hatcher, 2006, remembering rammohan

8/2/2019 Hatcher, 2006, Remembering Rammohan

1/31

2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2006/4601-0002$10.00

Brian A. Hatcher R E M E M B E R I N GR A M M O H A N :AN E SSAY ON T HE( R E - ) E M E R G E N C E O FM O D E R N H I N D U I S M

When do religious movements acquire their founders? It seems a straight-forward enough question to ask. In the field of religious studies, the teach-ing of religions in relation to their foundersnotably Laozi, Kongzi,

Buddha, Moses, and Jesusis altogether commonplace. Indeed, theimportance of such founders was underlined nearly a century ago byMax Weber, who defined the religious founder as a charismatic prophetwho by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divinecommandment.1

Yet Weber understood that the charisma of the prophet was not sufficientin itself; it needed to evoke a response of trust among a group of followers.2

What is more, for a religious community to develop and persist over time,

1 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1964),46. This emphasis on founders is repeated in the phenomenology of religion; see Gerardusvan der Leeuw,Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (Gloucester, MA:Peter Smith, 1967), 2:65054. For its more popular expression, see Clifford G. Hospital,

Breakthrough: Insights of the Great Religious Discoverers (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985).2 Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1968), 4849.

I would like to express my thanks to Jack Hawley and Brian Pennington for helpfulcomments on an earlier version of this article; to Paul Courtright, both for taking an interestin this material and for calling attention to the utility of the concept of emergence in hiskeynote address at the 2005 Conference on the Study of Religion in India held at AlbionCollege; and to April DeConick for sharing her knowledge of social memory studies.


2/31

History of Religions 51

Weber famously proposed that there would need to be routinization ofprophetic charisma by disciples leading to stable forms of leadership.3

Although Webers model cast the prophet as the sole foundation upon

which a religious movement is built, a recent anthology dedicated to re-visiting the concept of the religious founder proposes adjusting this model.In it, Michael J. McClymond observes, Religious founders engender re-ligious communities, but religious communities also engender founders.In this case there would be reciprocal causality rather than a one-way re-lationship of founder as cause to community as effect.4 Prophets do notdrop into the world from above; they are situated in history. Likewise, theirteachings are not created ex nihilo; if anything, they reveal the responsive-ness of the founder to his followersand not infrequently the handiwork

of later generations.5 We might even say that religious movements tendto obtain their founders retroactively.

When we consider the creation of religious movements in a context likecolonial South Asia, we must furthermore ponder the ways in which theentire process is colored or constrained by factors of colonial knowledgeand power. Just as we acknowledge that communities have a hand inconstructing their founders, today we also appreciate that scholars oftenhave a hand in constructing the religious worlds they study. Indeed, oneobjection to Weber is that his theory itself enshrines a particular Western

Protestant vision of religious experience.6In an attempt to incorporate an awareness of the part played by native

and nonnative agents (or we might say by insiders and outsiders) in theconstruction of religious traditions, Lionel Jensen recommends a methodthat emphasizes processes of what he calls reiterative invention.7

Jensen argues that Confucianism and its eponymous founder, Confucius(or Kongzi), have in fact been manufactured. By this he means they havebeen reinterpreted at crucial moments in history. At these moments,Confucius has been made to conform to the specific needs and desires

that prevailed among a community of interpreters.8 As he points out, onesuch moment occurred during the sixteenth century, when one important

3 Ibid., 60.4 Michael J. McClymond, Prophet or Loss? Reassessing Max Webers Theory of Religious

Leadership, in The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad asReligious Founders, ed. David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond (Grand Rapids,MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 616.

5 Ibid., 64955.6 This is the substance of Richard S. Cohens response to McClymonds essay in Freedman

and McClymond, The Rivers of Paradise, 66167.7 See Lionel M. Jensen,Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal

Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).8 Ibid., 25. Emphasis is used in the original to relate the act of making to the polyvalent

idiom of manufacturing.


3/31

Remembering Rammohan52

community of interpreters was the European Jesuits then active inChina.9

Jensens approach to Kongzi and the Confucian tradition suggests a

promising way to think about the manifold versions of Hinduism that havecome into being in the past two hundred years (since the first significantincursion of European, largely British, colonial power into South Asia).On the one hand, we are accustomed to attributing the rise of modernHinduism to the agency of a number of founding figures, men likeRammohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Swami Vivekananda, or Daya-nanda Sarasvati. On the other hand, it is now widely accepted that thereiterative imagining of modern Hinduism owes a great deal to the clas-sificatory and disciplinary matrix of European knowledge.10 To say this

is not to advocate a return to simplistic models of the European impacton South Asian religion, but rather to increase our awareness of thecomplexity of the intra- and intercultural processes that contributed tothe emergence of modern Hinduism. If modern Hinduism reflects this com-plicated process of reiteration and reformulation, then it becomes especiallyimportant that we think carefully about the role of those particular indi-viduals thought of as founders.

This essay takes up the man who routinely figures first in our list ofmodern reformers, Rammohan Roy (17721833), founder of the Brahmo

Samaj.11 While there are many manifestations of modern Hinduism, itseems the story always begins with Rammohan, who has been lauded asthe Father and Patriarch of Modern India.12 As founder of the BrahmoSamaj, Rammohan has been hailed as the pioneer of all living advance,religious, social and educational in the Hindu community during thenineteenth century.13 The question is, what does it mean to speak ofRammohan Roy as a founder? What is the origin of such a claim? Whendid Rammohan take on this status? And how might our answers to thesequestions help us think through the emergence of modern Hinduism more

generally?

9 Jensen writes that the Jesuit invention . . . reveals the same mechanisms of canon con-struction and textual manipulation that were so critical to the ru tradition (ibid., 26). He alsonotes that Western and Chinese imaginings of ru are indeed indisociable (ibid., 27).

10 See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and theMystic East (New York: Routledge, 1999).

11 Helpful background on Rammohan may be found in David Kopf s The Brahmo Samajand the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979),and in Wilhelm HalbfasssIndia and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNYPress, 1988).

12 See Brajendranath Seal, Rammohun Roy: The Universal Man, reprinted inRammohunRoy: The Man and His Work, Centenary Publicity Booklet (Calcutta: Satish Chandra Chakra-varti, 1933), 96.

13 J. N. Farquhar,Modern Religious Movements in India (1914; repr., Delhi: MunshiramManoharlal, 1967), 29.


4/31


When we find Rammohan hailed as the Father and Patriarch of ModernIndia, we may rightly suspect that such a status emerges less from his-torical analysis than from the confluence of religious and patriotic fervor.14

How such a claim came to be made should interest us. What factors sup-ported Rammohans elevation to the status of fatherhood? Pursuing thefull development of what we might call the myth of paternity is beyondthe scope and intent of this essay; what interests us here is the question ofRammohans status as founder of one particular modern Hindu religiousorganization, the Brahmo Samaj.15 Rather than illustrating the force of asingular creative personality, we can use the case of Rammohan Roy bothto frame a more satisfying account of religious founders and, in the pro-cess, to get a better purchase on those processes that have contributed to

the emergence of modern Hinduism in its multifarious forms.

religion and the chain of memory

If we are to speak of the emergence of modern Hinduism, we must come toterms with the rubric of modernity itself and, more precisely, the relation-ship between religion and modernity. The classical sociological under-standing of religion in the modern world is one of decline rather thanemergence. After Durkheim and Weber, what needed explaining was theprogressive demise of religion or, at the very least, the curious case of its

inexplicable survival. According to the secularization thesis, modernitywould witness the inevitable withering away of religion. In a bureau-cratic, technological, pluralistic world organized by instrumental ratio-nality, appeals to the supernatural would be ruled out; legal, scientific,educational, and political discourse would be conducted on empirical andrational grounds alone.16

14 Rather than speaking of nationalism, patriotism seems the better word here, in light ofthe linkage of nation and paternity. For recent uses of patriotism in the context of Indiannationalism, see C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and

Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998),and Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergenceof Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15 As with the Jesuits and Kongzi, the role of European observers in elevating Rammohanto fatherhood needs to be kept in view, from the status he earned in the eyes of his earliestChristian interlocutors and Unitarian supporters to his elevation by the likes of Max Mllerto the status of the first Indian practitioner of the comparative study of religion. Indeed,Mllers Biographical Essays (1883) was of immense importance for anointing severalfounders of modern Hinduism, including Rammohan, Keshub Chunder Sen, and Sri Rama-krishnaleading some to claim that Mller was himself in part responsible for Bengalsso-called renaissance; see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York:Scribners, 1975), 38.

16 Weber spoke of the elimination of magic from the world (Entzauberung der Welt) inhis Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1958), 105. Somerecognized that the withdrawal of religion would not be total; see Bryan Wilson, Secular-ization and Its Discontents, in hisReligion in Sociological Perspective (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983), esp. 51.


