [the] principle of continual development and progress of the soul from gross matter to the all-perfect Universal Spirit who is distinguished as personal, eternal, absolutely free, all powerful and all intelligent. There is nothing gross or material in it. The whole affair is spiritual. In order to impress this spiritual picture upon the student who attempts to learn it, comparisons have been made with the material world … Material examples are absolutely necessary for the explanation of spiritual ideas’ (Dasa 1999: 271). However, while Vyāsa, the composer of the Bhāgavata, did not prescribe ‘the worship of sensual pleasures’ as the pathway to God, the ascetics (vairāgīs) who set up places of worship with women have failed to understand that all descriptions in the text are spiritual and have no material associations. Perhaps with Brahmo critics in mind, Bhaktivinoda states defiantly that what we need to do when a religious tradition undergoes degradation across time is not to reject it completely but to restore it to its original purity: ‘Luthers, instead of critics, are what we want for the correction of those evils by the true interpretation of the original precepts’ (Dasa 1999: 277–78). He concludes the address with a rousing declaration of Vaiṣṇava universality: ‘See how universal is the religion of Bhāgavata. It is not intended for a certain class of the Hindus alone but it is a gift to man at large in whatever country he is born …’ (Dasa 1999: 281). At the same time, Bhaktivinoda was aware that he would have to preach this Vaiṣṇava dharma to audiences who had moved away from traditional Hinduism, and this concern is reflected in the first edition of his Kṛṣṇa-Samhitā

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which was published in 1879 (Wong 2014). He notes that while the supreme scriptural text that deals with transcendental (paramārtha) matters is the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, it is difficult to express supernatural truths clearly and the true significance of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is yet to be demonstrated clearly (Datta 1879: 2). Although everyone has eligibility in spiritual matters, individuals can be divided into three groups in terms of their ability to comprehend them. To the first belong the novices of a soft faith (komalśraddha) who do not have independent powers of analysis and who cannot apprehend the subtle meanings of the truths of Kṛṣṇa. Those who are able to apply reason to the matters of faith but are not fully proficient (pāraṅgata) are the ones with middling authority (madhyamādhikārī). The third group consists of the topmost individuals who are perfected in transcendental matters and who do not need to read the Kṛṣṇa-Samhitā other than to strengthen the definitive conclusions (siddhānta) that they have already arrived at. The Kṛṣṇa-Saṃhitā, Bhaktivinoda states, is targeted primarily at the madhyamādhikārī, in a context where many such individuals are turning to foreign religions (bijātīẏa dharma) after reading commentarial literature which is truly intended for the novices. If literature appropriate for the madhyamādhikārī were available, the great ills such as false religion and conversion to other religions (dharmāntar) would not have entered the land (Datta 1879: 4–5). An example of a madhyamādhikārī, from Bhaktivinoda’s perspective, could have been the convert to Christianity, Lal Behari Day, who had declared that even the ‘mystical’ dimensions of Vaiṣṇavism are, in fact, shot through with licentiousness – indeed, ‘it is impossible … to read without feelings of horror the disgusting and licentious manner, in which the union of Rādhā and Krishna is detailed in the sacred books of the Vaishnavas’ (1851: 190). The attempts of Bhaktivinoda, in response to such critics, to reconfigure the spiritual foundations of Vaiṣṇavism and present the Vaiṣṇava message as truly universal have been contrasted with the hermeneutic project of a contemporary by S. N. Dasa in these terms: ‘Whereas Bankim Chandra used rational criticism to eliminate the mythology surrounding the life of Kṛṣṇa, Bhaktivinoda proposed the use of critical analysis to interpret the life of Kṛṣṇa instead of rejecting it’ (Dasa 1999: 127). His project of the retrieval of a pure Vaiṣṇavism internally within Hindu universes was also extended to the landscape of religious diversity on a global scale, where he worked with the traditional Caitanya Vedānta scheme of five types of rasa: śānta, dāsya, sakhya, vātsalya, and mādhurya. The śānta-rasa is seen in the ancient sages who renounced Vedic sacrifices and became detached from the world; the dāsya-rasa in devotees of Rāma such as Hanumān and figures such as Moses in western Asia; and the sakhya-rasa in figures such as Uddhava and Arjuna, and also in the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia. There are

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many forms of vātsalya and one form which is mixed with opulence (aiśvarya) appeared in Jesus Christ. However, mādhurya shone brightly for the first time in the land of Vraja (Datta 1879: 76–77). In articulating the motif that the doctrinal formulations, ritual practices, and spiritual techniques of other religious streams can be accepted as provisional and partial, and yet as valuable, pointers to the fullness of liberation as taught by Vaiṣṇavism, Bhaktivinoda was effectively developing a style of premodern doxography found in figures such as Mādhava (c. 1400 CE) and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (c. 1600 CE) who sought to encompass a wide range of philosophical views by assigning them different ranks in a hierarchical scheme, at whose pinnacle they placed Advaita Vedānta. For instance, Mādhava placed a series of philosophical-theological systems in such a manner that the truth of each succeeding item on the list negated and corrected, that is to say ‘sublated’, the deficiencies of the former. The hedonists (Cārvākas) are defeated by the Buddhists, who are overturned by the Jains, who are refuted by the various devotional systems of Vaiṣṇavism and Śaivism, till one arrives at the penultimate stage of Yoga, the truth of which is most fully realised in Advaita Vedānta (Nicholson 2010: 160). In the south of the country, the Civañāṇacittiyār, a fourteenth-century Śaiva Siddhānta text of Aruḷananti, presents a detailed outline of doctrinal positions in order of decreasing error in the following manner: (1) the materialists (Lokāyatas), (2) the non-theistic schools such as the Buddhists and the Jains, (3) the Mīmāṃsā ritual theory, (4) the Grammarian view that the ultimate reality (Brahman) is the Word, (5) non-dualists such as Śaṁkara, (6) thinkers such as Bhāskara who see the world as real and not-real, (7) dualists such as the Sāṁkhya thinkers and (8) the devotees of Nārāyaṇa (Clooney and Nicholson 2001: 114–15). Bhaktivinoda’s doxographical enterprise – where the summit is Vaiṣṇavism and not Advaita or Śaiva Siddhānta – was inherited, and further developed by his son, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874–1937) who lived as a Caitanya Vaiṣṇava celibate ascetic. In a letter which, according to the hagiographical literature, Bhaktivinoda wrote to Bhaktisiddhanta a few weeks before he died, Bhaktivinoda asked his son to critique the viewpoints of the Sahajiyā groups and other traditions which were opposed to the pure conclusions of bhakti, through missionary work and sincere practice of devotion (Sardella 2013: 87). Bhaktisiddhanta would later state in an address that the Āuls, Bāuls, the Kartābhajās, Sahajiyās, and others have blemished the name of Caitanya, and transformed the spiritual dharma of Caitanya into a dharma involving the mind and body (Bhaktisiddhanta 1930: 33). In 1920, he revived the Viśva Vaiṣṇava Rāja Sabhā (established by Bhaktivinoda in 1885) which would be engaged in six forms of service, including spreading the sacred names of God by travelling through the world, organising public chanting (kīrtan) and

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teaching the truths of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa; printing the sacred books of the Caitanya traditions; providing rational defences of bhakti against arguments which were opposed to Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism; and so on (Sardella 2013: 97). In these projects, Bhaktisiddhanta had to struggle against three types of perceptions relating to Vaiṣṇavism – firstly, it was the religious pathway of the lower classes and was suffused with sentimental and immoral dimensions; secondly, its caste structures were out of step with the demands of modernity; and thirdly, its mystical dimensions drew people away from engagements with the everyday world (Sardella 2013: 9). Rehearsing a stock Brahmo critique of Kṛṣṇa, Bhaktisiddhanta states wryly in a lecture that someone might query why they should hear about Kṛṣṇa who was an immoral figure – they would rather listen to the heroic deeds of Napoleon (Bhaktisiddhanta 1940: 37). In short, throughout the nineteenth century, Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal was criticised as ‘degenerate’ by at least three groups of the bhadralok – members of the Brahmo Samaj such as Debendranath, Sivanath, and Sitanath; certain converts to Christianity; and ‘orthodox’ Vaiṣṇavas such as Bhaktivinoda and Bhaktisiddhanta. As Bhaktisiddhanta sought to retrieve and reconfigure a purified form of Vaiṣṇavism, he set up a pan-Indian religious institution called the Gaudiya Math (1920), published newspapers and journals, printed classical texts such as Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Caitanya-caritāmṛta, established a school in Mayapur (1930) where students received education in both secular subjects and Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, gave lectures on Vaiṣṇava themes at different places in India, and sent disciples to London and Berlin to spread the message of Vaiṣṇavism. This Vaiṣṇava universalism is declared in 1927 in the Harmonist, an English version of his father’s Bengali magazine, Sajjana-toṣaṇī: ‘The Lord desires His word to be preached to all living beings’ (Sardella 2013: 140). Some years later, he declares in a sermon on the Bhāgavata-purāṇa on 7 September 1935: ‘O humanity, all of you sing the glorious deeds (harikīrtan) of [Lord] Hari. Abyssinians and Italians – jointly worship Hari. Then there will be no more differences’ (Bhaktisiddhanta 1940: 165). Kṛṣṇa is the supreme divinity who is to be worshipped by all the deities and the sole purpose of existence for everyone in this world – human beings, beasts, birds, insects, trees, and stones – is to serve Kṛṣṇa (Bhaktisiddhanta 1940: 151). F. Sardella has therefore argued that ‘Bhaktisiddhanta promoted a deterritorialization of religion, taking advantage of modern opportunities to diffuse Vaishnavism beyond the geographical boundaries of India. By doing so, bhakti left its local “sacred space” and entered the foreign territory of the colonizing power’ (Sardella 2013: 178). These motifs of universalism in Bhaktisiddhanta’s thought and practice were largely shaped, according to Sardella, not by western rationalistic worldviews but by the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava teaching that the real person was not the

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psychosomatic individual but the spiritual self who is a devotional servant of the Lord (Sardella 2013: 244–45). 3

Ramakrishna between Brahmos and Vaiṣṇavas

The attempted retrieval of the spiritual core of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism is worked out in the introductory materials of D. C. Sen’s Chaitanya and His Age. The Orientalist Sylvain Lévi had declared in the ‘Foreword’ that the Caitanya movement is not, truly speaking, catholic, that is, ‘universally human’ but is a local movement restricted to Bengal (Sen 1922: xxi–xxii). In the ‘Preface’, Sen picks up this comment and states: ‘The universal recognition of the Buddha and a few other greatest leaders of the world in the spiritual domain is chiefly due to political causes, the advantage of which Bengal of the 16th century could not evidently possess. Vaisnavism of Bengal is, besides, the youngest of the world’s reputed creeds, so it is perhaps premature to pass a judgment now on Chaitanya’s work … I agree with [Lévi] so far that Chaitanya cannot have a universal recognition in this materialistic age. But I verily believe that when this age will be followed by one of spiritual awakening all over the world, he will be differently judged’ (Sen 1922: viii–ix). A few years later, G. N. Mallik echoes this sentiment when, on the one hand, he laments that sects such as the Āuls, the Bāuls, the Kartābhajās, and others are spreading an ‘unhealthy influence’ in the land (1927: 6) but, on the other hand, he declares that the Vaiṣṇava religion of Caitanya ‘is capable of becoming the universal religion … (1927:376). Even the teachings of the Sahajiyās, routinely berated by Vaiṣṇavas such as Bhaktivinoda and Bhaktisiddhanta, could be invoked in these imaginations of the universal religion – after presenting their system of beliefs and practices as grounded in monotheism and pure devotional intimacy between God and humanity, M. M. Bose argues that it is essentially the ‘ideal religion of the future’ which had already been preached by Caitanya in the sixteenth century (1930: 248–49). While Brahmos of different stripes, Bengali Vaiṣṇavas, and Christian missionaries were thus configuring distinctive visions of religious universalism, Ramakrishna, who was known as the ‘mad Master’ (pāgal thākur) of the temple of Kālī at Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, was embodying the ecstatic behaviour of Caitanya and teaching his disciples too to emulate the pure devotional love (rāgānuga bhakti) of devotees for Kṛṣṇa (Sil 2009: 89). He was able to communicate some of the classical Vaiṣṇava materials to his disciples not so much by offering scholastic disquisitions but through ‘common parables and analogies drawn from everyday life’ (Sen 2010: 82). He used various homely

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metaphors such as the water being called by different names by different people, an ascent to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a staircase or a rope, a mother who nurses her sick children with different kinds of food, and so on, to emphasise the point that the different religions have been produced by the divine reality to suit different aspirants, times, and countries (Smith 1991: 74– 5). Chiding human beings for fighting over religious affiliations, Ramakrishna argued that through varied pathways such as Hindu, Muslim, Christian, as well as Śākta, Vaiṣṇava, and Vedānta, all people approach the one Lord (īśvar) (Gupta 2010:77). Ramakrishna does not suggest that the approach of the Advaitin ‘gnostic’ ( jñānī) is superior to that of the theistic devotee (bhakta): the state that both may arrive at is that of the seer (vijñānī) who knows that the ultimate reality which is nirguṇa (without attributes) is also saguṇa (with attributes) (Gupta 2010: 51). Though Ramakrishna is sometimes presented as having moved through theistic experiences to the apex of Advaitic absorption, the reminiscences recorded in the Śrī Śrī Rāmakṛṣna Kathāmṛta reveal instead an array of Vaiṣṇava, Tāntric, and Vedāntic experiences without any clear-cut hierarchical organization among them (Matchett 1981). In Ramakrishna’s conception, the ultimate reality encapsulates both saguṇa and nirguṇa aspects, and harmonises seemingly conflicting religious traditions, so that both theistic and non-theistic pathways are directed to the common goal of the realisation of the divine. There are diverse spiritually efficacious routes to the divine which is limitless and each religious route captures a real aspect of the divine (Maharaj 2017). Consequently, although Ramakrishna did not believe in a universal religion which should be adopted by everyone, he was a ‘religious universalist’ who believed that human beings could be liberated through their distinctive religious traditions (Sharma 1998: 42). Thus, on the one hand, Ramakrishna was deeply immersed in Vaiṣṇava lifeworlds, as is evident from his frequent invocations of some of their central tropes: the cultivation of a spontaneous and undiluted devotion to God alone, the rejection of excessive scholarship on the pathway to God, the cruciality of devotional love as the preferred spiritual discipline in the age of Kali, the significance of taking the name of the Lord, the emphasis on worldly engagement with the heart constantly attuned to the Lord, and the paradigmatic cowherd women (gopīs) as the supreme devotees to be emulated by human beings. He would frequently exhort his audiences to cultivate the type of love-madness that is generated through constantly meditating on God. Ramakrishna himself was clearly such a God-intoxicated individual – he once stated that when he was walking at dusk along the banks of the Yamunā, he saw some cows which reminded him of Kṛṣṇa and he ran out like a madman (unmatta) asking: ‘Where is Kṛṣṇa? Where is Kṛṣṇa?’ Again, the moment he saw the Govardhan

