Hinduism in British India

“Hinduism” is, in a strong sense, a British invention. The word is Persian — hindu, from sindhu, the Indus — and the British inherited it from the Mughals. But the idea of Hinduism as a single, doctrinally coherent religion, comparable to Christianity or Islam, with a defined scripture, a defined clergy, and a defined set of practices, was, in the decisive sense, the creation of the British Orientalist and Protestant missionary enterprise of the early nineteenth century. The British did not invent the gods, the rituals, the philosophical systems, or the Sanskrit learning that we now call “Hindu.” They invented, rather, the category — and in doing so they made it possible for educated Indians to think of themselves as belonging to a single religion, and so to organise politically in the name of that religion.

The point was made most forcefully by C. A. Bayly, in Empire and Information (1996). Bayly argued that the British construction of Hinduism was not, as the older nationalist historians had it, an arbitrary act of classification. It was a long, contested, and often unintended process, in which the categories the British courts used, the categories the missionaries employed, the categories the census of 1871 and subsequent enumerations required, and the categories the Indian reformist bodies took up, slowly converged. The result was a body of legal, administrative, and intellectual practice that made “Hinduism” a workable object of politics — and, in the long run, the basis of one of the most significant political movements of the twentieth century.

The British Construction of Hindu Law

The British construction of Hindu law was, in the first instance, a work of Orientalist scholarship. The earliest British administrators of the Bengal Presidency were, very often, men who had been trained in the Persian and Sanskrit learning of Fort William College. They brought to the administration of Hindu personal law a profound — and sometimes not very critical — respect for the indigenous tradition. The principal texts of the early British construction of Hindu law were the Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), the translation of the Vivada Chintamani commissioned by Warren Hastings; the Mitakshara, a twelfth-century Sanskrit text on inheritance, translated by Duncan (later Sir William) Jones in 1793; the Dattaka Mimamsa, a digest of Hindu adoption law, translated by Sutherland in 1821; and the Vyavastha Chandrika, a digest of Hindu inheritance law, translated by Colebrooke in 1827.

The British courts’ treatment of Hindu law became, throughout the nineteenth century, a substantial body of case law. The Supreme Court of Bengal (1774–1862), the Sadar Diwani Adalat (the highest civil court of the Bengal Presidency, established 1772), and the Privy Council in London (the final court of appeal) were the principal fora. The most consequential single case was, perhaps, the Hanooman Persaud v. Mt. Babooee (1856), in which the Privy Council held that the British Indian courts should “enforce” Hindu personal law in matters of inheritance, succession, and religious endowment, and that they should “presume” the Hindu text to be the law, subject to the British courts’ power to modify it in cases of “injustice, oppression, or absurdity.” The principle was the foundation of the modern Indian legal treatment of religious personal law.

The construction of Hindu law had a darker side. The British courts’ administration of Hindu personal law in the early nineteenth century was, in practice, the administration of Brahmanical Hindu law: the texts that were translated and applied were the Sanskrit texts of the upper-caste tradition, and the custom of the lower castes, the adivasis, and the untouchables was, in effect, excluded. Sumit Sarkar, in Bengal: Rethinking History (2013), showed that the British construction of Hindu law was, in this sense, a Brahmanisation of Hindu legal practice. The British did not, of course, invent the caste system. They did give it a legal form that it had not previously had.

The Brahmo Samaj and the Hindu Reform Movements

The Indian responses to the British construction of Hinduism were, throughout the nineteenth century, diverse and often mutually hostile. The earliest, and the most consequential, was the Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy. The Brahmo Samaj was, in the first instance, a Hindu reformist body: it rejected image-worship, the authority of the Vedas as revelation, the caste system, and the more elaborate rituals of Hindu practice. It was also, in the second instance, a Christian-influenced body: Rammohan Roy corresponded with the Unitarian missionaries of Serampore, and his The Precepts of Jesus (1820) was an attempt to extract the moral teaching of the New Testament from the doctrinal apparatus of the Christian church.

“I, however, cannot but think that the distinguishing features of the Christian religion are the pure and strict monotheism which it professes, and the actual and unconditional surrender of the soul to the one true God, in whom we live and move and have our being. These are the grand and leading principles which the Brahmo Samaj, in common with the Christian church, holds to be the foundation of all true religion.” — Rammohan Roy, The Precepts of Jesus (1820)

The Brahmo Samaj went through three principal phases: the Brahmo Sabha (1828), the Tattvabodhini Sabha (1839), and the Brahmo Samaj of India (1866). The most consequential figure of the second generation was Keshub Chunder Sen, who attempted to construct a more universalistic theology on the basis of the Brahmo tradition. Partha Chatterjee, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), read the Brahmo Samaj as the founding moment of the modern Indian nationalist intelligentsia: the first body in Indian history to claim, in the name of a reformed Hinduism, the right to participate in the public life of British India.

The parallel, and more conservative, response was the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 by Dayananda Sarasvati. The Arya Samaj was, in the first instance, a Vedic revivalist body: it appealed back to the Vedas as the foundation of a “pure” Hinduism, free of the image-worship, the priestly hierarchy, and the elaborate ritual of the Brahmanical tradition. The Arya Samaj was, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the principal reformist body of the Hindu North-West, and it was, by 1900, a substantial presence in the Punjab, the United Provinces, and the Central Provinces. The Arya Samaj’s most lasting institutional contribution was the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) school system, which by 1947 included 65 schools and 12 colleges in the Punjab alone.