5/31


By the late twentieth century, scholars began to recognize that theconcept of religion presupposed by the grand theorists of secularizationharbored a normative judgment. It was not just that religion would dis-

appear from public life; according to this view, religion should disappear.At the same time, it became all too clear that religion would not be goingaway. The rise of so-called fundamentalist forms of religious faith, thepopularity of new religious movements (NRMs), the continued force ofreligion in political processes from the United States to Europe to SouthAsia, Latin America, and the Middle East, all gave ample reason forsociologists to rethink the secularization thesis.17

One problem with the secularization thesis was that it traded in ratherneat dichotomies like faith/reason and tradition/modernity. With the rise

of postmodern epistemologies and deconstructive modes of criticism, thesecherished dichotomies came in for attack. What if traditions could bemodern inventions?18 What if modernity could itself be seen as a kindof tradition, most particularly one shaped by the experience of westernEuropeans living in the wake of the Reformation and Enlightenment andreaching out aggressively to colonize the remainder of the globe? Withoutreviewing here all the ways in which this debate has played out in the fieldsof history, anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and religiousstudies, suffice it to say that returning to the problem of religion and

modernity was inevitable.The logic of the tradition/modernity dichotomy seems to force certain

intellectual moves when it comes to the study of Hinduism. We mightpresume, for instance, that we can identify a recognizable break withtradition. Identifying Rammoham as the father of modern Hindu reformis to see in him the marker of such a break. However, the counterpointnecessarily follows. Dont Rammohans endeavors build upon importantelements of previous intellectual and religious life in South Asia? Ifso, one is compelled to conclude that no radical break took place.19 Yet

another move might be to isolate the features of an authentic tradi-tional Hinduism, thereby equipping the scholar to judge the continuity(or validity) of its modern forms. If pressed to its extreme, such anapproach might find modern Hinduism to be so new that it makes no sense

17 For an early critique of the air of inevitability surrounding the secularization thesis,see Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 18701930 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 266. A significant example of an attempt torevisit the problem may be found in Peter Berger, ed.,Desecularization of the World: Re-surgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).

18 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 1992).

19 See Sumit Sarkar, Rammohan Roy and the Break with the Past, in his Critique ofColonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985).


6/31


to call it Hinduism.20 A further response might be simply to acknowledgethat we have tried all these options and remain unsatisfied. One mightconclude, as Partha Chatterjee once did after reviewing a set of essays on

Rammohan, that crucial categories such as tradition or modernitycan never be precisely defined in terms of a general theory of change insociety.21

Is Chatterjees the final word? One scholar who might disagree isDanile Hervieu-Lger, who has attempted to use the categories of tra-dition and modernity to arrive at a general theory of change, most notablyin her bookReligion as a Chain of Memory.22 Though working within thesociological tradition, Hervieu-Lger understands that what needs explain-ing about the modern world is not the demise of religion, but its trans-

formation. The categories of tradition and modernity together capture thesystole and diastole of such transformation.

Hervieu-Lger views religion as a social and ideological mechanismfor creating and sustaining both an individual and a communal sense ofbelonging. In short, religion is the mobilization of collective memory.23

The powerful hold of memory within a religious group is maintained bya groups awareness of itself as a lineage of belief.24 One belongs withina chain of memory, a filiation of traditions that provide location and mean-ing. Put somewhat differently, a groups identity is predicated on the con-

tinued attempt to renew or revive memories of its origins.25Hervieu-Lger underscores how the chain of memory experiences

stresses and strains under conditions of modernity. She conceives of

20 For a critique of this approach to modern Hinduism, evident in the work of scholars likePaul Hacker and Agehananda Bharati, see Brian A. Hatcher,Eclecticism and Modern Hindu

Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).21 Partha Chatterjee, Our Father,Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 44 (October 30,

1976): 1727.22 Danile Hervieu-Lger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000),

trans. Simon Lee from the French original,La religion pour mmoire (Paris: ditions du Cerf,1993). While Hervieu-Lgers work is grounded in the study of religion in modern Europe,she nevertheless provides a useful conceptual tool for thinking about the creation of modernHindu movements.

23 On collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F. Ditterand V. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), and Dominique MacNeill, Extending theWork of Halbwachs, Danile Hervieu-Lgers Analysis of Contemporary Religion,Durk-heimian Studies 4 (1998): 7386. For a recent summary of theoretical concerns surroundingHalbwachss work, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early ChristianCulture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1924.

24 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 12425.25 See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli

National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4. As this referencesuggests, Hervieu-Lgers work may be profitably read alongside the growing field of socialmemory studies. See Barbie Zelizer (Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape ofMemory Studies, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 [1995]: 21439), who definessocial memory as the shared dimension of remembering (214).


7/31


modernity less as a period than as a set of processes that include the riseof the autonomous individual, the spread of bureaucratic rationality, andthe shift from communal to societal systems. Such processes serve to

undermine the plausibility structures of religion by challenging the holdof collective memory.26 As she puts it, the immediatism of modernworldviews based on functionality and consumption leads to an atten-uating of inherited traditions. This is the problem of amnesia. At thesame time, the fragmentation of memory in a pluralistic world opens upspaces of belief in which new visions of the future can be formu-lated.27 This is the utopian dimension of modernity.28

Secularization theory fails to account for the persistence of religionin the modern world because while it may highlight the decomposition

of tradition, it neglects the recomposition of collective memory. Whilemodernity may threaten the plausibility of received traditions, the open-ing up of new spaces for belief means that given the right measure ofreligious innovativeness, moderns are able to reinvent the chain.29

Religion survives by reinventing and restructuring itself. Rather thanpositing a collision between dynamic modernity and stagnant tradition,Hervieu-Lger finds tradition and modernity engaged in an ongoingdialectic of loss and renewal. Traditions are forgotten, but they are alsoreenvisioned.

This helps to explain why modernity witnesses the efflorescence ofsmaller, elective religious groups.30 And the ability of these new groupsto persist depends upon their ability to identify reasons for believing intheir permanence. Continuity of the group becomes a paramount con-cern, something that is often achieved by latching onto specific emblemsselected from the repertoire of the so-called traditional religion. Theseemblems then become the building blocksor better, new linkswithwhich a group is able to forge its collective identity.31

26 Hervieu-Lger sees two broad tendencies at the root of the challenge: (1) the expansionand homogenization of memory, and (2) the fragmentation of memory (see Chain of

Memory, 12829). Following Halbwachs, she connects these developments to the rise of abourgeois social system.

27 See MacNeill, Extending the Work of Halbwachs, 80.28 For a succinct statement of this dynamic, see Hervieu-Lgers introduction toIden-

tits religieuses en Europe, ed. Grace Davie and Danile Hervieu-Lger (Paris: ditions laDcouverte, 1996).

29 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 143.30 One thinks of the so-called new religious movements that survive in relation to the larger

society by creating alternate communal structures; see Wilson,Religion in Sociological Per-spective, chap. 5.

31 For discussion of the role of symbolic emblems in French culture, see Pierre Nora,Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer(New York: Columbia University Press, 199698).


8/31


While Hervieu-Lger thus carries forward the standard view thatmodernity witnesses an increasingly contracted sphere for so-calledorganized religions (a process that is certainly borne out by statistics for

religious belonging in present-day France, for instance), she simulta-neously calls our attention to the efforts of any number of smaller re-ligious groups to imagine for themselves new communities of belonging.The goal for any new religious group is to discover new reasons forbelief in its own permanence, over and beyond the perils that threaten itsexistence . . . or beyond the atomization that constitutes a multiple threatto its own cohesion.32 What one believes in is the continuity of the group,a continuity to which the preservation of emblems carefully selected fromthe passing traditional religion may attest.

rammohan the founder

By calling attention to the way religious groups come to imagine them-selves, Hervieu-Lgers model opens up some interesting perspectives onRammohan Roy, the Brahmo Samaj, andby extensionother modernistHindu movements. While Rammohans life and his contributions to thereligious, political, and intellectual life of early colonial Bengal are wellknown, a brief summary will serve to raise the most important issues forconsideration in the present context.

Rammohan promoted a version of monotheism he hoped would restorethe rational and moral basis of Hinduism; he translated the ancient Upa-nisads into Bengali and English; he publicly debated the truths of Hinduismand Christianity with a variety of interlocutors, Hindu and Christian; hesupported the spread of English education in India; and he campaigned tosuppress the practice of widow immolation, known to the British as suttee.But in the present context, Rammohans most relevant accomplishmentwas the founding of a society in 1828, the Brahmo Sama j, to foster hisvision of Hindu monotheism.

Though born a Brahmin, Rammohans spiritual development took himdown a number of intellectual avenues. Early in life he is said to havestudied in both Patna and Benares, centers for Arabic and Sanskrit learn-ing, respectively. His first published essay was a lengthy rationalisticappeal for monotheism, written in Persian, Tuhfat al-Muwahhidin (Apresent to the believers in one god).33 Much of his most mature work

32 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 162. Where Grace Davie has described the post-religious attitude in contemporary Britain as one of believing without belonging, Hervieu-Lger speaks of belonging without believing (see Davie,Religion in Britain since 1945:

Believing without Belonging [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994]).33 On Rammohans debt to Islamic thought, see Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and

Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, repr. ed. by D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli (Calcutta:Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1988), 32.