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mountain near Vṛndāvan, he was overwhelmed with emotion – he ran to the top where he lost all consciousness of the outer world (bāhẏaśūnya haẏe gelām) (Gupta 2010: 78). Such was the love of the gopīs that they became completely intoxicated with love (premonmād) on seeing the Tamāl tree, and so fearsome was the fiery pain of separation that Rādhā underwent that it dried up her tears. Caitanya too was filled with such selfless love: on seeing a forest he viewed it as Vṛndāvan and on seeing the ocean he viewed it as the Yamunā (Gupta 2010: 450). These Vaiṣṇava allusions are clearly etched into the description of Ramakrishna’s state when a certain musician started singing about Rādhā at the home of a householder disciple: ‘When Sri Ramakrishna heard the song he suddenly stood up. Assuming the mood of Radha, he sang in a voice laden with sorrow, improvising the words: “O friend, either bring my beloved Krishna here or take me to Him.” Thus singing, he completely lost himself in Radha and could not continue the song. He became speechless, his body motionless, his eyes half closed, his mind totally unconscious of the outer world. He was in deep samadhi’ (Swami Nikhilananda 1974: 398). On the other hand, Ramakrishna was not directly affiliated to any traditional Vaiṣṇava lineage, and he would often reproach Vaiṣṇavas for being sectarian and not envisioning the divine presence in the mother Goddess Kālī. Ramakrishna was also visited by various Brahmos and he would chide them too for a somewhat different reason – their customary rejection of the notion that God has a form (sākār). On one occasion (27 October 1882), he tells some Brahmos that in the present age the proper dharma is the cultivation of devotion and they too should take the name of the Lord, and not go around in the manner of those followers of Vedāntic systems who declare the world to be like a dream (svapnabaṯ). They should develop the state of devotion in which they call out with deep yearning for the divine personal reality (Gupta 2010: 93). Crucially, Ramakrishna met Keshub sometime around 1875 and Keshub would often visit Ramakrishna at the Dakshineshwar temple. He tells Keshub, whom he met on several occasions, that along with the worship of the divine reality as formless, the unalloyed devotional love (ahetukī bhakti) of God too is a pathway to God (Gupta 2010: 38). Even though the subjectivities of both Ramakrishna and Keshub were shaped by certain Vaiṣṇava elements, given Keshub’s Brahmo affiliations, Keshub, unlike Ramakrishna, had to work within and against certain institutional boundaries. Thus, on October 29, 1879, when Keshub and some of his followers went to the temple, Ramakrishna first enunciated Sanskrit mantras such as ‘brahma māyā jīva jagat’ and then he declared ‘Guru Kṛṣṇa Vaiṣṇava’, at which Keshub replied that if they were to repeat this latter mantra people would regard them as traditionally orthodox (goṛā) (Gupta 2010: 40).

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For Ramakrishna, then, the true divinity is neither the Upaniṣadic Brahman of the Brahmos nor the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa of the Vaiṣṇavas: the divine reality is formless (nirākār) and also has varied forms (sākār) (Gupta 2010: 18) The divine reality assumes a particular form for the devotees and this divine reality is also formless for the jñānī who, by cultivating discrimination (bibek) between the real and the unreal, follows the path of negation (neti, neti) into the ineffable. According to one of his homely examples, Brahman is a shoreless ocean where at some places the water has frozen into blocks of ice through the ‘cooling power’ of the devotee’s love. These blocks melt with the rising of the sun of knowledge, at which stage, with the dissolution of the ‘I’, there is nobody to describe the divine, for those who might do so have disappeared (ke bolbe? jini bolbe, tini-i nāi) (Gupta 2010: 99). As Ramakrishna pointed out to Bijoy Krishna, while through the pathway of discrimination between the real and the unreal one could indeed reach the ultimate, in the present age of Kali the preferred pathway is that in which one regards oneself as the servant (dās) and devotee (bhakta) of the Lord. Once the summit of this devotional love (rāgbhakti) is reached, in the manner of supreme devotees such as Prahlāda, devotees become intoxicated with the love of God and reach God. When such a mature devotion (pākā bhakti), in which one becomes suffused with the divine presence, is developed one sees God in both the form and the formless aspects (sākār-nirākār dui sākṣātkār haẏ) (Gupta 2010: 123–24). In the ultimate analysis, what matters is not whether it is the personal (saguṇa) or the transpersonal (nirguṇa) ascription that applies most accurately to the divine reality but that individuals should possess a deep yearning (āntarik byākulatā): there are infinite pathways to, and there are infinite viewpoints about, the divine reality (ananta path – ananta mat) (Gupta 2010: 111). This theme of the transcendental unity of the world’s religions shapes various aspects of the thought of Swami Vivekananda who was for a while a member of the Brahmo Samaj. As a disciple of Ramakrishna who experimented with theistic and non-theistic forms of mysticism as alternative approaches to the supreme reality, Swami Vivekananda sometimes speaks of the harmony that his master achieved between the teachings of the followers of Śaṁkara, on the one hand, and of theists such as Rāmānuja, on the other hand. Swami Vivekananda strikes the notes of his guru when he urges us to gather nectar from many flowers in the manner of bees which are not restricted to only one; therefore, he expressed a wish for ‘twenty million more’ sects which would provide individuals with a wider field of choice in the religious domain (1972: vol. 1, 325). In his famous words at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda stated that he was ‘proud to belong to a religion that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance … [and] proud to

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belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth’ (1972: vol. 1, 3). All the historical religions are multiple expressions of the ‘great universal truth’ which forms the essence or the substance underlying them (1972: vol. 2, 365). The non-essentials, which constitute the differences across religions, pertain only to ‘secondary details’ such as doctrines, rituals, and modes of worship (1972: vol. 1, 124). Given the variations of human subjectivities and inclinations, it is but proper that there are numerous religious ways since, as Ramakrishna taught, ‘[t]he more the number of paths, the more the chance for every one of us to know the truth’ (1972: vol. 8, 79). The recognition of the validity of diverse religious streams implies that it does not matter ‘whether one approaches the destination in a carriage with four horses, in an electric car, or rolling on the ground. The goal is the same’ (1972: vol. 1, 468). A careful reading of his various statements on the theme of ‘religious diversity’ in the Complete Works also indicates in some places a gradualist scheme where the dvaita of Madhva, the viśiṣṭādvaita of Rāmānuja, and the advaita of Śaṃkara are arranged on an ascending scale, so that individuals who start with the first point can ultimately reach the third point: ‘[t]his is … my mission in life, to show that the Vedāntic schools are not contradictory, that they all necessitate each other, all fulfil each other, until the goal, the Advaita, the Tat Tvam Asi, is reached’ (1972: vol. 3, 324). As for the religious streams which have not arrived at the apex, ‘even at their best’ they are ‘but kindergartens of religion’ and ‘rudiments of religion’ (1971: vol. 8, 140). He could place Advaitic wisdom at a higher standing with respect to the devotionalism of theistic folk in passages such as these: ‘Devotion as taught by Nārada, he [Ramakrishna] used to preach to the masses, those who were incapable of any higher training. He used generally to teach dualism. As a rule, he never taught Advaitism. But he taught it to me. I had been a dualist before’ (1972: vol. 7, 414). According to another reading, however, the ‘Advaitism’ which he thus places at the summit of the religious quest is not the classical archetype of Śaṃkara but an infinitely expansive plenitude which includes both Advaitic self-knowledge and devotional practice. In ‘Bhakti-Yoga’, he argues that these streams ‘converge and meet at the same point’ (1972: vol. 3, 32) – even though the aspirants after knowledge regard devotion as an instrument to liberation and the devotees regard devotion as both the instrument and the goal, this is ‘a distinction without much difference’ (1972: vol. 3, 34). Presenting conjugal love as the highest ideal of love, Swami Vivekananda evokes the theme from Caitanya Vaiṣṇava milieus that Kṛṣṇa is the true Lord towards whom all individuals should cultivate finetuned feminine subjectivities (Sarbadhikary 2015: 107) and argues: ‘In this sweet representation of divine love God is our husband. We are all women; there are

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no men in this world; there is but One man, and this is He, our Beloved. All that love which man gives to woman, or woman to man, has here to be given up to the Lord’ (1972: vol. 3, 96). Thus, some monks of the Ramakrishna Mission present Swami Vivekananda’s standpoint as akin to Ramakrishna’s position which affirms the soteriological efficacy of both Advaitic self-realisation and devotional worship (Swami Tapasyananda 1990: xxxi). 4

Between Traditional Modernities and Modernised Traditions

These diverse configurations of universalism – Christian, Brahmo, Caitanya Vaiṣṇava, and the Ramakrishna Mission – were all posited and propagated against the dense backdrops of the gradual entrenchment of colonial modernities. If Bhaktisiddhanta lived as an ascetic and lamented that those who are bound to fleeting sensual pleasures and are averse to the service of Kṛṣṇa are immersed in the domain of worldly māyā, he also used implements of ‘material civilization’ such as automobiles, telegraphs, and the radio, which he said should be used not for selfish enjoyment but for the purpose of spreading the teachings of God. Such individuals, who indwelt the hybrid spaces emerging at the confluences of European and Indic worldviews, cannot be categorised as ‘traditionalist’ or ‘modernist’ in a modular sense. Their dynamic standpoints were situated on a fine-grained continuum of engagements both with premodern Hindu and with contemporaneous western lifeforms. In forging their distinctive conceptual, existential, and institutional pathways they were engaging with the impact of western presence which has been characterised by W. Halbfass (1990: 217) in these terms: ‘an exposure to new forms of organization and administration, to unprecedented claims of universality and globalization, to rationalization, technology, and a comprehensive objectification of the world … a new type of objectification of the Indian tradition itself, an unprecedented exposure to theoretical curiosity and historical “understanding,” and to interests and research and intellectual mastery’. While some individuals such as the members of Young Bengal, and from within the Brahmo Samaj, Akshaykumar moved away from traditional understandings of divinity, others such as Bijoy Krishna moved much farther than contemporary Brahmos into Vaiṣṇava territories. If the hybridity of such Brahmo-Vaiṣṇavas was critiqued by Brahmos who were opposed to all traces of image worship, reverence to gurus, and divine intermediaries, revitalised formulations of Vaiṣṇavism too could meet with stiff opposition from Caitanya Vaiṣṇava traditionalists. Thus, even as he sought to interweave modernist elements into inherited styles of reading the Vaiṣṇava materials and indwelling Vaiṣṇava worldviews, Bhaktisiddhanta

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was opposed on several fronts: his use of contemporary technological tools militated against some of the bhadralok imaginations of the status and the role of an ascetic; some critics were opposed to his literal readings of the scriptural materials; and not many were receptive to his notion of a transnational bhakti across the boundaries of Bengal (Sardella 2013: 126–27). Moving back a few decades, the generation of Bankim Chandra and Keshub has been characterised by Sen as that ‘which was situated, perhaps more tantalizingly than ever before, at the crossroads of modernity and tradition; a wistful longing for the past and alluring hopes for a positive future’ (Sen 2010: 65). Their negotiations between past and present did not usually lead to an attempt like that of Young Bengal to start the process of building Bengal de novo from a clean slate or to a call to return to a putatively primordial ancient epoch uncontaminated by contemporary inscriptions. Given the fluidity of these transactions, as we approach the figure of Vidyasagar we encounter what Hatcher has termed an ‘intepretive dilemma’: Vidyasagar was both a Sanskrit Brahmin pundit and a social reformer who had a positive view of European science and literature (Hatcher 1996: 10). The dilemma is resolved when we understand that the ‘modern traits we can detect in [Vidyasagar’s] character are articulated through, rather than in spite of, his traditional identity’ (Hatcher 1996: 28). Bankim Chandra too, as we have seen, is not easily placed at a specific point on these western-Indic continuums. Though Bankim was influenced in the 1870s by aspects of European Positivism, he reworked them through the conceptual lenses of indigenous traditions such as Sāṃkhya and the ideal of Kṛṣṇa. Bankim’s critics in the Adi Brahmo Samaj had rejected Comte’s Positivism as ‘godless’ (Sen 2008: 40–41), and Bankim himself ultimately rejected Positivism on the grounds that it did not include the concept of God (Sen 2008: 76). Bankim’s reversal fits the pattern identified by G. H. Forbes (1999) – some Hindus who turned to Positivism in the 1860s had rejected traditional aspects of Hinduism and accepted the conclusions of contemporary science, though they were also wary of worlds without any religious foundations. Again, while in an early essay, Sāmya (1872) the imprint of Utilitarianism is clear, in later years Bankim moved away from some aspects of Utilitarianism which he associated with materialism. However, he never decisively rejected Mill’s views and on Mill’s death he described the philosopher as a ‘close relative’ (Sen 2008: 24). In Akshaykumar, we have seen a similar intertwining of vernacular idioms and western scientific vocabularies. He exhorts his readers to eat in moderation, breathe clean air, live in clean accommodation, sleep every night for six to seven hours, not allow themselves to become agitated, and remain patient in the face of danger, and states that all these rules are direct commandments