The Ramakrishna Mission and Vivekananda

The third response, and the most influential in the longer run, was the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in 1897 by Swami Vivekananda. The Ramakrishna Mission was, in the first instance, a Hindu universalist body: it accepted the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Puranas as equally authoritative, and it attempted to construct a theology that would reconcile the apparently contradictory traditions of Hindu practice. Vivekananda’s address to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago was, in cultural terms, the founding moment of modern Hindu self-presentation to the West.

“I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.” — Swami Vivekananda, address to the World Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 11 September 1893

The Ramakrishna Mission was, throughout the twentieth century, a substantial educational and social-welfare organisation. Its most lasting institutional products were the Belur Math (1897), the Varanasi Hindu University (1916), and the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira (1941). The Mission was, by 1947, the most substantial non-Christian religious educational system in British India, and it was, in the twentieth century, the principal international Hindu body.

Hinduism and the British Law of Religious Practice

The British Indian government’s treatment of religious practice was, throughout the nineteenth century, a substantial body of legislation. The most consequential single piece of legislation was the abolition of sati (the burning of widows) in 1829, the result of a long campaign by Rammohan Roy, the Baptist missionary William Carey, and the Serampore missionaries. The other principal pieces of legislation were the Widow Remarriage Act (1856), the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (1850), and — in the post-independence period — the Hindu Marriage Act (1955), the Hindu Succession Act (1956), the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act (1956), and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act (1956), all of which codified, for the first time, the law of Hindu personal status.

The most controversial British Indian legislation on religious practice was the Religious Endowments Act (1863, expanded 1951), which gave the British Indian state a substantial role in the administration of Hindu temples and religious endowments. The Act was the first major British Indian intervention in the internal administration of Hindu religious institutions, and the foundation of a substantial body of case law on the British Indian state’s role in Hindu religious life. The 1857 educational dispatch of the Court of Directors — which assigned government funds to the education of the Indian upper classes in the English-language and the European sciences — was, in this context, a complementary measure: the British state, in effect, chose which Indians it would educate, and it educated them in the categories it had inherited.

The Hindu Mahasabha and the Political Mobilisation of Hinduism

The political mobilisation of Hinduism was, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a substantial movement. The Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1909, was the principal Hindu political body, and it was, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a substantial presence in Indian politics. The Hindu Mahasabha’s most consequential moment was, perhaps, the 1923 Nagpur Session of the Indian National Congress, in which the Mahasabha attempted to commit the Congress to a programme of Hindu political mobilisation. The Mahasabha’s most lasting contribution was, however, the construction of a substantial Hindu political vocabulary — Hindu rashtra, Hindutva — that would, after 1947, be the principal ideological inheritance of the Hindu nationalist movement.

The Hindu Mahasabha was, however, eclipsed in the 1920s and 1930s by the Indian National Congress, which, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, was attempting to construct a more inclusive Indian political community. The Congress’s most consequential Hindu moment was the 1929 Lahore Session, which committed the Congress to Poorna Swaraj (complete independence) and which was the founding moment of the modern Indian nationalist movement. The 1935 Government of India Act, which provided for the election of a substantial Hindu majority in the central and provincial legislatures, in effect, made the Congress the principal Hindu political body in British India.

The Partition of 1947 and the Post-Colonial Inheritance

The partition of British India in 1947 was the most dramatic single consequence of the British construction of Hinduism. The partition was the result of the British Indian government’s failure to construct a constitutional framework that would have accommodated the substantial Hindu and Muslim political communities of British India; the partition was also, in part, the consequence of the Hindu Mahasabha’s and the Muslim League’s construction of mutually incompatible political communities. The partition was, in the longer term, the foundation of the post-colonial Indian state’s treatment of Hinduism — a treatment that was, in the 1950s, considerably more cautious than the Hindu Mahasabha’s demands, but that was, by the 1990s, considerably more accommodating.

The post-colonial Indian state’s treatment of Hinduism has been, throughout the period since 1947, a substantial body of legislation and case law. The Constitution of India (1950) has, in Articles 25–28, a substantial body of religious-liberty provisions that have shaped the modern Indian state’s treatment of Hinduism. The Indian Supreme Court’s case law on Hinduism — the Sabarimala case (2018), the Ram Janmabhoomi case (2019) — has shaped the modern Indian political debate on the role of Hinduism in Indian public life.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Hinduism in British India has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of C. A. Bayly (Empire and Information 1996), Sumit Sarkar (Bengal: Rethinking History 2013), Partha Chatterjee (Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 1986), and the post-colonial generation of Indian historians. The earlier Orientalist accounts — the works of H. H. Wilson, John Muir, and the contributors to the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question is whether “Hinduism” is best understood as a British construction imposed on a much more diverse Indian religious inheritance, or as a long-standing Indian religious tradition that the British merely codified. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give either reading a clean bill of health.

In this Section

Other Sections