9/31


would focus on mastering and translating Sanskrit texts on Vedanta fromthe Upanisads to the Brahma Sutras. In addition to his immersion inIndo-Persian and Vedantic learning, Rammohan also studied Tantra and

had worked in close contact with the English collector, John Digby, for adozen years in the outlying districts of Bengal. Thus, by the time hesettled in Calcutta in 1815, he had amassed the kind of experience thatwould earn him acclaim as a polymath scholar and polemicist.

After settling in Calcutta, Rammohan created one firestorm afteranother, attacking both Christian Trinitarian doctrine and what he took tobe the idolatry of Hindu religious life. Whether drawing upon Muslimmutazilite theology or Enlightenment ideals of reason, Rammohan was aquintessential rationalist. That his rationalist critique of religion could

build upon Hindu and Muslim intellectual traditions suggests the degreeto which his work challenges any neat dichotomy of tradition/modernity.Was he modernizing traditions? Was his modernity tradition-based? Washe a traditional modernizer or a modern traditionalist? These word gamesare by now either overworked or underwhelming; their rhetorical forcedepends upon the dichotomy they challenge while doing little to extendthe analytic usefulness of either category.34 Here is one area in which wemay benefit from the work of Hervieu-Lger.

Rammohans rationalist critique was at times Deistic in its tone (this

is most noticeable in his English works) and at others it retained its in-debtedness to sacred Hindu scripture (something made very clear in hisBengali writings). What was central to his vision was what he once referredto as a simple code of religion and morality.35 This simple code couldbe found at the heart of all religions, and Rammohan worked to explicateboth its Christian and its Hindu articulations. The core of authentic re-ligionwhich for Rammohan would need to be disentangled from thefanciful myths and idolatrous rites of his own daywas belief in oneultimate Being who is the animating and regulating principle of the whole

collective body of the universe and who is the origin of all individualsouls. All that was required to worship such a Being was compassion orbenevolence towards each other.36

34 Early works challenging the dichotomy include Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne HoeberRudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1967), and Amales Tripathi, Vidyasagar: The Traditional Modernizer(Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1974).

35 See Rammohans introduction to Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness(1820), in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of Tuh-

fatul muwahhiddin (Allahabad: Panini Office, 1906), 485.36 The Brahmunical Magazine, or the Missionary and the Brahmun. No. IV, in The

English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 198. These words from 1823 emerge from a Hinducontext, but may profitably be compared to what Rammohan elsewhere says with regard toChristianity; see his Second Appeal to the Christian Public in Defence of The Precepts ofJesus, in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 566.

One Line Long


10/31


This was the theological and moral bedrock upon which Rammohanestablished a new religious organization, the Brahmo Samaj, or the so-ciety of the worshippers of the absolute, that met for the first time in

north Calcutta on August 20, 1828 (6 Bhadra 1750 aka). At this pointthere was no organization, no membership, no creed.37 Those gatheringwith Rammohan were encouraged to know the Supreme God accordingto Rammohans reading of the Upanisads, which he referred to as theVedant (i.e., Vedanta). Following the classical Hindu tradition, acquisitionof such knowledge would require study, meditation, and diligent restraintof the passions. But Rammohan also insisted that everything done in thisworld should be done in a spirit of dedication to God.38 He was just asopposed to renunciatory forms of Hindu worship as he was to idolatry

and polytheism. His ideal was the brahmanistha grhastha, the godlyhouseholder.39

On January 23, 1830 (11 Magh 1752 aka), meetings of the BrahmoSamaj were shifted to a new building on Chitpur Road in north Calcutta.This date marked a new level of organization and self-awareness for thegroup, as evinced by the publication of the Brahmo Trust Deed. This docu-ment testifies to Rammohans desire to create a public form of worshipopen to all people without distinction and dedicated to worship of theImmutable Being who is Author and Preserver of the Universe.40 We

shall see below that the 1830 date would assume great liturgical signifi-cance in the later Brahmo movement.

The year 1830 was also significant insofar as it was in November ofthis year that Rammohan set off on a mission to England. There he hadmany supporters, chiefly among the Unitarians, who saw in him a fellowrationalist and theist. While in England, Rammohan had an opportunityto deepen his Unitarian contacts while completing a mission on behalf ofthe Mughal emperor in Delhi, Akbar II. However, his visit ended in hisuntimely death in 1833, while staying with friends in Bristol.

In most accounts of modern Hinduism, this sort of narrative would serveas justification enough for thinking of Rammohan as the founder of theBrahmo Sama j. But from the vantage point provided by Hervieu-Lger,it scarcely tells us anything at all. Most telling is the relative absence ofreference to the group who constituted the early Brahmo community. Theone thing we do note in this regard is the ongoing transformation of the

37 See Farquhar,Modern Religious Movements in India, 34.38 See Dilipkumar Biswas, Ramamohaner dharmacinta, inRamamohana Smarana, ed.

Pulinbihari Sen et al. (Calcutta: Ramamohana Raya smrtiraksana samiti, 1989), 36869.39 See Brian A. Hatcher,Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in

Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2016.40 Quoting from the Trust Deed as cited in Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in

India, 35. The editor of The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy tells us that though theTrust Deed was not composed by Rammohan, it was nevertheless inspired by him (213).


11/31


group between 1828 and 1830. We might well ask if this is all there is tothe story.

the brAhmo samAj as elective fraternity

In Rammohans voluntary religious association, the Brahmo Sama j, wehave just the sort of elective fraternity about which Hervieu-Lger haswritten in her attempt to understand the ways religion transforms itself inthe modern world. Most importantly, Hervieu-Lger remarks that suchvoluntary associations, constructed to reflect the shared interests andexperiences of a group of people, often move to create narratives of an-cestry for themselves. These narratives stand in the place of the genea-logical ties that had defined membership in the passing majority tradition

(French Catholicism, for instance). Often the creation of such a narrativeinvolves the group imagining itself as an ideal family, united around afather figure. In the rapidly changing modern societal system, theseimagined genealogies provide just the kind of emotional stabilizationand validation of the groups stability that sociologists have taken asevidence of religions persistent appeal.41 However, there is a seemingparadox here insofar as the modern domain of religious believing . . .has its source in the rationale of modernity.42

Unlike others, Hervieu-Lger does not take this paradox as proof that

the persistence of religion reveals the limits of rationalization.43 Rather,she argues that the modern validation of individuality necessarily impliesthat individuals must construct their own worlds of meaning. But suchmeaning must be attested by others; it requires social confirmation.What paradox there is consists in the fact that individualism itself pro-duces anti-individualist moments in which relationships of affinity areformed in order to confirm belief.44 Hervieu-Lger writes, In societieswhere there is no sense of permanence or certainty, the production ofcollective meaning and the social authentication of individual meaning are

a matter for voluntary communities.45To return to Rammohans world, we can note that early nineteenth-

century Calcutta witnessed the rapid emergence of any number of volun-tary associations or elective fraternities. The earliest of these is usually

41 See Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 156.42 Ibid., 97.43 For an example of a scholar who does draw this conclusion, see Bryan Wilson, Secular-

ization and Its Discontents, in hisReligion in Sociological Perspective, esp. 5051.44 Summarizing Hervieu-Lger, Grace Davie remarks that the paradox of modernity is

that in its amnesiac forms it destroys the sense of religion, but in its utopian forms it fostersa sense of the religious; seeReligion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (New York:Oxford University Press, 2000), 31.

45 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 95.


12/31


said to have been Rammohans Society of Friends (Atmiya Sabha), whichhe formed in 1815.46 Over the next three decades, a wide variety of othervoluntary associations were formed in Calcutta: the Indian Agricultural

and Horticultural Society (1820), the Gaudiya Samaj (1823), the DharmaSabha (1830), the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge(SAGK, 1838), the Landholders Society (1838), and the Hindu Theo-philanthropic Society (1843), to name but a few of the most prominentorganizations in the first few decades of the century.47

Interestingly enough, the origin stories of these societies do often turnupon the founding role of a leader, or father, to borrow Hervieu-Lgers term. The Brahmo Samaj had Rammohan; the conservative Hinduorganization known as the Dharma Sabha had Radhakant Deb; Henry

Derozio is routinely viewed as the guiding light of the Young Bengalfaction within the SAGK. Clustering around these fathers, members ofsuch associations confirmed their shared sense of identity and memory.