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(sākṣāt ājñā) of God (Dutta 1856: 46–47). Akshaykumar’s contemporary, Rajnarayan had once been an enthusiastic member of Young Bengal but after he moved into the Brahmo Samaj under Debendranath, he began to articulate the Brahmo-dharma as deeply continuous with, and as the spiritual elevation of, its Hindu roots. In the same year (1866) that Keshub moved away from Debendranath to form his Brahmo Samaj of India, Rajnarayan founded the Society for the Promotion of National Feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal, and declared that the Society would promote the knowledge of Hindu medicine, publish in Bengali the Indological researches of western scholars, encourage Bengalis to speak to one another in Bengali without the admixture of English words, and so on (Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, 1844: no. 271: 258–61). However, even as Rajnarayan was exhorting Bengalis not to pepper their speech with English words, his own immersion in European thought could become his Achilles heel: the poet Ishwar Chandra Gupta satirically wrote about Rajnarayan that he seeks to explain the meaning of Vedānta by reading Bacon (Bacon paṛiẏā kare beder siddhānta) (Basu 1879: 32). Even Keshub, the target of some of Rajnarayan’s sharpest critiques of emotional excess, could claim that he is a ‘positivist’, in that he will not accept anything as true until it can be demonstrated with clear and irrefutable evidence. However, he has a clear perception that the ‘spirit-voice’ of God speaks to him: God has spoken to him ‘often and often, and every time it was a demonstration, a clear, positive demonstration, of a mathematical character’ (Sen 1901: 346). While he is infused with the spirit of Christ and the Biblical characters are living figures for him, and he indwells the ancient mystical ages of the Hindu yogis, he declares that he is also a scientist, and it is to science that he turns for a proper understanding of the laws and phenomena of nature (Sen 1901: 347–49). His God is, in truth, the ‘God of Science’, and should it turn out that his mystical communion, meditation, and asceticism are in contradiction to what science teaches about the revelation of God in the diversity of natural phenomena, he would abandon all of the former (Sen 1901: 349–50). Going back even further in time, the ‘orthodox’ section around the time of Rammohun too was not necessarily opposed to all forms of social reform. Thus, Sir Radhakanta Deb (1784–1867), who was Rammohun’s main opponent and a leader of the Dharma Sabha, was also the Director of Hindu College and co-authored a book on female education in 1822 (Sen 2008: 22). Along such complex pathways, Brahmo intellectuals and social activists sought to configure modes of what has been recently called ‘multiple modernities’, in opposition to the notion that modernity is a distinctively European phenomenon which was diffused to other geopolitical locations and would become entrenched there in the European modular forms. In critiquing this

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projection of the Eurocentric axis of modernity, it has been claimed that we should instead speak in terms of the strategic appropriations of some of the notions and institutions representative of western modernity which ‘permitted many in non-European societies – especially elites and intellectuals – to participate actively in the new modern universal (albeit initially Western) tradition, while selectively rejecting many of its aspects – most notably that which took for granted the hegemony of the Western formulations of the cultural program of modernity’ (Eisenstadt 2000: 14). Thus, at a ‘Farewell Soiree’ organised for him on September 12, 1870 in London, Keshub, who lived in between several types of ‘multiple modernities’, declared: ‘The result of my visit to England is that as I came here an Indian, I go back a confirmed Indian; I came here a Theist, I returned a confirmed Theist. I have learnt to love my country more and more. English patriotism has by a sort of electric process quickened my own patriotism. I came here a believer in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, and I shall return confirmed in this belief’. Further, the truths that he has discerned on the banks of the Ganges and in the Himalayas are also those he has perceived in England: ‘I am now, thank God, a man of the world, and can say that England is as much my Father’s house as India’ (Chatterji 1871: 494). As we have seen, Keshub’s religiously-rooted vision of Hindu universalism occurs also across the Brahmo texts of Debendranath, Rajnarayan, Pratap Chandra, Bijoy Krishna, Sivanath, Bipin Chandra, and Sitanath. Their reflections on religious diversity are varied, and at times conflicting, attempts at harmonization – if classical Vedāntic exegetes sought to harmonize scriptural data, sensory evidence, and rational capacities, they add to this conceptual task the presence of different religious streams, both Indic and western, and seek to weave worldviews in which the multiple divinities are rooted in the unitary divine reality. True religion, according to them, lies not in the exoteric apparatus of rituals, customs, and institutions but in the inner life of the infinite spirit which underlies them, and through engaged participation in concrete sociohistorical contexts individuals can gradually move across life-times to the divine reality. In thus marking out the Brahmo quest for the eternal as disjoint from Vaiṣṇava concepts, imageries, and rituals they sought to demythologise these traditional elements and re-mythologise them with the Brahmo vocabularies of the universal spirit. Far from becoming an accidental footnote to the Brahmo text, however, it is precisely the Vaiṣṇava registers of devotional self-abasement, passionate love, and ecstatic joy that repeatedly return to the Brahmo lifeworlds during the long nineteenth century marked by active contestations over the nature and the structure of Hindu religious universalism.

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Conclusion In studying forms of Hindu ways of living, thinking, and acting in the timeframe from 1800 to the present, it is not always easy to move away from the dialectical pingpong of either India or Europe. By and large, scholarly circles have heeded the Saidian injunction to highlight the enmeshments of knowledge production of the Orient in colonial imperatives. The claim that there is an ‘essential Hindu’ way of being in the world that has been passed down to us from ancient times without any modulation or inflection by colonial presences is rightly rejected as historically naïve. From this end of the rejection of a primordial essence of Hinduism, however, the pendulum has at times swung to the opposite end where premodern vernacular antecedents to contemporary Hindu styles of belief and practice are not sufficiently acknowledged or highlighted. This book has explored the palimpsest-like quality of some Bengali texts whose authors seek to alternatively retrieve, reject, or rework premodern Vedāntic materials even as they regard various European thought-forms as their active interlocutors. As far as I am aware, Christian theologians do not regard Martin Luther as a neo-Christian in his own times nor do they view the World Assemblies of God Fellowship as neo-Christians in our own times. And rightly so, because while Christian doctrine is indeed structured by certain creedal formulations, ‘Christianity’ is not a static monolith for it is continuously inflected by its multiple sociohistorical iterations. The view that non-Christian worlds – Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism – need to be assessed in terms of whether they have finally reached the milestone of ‘modernity’ should be understood to be shaped by the ahistorical assumption that ‘Christianity’ and ‘modernity’ are conceptually congruent. Therefore, the phrase ‘Modern Hinduism’ is best employed as a heuristic device with which to introduce undergraduate students to Hindu worlds across the period associated with British colonial rule (Company and Crown), and it can mislead if its highly composite nature – the persistence of the premodern pasts in the multiple colonial presents – is not sufficiently highlighted. When Rammohun characterised some Vaiṣṇavas of his times as the propagators of ‘new’ (nabīn) doctrines (RR, 156–57), he did not mean to suggest that they were effecting a radical break or rupture with ancient worldviews; rather, his claim was that these Vaiṣṇavas were interpolating their own viewpoints into some Sanskrit texts. However, as we have seen, Vaiṣṇava worldviews often provided the lifeblood for the spiritual sensibilities

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of various Brahmo figures after Rammohun, especially as they sought to distantiate Hindu ways of apprehending the divine reality from classical Advaitic emphases on the quest for nonduality between the human self and the divine self. When the Christian missionary William Clarkson argued that the Hindu cannot ‘distinguish between God and man – the Creator and the creature’ (1850: 126), it was precisely this spectre of ‘pantheism’ that Brahmos such as Debendranath and Bipin Chandra sought to exorcise through their religious visions inflected with Vaiṣṇava vocabularies of devotional servitude. Our study has highlighted some of these dense contestations in nineteenthcentury Bengal between reconfigurations of Advaita – often presented as the primordial essence of human religiosity, and Vaiṣṇava worldviews – often critiqued by promoters of Advaita as particularistic. In this way, it also contributes to the wider literature on the deeply contested nature of ‘Hindu’ identity across premodern milieus and in our own times. Elaine Fisher has argued that in late medieval and early modern India, to be a ‘Hindu’ was to be a member of a ‘sectarian’ religious community, such as Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava, where each community regarded its divinity as encompassing the lesser deities worshipped by others (Fisher 2017: 31–32). Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava theologians from different communities, according to Fisher, were ‘thoroughly preoccupied not with unity but with difference – with advocating the truth of one Hindu community above all others’ (Fisher 2017: 48). Again, Valerie Stoker (2016) has pointed to the complex dynamics between, on the one hand, selective royal patronage by the Vijayanagara court of specific religious institutions and, on the other hand, the responses of sectarian groups through patterns of polemical texts and monastic expansion. She discusses, in particular, the critiques developed in the south of the country by Vyāsatīrtha (1460–1539) of rival Vedāntic systems such as Advaita – their polemic force was felt all the way north in Benares, prompting Madhusūdana Sarasvatī to attempt a systematic refutation of his Nyāyāmṛta (Stoker 2016: 2–4). Around this time, in the west of the country, Jaisingh II (r. 1699–1743) sent out in the 1730s a decree that those organizations which sought state approval should produce a document demonstrating their Vaiṣṇava orthodoxy in terms of lineage and doctrine (Hawley 2015: 200). Against this backdrop, several Bengali figures during the nineteenth century consciously and creatively configured styles of ‘eclecticism’ such as Rammohun’s Precepts of Jesus, Swami Vivekananda’s translation of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, Keshub’s New Dispensation, and others. According to Hatcher (1999), ‘democratic’ eclectics such as Rammohun seek certain commonalities across religious traditions whereas ‘aristocratic’ eclectics instead present their own spiritual system as the apex and hierarchically reorder other systems with respect to this apex (Hatcher 1999). Such ‘aristocratic’

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eclecticism would appear in a wide range of twentieth-century Hindu figures according to whom the socioritual dimensions of theistic forms of envisaging the divine reality contain only partial glimmerings of the ineffable truth. Thus, Radhakrishnan writes that when human beings seek to express the absolute in conceptual categories derived from their specific cultural contexts, they necessarily distort its ineffability, and the lamentable human forgetfulness of the tentative nature of these expressions leads to the emergence of diverse religions, thus breeding intolerance, hatred and warfare. Nevertheless, creedal structures, which are the props of ‘authoritative religion’, are necessary for the sake of those who have not yet ascended to the highest spiritual level in order to orientate them towards the infinite spirit (Radhakrishnan 1936: 502–503). In this vein, his contemporary Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) argued that theistic Hindu systems ultimately converge into the truth of Advaita: ‘Non-dualism is the highest realisation … Advaita philosophy can be grasped only by the microscopic few. So, He [Krishna] speaks of other kinds of philosophical doctrines in other places, to suit different kinds of aspirants …’ (Miller 1986:178). Along this historical pathway, we also arrive at one of the most vexed disputes in the academic study of religion – whether religion itself is a category that is mistakenly applied to the conceptual-experiential systems of Indic origins. It has been argued that this category is laden with specific western presuppositions such as the Christian emphasis on creedal formulations, belief, faith, scriptural revelation, dogmatic orthodoxy, and so on, and the European Enlightenment separation of a ‘public’ domain from religious concerns which are located in a ‘private’ sphere of interiority (King 2010; Masuzawa 2005). Our study has indicated that while some of these specifically Euro-Christian associations of ‘religion’ are not reflected in the writings of Rammohun, Rajnarayan, Keshub, Sitanath, Pratap Chandra, and others, these Brahmos could characterise – when writing in English – the Vedānta-shaped message of their Indic worldviews as ‘religious’. It is indeed the case that the British ‘discovery’ of Hinduism was constrained by, on the one hand, the specifically Christian concerns of accommodating Hindu history into a Mosaic chronology, searching for elements of Christian truth in the Hindu traditions and so on, and, on the other hand, the colonial project of classifying, enumerating, and tabulating the natives into neatly demarcated religious groups. However, to argue that these European encounters produced ex nihilo and without native participation a completely new formation called ‘Hinduism’ would be to repeat – perhaps unwittingly – earlier Orientalist tropes of Indian passivity. Rather, we should view the colonial presence as instituting or facilitating certain political backdrops against which notions of Hindu identity were articulated by an assorted group of figures such as Rammohun, Swami Vivekananda,

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and others who saw Hinduism variously as pure monotheism, a unified front against colonialism and Christian missionaries, the essence of human spirituality and so on (Viswanathan 2003). Beyond the boundaries of Bengal, during the late nineteenth century, Bharatendu Harischandra (1850–1885) in Benares attempted to consolidate the position of Vaiṣṇavism as the oldest monotheistic faith in the Indian subcontinent, as the natural religion (prakṛt mat) which had historically progressed from the age of the Vedas to his times, and as the foundation of unity of the people of the land (Dalmia 1995). To write off these configurations of ‘modern Hinduism’ merely as a product of the false consciousness of nineteenth-century Hindus would be to reiterate a form of Orientalist discourse which suggests that the natives cannot re-present themselves and must have their representations checked for authenticity by the colonisers (Smith 2000). As a characteristic marker of this ‘modern Hinduism’, religious universalism – the claim that underlying the diverse religious traditions of humanity there lies a spiritual essence constituted by love, altruism, and peacemaking – is best understood as an ongoing project in which figures who are conversant with classical Sanskrit-shaped vocabularies seek to articulate this primordial essence through contemporary concepts. The conglomerate of socio-cultural traditions that are encompassed today by the term ‘Hinduism’ has historically accepted a significant diversity of metaphysical and theological views, and because of the absence of firm ecclesiastical structures extending over wide geographical territories, there has been no rigorous pan-Indian enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy in a Christian or Islamic sense. Within socio-political matrices shaped by colonial pressures, various Brahmo figures configured highly synthetic tapestries in which elements from diverse arrays of western and Indic vocabularies, motifs, and symbolisms were variously selected, compared or correlated, and occasionally situated on hierarchical spectra (Hatcher 1999). In the timeframe of 1850 to 1950, this project was undertaken against the colonial backdrop of Orientalist romanticisations of the East as the cradle of pristine humanity, and Hindu writers often presented distinctive variations on the dialectic of a materialistic West and a spiritual East (King 1999). Thus, we find Keshub declaring stridently: ‘The East is emphatically the Holy Land. No great prophet was born outside the boundaries of Asia’ (Quoted in Slater 1884: 130). The Orient may have lagged behind in the field of industrial development but in matters of the spirit, it is to the Orient that (even) westerners go in search of their soul, while the Orient must receive from the Occident something of its vitalistic ethic of social activism (Swami Vivekananda 1972: vol. 4: 405). This is a recurring theme enunciated even today by various figures, in India and in diasporic locations, who invoke the spiritual unity of religions as they, on

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the one hand, rework elements from the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Bhagavad-gītā, Bhāgavata-purāṇa, and other scriptural texts and, on the other hand, creatively adapt idioms from quantum physics, ecology, neurobiology, and so on. In recent decades, one also hears politicians claiming that India is, in fact, poised to take centre stage on the field of socio-economic development, but this will be development with a ‘human face’ for it will be grounded in the spiritual depths of yoga, mindfulness, and meditation. Such is the great ‘eclectic’ power of the Hindu soul, it is claimed, that even as Hindus live, move, and have their sociopolitical beings in the entangled milieus of global finance – stretching from Boston to London to Frankfurt to Mumbai – they remain at heart Hindustani. Thus, even as they inhabit worldly domains, Hindus would remain centred everywhere in a spiritual gravitas. Our study of some transnational narratives of entanglement between European and Indic civilisational and religious currents – starting from Rammohun to Bipin Chandra to Pratap Chandra and beyond – in the production of Hindu modernities also responds to Gyan Prakash’s call for postfoundational histories which would not simply turn on its head, in a nativist reversal of the Hegelian dialectic, the Orientalist’s declaration of the preeminence of the Occident over the Orient, but will destabilize and reveal the internal fissures of these oppositional categories by demonstrating how they were initially constructed as unstable entities. Thus, the demystification of a unitary India either as ‘timelessly static’ or as ‘actively self-sovereign’ goes hand in hand with the similar deflationary deconstructions of a homogenous Western tradition which is being increasingly shown, by intersecting webs of feminist and post-structuralist thought, to be riven with deep internal fragmentations (Prakash 2000). To seek such an understanding of how distinctively Hindu religious imaginations are being presented from within colonial currents would not imply a reversal to the berated post-Enlightenment Cartesian cogito which is said to be sovereign in its freedom; rather, the challenge is to highlight the processes through which these imaginations are being configured at the crisscrossing nodes of Western systems of classification and indigenous idioms. It is also to engage with the claim of Raymond Williams (1979: 252) that ‘however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project’. Thus, figures such as Rammohun, Keshub, and others often berated Europe for its dismal record of failure to live up to its own ideals that it was seeking to spread throughout the world. According to Rammohun, Christian Europe had descended into

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irrationality in professing its belief in the ‘superstition’ of the Trinity, whereas Keshub, who was much closer to the experiential worlds of Christianity, argued that the selfish, factious, class-ridden, and belligerent English Christians were yet to attain the simplicity of the Christian spirit (Raychaudhuri 1988: 33–36). These dynamic transactions between indigenous sensibilities and European terminologies constitute a continuous flow of ideas some of whose key moments I have highlighted in this book across the period 1800–1900. It would be another project to push these moments back to the time slice of 1500–1800 on a highly diverse landscape comprising commentators on Sanskrit texts such as the Upaniṣads, vernacular poet-singers (sants), and propagators of Vedic ritual-cosmological worldviews, yoga, bhakti, tantra, and Sufism. At the same time, however, Hindu universalisms have not been enunciated on frictionless planes – indeed, any projection of universalism from within traditional Hindu milieus has to engage with the normative fault lines associated with caste and gender. In recent decades, scholars and activists from various postcolonial, feminist, and anthropological perspectives have underlined the exclusionary processes at work in quotidian forms of Hindu living. Contemporary defenders of the ‘essence’ of Hinduism as the eternal religion (sanātana dharma) often fail to highlight the point that the spiritual light of proclaimed Vedic antiquity is refracted across various Hindu spaces into the dense socio-ritual spectra of caste-based and gender-shaped asymmetries. It has been argued that while a hierarchical division of labour as well as various types of gendered inequalities did exist in precolonial India, the reports of the British census centred around caste led to a heightened awareness of the status of individuals and communities across the social spectrum. The enumerative strategies adopted by the late colonial state such as the decennial all-India census from 1870 onward produced a social landscape dotted with communities whose self-understanding was characterised by officially enforced labels. This project, which was based on close linkages between the processes of objectification, surveillance, systematization, and group-consciousness, played on indigenous notions of difference to produce Hindu and Muslim ‘enumerated communities’ whose violent frictions continue to erupt through the politics of caste and community (Appadurai 1993). Whereas colonial writers regularly viewed India as frozen into a timeless state of static degeneration from which the British were morally bound to retrieve it, in some strands of contemporary writing the pendulum seems to have swung to the opposite extreme and it is claimed that life in pre-colonial India was characterised by fluidity and mobility across caste-boundaries. However, we need a more nuanced understanding of the matter which will emphasise both the prevalence of powerful Brahminical ritual and social hierarchies, prior to and during the colonial regime, and the

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influence of streams of devotional egalitarianism which sought, to different degrees, to subvert Brahminical notions of purity and pollution. Whereas Louis Dumont famously argued that the socioeconomic aspects of Indian society are ‘encompassed’ by religious values, a number of scholars have argued that the caste system could not have been propagated simply though the notions of purity and pollution. Rather, one must emphasise, they claim, the political frameworks within which such notions operate and highlight the economic power and control that the upper castes have exercised over the lower (Beidelman1959). Again, during the course of the nineteenth century, some highly educated Bengali women (bhadramahilas) began to embody, partly in response to some Victorian ideals of womanhood, the values of orderliness, cleanliness, and a reasonable awareness of nationalist politics, alongside the traditional Hindu values of self-sacrifice and domestic competence. Though they sometimes became employees of the colonial state, participants in public affairs, and founders of philanthropic organizations, they were unable to mobilize a group identity against the dominant male-centred value systems, and in areas such as public life and policymaking their influence and social mobility remained limited (Borthwick 1984). Such women were usually the sites or the ground over which male Hindus and British colonialists waged their political battles over authority and control. The British routinely harped on the appalling conditions of Indian women under their men and regarded it as an aspect of their civilizing duty to rescue them from the hands of such tyrants. This programme of the ‘regeneration’ of women produced acute tensions in the Indian male who feared that such educated women might adopt forms of Westernization that would challenge their superiority in the domestic sphere. As P. Chatterjee (1989) has demonstrated, one mode of resolving this dilemma was to map the older Orientalist distinction between the ‘spiritual East’ and the ‘material West’ onto the newly invented one of the ‘private home’ and the ‘public world.’ Thus, Chatterjee has argued that the reason why the ‘women’s question’ disappeared from the arena of public debate towards the end of the nineteenth century is that the leaders of the nationalist movement were able to co-opt this question and align it, at least until political independence in 1947, with nationalist politics by re-inventing women as the bearers of spiritual values against the oppressions of British rule. Hindu universalism, then, is another essentially contested concept – whether the combination of the claims that all human beings are transcendentally equal and all human beings are situated within organic wholes structured by the normative boundaries of caste and gender is to be regarded as a blatant logical contradiction, a profound Vedic mystery, a mode of false consciousness,

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a style of political rhetoric, an intriguing social paradox, or a modus vivendi of ‘living together but separately’ is a puzzle that I propose to scholars across the diverse fields of Hindu Studies. All styles of Hindu universalism are structured by this conceptual paradox: they seek to soar to the rarefied ionosphere where everything is transcendentally equalised but the contested sites on, and from, which such projections are launched continue to be stratified along multiple fault lines. Elsewhere, such universalist gestures come packaged with strident emphases on Vedic sensibilities as constituting the ‘essence’ of being Hindu. Decades of colonialist writing had either relegated Indian cultural formations to the discarded dustheap of history or had kept them alive only as museum-piece curiosities from an old glorious past. The acrimonious attacks on Indian primitivism gave rise in due course to a counter-blast directed not only at the colonial administrators but also at the Christian missionaries, and this style of response became especially prominent in the writings of leaders such as Swami Dayanand Saraswati, and the interest groups associated with the Cow Protection movement and the promotion of Hindi in the (‘Hindu’) Devanagari script as opposed to the (‘Muslim’) Urdu script. Around 1900, various movements began to appear on the socio-cultural scene such as the Sanatan Dharma Sabhas among the Hindus which promoted Sanskrit and contributed to a general revival of Vedic thought, and the anjumans among the Muslims. It was from this time that the notion of a ‘religious community’ began to play an increasingly significant role on the socio-political terrain, when due to the fusion of several lines of force such as the conversion movements of the Christian missionaries; the activities of socioreligious reformers within Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam; and the accumulating data on caste and religion through the census, the question of the political-religious affiliation of the marginalized groups such as the lower castes came to the fore. Simultaneously, the processes of constructing ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, and ‘Sikhism’ out of various classes, castes, and regional groups gathered momentum. These fragile and contested negotiations often emerged in response to a welter of political anxieties, projected long-term goals, and social crises experienced differently across the spectrum of proposed ‘imagined communities’ (Thapar 1989). From the 1920s onwards, however, such mobilizations of Hindus and Muslims along communitarian lines was increasingly castigated by a new breed of nationalists who began to champion a ‘pure nationalism’ that rose above the parochial attachments of caste and community. Gyanendra Pandey has demonstrated that while until the 1920s, nationalist leaders viewed the nation as an implicit unity of discrete communities such as the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, and

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the Sikhs, bound together by the common experience of colonialist subjection, from this decade onwards a new voice emerges, especially through figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, which distinguishes between ‘Indian nationalism’ and ‘religious nationalism’ (Hindu or Muslim). New constructions of the Indian pasts began to emerge which invoked the ‘Spirit of India’ underlying the various peoples geographically scattered across the different parts of the country, and declared that it is this Spirit that has been progressively unfolding itself through the times of Chandragupta, Ashoka, Akbar, the Rajputs, the British, and the nationalists themselves. Because of its ‘synthetic’ nature, Indian civilization had brought under its fold, not through brute force but through assimilation, all those who had arrived at its doorsteps as marauders seeking conquest and plunder (Pandey 1990). Looking back at 1820 from our vantage point of 2020, it would, of course, be extremely Whiggish to claim that all modernist aspirations to universalism on Hindu socioreligious landscapes over the last two hundred years can be traced back to the writings of Rammohun – who wrote in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. I conclude with an array of moments as a parting thought for intellectual historians who seek to understand how ideas move human beings, even if not always, as Marx would remind us at once, in circumstances that they have themselves consciously chosen. In his Upton Lectures delivered at Manchester College, Oxford in 1926, and later published as The Hindu View of Life, Radhakrishnan argued that though Hinduism started with the ethnocentric notions of the Vedic Aryans, it ‘developed an ethical code applicable to the whole of humanity’ (1927: 97). Several years before Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, who had been an inspirational figure for Radhakrishnan as a college student, had declared: ‘We believe there is a germ of truth in all religions, and the Hindu bows down to them all; for in this world, truth is to be found not in subtraction but in addition. We would offer God a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers of all the diverse faiths’ (1972: vol. 4, 191). I shall let Rabindranath Tagore, a contemporary of Swami Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan, and one of the finest products of wider Brahmo milieus, have the last word: ‘Modernism is not in the dress of the European; or in the hideous structures where their children are interned when they take their lessons; or in the square houses with flat, straight-walled surfaces  … These are not modern but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste’ (Kopf 1979: 305–6).

Appendix A 1772 1817 1826 1828 1829 1833 1835 1838 1840 1841 1847 1857 1858 1865 1866 1874 1878 1884 1885 1894 1899 1905 1914 1919 1932 1937 1945

Birth of Rammohun Roy. Birth of Debendranath Tagore. Birth of Rajnarayan Basu. The Brahmo Samaj is founded by Rammohun. Sati is abolished. Rammohun dies. Introduction of English education; Calcutta Medical College is founded. Birth of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee; Keshub Chandra Sen; and Bhaktivinoda Thakur. Birth of Pratap Chandra Mozoomdar. Birth of Bijoy Krishna Goswami. Birth of Sivanath Sastri. The Indian Revolt/“Sepoy Mutiny”. Birth of Bipin Chandra Pal; Crown Rule begins. Birth of Sitanath Dutta Tattvabhushan. The Brahmo Samaj of India is founded by Keshub. Birth of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati. The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj is founded. Keshub dies. Foundation of the Indian National Congress. Bankim dies. Rajnarayan dies; Bijoy Krishna dies. Debendranath dies; Pratap Chandra dies. Bhaktivinoda Thakur dies. Sivanath dies. Bipin Chandra dies. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati dies. Sitanath dies.

Appendix B Rammohun Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, and later the Adi Brahmo Samaj of Debendranath Tagore, were often criticised for propounding highly rationalistic styles of spirituality. As the Brahma-sangīts translated here indicate, however, Adi Brahmo religious life was composed of multiple strands encompassing ascetic renunciation, devotional fervour, and self-abasement in front of the divine reality. The flavours of bhakti were integral also to Adi Brahmo religiosity. O mind, make your space pure, Plant in it the seed of the worship of the self. With the watering of diligence and the streams of discrimination and detachment, At every moment irrigate it, wholeheartedly. Then the tree will become full of liberation and produce fruits of eternal knowledge – fruits of immortality. If you have this understanding, your sorrows will disappear, You will reach the supreme shelter and find supreme wealth. chakravarti 1886 [henceforth BS]: 7–8

O mind, bring your life to fulfilment, Dedicate yourself to truth. Understanding that the world is impermanent, be steadfast in truth, Thus you will always remain happy – why wander aimlessly? Remain subject to the one who controls the world, Dedicate your life to the giver of life. If you find the one, all your suffering will go away, You will reach the eternal, on the other side of the ocean of suffering and delusion. BS, 10–11

Indeed you are very beautiful, Your house is full of wealth and you are supremely talented. You have a splendid kingdom and a great family – beautiful horses, chariots, elephants, and gates. But reflect on how nobody will accompany you, You will certainly have to abandon everything in a few days.