While each of these associations can be seen as a particular response tothe fractured continuity of the collective memory, it is clearly not the casethat all such associations were religions. Hervieu-Lger herself recognizesthat something has to happen for any given elective fraternity to becomea religious association. As she explains, this happens when a groupfinds . . . a representation of itself that can incorporate the idea of its

own continuity beyond the immediate context that brought its memberstogether.48 Having exited the collective memory of a particular religioustradition, members of new religious groups resocialize around their ownlocalized traditions of memory. With the ongoing deregulation of autho-rized memory . . . [and] the burgeoning of elective fraternities, . . . [onewitnesses] the pluralization . . . of forms in which these same fraternitiescan bring about . . . their own religious consolidation.49

If we take a moment to examine the Brahmo Samaj and its developmentduring and after Rammohans life in these terms, we notice some inter-

esting patterns. It goes without saying that during the early nineteenth cen-tury, the Hindu tradition in Bengal began to feel the full force of critiques

46 This was apparently little more than an informal gatheringSophia Dobson Colletcalls it not quite publicfor conversation and debate (Life and Letters, 76).

47 It has been estimated that in the sixty years from the founding of the Atmiya Sabha tothe founding of the Indian Association in 1876, at least 200 voluntary associations wereformed in Calcutta; see Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in

Bengal (18151876) (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), 14.48 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 152. She refers to Hegels claim that the early

communities of Jesus disciples were elective fraternities rather than a religion since theirfraternal love did not also contain a representation of their union.

49 Ibid., 156. A cognate approach, which demonstrates familiarity with Hervieu-Lgersarguments, may be found in Olivier Roys treatment of contemporary Islam; see Globalized

Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).


13/31


based on Enlightenment rationality. The combined forces of rationalism,historicism, and scientific empiricism all worked to threaten the collectivechain of memory that constituted the broader web of Bengali Hindu tra-

dition. At the same time, Christian missionaries mounted a sustainedpolemic against what they took to be the most egregious errors of Hindu-ism, namely, polytheism, idolatry, and mystical withdrawal. The classicexample of a break with tradition during the early colonial period can befound in the Young Bengal group, those English-educated youth whoadopted a stance of radical rejection of the collective tradition. Far moremoderate was Rammohans exit from tradition, though in his creation ofthe Brahmo Samaj we notice the attempt to reestablish a set of traditionsthat could anchor identity and provide meaning.

Rammohans strategy was to retrieve the Vedanta of the Upanisadsfrom oblivion and to identify in it a religion that could both answer thechallenges of modernity and provide new norms of collective identity.Toward this end he created the conditions for a small group to meet,discuss, and worship according to this Vedantic monotheism. It is tellingthat the decision to form the Brahmo Sama j seems to have grown quitedirectly out of a desire to fill what Hervieu-Lger might call the spacefor belief that was opened up by Rammohans decision to step awayfrom both Hinduism and Christianity. Initially that space was filled by Uni-

tarianism, but this was a tradition to which Rammohan and his associatescould not fully commit. Instead, a contemporary account tells us that twoof Rammohans closest associates, Candrasekhar Deb and TarachandChakravarti, suggested to him that rather than attending Unitarian servicesas they had been doing, they should establish their own place of worshipanalogous to what the Christians had.50

The initial success of Brahmoism could be ascribed, following MaxWeber, to the charisma of Rammohan, who by virtue of his mission pro-claims a religious doctrine or divine commandment.51 And given all we

know of Rammohans wide learning, polemical skills, and undoubtedspiritual calling (to use another of Webers concepts), it is not hard tosee the Brahmo Sama j as the direct expression of his vision. But as wehave seen, Weber also spoke of the routinization of charisma that had tooccur to guarantee the continued existence of a religious movement. Thecrisis brought about by the death of the founder can only be resolved

50 See TattvabodhiniPatrika 50 (1769 aka), 107; cf. Collet, Life and Letters, 220; andSibnath Sastri, Ramtanu Lahidi o tatkalina Bangasamaja, repr. ed. (Calcutta: New AgePublications, 1983), 103.

51 Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 46.

One Line Short


14/31


through the groups ability to maintain the permanence of his preachingand the congregations distribution of grace.52

The question to be asked is, do we see this process occurring after

Rammohans departure for England in 1830 and his death there in1833a mere five years after the creation of the Brahmo Sama j? Howdid the movement fare in those subsequent years? Can we rightly speakof a movement at this point? Had the elective fraternity acquired in thoseearly years the requisite sense of its own story, its own identity, to warrantcalling it a religious association?

The argument of this essay is that the Samaj had not by this time realizeditself as a religious association, let alone a movement. The evidence in-dicates, in fact, that after Rammohans departure for England, the affairs

of the Sama j suffered greatly. More importantly, as Benoy Ghosh onceremarked, during the 1830s the Brahmo Sama j was little more than agroup of people who gathered to worship God.53 Ghosh was implyingthat something else had to happen before it could become a religiousorganization, properly speaking (what he called, in Bengali, a dharma-gosthi). He provides 1843 as the date for this transformation. We shallsee presently what makes 1843 such a special year. For now, what is im-portant is Ghoshs insight into the fact that the birth of the Brahmo Samajas religious movement should perhaps not be dated to Rammohans found-

ing act of 1828. While Ghosh offered no theoretical interpretation to makesense of his remark, the purpose of this article is to suggest that the creationof the Brahmo Samaj as a religious movement can be identified with themoment whenas Hervieu-Lgers theory would suggestthe memberscreated a narrative about themselves that included reference to a found-ing figure. That figure was, of course, Rammohan Roy.

the brAhmo samAj after rammohan

In the wake of Rammohans departure and death, the energy and activities

of the Brahmo Samaj were severely weakened. The death of the Founderwas almost fatal to the infant society, remarked J. N. Farquhar in his in-fluential early study of the period.54 Attendance dwindled at its weekly

52 The relevant passage is, a religious community arises in connection with a propheticmovement as a result of routinization (Veralltglichung), i.e., as a result of the processwhereby either the prophet himself or his disciples secure the permanence of his preachingand the congregations distribution of grace, hence insuring the economic existence of theenterprise and those who man it (ibid., 6061).

53 See Benoy Ghosh, Samayik-patre banglar samaj-citra, pt. 2 (Calcutta: Viksan, 1963),1718. Compare J. N. Farquhars comment about the early Brahmo Samaj under Rammohan:There was no organization, no membership, no creed. It was merely a weekly meeting opento any who cared to attend (Modern Religious Movements in India, 34).

54 Farquhar,Modern Religious Movements in India, 39.


15/31


meetings. To those familiar with the association it must have seemed as ifRammohans vision and his Samaj would both soon fade from memory.Such might well have been the case, were it not for the dedicated work of

Rammohans closest associates. None was more instrumental in keepingthe Brahmo Samaj alive than Ramacandra Vidyavagia (17861845). Asfirst preceptor, or acarya, of the Samaj, Ramacandra had delivered the in-augural discourse before the Samaj in 1828. After Rammohans departurehe faithfully presided over weekly meetings, continuing to deliver dis-courses on the Upanisadic theology first enunciated by Rammohan. As onelater Brahmo commented: Only the faithful Ram Chandra Vidyabagishremained steadfast; and for seven years he regularly and punctually con-ducted the weekly service, as directed by Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, often

alone like the solitary watcher by the dim-burning pyre at the burning-ghat.55 We should note that the image evoked here is one of the death ofa movement, rather than its birth. For the Brahmo Samaj to survive wouldclearly require the agency of men such as Ramacandra.

Like Rammohan, Ramacandra was a Brahmin by birth. Unlike Rammo-han, he had trained as a Sanskrit pandit.56 However, his world was drawnclose to Rammohans in many ways, not least because Rammohan hadstudied under Ramacandras older brother, who had renounced worldlylife and become a tantric ascetic known as Hariharananda Tirthasvami. It

may even be that Rammohan and Ramacandra met one another throughHariharananda.

Clearly the two formed a powerful intellectual friendship. Ramacandrasmastery of Sanskrit literature was a valuable asset to Rammohan. In fact,Rammohan sent Ramacandra to study Vedanta, which he is said to havemastered in very little time.57 Sources indicate Rammohan also gaveRamacandra funds with which to open a Sanskrit school for teachingVedanta. In some respects it is remarkable that a rationalist reformer likeRammohan could find common cause with a custodian of Brahmanical

tradition. But this should only serve to remind us how difficult it is togeneralize about ideological orientations in colonial Calcutta. It is notthat one man was more modern than the other; rather, both men workedcreatively within a modern context to reinterpret the traditions mostmeaningful to them.

Having said this, it should be noted that Calcutta society was at thistime fractured by competing ideologiesreligious, social, economic and

55 Hem Chandra Sarkar, The Religion of the Brahmo Samaj, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: Classic,1931), 5.

56 On the relationship between Rammohan and Ramacandra, see Hatcher, Idioms ofImprovement, chap. 8.

57 These facts are reported in a short life of Ramacandra published in TattvabodhiniPatrika, no. 21 (1 Vaiakha 1767 aka), 16567.


16/31


political. We must attend to these fractures if we are to appreciate why theBrahmo Samaj went into decline following Rammohans death. The Samajfaced intellectual challenges on at least three fronts: (1) from English-

educated Hindu youth, (2) from Christian missionaries, and (3) fromadvocates of existing forms of Hindu orthodoxy.58 The pressures of thispluralist ideological matrix help explain, in Hervieu-Lgers analysis,how collective memories were threatened and new spaces for belief wereopened.

Strident rationalists, like the English-educated youth of the YoungBengal faction, had no patience for religion. They were notorious inCalcuttan society for flouting all religious orthodoxies.59 Their mottowas, He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he

who does not is a slave.60 To the members of Young Bengal, even anindigenous religious movement such as the Brahmo Sama j would haveappeared to be simply another form of religious sectarianism.

Over against the enlightened rationalism of the college educated, therewas the evangelical zeal of the Christian missionaries. No friends to Hinducustom or theology, the missionaries would have been just as impatientwith Rammohans attempt to reform Hinduism. Not only had Rammohandared to subject the Gospels to rational analysis, in the Brahmo Samajhe offered a monotheism devoid of both grace and atonement. To the

missionary, what Rammohan offered was not simply heathen error, butworse, the means to be a theist without becoming a Christian. Thus themissionaries found themselves having to combat not just stereotypicalnotions of heathen idolatry, but also the revamped arguments of suchmodern Hindu theists.

Finally, there were those Bengali Hindus who took offense at Rammo-hans critique of idolatry, his rejection of the myths and ceremonies asso-ciated with Puranic Hinduism, and his attempt to seek a ban on the ritualof sati, or widow immolation. Indeed, in their eyes Rammohan seemed

to have mounted an assault on the entire mythic and ritual framework ofPuranic Hinduism. Among these so-called conservative Hindus, Rammo-han was truly persona non grata; he was openly scorned and vilified,especially in connection with his appeals to abolish sati.61

58 See Ghosh, Samayik-patre banglar samaj-citra, 2425.59 For reports of upper-caste Hindu members of Young Bengal buying meat kebabs from

a Muslim vendor and eating them in plain view, see Sastri,Ramtanu Lahidi, 172.60 Ramgopal Ghosh, cited in Susobhan Sarkar, Derozio and Young Bengal, in Studies in

the Bengal Renaissance, ed. A. C. Gupta (Jadavpur: National Council of Education, 1958), 19.61 I would like to thank Paul Courtright, who has studied this period and the saticontro-

versy in particular, for suggesting to me how vilification of Rammohan could have worked toshape or even suppress public memory of him after his death. For further context, see Brian


17/31


Clearly, after Rammohans death there would have been many whowould have been happy to see the Brahmo Sama j fade into obscurity.Given the explosion of print journalism in Calcutta at this time, these

contending groups had ample means to advance their ideological positions.It is against this backdrop that we should return to Hervieu-Lgers conceptof amnesia. One corrosive effect of modernity is to break down collectivememories, leading to a more pluralistic world of competing claims andsocial groups. In light of the ideological strains placed on the Samaj fromthe groups identified above, it is easy to see why the vitality of the Samajdiminished throughout the 1830s.

Attendance at the Samaj fell off drastically. In such a climate, even ifone were sympathetic to the goals of the Samaj, it would have been far

easier simply to stay out of public view. As Amiya Kumar Sen has noted,many members of the Samaj at this time simply accepted its principlesintellectually and did not follow them in their daily lives and activities.62

Sen also notes that what was lacking was the institutional means to counterthe charges leveled at the Brahmo Samaj by each of these opposing con-stituencies. Most important, Sen observes, There was nothing in theSamaj itself to unite them into a community. Even the works of RajaRammohan Roy became scarce and did not wield that influence whichthey did when he was alive. There was thus a void in the social and re-

ligious thought in the country.63 It is precisely this sense of a void thatcorresponds to the kind of amnesia identified by Hervieu-Lger. If that issoand Sens remark about the scarcity of Rammohans work seems tosupport thisthen the solution would have to come through some attemptto remember Rammohan, to incorporate his story into the story of thosewho continued to call themselves Brahmos. The Brahmo Samaj neededa representation of itself that could incorporate the idea of its owncontinuity.64

brAhmoism without rammohan

Ironically, the means to save the Brahmo Sama j came neither throughaggressively recruiting new members nor through more active advocacyof the Samaj in print, but inadvertently by the creation of yet anothervoluntary association. This new association would take up Rammohans

62 Amiya Kumar Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta:Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1979), 12.

63 Ibid.64 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 152.

K. Pennington, Constructing Colonial Dharma: A Chronicle of Emergent Hinduism, 18301831,Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 3 (2001): 577603, as well ashis Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 5.


18/31


cause, but it would do so under the terms of a new synthesis.65 The nameof this new association was the Tattvabodhini Sabha, or the Society forthe Propagation of Truth. It was established in 1839 under the leadership

of Debendranath Tagore (18171905).The creation of the Tattvabodhini Sabha was to become, in retrospect,

a defining moment in Brahmo history. It has claimed the attention ofreaders of Bengali literature for over a century and a half. In the simplestof terms it is a story about the meeting of two men, Rammohans oldfriend Ramacandra and Debendranaththe latter anxiously seeking God,the former faithfully tending to the legacy of Rammohan. Their encounterwould not only mark an upswing in the fortunes of the Brahmo Samaj, itwould also contribute significantly to the areas of Bengali literature, social

reform, and scientific learning. We can only summarize the story of thecreation of the Sabha here.66

Debendranath was the eldest son of Dwarkanath Tagore, patriarch ofthe Tagores of Jorasanko, a family whose history is intimately bound tothe history of the Brahmo movement in particular and the renaissanceof Bengali culture more generally. Dwarkanath was a businessman withextensive contacts with European traders and a wide range of commercialinterests.67 Dwarkanath had also been a great friend and patron of Rammo-han. He was a trustee of the Brahmo Samaj and one of the few stalwarts

who attended meetings of the Brahmo Sama j after Rammohans death.He paid the bills to keep the Samaj afloat during those lean years.68

When Debendranath was eighteen, his father went on a journey to northIndia. While he was away, Debendranaths grandmother died. Deben-dranath was close by throughout this period. Sitting near her on the nightbefore her death, he felt his worldly concerns melt away, along with hisdesire for worldly power. In their place, he experienced a profound senseof bliss that led him to ask about the meaning and purpose behind life.Finding no earthly cause for such bliss, Debendranath concluded it was a

65 See Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance, 13.66 The best source on Debendranath is his autobiography,Maharsi Debendranath Thakurer

atmajivani, repr. ed. by Arabinda Mitra and Aim Amed (Calcutta: Chariot International,1980), trans. Satyendranath Tagore and Indira Devi as The Autobiography of Maharshi De-vendranath Tagore (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri, 1909). Compare the early account of the Sabhafound in Raj Narain Boses discourse, Brahmadiger sadharana sabha, in Rajanarayana

Basur vaktrta, pt. 1, 3rd rev. ed. (Calcutta: Valmiki, 1871), 91106. See also Hatcher,Idioms of Improvement, 21314.

67 He has been called Indias first modern-style entrepreneur (Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj,162). On Dwarkanath, see Blair Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Ageof Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

68 See Sastri, Ramtanu Lahidi, 171. Dwarkanath does not appear to have done muchpublicly to promote the Samaj, perhaps out of fear of being associated too closely withRammohan in the eyes of his conservative opponents in the Dharma Sabha.


19/31


gift from God. Subsequently Debendranath fell into extended meditationon the religious life.

Around this time he remembered the work of Rammohan Roy. Rammo-

hans books on religion had been stored in his fathers library and his fatherhad also arranged for Debendranath to attend the school Rammohan hadestablished in north Calcutta. Debendranath even remembered playing inRammohans garden as a boy, picking fruit and being pushed on the gardenswing by the great reformer himself. Recalling that Rammohan did nottake part in any image-worship or idolatry, Debendranath vowed to adoptthe same practices.69

It was at this point that Debendranath chanced upon a stray page ofSanskrit text. Although he had studied Sanskrit, he could not decipher it.

He sought help from the familys pandit. Recognizing it as the kind ofwisdom popular among the Brahmos, the pandit referred Debendranathto Rammohans friend Ramacandra. When Ramacandra was shown thepage, he was instantly able to identify the passage as the first verse of theIa Upanisad.70 He read the passage for Debendranath and explained itsmeaning.