Appendix B Therefore, listen to me – give up this pride generated by tamas, Cultivate detachment in your mind, and in your heart the supreme truth. BS, 13

Where did you come from and where will you have to go to? Who are you and who is yours? – not once did you reflect. Intent on insubstantial goods, thinking about insubstantial pleasures, You wasted your life in vain. Worship now the supreme reality. BS, 17–18

O mind, think of the supreme Lord, Why think of anything else in the world which is insubstantial? Your body, mind, wealth, and life – all will pass away, Your only pilot on the ocean of the world is your knowledge of the truth. BS, 19

Think of the one who dwells in your own heart. All the scriptures declare that if your mind is pure the darkness of ignorance is dispelled, You will not again have other desires, And you will directly see the one. BS, 24

Who can describe the incomparable glories of the one? Even the scriptures and the philosophies fail to praise the one: The supporter of the world not supported by anything, Without qualifications and without change, Self-luminous and indestructible, Is not reachable through the intellect. Listen, you of the pacified mind – the one is the life of life, the mind of the mind. BS, 27–28

O mind, do not forget the eternal true self on whom rests the whole world. Think always of the supreme substance

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Appendix B who pervades all sentient and insentient beings in the world, Control your senses and abandon egoism, And cut away your intoxication with the sword of knowledge. BS, 28

Do not sink into the lake of māyā, Do not forget in the illusory sinful pleasures that the world is not substantial, Only the one is the eternal of whom this world is the creation. BS, 33

Think of the one who is the supreme cause, Who is the father and the mother of the world. If you seek the one and know the one you will become blessed, To know the one, intently keep the company of holy people. BS, 38

You are the light of lights, reveal yourself to me! The sun, the moon, and the stars are not pleasing to me if I do not find you. Without you of what worth is my life and my youth? What will I do with knowledge if I do not get you? BS, 40–41

I take shelter at your feet, you are the giver of fearlessness, I have no other help. You are my all, How do I speak of your compassion? You are my help. BS, 41–42

Why do you forget your eternal friend? From the eternal friend you have got your wealth, life, and status. Why do you forget such an eternal friend? Do not stay away from the eternal friend, Where else is liberation, where else is peace? Why do you forget the friend of all your life, your eternal help, the abode of mercy? BS, 44–45

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Reveal yourself unto me in my affliction, I am poor and wretched. I am in agony in my illness, I am distressed with sorrow, and I am stained with grief. BS, 46

Sing day and night the glories of Brahman, Never forget Brahman’s compassion. Open up the doors of your heart, And seeing the glow on the face of Brahman, Dispel the darkness of your mind. BS, 47

Where is the Lord, the life of my life? How much more will I, impure with sin, have to endure? To whom will I lament? O refuge of those without refuge! Have mercy on me, o abode of mercy. BS, 48

When I am with the one full of joy and full of love – what wealth do I not have? Show me your auspicious form, For when I see you, New life comes into my body. BS, 50–51

Do you not know how great is the compassion of the one? Those who do not see or do not seek the one, Even to them does the one offer the gift of love. O tongue, preach the name of the one, O eyes, always look at the face of the one which produces joy and which is beautiful. BS, 50–51

Your life passed by in vain, Tell me: how much longer will you remain in the blindness of delusion? For the joys of a few days you forgot the friend of your life, And even now you do not give any thought, o thoughtless person. Do not cast aside the immortal while living in the impermanent world,

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Appendix B All its things will vanish in a moment. What allures you so much that you forget the substance of your life? – the wealth finding which all lack goes away? BS, 51–52

Today is our great festival. Our joy knows no bounds! Friends – let us all call out to our companion. Our joy knows no bounds! BS, 56

Who can forget you on receiving the nectar of your love, seeing your compassion? You are the shelter of those without shelter, You are the lord of those without protectors, Everyone receives your shade. You are the friend of the world, In whichever direction I look, I see your love. BS, 58–59

Wherever I cast my glance I see your eternal love. Human beings in their impurity do not see you, do not seek you, Alas, such is delusion. BS, 59

Lord, what will I give you? Everything is yours, what do I have that I can call mine? The flowers of love in my heart – it is you who have cultivated them, Lord, take them – they are your own wealth. BS, 60–61

Do not stay away from me, O lord! In times of prosperity, of great distress, and of vicious sinfulness, I am ever yours. I do not seek wealth or status from you, Give me this right – I will always remain, Your companion and your attendant. BS, 61–62

Appendix B My heart is restless in separation from you, Like a thirsty cātak bird. Pacify my parched soul, Dwell in my heart. Give me fearlessness by revealing your fearless face. Those who become strong with your strength – What fear do they have? BS, 66

O lord, give your grace to this heart of a devotee, Make my life and mind full of immortality. Give me love, give me knowledge, give me liberation, Save me. I beg you to give me a place at your feet. BS, 102

Reveal yourself unto me, friend of my heart, Fulfil this desire. You are the very light of my eyes. On seeing you my heart is satisfied, I lovingly call out to you again and again. I surrender my life and my mind to your feet, Come to me, the beloved wealth of my heart. Thirsting for you I cry day and night, Shower on me streams of peace. BS, 132

With great restlessness I have come in hope to your door, O Lord, Reveal yourself unto me, Lord, in my heart, All suffering and distress will go away. BS, 133

Never will I leave your feet. If I lose you, what else remains for me in the world? Whichever way I look I see great emptiness. You are the ocean of compassion, the liberation of the wretched, Do not abandon me, I am tormented with sinfulness, Without you where will I find streams of peace? BS, 136

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Appendix C Writing at the start of a new century, Nagendranath Chattopadhyay provides a precise overview of the Brahmo viewpoints on the use of images in apprehending the divine reality, by painstakingly working through the dialectic of the finite and the infinite, and the personal and the suprapersonal. Various defences of the veneration of images are considered and ultimately rejected through an invocation of Upaniṣadic wisdom.

The Worship of the Infinite (Chattopadhyay 1965 [1900]) Many European Christians defend the notion of God’s incarnation by claiming that finite beings such as us cannot cultivate a sense of the infinite. It is because God came down to earth as Jesus that we are able to understand God. Those in our country who seek to revive older forms of worship are beginning to echo this statement, and they claim: ‘We are limited beings, how can we know that infinite person? And if we cannot know the infinite person, how can worship be possible? Ergo, it is definitely necessary to accept the worship of images and the notion of God’s incarnation’. Can we not know the infinite? By following the footsteps of the ancient sages, I respond to this question thus: it is not the case that we know the infinite and it is also not the case that we do not know the infinite. What do we mean when we say that the infinite cannot be known? It means that, in fact, we know the infinite. Regarding that which is completely unknown to us, how could we know whether it can be known or cannot be known? But if regarding it, we can say that it cannot be known, then we certainly know something about it. Otherwise, how could we know that it cannot be known? If we truly did not have any knowledge of the infinite, we would have to say that we do not know at all whether the infinite can be known or cannot be known. But since we have said that the infinite cannot be known, then it is certain that we have some mental conception of what the infinite is. If the infinite were completely unknown, then we could never state whether it can be known or cannot be known. Furthermore, it is precisely through knowing the limited that the infinite can be known. The infinite and the limited are relative to each other. Short implies long and long implies short; gross implies subtle and subtle implies gross. Good implies bad and bad implies good. In the knowledge of short is latent the knowledge of long and in the knowledge of long is latent the knowledge of short; in the knowledge of the gross is latent the knowledge of the subtle and in the knowledge of the subtle is latent the knowledge of the gross; in the knowledge of good is latent the knowledge of bad and

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in the knowledge of bad is latent the knowledge of good. All these forms of knowledge are relative to one another. In the knowledge of one is latent the knowledge of the other. Relative knowledge and absolute knowledge are one knowledge; or they are two aspects of one knowledge. Likewise, the knowledge of the infinite and the knowledge of the limited are one knowledge; or they are two aspects of one knowledge. Therefore, the knowledge of the infinite is latent in the knowledge of the limited and the knowledge of the limited is latent in the knowledge of the infinite. That which is limited itself implies the infinite and the infinite itself implies that which is limited. What is the limited? – that which is not infinite. What is the infinite? – that which is not limited. The limited and the infinite reciprocally express each other. In this respect, there is another matter to be considered. If knowledge of the infinite were impossible, how did the word ‘infinite’ come into our language? Through words the ideas of human beings are expressed. If human beings did not have the idea of the infinite, then how do we explain the origin of the word ‘infinite’? When we discuss the notions of space and time, it is clear that human beings have knowledge of the infinite. Think of a limited space. What lies on its frontiers? More space. And on the frontiers of that space? More space, of course. You see in this way that there is no limit to space. Small children do not have this knowledge of infinite space. That is why many small children think that if you put one bamboo on another, and continue to do so in a long series, the pile will reach the sky. The idea of infinite space has not developed in the minds of small children, which is why they think that space extends up to the blue sky. In this manner, think also of time. It can never be the case that there is time but no events. Again, it can never be the case that there is an event but no time. Can anyone conceive that an event is taking place but not in time? Events and time are bound together in an indissoluble relationship. The event that is occurring right now is certainly occurring in time. Prior to this event certainly there was time. If there is time, certainly there are events. Prior to that event certainly there is time, for if there is time there are events. Again, prior to that event certainly there is time, for if there is time there are events, and so on. In this way the mind gets distended into beginningless time. What applies to the past also applies to the future. After the present event certainly there is time. There is time, therefore there is an event. After that event certainly there is time. There is time, therefore there is an event. In this way the mind gets distended into infinite time. Through such examination, it becomes clear that human beings have knowledge of the infinite. If we analyse our knowledge, it is seen that the knowledge of beginningless and infinite time is latent in it. Some philosophers claim that the knowledge of the infinite is merely negative in nature. This statement is not reasonable. The knowledge of the infinite is positive in

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nature. What is the infinite? That which is bigger relative to the limited is the infinite. Therefore, the knowledge of the infinite is positive in nature. It is not negative in nature in the manner of ignorance or darkness. Then what is the significance of the statement that we do not understand the infinite? It means that with our finite intellects we cannot comprehend the infinite. It does not mean that we do not understand the infinite at all. Why should we speak thus of the infinite alone? Even of limited substances, do we have complete knowledge? Consider these examples. We know how big the earth is, and we know its diameter and its circumference. But can we form a clear conception in our minds of these measures? Think, as another example, of something that is extremely minute compared to the whole earth – a mere portion of the earth. We can know the height and the length of the Himalayas. But can our minds form a conception of the entire Himalayas? The Himalayas are a vast entity. Leave aside this example and consider a tree. Can we form a complete conception of an entire tree? Can we think at once of the aggregate from its roots to its highest point – trunk, branches, twigs, buds, leaves, flowers, fruits? Is it not true that we cannot completely conceive of even one tree? If we focus on one of its parts, the other parts slip away from our mental gaze. If we think of one the other goes away, and if we think of that one this one goes away. We do not have the power to think of everything together collectively. If we think of trees in general we have the knowledge of one tree, but we do not have a clear conception of each of its parts. This sort of knowledge is called symbolic conception by western philosophers. Can one bring to one’s mind at one time the collectivity of the rooms, doors, windows, and wood in a house? Never. So tiny is the human intellect! I can sense that there is sunlight outside the room where I am sitting. But can I form a conception of how far that sunlight extends? When we do not truly have the conception of even limited beings, how can the complete conception of the infinite be possible? Therefore, we should affirm that just as some knowledge of limited beings is possible, some knowledge of the infinite is also possible. Just as we have knowledge of the limited we also have knowledge of the infinite. Some argue in another way that the worship of the infinite person is not possible. They argue that it is not possible to worship Brahman beyond attributes (nirguṇ). It is indeed possible to worship Brahman with attributes (saguṇ). To resolve this dispute, we have to properly understand what these terms – ‘beyond attributes’ and ‘with attributes’ – mean. What do ‘beyond attributes’ and ‘with attributes’ mean? That which is beyond sattva, rajas, and tamas is beyond attributes, and that which is composed of sattva, rajas, and tamas is what is possessed of attributes. The next question is: what are sattva, rajas, and tamas? Brahman works in the world in three forms – through the operations of creation, sustenance, and dissolution. These

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three forms are sattva, rajas, and tamas. What is sattva? That power through which the mind is illuminated with knowledge and joy becomes expressed in the heart is sattva. What is rajas? That power which generates attachment and aversion, and keeps people entangled in circles of worldly action is called rajas. What is tamas? That power which does not allow the development of knowledge, and which generates lethargy and delusion, is called tamas. This is the teaching of Hindu philosophy. According to Hindu philosophy, all substances are composed of these three. In other words, the three powers, sattva, rajas, and tamas, are present in different measures in all substances in the world. Now consider carefully the significance of the notions of saguṇ Brahman and nirguṇ Brahman. Through sattva, rajas, and tamas the supreme Lord brings about the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of the world. Therefore, the one who is immanent in the world, and who is operative through the world, is saguṇ Brahman. But Brahman is infinite. The world does not exhaust Brahman; therefore, Brahman is transcendent to the world. This reality which is transcendent to the world is precisely the nirguṇ reality. It is devoid of sattva, rajas, and tamas. The same individual is both saguṇ and nirguṇ Brahman. Brahman is one. It is simply that the condition of being active in worldly operations is called saguṇ and the condition which is transcendent to the world is called nirguṇ. Can we find any synonyms in European philosophy for the terms ‘saguṇ Brahman’ and ‘nirguṇ Brahman’? These ideas can be expressed with English words – saguṇ Brahman is ‘Immanent God’ and nirguṇ Brahman is ‘Transcendent God’. God is infinite. Therefore, God cannot be merely immanent; God is certainly transcendent as well. Those who claim that the worship of nirguṇ Brahman is not possible, why do they speak in this way? They think that it is not possible for us to have knowledge of what is beyond attributes. That which we cannot possibly know – how could we worship that? But why is knowledge of what is beyond attributes not possible? Because it is precisely through attributes that we come to know entities. That which is beyond attributes, how is knowledge of that possible? The famous novelist, Bankim Chandra, has declared in his book on dharma that he does not understand the concept of that which is beyond attributes; and that knowledge of what is beyond attributes is not possible. Those who think in this way are subject to a serious misconception. The misconception is this: it is true that nirguṇ means that which is beyond attributes, but in this case that which is beyond attributes means that which is beyond sattva, rajas, and tamas. To say that something is beyond attributes is not to say that it has no attribute whatsoever. It is a serious error to regard western agnosticism as well as the Indian notion of God as nirguṇ as propounding the same thesis.