Of this moment, Debendranath would later write, nectar from paradisestreamed down upon me.71 He had found the Brahmo God. Suddenlythe position he held at this fathers bank meant nothing to him. Instead,

Debendranath now saw a divine presence (and purpose) behind creation.And he saw a new purpose for his own life. Henceforth, he would work totranslate the content of his awakening into a coherent spiritual message.Indeed, he spoke of a strong desire to spread the true religion.72

This desire was manifested in the creation of the Tattvabodhini Sabhain 1839. Debendranath described the goals of the Tattvabodhini Sabha:Its object was the diffusion of the deep truth of all our shastras and theknowledge ofBrahma as inculcated in the Vedanta. It was the Upanishadsthat we considered to be the Vedanta,we did not place much reliance

on the teachings of the Vedanta philosophy.73 At this point, Debendranathand the other members of the new Sabha were not thinking of themselvesas Brahmos, nor do the goals of the Sabha yet make explicit reference toRammohan. This, despite the fact that the knowledge of God, or brahma-jana, sought by members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha was understood inprecisely the terms Rammohan had understood itas a monistically

69 Tagore,Autobiography, 1314.70 There is reason to believe that the page Debendranath had found was in fact torn from

an edition Rammohan had made of this Upanisad (see Maharsi Debendranath Thakureratmajivani, 169).

71 Tagore,Autobiography, 15.72 Ibid., 16.73 Ibid., 18.


20/31


oriented monotheism, to borrow Wilhelm Halbfasss characterization.74

The path described is one based on both reason and scripture. Worship wasunderstood as knowledge and love of God coupled with the performance

of those deeds that are pleasing to God.The absence of Rammohan from the picture at this point is made

strikingly clear in a little-known set of discourses delivered by membersof the Tattvabodhini Sabha in Calcutta in its inaugural year, 183940, andsubsequently published as a small volume in 1841.75 In these discourses,a range of different members present their interpretations of what it meansto live according to a rational, monotheistic theology of this-worldlyworship that is accountable both to the astras and to reason. In theirrecourse to Upanishadic scriptural emblems (e.g., passages from the

Katha and Mundaka Upanisads), in their attempt to balance the demandsof reason and scripture (or astra), in their marvel at the purpose behindGods creation, in their rejection of the renunciatory ethic, and in their callto an active expression of moral diligence and spiritual reflection, thesediscourses remind us in concrete ways of the teachings of Rammohan.However, at no point in the published collection of these discourses isany mention made of the Brahmo Sama j or Rammohan Roy. This isBrahmoism without Rammohan.

These discourses allow us a glimpse of yet another new elective fra-

ternity formed in Calcutta, a group that gathered to discuss, ponder, andworship according to a particular vision of reasonable Hinduism. But ifthe Brahmo Samaj was at this time languishing with no active memory ofRammohan, this group also seemed to lack the defining characteristic ofa religious fraternitythat is, a clear representation of themselves. They,too, lacked a collective memory that could, in Durkheims terms (whichclearly underwrite Hervieu-Lgers analysis), renew the sentiment theyhad of themselves and their unity.76 If the Brahmos struggled to carry onRammohans teachings in the absence of their founder, the Tattvabodhini

Sabha appears to have adopted the teachings without any reference to thefounder. In an interesting turn of events, the revival of the fortunes of theBrahmo Samajindeed its real constitution as a religious bodywouldcome only when the members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha remembered

74 See Halbfass,India and Europe, 205.75 Sabhyadiger vaktrta (Calcutta: Tattvabodhini Sabha, 1841). The book features twenty-

one discourses by a variety of different members. However, identifying specific authors ismade difficult by the fact that the discourses are signed with what appears to be a systemof initials for which there is no key. I address the question of authorship as well as the his-torical and theological context of the work in an annotated translation of Sabhyadiger vaktrta(currently in progress).

76 mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain(New York: Free Press, 1965), 420.


21/31


the one man to whom their vision could be traced, Rammohan. As thediscourses from 183940 reveal, this had not happened in the first yearsof the Sabhas existence. But within a few short years this would change.

remembering rammohan

The discourses printed in Sabhyadiger vaktrta were published in 1841. Thevery next year, Debendranath attended a meeting of the Brahmo Samaj.He tells us that it was on this visit that he witnessed how far the Samajhad declined.77 In response, he pledged to revive the Brahmo Samaj byarranging for the Tattvabodhini Sabha to begin managing its affairs.Simultaneously, he mandated that the spiritual activities of the Sabhawould henceforth be carried out by the Brahmo Sama j. In this moment,

the Tattvabodhini group acquired a representation of themselves; theybecame Brahmos.

One index of this transformation can be found if we examine changesthat were made to the liturgical calendar. Up to this point, the Tattva-bodhini Sabha had met weekly and monthly on Sundays; the discoursescollected in Sabhyadiger vaktrtawould have been delivered at these meet-ings. Annually the founding of the Sabha was celebrated on October 6 inmemory of the meeting at which the group decided on its name and con-firmed its mission (21 Avina in 1761 of the aka era, to be exact).78

By contrast, the Brahmo Sama j was by this time meeting weekly onWednesdays and monthly on Sundays. The anniversary of the Samaj wascelebrated not on the date of its first meeting in August of 1828, but onthe date of the formal inauguration of the Sama j, namely, January 23,1830 (11 Magha 1752 aka).79 Now, under Debendranaths new arrange-ment, the Tattvabodhini Sabha abandoned its own monthly Sunday meet-ings in order to meet during the Brahmos regular worship time. In a finalmark of the absorption of the Sabha into the Samaj, it was decided thathenceforth anniversary meetings would be held on the date of January 23

(11 Magha). In time this date would acquire an aura of great sanctity,thanks in large part to the work of the Tattvabodhini group.80

In this way the dynamism of the Sabha began to contribute to the re-vitalization of Brahmo worship. Under Debendranath, the Brahmo Samajwould begin a new phase of self-definitionliturgical, theological, andsocial. The process of redefinition was marked by two further develop-ments during the following year, 1843.

77 SeeMaharsi Debendranath Thakureratmajivani, 76.78 The title page ofSabhyadiger vaktrta reads (in Bengali): This society was established

on Sunday, the 14th day of the dark fortnight, in the month ofAvin, in the year 1761.79 See TattvabodhiniPatrika, pt. 2, no. 9 (1 Vaiakha 1766 aka), 72.80 One later Tattvabodhini author praised the date as a joyous holy day (anandajanaka

pavitra divasa); see TattvabodhiniPatrika, pt. 1, no. 103 (1 Phalguna 1773 aka), 146.


22/31


First, the Tattvabodhini Sabha launched a new Bengali periodical, theTattvabodhiniPatrika. As with the original Sabha, it was dedicated to thegoal of propagating Vedanta. However, the Patrika also announced its

commitment to republishing the writings of Rammohan Roy, which itnoted had fallen into near obscurity since his death.81 In a second majordevelopment, four months after the publication of the Patrika, Deben-dranath joined twenty-one other members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha intaking formal initiation (diksa) into the Brahmo Samaj. The old Brahmostalwart Ramacandra presided over the ceremony as acarya. As Deben-dranath later wrote: This was an unprecedented event in the annals ofthe Brahma-Samaj. Formerly there had existed the Brahma-Samaj only,now the Brahma Dharma came into existence.82 As this comment in-

dicates, by this point Debendranath had come to see the Brahmo path asdharma, a code, a religion, a way of life. And as the explicit commitmentto republishing the works of Rammohan suggests, this dharma was clearlytraced to the founding efforts of Rammohan.

Not surprisingly, this is the moment Benoy Ghosh had in mind when hecommented on the transformation of the Brahmo Samaj in 1843 from amere association into a religious organization (dharmagosthi). Like Ghosh,David Kopf also remarked that it may well be argued that the BrahmoSamaj as we have known it since began with the covenant ceremony in

1843 and not earlier. But while Kopf highlights the significance ofDebendranaths initiation for marking the beginnings of a distinctlynew sense of Brahmo community, he focuses so closely on the leader-ship and initiative of Debendranath that he fails to give due weight to thegroups simultaneous attempt to reconnect with Rammohan.83

However, if we follow Hervieu-Lgers analysis of how modern electivefraternities become enduring religious entities, we are able to see thatthis transformation in the identity and collective memory of the Sabhacoincided with an explicit return to Rammohan. Preserving the memory

and propagating the vision of the groups father now became the missionof the Sabha. Ironically, the decision made by the Tattvabodhini group toembrace Rammohan and the Brahmo path would also mark the beginningof the end of the Sabha. While the Sabha continued to meet independentlyuntil 1859, it was eventually dissolved, its identity and its mission by thensynonymous with the Brahmo movement.

It is as if the followers of Debendranath had originally been moved bya vision, but could not conceptualize themselves as standing in a tradition.

81 See TattvabodhiniPatrika, no. 1 (1 Bhadra 1765 aka), 1.82 Quoted in Frans L. Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj (18601884)

(Leuven: Catholic University, 1988), 34.83 See Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj, 163.


23/31


Living as they did at the end of the 1830s, a turbulent decade during whichcontests over religion, culture, and politics had driven Rammohan and theBrahmo Sama j underground, the members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha

suffered from a kind of amnesia. The discourses of 183940 reveal themto be proponents of Brahmo thought, but the absence of Rammohan fromthose discourses suggests the degree to which the message had floatedfree of any collective memory. In order to understand themselves, theTattvabodhini group needed to remember Rammohan. They needed to re-incorporate him within their story. Clearly, in this case rememberingis not a matter of recall, but a selection and reorganization of traditions sothat the present can be better understood in light of its past and a sense ofcontinuity between the present and the past is achieved.84

Remembering Rammohan required a critical resolution such as thattaken by Debendranath in merging the interests of the two groups. Thisresolution was then confirmed in the new rites of commemoration estab-lished when Debendranath highlighted the Brahmo anniversary date. Wemight say that by 1843 the Sabha found itself facing a memory crisis,the resolution of which required these new ritual expressions.85 These ritesand the memory they expressed are thus evidence of a major transforma-tion in the groups self-understanding. Once the Tattvabodhini groupbegan to think of themselves as Brahmos carrying on the work of Ram-

mohan, the integrity and plausibility of their religious movement wassecured. At this point, members began to say explicitly, as they did in anEnglish-language proclamation from 1844, We follow the teachings ofRammohan Roy.86

Rammohan could now clearly be called a founder.87 A report for theyear 184344, composed in English and published in the TattvabodhiniPatrika, shows the Sabha in the process of rewriting the story of theirestablishment to include explicit mention of their newly rememberedfounder: The TUTTUVOADHINEE SUBHA was established . . . by a

select party of friends, who believed in god as the One Unknown TrueBeing, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the Universe,. . . Theavowed object of the members was to sustain the labours of the late

84 April DeConick,Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas (New York: Continuum,2005), 12.

85 See R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1993).

86 Quoting from an English-language statement of beliefs found in TattvabodhiniPatrika,pt. 2, no. 16 (1 Agrahayana, 1766 aka), 12527. Incidentally, this may help us understandwhy certain prominent members of the Sabha, notably, Ivaracandra Vidyasagara, choseto dissociate themselves from the group. While membership initially demanded little or noreligious commitment, this would have changed once the Sabha became overtly Brahmo. OnVidyasagaras involvement with the Sabha, see Hatcher,Idioms of Improvement, chap. 9.

87 See TattvabodhiniPatrika, no. 9 (1 Vaiakha 1766 aka), 66, where Rammohan isreferred to as the sthapanakarta, or founder of the Brahmo Samaj.


24/31


Rajah Rammohun Roy. However, the conclusion of the report makes itclear not only that there had been a hiatus in the collective memory broughton by Rammohans departure and death, but also that the revitalization of

the Brahmo movement was dependent upon the work of the Sabha:

The members are fully aware of the extent, to which the cause of religion wascarried during the time of the celebrated Rammohun Roy. But it is no less afact that, in his lamentable demise, it received a shock from which it was fearedit could hardly have recovered. The exertions of the Tuttuvoadhinee Society,however, have imparted renewed energies to the cause. They have led a largenumber of the educated and respectable members of society, to appreciate theknowledge of God. The meetings of the Braumhu Sumauj are now attended by

overflowing congregations, and religious discussion are extensively maintainedin Native society.88

Further evidence of the elevation of Rammohan to the status of founderis given in a passage from an annual report of the Sabha for 1846, whichdescribes Rammohan as having descended (avatirna, semantically akin tothe concept of avatara) into Bengal to establish the Brahmo Samaj.89

This is the background against which we should also read an English-language passage written by Debendranath in 1846 in which he outlines the

moral and theological tenets of his new dharma. While Rammohan is notexplicitly invoked, the concept of the godly householder (brahmanisthagrhastha)to which we have seen Rammohan gave pride of placeisclearly emphasized: As spiritual worshippers of our All-BenevolentLegislator and followers of the Vedantof Ooponeshud, . . . we areBhrummunistha Grihustha, or monotheistic householders. . . . The objectof our humble exertions is not merely a negative reformation in the re-ligious institutions of our countrymen, but apositive one too,not merelythe overthrow of the present systems, but the substitution in their place of

more rational and proper ones.

90

Clearly Rammohans Brahmo ideals provided the Tattvabodhini Sabhawith the means to ratify their own identity as a movement. This rearticu-lation of the groups self-understanding was made clear at a meeting held

88 See Report of the Tuttuvoadhinee Subha, 1843 44, TattvabodhiniPatrika, no. 13(1 Bhadra 1766), 1034.

89 1768 aker Samvatsarika aya vyaya sthitir nirupana pustaka (Calcutta: TattvabodhiniSabha, 1846), 12. Interestingly, the first biography of Rammohan appeared around the sametime. Writing in the Calcutta Review for December 1845, Kishorychand Mitra cast Rammo-han in the role of cultural progenitor, remarking that Rammohan was evidently the first whoconsecrated, so to speak, the Bengali language. See J. K. Majumdar,Raja Rammohun Royand Progressive Movements in India (1941; repr., Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1983),279.

90 TattvabodhiniPatrika, pt. 3, no. 40 (1 Agrahayana 1768 aka), 382.


25/31


on May 28, 1847. Hitherto the Tattvabodhini Sabha had defined its goalas the propagation of the true religion as taught by Vedanta (vedantapratipadya satyadharma). At the May 1847 meeting it was resolved to

formally replace this language with the explicit rubric ofbrahmadharma;the Sabha would now propagate the Brahmo religion of Rammohan.91

Years later, in 1864, Debendranath gave a Bengali address in which helooked back over the previous twenty-five years of the Brahmo Samaj. Inthat address, Debendranath clearly identified Rammohan as the foundingfather of the movement, referring to him as the countrys first friend(deer prathama bandhu).92 Indeed, Debendranath crafted a virtualcreation myth that depicts Rammohan appearing in the midst of darknessand lethargy to plant the seeds of monotheistic worship. In this evocation

of Rammohan as pioneer, father, and founding guru, Debendranathoffered the Brahmo Samaj a representation of itself as an ongoing lineageof belief traced to a founder whose memory now served to unite them asa religious association. And, as Debendranath remarked toward the closeof his address, it was not as if he and Rammohan had different visions;their goals were one and the same.93

What is equally striking about this address is that while it takes usback to the time of Rammohan and his founding of the Brahmo Samaj in1828, if read carefully, it also becomes clear that the scope of this twenty-

five-year retrospective really only takes the reader back to 1839, the yearthe Tattvabodhini Sabha was founded. We are thus led to see in rathergraphic terms the very time lagthe lapse of memory, if you willbetween Rammohans creative action and the birth of the organizationthat was to revive his vision.

Of course, this was not the end of the process. As J. N. Farquhar re-marked laconically, there were difficulties.94 The pressures of colonialmodernity would continue to threaten the plausibility structures thatsupported the Brahmo movement. In the decades after Debendranaths

adoption of the Brahmo faith, it was repeatedly forced to review and re-vise its store of memories. Space permitting, one could go on to explorethe way the movement struggled in the coming years with such issues asthe proper weight that should be accorded to scripture versus reason, aswell as with the authority of personal intuition. At critical junctures new

91 See Dilipkumar Bivas, Tattvabodhini Sabha o Debendranath Thakur, Itihasa 5,no. 1 (1954): 47. The textual expression of this new identity would soon follow in the formof Debendranaths new Brahmo scripture, entitled simply Brahmo Dharmah (Calcutta,1850).

92 Brahmo Sama jer pacavimati vatsarer pariksita vrttanta (1864; repr., Calcutta:Sadharan Brahma Samaj, 1957), 2.

93 Ibid., 35.94 Farquhar,Modern Religious Movements in India, 40.


26/31


developments were accommodated to new memories. What is more, intime the creative agency of other father figures would need to be invokedto integrate and commemorate the evolving sense of group continuity. In

time Debendranath himself would become one such father, as wouldKeshub Chunder Sen (183884) later still, when he founded the NewDispensation (nava vidhana) in 1879.95

In fact, Keshubs views on Rammohan from the mid-1860s are par-ticularly interesting. While he recognized Rammohan as the great manwho brought his fellow citizens together to worship the One God, Keshubdid not credit Rammohan with founding a religious movement. His viewsin this respect seem to anticipate Benoy Ghoshs observation about theearly Sama j. As one scholar has remarked, Keshab especially empha-

sized that Roy did not found the Brahmo community of the decades tocome, emphasizing only that he created a place and reason for people toworship.96

At this point, Keshub was clearly less interested in historical observationthan in the ongoing validation of the movement, its memories, and itsleaders. Chief among his concerns around this time was the question ofleadership. Who would be granted creative agency? Even as he broke withDebendranath to form the Brahmo Sama j of India, Keshub could praisethe role of his former patron and spiritual mentor, Debendranath: When

the patriotic, virtuous, great-souled Raja Ram Mohun Roy established apublic place for the holy worship of God in Bengal, the true welfare of thecountry began. . . . But that great man being within a short time removedfrom this world, the light of Divine worship kindled by him came verynearly to be extinct.97 Referring to Debendranath, Keshub went on tosay, God raised you, and placed in your hands the charge of the spiritualadvancement of the country. . . . Thus have you generally served theBrahma community after the ideals of your own heart, but you havespecially benefited a few among us whom you have treated as affection-

ately as your children. These have felt the deep nobleness of your char-acter, and elevated by your precept, example, and holy companionship,reverence you as their father.98

Keshubs break with Debendranath and his subsequent move to formthe New Dispensation are striking illustrations of the very fluid processthat was the construction of Brahmo religious identity throughout the

95 In Debendranaths case, the date of his formal adoption of the Brahmo path (7 Pousa)would in time become another important liturgical date for later Brahmos.