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Agnostics do not wish to attribute knowledge or anything else to God. Herbert Spencer only accepts power in this context. The defence of nirguṇ in India is not the same standpoint. Here nirguṇ simply means devoid of sattva, rajas, and tamas. The one who is nirguṇ Brahman is ‘reality, consciousness, infinite Brahman’, the one who is nirguṇ Brahman is ‘the blissful, the immortal’, the one who is nirguṇ Brahman is ‘peace, auspiciousness, nondual’, the one who is nirguṇ Brahman is ‘pure, sinless’. Whoever said that nirguṇ Brahman is devoid of attributes such as knowledge? The powers resting on Brahman are sattva, rajas, and tamas. Therefore, Brahman is transcendent to these three powers or attributes. With the support of Brahman, the three powers are operative in the world; therefore, in one sense these three powers are indeed of Brahman but Brahman is truly transcendent to them. The one who is operative in the world is certainly possessed of attributes because the one works through attributes. But the one is also transcendent to the world and, therefore, the one is beyond attributes. The reality of the one transcendent to the world is transcendent to sattva, rajas, and tamas. Those who say that saguṇ Brahman can be known but nirguṇ Brahman cannot be known are deeply mistaken. They are mistaken because nirguṇ does not mean devoid of knowledge and other attributes. Some say that the power of Brahman is expressed in the world in a limited and relative manner. We can know only that which is limited and relative. Beyond that we do not know anything. We know that which is relative but of the absolute we have no knowledge. Therefore, it is not possible for us to have knowledge of nirguṇ Brahman transcendent to the world. That we have knowledge of the relative but have no knowledge of the absolute is clearly an illogical statement. The knowledge of the relative and the incomplete, and the knowledge of the absolute are both co-relative ideas. Just as those who know what is long also know what is short, and those who know what is good also know what is bad, in that way those who know the relative also know the absolute. What is the relative? That which is not the absolute. What is the absolute? That which is not incomplete. Therefore, the knowledge of both are mutually dependent or relative. One cannot know the one without knowing the other. Or, we can simply say that they are two aspects of one knowledge. Some say that whatever we know, we know through space and time. Therefore, it is not possible for us to know that which is beyond space and time. Let us look into the coherence of this claim. What is the knowledge of space? In the knowledge of space, we know the relation between here and there. The knowledge of the here alone is not the knowledge of space; and the knowledge of the there alone is not the knowledge of space. Here implies there. The knowledge of the relation between here and there is the knowledge of space. Our knowledge is not limited to the ‘here’ or the ‘there’. The knowledge of space

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consists of the conjunction of the knowledge of the ‘here’ and the knowledge of the ‘there’. This knowledge brings together the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. Through this union the knowledge of space is generated. This knowledge is not limited to the ‘here’ but is also present in the ‘there’; and this knowledge is not limited to the ‘there’ but is also present in the ‘here’. Therefore, this knowledge is not limited to either of them; this knowledge is transcendent to both the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. This knowledge remains in between both and is transcendent to both, and unites them, and establishes a relation between them. If this knowledge were not transcendent to the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, it could not have brought about the union of the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. If I have to unite two entities, then I have to be transcendent to both of them. If I cannot hold them both, how would I bring about their union? Therefore, I am transcendent to both of them. Our knowledge establishes union and relation between space, and this is the proof that our knowledge is transcendent to space. It is the same matter with respect to time. What is our knowledge of time? – the relation between ‘now’ and ‘then’. If our knowledge were not transcendent to both ‘now’ and ‘then’, it could never bring about their union and a relation between them could not be established. Whatever has been said with respect to space also applies to time. Therefore, this is the proof that while our knowledge is immanent in space and time, it is also transcendent to space and time. Those who say that all entities and events in the world are within space and time, and we know everything entirely through space and time, so that we can know only that which is in the world and we cannot know what is transcendent to the world – the illogicality and the incoherence of their viewpoint has been demonstrated. If our knowledge can be immanent in space and time and yet be transcendent to space and time, why would it be impossible for us to gain knowledge of what is beyond space and time? That nirguṇ Brahman which is transcendent to the world cannot be known and therefore the worship of nirguṇ Brahman is not possible – the incoherence of that standpoint too has been demonstrated. The knowledge of that which is immanent in the world and the knowledge of that which is transcendent to the world are bound together indissolubly. When we know through space and time, we also know that which is beyond space and time; and when we know saguṇ Brahman, we also know nirguṇ Brahman. Without knowing saguṇ Brahman, nirguṇ Brahman is not known, and without knowing nirguṇ Brahman, saguṇ Brahman is not known. I am myself both possessed of attributes and beyond attributes – then why should I not be able to know saguṇ and nirguṇ Brahman? I am in the world and yet I am beyond the world. Those who know the limits of space and time certainly transcend those limits. Without knowledge of the infinite the knowledge of the finite is impossible. What is the infinite? – that which is not finite. What is the finite? – that which is not the infinite.

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Both these knowledges are relative to each other. Within the knowledge of the infinite is the knowledge of the finite, and within the knowledge of the finite is the knowledge of the infinite. In truth, these two knowledges are two aspects of one knowledge. If we do not overcome limits we do not know these limits. Without being transcendent to the limits of space and time, we cannot know the limits of space and time. Therefore, just as I am within space and time, in that way I am also beyond space and time. This matter can be understood in another way. Without the two of the knower and the known, knowledge is not possible. The self is the knower and the world is the known. The knower is certainly transcendent to the known. Therefore, the self is certainly transcendent to the world. The knower which is the self is certainly transcendent to the whole world which is the known. Without the two of the subject and the object, knowledge is not possible. The subject is certainly transcendent to the object. The self is the subject and the world is the object. Therefore, the self is transcendent to the world. In the language of western philosophy, everything external is phenomena and the self is the noumenon – the self is the witness of the former and is therefore transcendent to all of them. Therefore, the self remains within the world and is yet transcendent to the world. Therefore, the self is both nirguṇ and saguṇ. Brahman is both saguṇ and nirguṇ. So how could we argue that the self cannot know Brahman? Events are occurring in time and passing by. What is the present at this moment is the past in the next moment. The stream of events is flowing on. The stream of time or the stream of events is flowing on like a river stream. It does not stay still for a moment – now it is here, and then it is gone. The stream of time is flowing along sequentially and is not stable even for a moment. But the self or the ‘I’ remains one. Everything else is arriving in time and going away in time but the ‘I’ remains transcendent to time. The witness to everything, which remains behind every object, is this permanent self or the ‘I’. This ‘I’ or the self ever remains one. This is why memory is possible. Everything else is flowing past in the stream of time, but the self or the ‘I’ remains transcendent to the stream of time and holds together all of that within itself. This is why memory is possible. So how could we argue that we cannot know the nirguṇ self and the nirguṇ supreme self? Some individuals wish to put an end to all worship of the formless, transcendent, and infinite Brahman. They say that the worship of the nirguṇ Brahman is not possible because the nirguṇ Brahman cannot be known. The worship of saguṇ Brahman is possible but saguṇ means that which has form. Therefore, the worship of the formless is totally impossible. It has been established that the worship of the formless and nirguṇ Brahman is possible. Let us now discuss the matter of saguṇ Brahman. Why should we agree with those who say that saguṇ means that which has form? The word saguṇ simply means that which is possessed of sattva, rajas, and tamas. We do not have to argue that whatever is saguṇ necessarily has form.

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To explain the notion of the knowledge of the infinite, the poet Rabindranath has given a beautiful example. A certain individual decided to travel to the sea to see it and began to prepare for the journey. Around this time, a teacher appeared, and hearing about the planned journey to see the sea protested that it was impossible to see the sea. How much of the shoreless sea can a human being see? How far does the human sight extend? Human sight is bound to finite limits. Therefore, wishing to see the vast sea is mere fantasy. It is never possible to see the sea. Therefore, it was concluded that seeing a pool of water at home was far better than trying to see the sea. The advice of many people regarding the worship of the infinite is similar to the advice of the teacher with respect to seeing the sea. How much of the infinite Brahman can human beings know? How far does their knowledge extend? The mental vision of human beings is limited to extremely finite limits. The worship of the infinite Brahman is mere fantasy. Therefore, the worship of Brahman is not possible at all. Can we see all of the infinite sky? Certainly we are able to see only an extremely small portion of it. Then why are we not satisfied with seeing the sky while simply remaining indoors at home? Because we cannot then see as much of the sky as is possible for us. We will see as far as we have the power to see, and then we will understand that there is much more to see and there are no limits to our seeing! This is the joy of seeing the sky. This matter applies also to the infinite person. Our mind flows out as far as possible. In the end, it seeks more and does not find any limits. Then in astonishment, it cries out: ‘Lord, you are blessed. Nobody can understand you. The knowledge, intellect, and imagination of human beings are all overcome. Blessed Lord!’ [The Upaniṣad states:] ‘Before they reach it, words turn back with the mind; the one who knows the bliss of Brahman is never afraid’. Whoever knows the blissful Brahman which the mind along with words cannot reach and turn away does not fear anyone. Some people quote the first half of this scriptural verse and cast aside the second half – to deceive people. The first half demonstrates that human beings cannot know the infinite person. But if the second half is also quoted this point is not highlighted, which is why they do not quote the second half. If the entire scriptural verse is quoted, they cannot put forward their viewpoint. Therefore, very carefully, they do not quote the second half. Many people say that God is infinite; therefore, the worship of God is not possible. I hold the opposite of this statement to be true. It is not that God cannot be worshipped because God is infinite; it is precisely because God is infinite that God is the one to whom worship is due. That which is limited and finite, how can worship be due to it on

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the part of human beings who are oriented to the infinite? How can that – which our finite and limited knowledge and intellect are capable of comprehending – be that to which our worship is due? How can that which our finite intellect easily comprehends be that to which our worship is due? God is the one to whom worship is due because God is infinite. How can that which is finite and limited be that to which our worship is due? If it is said that the worship of the infinite is difficult, then it is a fact that dharma itself is difficult. There can be no deception in matters of dharma. There can be no deception in offering worship to God. Without the worship of the infinite Brahman there is no liberation. What is the significance of this statement? With a little reflection its significance will become clear. Human beings configure their gods according to their wishes. In the Bible it is said that ‘God made man out of his own image’. But in this context precisely the converse is true: ‘Man makes God out of his own image’. Theodore Parker has stated that if oxen had knowledge of God, they would imagine that God is a vastly powerful ox who blissfully roams through the fields of heaven. Parker has also stated that if they had knowledge of the devil, they would imagine that the devil is a famished and wicked ox who is constantly struggling with the glory of God! We see in the world that a person’s knowledge of God is related to the person’s mentality. To destroy their enemies people make false allegations against them in court. To win a case they resort to various types of falsities. In many cases they resort to one particular measure – at the temple of Kalighat they worship the divine mother and sacrifice a goat to her. As if the mother Kālī could be bribed in this way, and by accepting their worship and their sacrifice she would participate in the court case based on falsity! Perhaps you have heard that before going on a raid the dacoits first worship Kālī. So that they can be successful in their dacoity and unlawfully seize everything that belongs to others, they worship the mother! Near my village home there was an image of the ‘Dacoit Kālī’. What a fearful visage she had! In earlier days, before dacoits went out on their raids they would worship her. Rabindranath has truly said: If we are but our dispositions, and we form our deities in our image, then where is our liberation? What is the point of bathing and feeding the deity, putting the deity to sleep inside a mosquito net, and even appointing a dancing girl for the deity? Then we are worshipping our own dispositions as our deity. We immortalise our greed, our violence, and our finitude as our deity. This is the reason why dacoits regard Kālī as supporting them in their dacoity. Those who take false oaths promise an animal to the deity so as to win a case in court – thus, all injustice, iniquity, and evil acts which are reprehensible in the human world are yet presented as irreproachable in the character of the deity. All this is true. That is why we hear the proverb: ‘In the case of the deities, it is all playful sport but in the case of human beings, it is sinful’.

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Here is an illustration of this statement. In the Caṇḍīmaṅgal written by Kavikaṅkan, we read that Mother Canḍī had a great desire to spread her worship in the world. She became immersed in thought as to how to bring this about. If a deity were to be born as human on earth, her wish would be fulfilled. But how can a deity be born in human form on earth? Is it even possible? Then Mother Canḍī thought of a stratagem. At the advice of Nārada, fearing the demons Lord Indra had begun to worship the God Śiva every day. His son Nīlāmbar was instructed to procure flowers from the garden for the worship of Śiva. Nīlāmbar procured hundreds of types of flowers from the garden. Mother Caṇḍī sat down inside the flowers in the form of an ant. As soon as the Lord of the gods, Indra, placed flowers on top of the head of Śiva at the time of worship, Mother Caṇḍī in the form of an ant bit Śiva. Śiva became restless with the bite. That was indeed a fearsome bite. Śiva became furious. Indra told Śiva that he had no knowledge of the matter and it was his son Nīlāmbar who had brought the flowers. Then Śiva cursed the son of Indra that he would be cast away from heaven and would be born in a human form on earth. At this curse of Śiva, the son of Indra was born as Kālketu in Gujarat. He endured great suffering. Finally, at the mercy of Mother Caṇḍī, he became the king of Gujarat. Through him the glory of Caṇḍī and the worship of Caṇḍī were spread throughout the world. With such a stratagem Mother Caṇḍī propagated her worship throughout the world! Some might say that this account is not from the Purāṇas and is merely the fantasy of Kavikaṅkan. Though it is the imaginative product of Kavikaṅkan, ordinary people regard it as a Purāṇa and believe it to be true. There are many things which are not in the scriptures and are yet revered by people as a Purāṇic account. Thus, incidents relating to Manasā, and Śiva and Durgā, vows taken by girls, the worship of Satyapīr, and so on are regarded as Purāṇic by the general people. Satyapīr was initially worshipped by Muslims. Gradually, Satyapīr also became a deity of Hindus. As a Hindu deity, the name became Satyanārāyaṇ. From time to time, many new deities have been created. In the times of the Ṛg Veda there were thirty-three deities. Gradually this number became thirty-three crore. Śītalā, Manasā, and other deities were produced from time to time. According to the English, four hundred years ago, cholera broke out in the town of Jessore. After the emergence of cholera, a new deity called Olābibi was created. Human beings have continually configured deities according to their wishes. The deities dine, go to sleep, reject bodily waste, marry, have children, and are bound by mutual hatred, violence, and dissension. If you say that all these matters have a spiritual significance, I have three things to say. First, not everything can be given a spiritual meaning. Second, it is educated people who are aware of such spiritual significance. Ordinary people are not aware of any such spiritual meaning. They regard all these matters as true and as real events. Third, a

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spiritual meaning is the death knell of idolatry. This is what happened in ancient Rome too. When disbelief in the prevalent idolatry emerged among the educated classes of Rome, they offered a spiritual reading of the prevalent gods and goddess. Thereafter at an opportune moment, Saint Paul went there and preached Christianity. Within a few centuries the entire land accepted Christianity. Some people say that to configure God as similar to humanity is a weakness natural to human beings. Human beings naturally ascribe their own characteristics to God. But by calling this ascription a natural weakness shall we seek to promote it? Shall we not instead strive to bring it about that the weakness is removed? But it is to be lamented that even some educated people are promoting this weakness, they are seeking to entangle the self securely in the impenetrable nets of evil customs, they are casting thorns on the pathway of human beings towards liberation, they are trying to make even denser the all-encompassing darkness, and they are striving to reinforce the disposition to adorn God with human qualities and not allowing it to weaken. Moreover, those who think that the worship of all these deities is a bridge towards the worship of the infinite Brahman are greatly mistaken. By worshipping deities human beings remain bound to their own dispositions and their own finitude. Where is liberation in that? How can they who remain bound to their finite conceptions be liberated? Many ask, in that case, how could the poet Rāmprasād have been liberated? There are two responses here. First, he was a yogi and a scholarly person. Therefore, is it surprising that he was able to gain knowledge of Brahman? Second, an innate genius is able to surpass obstacles. With his innate spiritual power, he was able to cut through the nets of evil customs and attain pure knowledge of God. His example does not apply to ordinary people. What happens to them? They are like the insect that would fly in the sky, but instead falls into a spider’s web and does not receive any food. Such is the fate of ordinary people. The bird that would rise to the sky and flood the world with its sweet melodies is thrashing about in its net. Everyone knows that through worship there takes place the development of one’s devotional dispositions. Whether you worship trees or stones, or birds and animals, if you worship them with devotion, your devotional dispositions will certainly be fully developed. But does this full development in itself mean that the true end of worship has been realised? Not at all. Other than the full development of devotion, there is another crucial end of worship – to structure oneself in the light of the ideal of the deity to whom worship is due, and to bring about one’s development and proper expansion. In the forms of worship which involve images, this crucial end is not realised. This is because the deities are structured with human conceptions. It is certainly the case that in the prevalent forms of the worship of deities, human beings remain bound to their own finite conceptions. Where is liberation, then? Many people in the country believe that by worshipping any material substance as a deity they can become liberated. Thus, it is said: ‘You will go to heaven by worshipping

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the husking pedal – of what use is all this learning and measuring?’ Worshipping the husking pedal with devotion might lead to the development of devotional dispositions but such worship does not lead to the realisation of the supreme end that I have mentioned. One does not expand oneself. One’s true progress does not take place. Birds do lays eggs as an innate ability. If instead of a real egg they were to lay a stone egg, they would do this through their innate ability. Through this act, their natural ability would indeed be developed but the real end of laying eggs would not be realised. Because from such a stone egg there will be no fledgling. The same case applies to the worship of bricks, wood, or stone. There is indeed the development of devotion but the insular subjectivity of the self is not removed. Human beings remain bound to the nets of their dispositions. For this reason, the supremely wise ancient seers have declared that there is no liberation through the worship of images and there is liberation only through the worship of the infinite Brahman. Because the worship of Brahman takes the self across its finite conceptions and into a higher state. It is true that we cannot form a conception of the infinite, but to know that infinite person we can make gradual efforts and know the infinite person for infinite time with gradual steps. For infinite time we will strive to know the infinite person and for infinite time we will continue to know the infinite person. The spiritual aspirants keep on knowing that infinite person in steps through their infinite life. It is not possible to contain the water of the vast ocean in a pot. But it can hold that much water which corresponds to its own size. In that way, can the ocean of Brahman be contained in the pot of our heart? The pot of our heart can certainly contain water from the ocean of Brahman which corresponds to its own size. But such is the nature of the pot of our heart that it will keep on expanding through infinite time. All the waters of the ocean of Brahman will gradually find their place there. By not being able to comprehend the infinite, do not trivialise the infinite person through your imagination. Rather, magnify yourself. Expand your heart, mind, and self. What do small uncomprehending children know about their fathers? Yet they call out to their father as ‘father’, they can love their fathers, and they can sit on the lap of their fathers. Such is the relation between God and humanity. Whether we understand God or we do not understand God – what of it? In the presence of God, we are but children. God is our father. We can call out to God as our ‘father’, we can love God, and we can sit on the lap of God. Can small children ever completely know their fathers through any time? The more they grow up, the more they will know them. The more we grow up, the more we too will know God. We will keep on knowing God through infinite time. It is precisely because we do not understand God that God is the one to whom worship is due. That which our finite intellects can comprehend is but a trivial entity. How can such an entity be that to which our worship is due? There is no satisfaction in what is limited. The ancient seers of the Upaniṣad have declared:

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Appendix C yo vai bhūmā tatsukhaṃ nālpe sukhamasti. There is happiness only in the vast universal and not in finite entities.

The worship of the infinite Brahman which is conscious and formless is established through perception. Of all the means of knowledge perception is the root. What is known through perception does not require any other means of knowledge. Therefore, I say that history stands as witness to the significance of the worship of the infinite person. In ancient times in the western world, Socrates and others became blessed through their worship of Brahman, infinite and conscious. The ancient seers of India experienced the supreme Brahman as clearly as a ‘fruit in the palm of their hands’. In present times in the western world, Theodore Parker, Emerson and others have become blessed through the worship of the one infinite person. In India, Nanak, Kabir, and others became blessed through the worship of the one, transcendent, and conscious Brahman, and they brought blessedness to hundreds of people by propagating this worship. O worshippers of the infinite! Have you not become fulfilled by experiencing the direct fruit of the worship of Brahman in your life and in your hearts? Can you not declare, putting your hands on your hearts, that we have become blessed through the direct worship of that infinite and formless God? Let them who have never eaten sugar claim that sugar is bitter, but why would they who have tasted sugar claim that sugar is bitter? If someone closes the windows of their house and claims that there is no sun in the sky – let them speak in this manner, but those who have directly seen the sun in the sky – how can they speak in this way? Those who have never received a taste of the worship of Brahman might reject the usefulness of the worship of Brahman but those who have directly experienced in their lives the fruit of the worship of Brahman – how can they do so?

Appendix D Bijoy Krishna Goswami speaks his mind on why he does not regard certain Vaiṣṇava-shaped styles of spiritual seeking as antithetical to the ideals of the Brahmo Samaj. He says that he himself develops the spiritual sentiments associated with the worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.

The Discipline of Yoga (Goswami 1886: 22–33) Question 25: Small children, as well as illiterate men and women, recite difficult Sanskrit mantras given to them by you – is this not superstition? Answer: I have already stated that there is no one name that applies to everyone. It is possible to clearly explain the meaning of each name. Even if it is not, there is no harm – God does not have a specific name. Whatever word is applied to God is a name of God. The symbol OM has no intrinsic meaning but the sages are able to discern the true nature of God as latent in that symbolic form. The word ‘mother’ has no intrinsic meaning but when children call out ‘mother’, they recognise as their mother whoever comes at once to them. In that way, God has no intrinsic name and yet every name is applicable to God. Call out to God with whatever name you choose – Hari, Kṛṣṇa, Kālī – and even ‘machine’ or ‘husking pedal’: in time you will receive an answer and directly see God. Then you will have no need for names. For this reason, whether or not you understand the etymology of a word, it is sufficient that you keep in mind, with that word, only the God whom you are worshipping. In truth, the word īśvar for God can also mean a king and the word hari for God can also mean an animal such as a lion or a monkey. It is not the case that the entity is dependent on the nomenclature – rather, the nomenclature is dependent on the entity. That is why I have already said that our discipline is not simply a discipline involving names – it is a discipline that takes one to the real Brahman. Question 26: We have heard that you sing songs relating to Rādhā, Kṛṣṇa, Durgā, Kālī, and others. Is this proper? Answer: There is no rule regarding songs of this type. They are not connected with spiritual discipline. However, I regard the spiritual significance of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa as extremely noble and elevated for the purpose of yoga and dharma. Here Rādhā is the worshipper and Kṛṣṇa is the supreme Lord to whom worship is due. I myself develop this sentiment because it is greatly beneficial to the spiritual life. And with those who benefit in their spiritual discipline through the mental cultivation of this sentiment, I sing songs about Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, that is, about the union of love between the spiritual aspirant and the blessed Lord. But I have myself never used the

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name of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in public spaces among those who are unable to receive the spiritual meaning, or while giving sermons or offering worship at the time of preaching the Brahmo-dharma. Indeed, I believe that such activities should not be undertaken till the shameful notions which have been historically associated with the worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa are dispelled and an elevated spiritual significance becomes clear to the general people. Regarding the names of Kālī, Durgā, and others, a lot has already been said. On this occasion, it is sufficient to say that whatever name satisfies the heart is the name that should be taken. But these matters do not apply to the time of preaching the dharma. As long as while using a name the general people think of a finite individual or form other than God, such activities would be an impediment in the propagation of truth … That adepts such as Rāmprasād sought to realise the supreme Brahman through the names of Kālī and Durgā is evident from their songs. But in praising the image or form of those deities one should never encourage thoughts of idolatry. That the name and the image are distinct should not be forgotten by anyone. Therefore, it is necessary that everyone should understand that God can be attained by calling on God with any name but it is impossible to find God in the image. Because the image is false and the name is true. Question 27: Is the spiritual authority to impart this discipline limited to any specific individual? Answer: This cannot be possible at all. Whoever has realised, to whatever extent, the true dharma of God in one’s life gains, to that extent, the power to help other people. But those who have not received the power which is necessary to give the vision of dharma to other people and to develop the capacity of yoga of other people can never initiate them into this discipline. Four stages have been outlined on the pathway of yoga – the initiator, the aspirant, the partly perfected, and the completely perfected. In the stage of the initiator, only a few preliminary sentiments of dharma are sprouted such as humility, detachment, love, and purity, and then in the stage of the aspirant, the presence of God becomes expressed in small amounts; at the end of this stage, there is the clear vision of Brahman. Then in the stage of the partly perfected, individuals often live in the presence of God and become fulfilled by realising various truths, but occasionally they lapse from this state. At such times, they undergo great suffering. At such moments of disassociation from God, sin can enter their lives and bring about great spiritual destruction. Finally, with the mercy of God, those who constantly live and move in the fullness of God through an indissoluble state of yoga arrive at the stage of the fully perfected. This is the true stage of perfection. If yoga is to be learnt, one must receive initiation from a perfected yogi … How can they who are blind show the way to others? How can they who possess a mere hundred rupees give freely to others? They whose power is connected with the supreme Lord who is infinitely powerful are truly they who have gained the infinite flow of power. Other than them, nobody has the spiritual authority to initiate others into yoga. It is because of seeking initiation