96 Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj, 30, referring to Keshubs remarks intheIndian Mirror(January 1, 1865).

97 Life and Works of Brahmananda Keshav, 2nd ed., compiled by Prem Sundar Basu(Calcutta: Navavidhan Publication Committee, 1940), 12627.

98 Ibid., 12728.


27/31


nineteenth century. Part of that process, as Hervieu-Lger makes us aware,was the imagining of chains of memory and affiliation, forged in relationto stories of founders, and uniting all those who claimed to participate in

the movement. If hitherto it has been customary to tell the story of theBrahmo Samaj as a narrative of persistent tension and schism, perhapsHervieu-Lger provides us with a different theoretical lens through whichto view this history.

conclusion

Who, then, created the Brahmo movement? Was it Rammohan, or wasit the Tattvabodhini Sabha under Debendranath? Obviously there wouldhave been no Brahmo Samajand most likely no Tattvabodhini Sabha

without Rammohan. One could indeed argue that Debendranath wouldnot have undergone his spiritual awakening without Rammohan, sincethat awakening was precipitated by a reading of Rammohans belovedIa Upanisad as mediated by Ramacandra Vidyavagia. And yet wouldRammohan have become Rammohan Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj,without Debendranath? That is, how much depended on those crucial actsof collective remembrance sparked by Debendranath and members of theTattvabodhini Sabha?99

We began this essay by asking how religions acquire their founders. As

we anticipated then, and as I have shown, this apparently unambiguousquestion can be rather difficult to answer. Great individuals may createcommunities, but as the case of Rammohan and the Brahmo Samajdemonstrates, communities also create their founders. Weber told us thatfounders are prophet figures.100 He distinguished between renewers andfounders, on the one hand, and reformers on the other. However,rather than assigning such labels to religious leaders based on what we taketo be their inherent qualities (the ideal type), it may be more useful tothink of a leaders status in the eyes of the communities he or she helped

to establish.Perhaps it might even help to see founder as something of an emic

category that points primarily to a communitys memory of its leaderscreative agency. By contrast, reformer could perhaps find better use asan etic term, one chosen to highlight the historicity of a particular leadersactivities. Where Weber forces us to decide whether Rammohan was afounder or a reformer based on our assessment of his prophetic agency,this article explores the ways in which one individuals reformist activity

99 It is worth noting that the Trust Deed of the Brahmo Samaj, the document that appearsto enshrine the founders vision, was first published in the TattvabodhiniPatrika in 1850; seeThe English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 213.

100 See Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 54.


28/31


may be remembered as the work of a communitys founder.101 Not insig-nificantly, using the categories of reformer and founder in this fashion alsoprovides us with a more nuanced way to handle the tradition/modernity

dichotomy. As an emic category, founder carries echoes of rupture andnovelty; as an etic category, reformer reminds us that communitiesemerge from particular historical processesprocesses we may under-stand as a series of tradition-making and tradition-breaking events.

In this respect, our consideration of founders benefits from attention tothe work of Hervieu-Lger, who calls attention to the dynamics of memoryand community. Hervieu-Lger also helps us rethink the problem of re-ligion and modernity. She moves us gently away from either functionalistviews that fail to appreciate religions resilience under the conditions of

modernity or overly simplistic substantive views that speak of the questfor meaning but cannot articulate the active, processual, and communalquality of the quest. Hervieu-Lger allows us to see that modernity mayboth destroy forms of religious faith and open up new spaces for belief.Likewise, tradition may work to restrict religious growth, but it may alsoprovide the very mechanism to ensure it.

All of this puts us in a position to contemplate the vexing problem ofmodern Hinduism itself. Does it exist? Does it not? Was it created, in-vented, or constructed? If so, when, and by whom? Before the rise of post-

colonial studies no one really thought to raise such questions; today theywont seem to go away.102 How might our consideration of Rammohanand the Brahmo Samaj assist us in tackling this issue?

In some ways the question, Is there such a thing as modern Hinduism?operates like an academic koan. Like Joshus mu, it seems to hold out thereward of deepened insight while nevertheless denying that such insightwill come from a definite answer. Deny the existence of modern Hinduismand invite immediate rebuttal in the form of lists of modern reformersand contemporary movements, from Rammohan Roy to Sai Baba. Assent

101 For a Weberian approach to Rammohans charisma, see David Kopf, RammohunRoy and the Bengal Renaissance: An Historiographical Essay, in Rammohun Roy and theProcess of Modernization in India, ed. V. C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), esp. 22; cf. hisearlier essay, The Brahmo Samaj Intelligentsia and the Bengal Renaissance: A Study of Re-vitalization and Modernization in Nineteenth Century Bengal, in Transition in South Asia:Problems of Modernization, ed. R. I. Crane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970),748.

102 Recent literature on this topic is extensive. Influential studies include David N. Lorenzen,Who Invented Hinduism? Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999):63059; Brian K. Smith, Questioning Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions ofHinduism,International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 3 (1998): 31339; Wendy Doniger,Hinduism by Any Other Name, Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 3541; John StrattonHawley, Naming Hinduism, Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 3034; Robert Frykenberg,The Emergence of Modern Hinduism as a Concept and as an Institution, inHinduism Re-considered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 2949.


29/31


to the existence of modern Hinduism and risk attack from those whowould deconstruct modern or Hinduism or both. But spend too muchtime looking at the question, and find yourself ridiculed for focusing on

the finger pointing at the moon rather than on the moon itself (whichcould be another way of saying, too much theory). Perhaps, then, if thequestion is a koan, the most satisfactory answer is both yes and no.

This seems to be the solution promoted by Brian Pennington, thoughabsent any reference to koans. According to Pennington, it seems un-necessarily fussy to argue that modern Hinduism does not somehowshow the effects of developments taking place during the colonial period.However, Pennington also rejects the utter discontinuity with the pastthat seems to follow from a strict constructionist reading of colonial

history.103 As Pennington suggests, while it is entirely reasonable toassert that such a thing as modern Hinduism does exist, it is also clearthat speaking this way about Hinduism can be misleading. He reminds usthat theories should seek both to clarify things and to problematize them;when we err too far in one direction, we run into problems.104

The present attempt to reconsider Rammohans status as a founder ofmodern Hinduism, adopting as it does a processual view of tradition andmodernity, suggests that one way to see modern Hinduism is as a chainof memory-events, an ongoing, multifarious process of destruction and

creation, forgetting and remembering, rejection and selection.105 If we havedifficulty pinning down the essence of modern Hinduism this is surelybecause it has taken many forms, just as the Brahmo Sama j itself wasone thing when first convened under Rammohan and another when sub-sequently remembered and reconstituted by Debendranath (not to mentionKeshub). Hervieu-Lgers work suggests that when the corrosive effectsof modernity open up new spaces of belief, individuals invariably moveto occupy those spaces. At the same time, they reach back to retrievememories of significant individuals, events, emblems, and other sources

around which to begin telling their story. Sometimes those spaces of beliefmay even open up in the midst of recently configured groups, leading aswe have seen in the history of the Brahmo Samaj, to further iterations andmanifestations of the original movement.

The South Asian contextand the Hindu tradition aloneoffers a richrange of philosophies, soteriologies, and forms of practice from which tocobble together new patterns of religiosity. There already is, in Hervieu-Lgers terms, a lot of space for belief. Add to this the catalyzing effect

103 See Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? 17071.104 Ibid., 17475.105 On the process of selection involved in the poesis of religious creation, see Hatcher,

Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse, chap. 2.


30/31


of European modernity and colonial agency in the realms of education,theology, and Orientalist scholarship and the context becomes highlyconducive to both the emergence and the reconfiguring of any number of

modern Hinduisms. A mere sampling would include modernist movementslike the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Parthana Sama j, and RamakrishnaMission; neodevotionalist movements like the Radhasoamis, Brahmaku-maris, and Swami Narayanis; any number of associations dedicated topreserving the Sanatana Dharma (or eternal religion); and a varietyof lesser-known movements of varying durability and scope, such as theKartabhajas and recent variants of Baul spirituality.106

Yes, modern Hinduism exists, but it exists in many forms. If we struggleto pin down what Hinduism is, it is not because it is an artificial construct,

but because under the conditions of modernity it has almost ceaselessl

hatcher, 2006, remembering rammohan

Documents