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from lowly people that fearsome tyranny associated with gurus and forms of bestiality are being spread in our country. Question 28: Other than your pathway is there no pathway to liberation? Answer: I would never utter such a terrible statement. It is such statements which have generated so much sectarianism. It has already been stated that it is God who is the means and the instrument for attaining God. Those who would rely with simplicity on God, who is of the nature of truth, and pray to God, yearning restlessly for liberation, will attain liberation. If a particular means is superior for an individual to attain dharma, it is God who will bring that means to that individual. It is necessary to place one’s trust entirely on God … Question 29: Is it true that those who practise yoga are often idealistic and averse to action? Answer: There can be no error greater than this notion. For yogis there are no newspapers or lectures and the news of their activities is not propagated through any external signs. They often live in secret in remote gardens or caves in mountains, and even when they come to public spaces they usually go away after speaking a few words to people. If for these reasons it is thought that they are merely beggars who are slothful, meditative, and averse to the world, there is no greater error. If you will but spend a week in the company of a true yogi, you will know how altruistic they are, how much they think about the welfare of the world, how they strive to dispel the suffering of people and to increase the happiness of people by sacrificing themselves, and how they reach fulfilment through great vows, and the mercy of God and their own exertion. Those who have never met yogis, have not made spiritual progress in the company of holy individuals, and believe that they have received the knowledge of the yogic vision from those who are, in truth, false, slothful, and mercantilist pseudo-ascetics – how will they apprehend the great mystery of the nature of yogis? They have no right whatsoever to make pronouncements on this matter. That in the country where the sages are poets, philosophers, writers, inventors in scientific fields, astronomers, mathematicians, physiologists, developers of Āyurveda, and political administrators, and where indeed the sages are involved in every stage of all worldly affairs, in that very country people regard yoga, asceticism, and sloth as synonymous – what can be more astonishing and saddening? In the very country where great yogis such as Janaka, Yājñavalkya, Vaśiṣṭha, and others have been born and have clearly demonstrated that worldly living and dharma are substantially one; where ascetics such as Buddha, Śaṅkarācārya, Nānak, Kabīr and Śrī Caitanya have sacrificed their own happiness, peace, stability, and life for the supreme welfare of the general people; where even today many spiritually perfected holy individuals who are working to counteract the spiritual decline and the moral bestiality of the people live in forests or caves in mountains, undertake hundreds of great hardships such as going without food, sleep, and so on, and travel great distances on foot; and where holy individuals are going about everyday

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and strenuously working to restore blessedness to the unfortunate land by bringing the light of love, purity, and truth to the darkened skies of the general people, by relieving the distress of the thirsty, by collecting and spending lakhs of rupees for those on the brink of death because of starvation, by giving medicines to the sick, by giving consolation to those stricken with grief, by giving knowledge to the ignorant, and by giving hope to the despondent – alas! we, its people, yet declare, in the manner of the blind who cannot see, that yoga brings along with it sloth and aversion to work! … Question 30: What is your opinion regarding the present-day movement in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj relating to the discipline of yoga? Answer: I regard it as a positive development. I am certain that at the root of this movement lie elevated spiritual ideas, and it will bring about the welfare of the entire Brahmo Samaj and the country. Just as the Brahmo Samaj has gradually progressed, step by step, from its infancy and has acquired many priceless truths so far, this discipline too is such a priceless jewel of truth which has been sent by God – it is a new ornament of the Brahmo Samaj, and the common wealth of the Brahmo Samaj and all the people … If the ideals of the Brahmo Samaj do not become constricted, then its members will not say that the Brahmo-dharma and yoga are independent of each other. I can say that even after a lot of examination I have not found in this yoga even the slightest sentiment or notion or action which is opposed to the Brahmo-dharma. At the same time, they all have the right to examine this matter independently. This is why I have declared all my thoughts before them. Even after this, if some people find some errors in my view, I shall correct it. And even if after regarding it as pure and concordant with the holy will of God, the members of the Brahmo Samaj are not inclined to accept it, I will know that they have become constricted like conservative people and have departed from the infinite ideals of the Brahmo Samaj. But I believe that the Brahmo-dharma is the dispensation of God, so that such an unfortunate course of events will not unfold. Let the will of the blessed God be fulfilled. Let the truth win. I am a mere insect and a servant of God – beyond this, I do not know anything else.

Appendix E Sivanath Sastri strikes the Brahmo leitmotif of harmony, and appeals to his readers to harmonize the dimensions of knowledge, devotion, and will in their everyday lives.

The Liberal Ideas of the Brahmo Samaj (Sastri 1903: 1–6) In our country, the three pathways of knowledge, devotion, and action have remained distinct. They are regarded as essentially opposed. Such opposition between the followers of Advaita Vedānta and Vaiṣṇavas is well-known. The Vaiṣṇava religion emerged to establish the superiority of devotion over knowledge and action. The Śrīmad-Bhāgavat was written to declare the greatness of devotion. It gives the example of Ajāmil. Ajāmil, the son of a Brahmin, had fallen away from the status of being a Brahmin because he had committed numerous sins, and becoming attracted to an untouchable woman he began to live in the quarters of the untouchables. Finally, the time of death approached. The untouchable woman had given birth to a son called ‘Nārāyaṇ’ and Ajāmil greatly loved him. As he was dying, he called out to his son, ‘Nārāyaṇ’, ‘Nārāyaṇ’. After his death, a great dispute ensued over his soul between the messengers of death and the messengers of Viṣṇu. Regarding Ajāmil as a great sinner, the messengers of death were taking away his soul to hell, and at this time the messengers of Viṣṇu arrived and sought to wrest his soul away from them. They asked the messengers of death: ‘You are calling this person a sinner. All right, what do you call dharma?’ The messengers of death were flustered. Then the messengers of Viṣṇu said to them, ‘Go and learn about dharma from the king of dharma, your master who is death’. On returning after learning about dharma, they said: ‘The performance of actions prescribed by the Vedas is dharma’. The messengers of Viṣṇu declared: ‘Fools! Is that really dharma? With that is the seed of sin in the human heart destroyed? It is only through devotion that the seed of sin is destroyed’. This story seeks to demonstrate precisely that devotion alone is the pathway to liberation. Everyone knows about the opposition between Śāktas and Vaiṣṇavas, and this is simply an opposition between action and devotion. The great-souled Caitanya strove whole-heartedly to establish the superiority of devotion in the midst of the widely prevalent Tantric rituals of his times. It is established through many such instances that for a long time the three pathways of knowledge, devotion, and action have remained opposed in this country. The Brahmo-dharma has emerged to bring about the harmony of these three. The Brahmo-dharma declares that in order to attain the Lord, one needs the assistance of

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all these three. The great-souled Jesus declared: ‘Love your God with all your mind, all your heart, and all your strength’. In this teaching too, we see the harmonisation of knowledge, love, and will. Therefore, there is no opposition between these three pathways in the dharma of true love.

…

What is the teaching on the pathway of knowledge? When we inquire into the root of the world, when we analyse the nature of the self, and when we remain distant from worldly storms, what truth and what notion of God does knowledge teach us? Knowledge teaches us that the divine is the essence and the truth. As long as we do not move into our inner selves in this way, we will continue to regard the external world as substantial. By moving into our inner selves, we have understood that God is the essence and the supreme power – but is this enough? No, our hearts seek something more. We cannot be satisfied merely by knowing the divine as pure being – we seek the divine as the person full of love. Then when we look with the eye of love, we see that the one who is realised through knowledge as supreme power is vast love. Even with this we are not satisfied. We want the divine in a more intimate manner. The divine exists and the divine is love – but the divine can be far away from us and the divine might not have any intimate relations with us. We seek the divine also with our will. There is a deep union between our own will and the blessed will of the divine. The divine is a person who is full of knowledge, love, and will – if we do not know these truths, our idea of God does not reach its fulfilment. Thoughtful scholars have divided the human self into three dimensions: knowledge, love, and will. Our knowledge reaches its fulfilment when it keeps on progressing on its pathway of knowledge and becomes merged with infinite knowledge. This is not similar to the way in which small rivers lose their independence by dissolving into the ocean, but it is similar to the way in which in a finely-tuned instrument, big and small parts strike one note while retaining their independence. In that way, our human love reaches its fulfilment when it keeps on progressing and merges with the love of God which is latent in the world, so that this love of God directs us. The well-known Emerson has declared that all of religion, teaching, custom, and reformation have solely one objective – ‘It is engaging us to obey’. That is to say, removing the lack of harmony or the opposition between the nature of God and the nature of humanity, so that the nature of humanity merges with the nature of God. What is this merging like? – whatever actions are pleasing to God are also the actions that are pleasing to us. In other words, the heart reaches a state where whatever is beneficial to the world and whatever produces the well-being of the people, we love precisely that … The great sage Debendranath Tagore has declared somewhere that human beings are unhappy in all forms of dependence, but there is one place where they indeed seek

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dependence and do find happiness – this place is the love of God. The deeper meaning of this statement is that the greatness of love lies in that it can grant the highest happiness of independence to dependence. Those who are full of love naturally perform good deeds, and joyfully fulfil the commandments and the will of God, and yet they feel, just as fish are completely free within water, that they are completely free. Human nature does not reach its fulfilment until the will of God and our own will become one, and until our finite wills resonate with the great will of God. Human beings will be able to stand on the path of truth on that day when they understand that there is not even an atom whose movement is not towards truth. If the creator is full of knowledge, love, and will, and wills the welfare of the world, then everything on earth has been created to fulfil the creator’s will and make dharma victorious. When the three of knowledge, devotion, and will come together, then most remarkably one reinforces the others. So I wonder: where indeed is that opposition among these three? First, love is generated from knowledge. When we look at everything through knowledge which is imprinted with love, increasingly more love is generated through such a vision. And this love generates knowledge. Regarding the deeper matters of the heart and the soul, it is definitely true that whoever has no love is blind and has no knowledge either. Whatever is touched with hands devoid of love is seen to dissolve at once. Often it has happened that what I had earlier observed in a superficial manner, after the appearance of love I see all of them in a new way and with true knowledge.

…

Again, when knowledge and love merge and function properly, they generate and strengthen will and action. This is indeed the liberal ideal of the Brahmo-dharma. We should always regard this as our objective. It is vital that this idea becomes expressed through us. If there is anyone whose suffering has to be removed and anyone who has to be protected from oppression – they are in this country. Our country is ridden with the torment of starvation, the agony of poverty, and the lamentation of widows – shall we do nothing? We must step onto the field of action by merging our will with the supreme power and the great will of the divine. May the will of God be done. The dharma that we have accepted, the dharma that will lead to the salvation of the world – may that dharma be victorious.

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Index Adi Brahmo Samaj 6, 38, 56, 60, 62, 63, 72, 80, 89, 105, 146, 174, 178, 181, 193, 206 Advaita Vedānta XIV, XV, XVI, 2, 3, 4, 5, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 47, 57, 60, 62, 90, 105, 116, 118, 124, 136, 155, 156, 175, 185, 191, 197, 198, 229 Advaitācārya 4, 89, 102 Aruḷananti 185 Arya Samaj XVIII, 20, 147 bhadralok 1, 5, 7, 14, 23, 40, 171, 186, 193 Bhagavadgītā 24, 35, 84, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121, 149, 150, 152, 163, 166, 167, 169, 175 Bhāgavata-purāṇa 4, 11, 13, 23, 32, 34, 35, 46, 84, 89, 108, 149, 150, 152, 158, 159, 169, 182, 184, 186, 200 Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati 15, 24, 185 Bhaktivinoda Thakur 14, 24, 110, 181, Brahmo Samaj of India 6, 19, 39, 56, 58, 62, 83, 84, 91, 105, 112, 130, 171, 174, 194 Brahmasūtra 24, 31, 32, 34, 90, 118 Buddhism 53, 74, 156, 168, 176, 196 Caitanya 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 34, 35, 46, 56, 76, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 95, 102, 103, 104, 106, 110, 114, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 170, 171, 172, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192, 227, 229 Caṇḍīmaṅgal 221 Carey, William XXII, 35 Cobbe, Frances Power 89, 173 Collett, Sophia Dobson 173 Comte, Auguste 149, 156, 169, 193 Derozio, Henry Vivian 39, 40 Duff, Alexander 45, 56 Durgā 39, 100, 101, 103, 122, 221, 225, 226

Harischandra, Bharatendu 199 Harivaṃśa 23, 159, 160 Harmony X, 6, 70, 71, 73, 74, 83, 97, 100, 132, 133, 140, 147, 165, 174, 175, 190, 229, 230 Haṭhayogapradīpikā 94 Hegelianism 110, 121, 122, 124 Hindu College 16, 39, 40, 55, 61, 194 Idealism 99, 110, 116, 117, 121 ISKCON XV, XVI, 15, 24 Jayadeva 158, 162, 169 Kartābhajās 3, 14, 92, 185 Lahiri, Ramtanu 40 Līlā 4, 11, 13, 15, 18, 124, 126, 135, 160, 161, 177 Lord Cornwallis XVIII Mahābhārata 32, 40, 84, 151, 158, 159, 160, 161 Manusmṛti 40, 43 māyābād 90 Marshman, Joshua XXII, 35, 51, 52, 53, 173 Mill, James XIII Mill, John Stuart XIII Mīmāṃsā 151, 185 Mitra, Kishorychand 40 Müller, Max 154 Narottama-dāsa 8, 25 Nyāya 151, 153 Parker, Theodore 131, 173, 181, 182, 183, 220, 224

Guru Granth Sahib 96

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli X, XII, XV, 198, 204 Ramakrishna Paramahamsa 24, 170, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Rāmānuja XII, 122, 150, 190, 191 Roy, Gour Govind 176

Hafiz 38 Haribhaktipradayini Sabha 83

Sahajiyā 13, 14, 15, 185 Sajjana-toṣaṇī 186

East India Company XVII, XVIII

Index Sāṃkhya 151, 157, 158, 185, 193 Sangat Sabha 63 Sarasvatī, Madhusūdana 150, 185, 197 Sarkar, Mahendra Lal 168 Sen, Girish Chunder 176 Sen, Krishnaprasanna 5 Spencer, Herbert 108, 155, 169, 216 Sri Aurobindo X Sri Caitanya Sabha 83 Swami Dayananda Saraswati 147 Swami Prabhupada XVI, 15 Swami Vivekananda X, XII, 24, 170, 190, 191, 192, 197, 198, 204 Tagore, Dwarkanath 5 Tattvabodhini Sabha 39, 40, 47, 61

245 Tarkachudamani, Sasadhar 5, 20, 154, 170 Unitarianism 52, 138 Universalism IX, X, XI, XIV, XV, 2, 24, 27, 72, 93, 95, 99, 101, 105, 167, 172, 176, 186, 192, 195, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204 Vaiśeṣika 151 Vicārasāgara 94 Vidyabagish, Ramchandra 39, 58, 133 Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra 40, 41, 59, 152, 181, 193 Viṣṇu-purāṇa 23, 158, 159, 160 Vyāsatīrtha 197 Young Bengal IX, 39, 40, 61, 183, 192, 193, 194