Religion, Law and Power: Tales of Time in Eastern India, 1860-2000

by Ishita Banerjee-Dube

Overview

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. Religion, Law and Power should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

About the Author:
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Associate Professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, El Colegio de Mexico

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843312345
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	225
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México. Her several authored and edited books include ‘Divine Affairs’ (2001), ‘Unbecoming Modern’ (2006), ‘Caste in History’ (2008), ‘Ancient to Modern’ (2009), and ‘Understanding Modern India’ (forthcoming).

Read an Excerpt

Religion, Law and Power

Tales of Time in Eastern India, 1860-2000

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By Ishita Banerjee-Dube

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2009 Ishita Banerjee-Dube
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-347-2

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Tales of Time

Time and temporality lie at the heart of configurations of history. They provide history writing with vital organizing principles. All too often, these concepts and entities are held in place by the historian in chiefly implicit ways. At other moments, time and temporality occasion the most severe disagreements among the practitioners of the discipline. This is because 'history' as we know and understand it is defined by a marking out of the past from the present, premised upon an implicit belief in a linear progression of time. The stark separation of the past from the present, a foundational element of the 'rupture' believed to have been occasioned by modernity, is considered to be based on rational modes of taking stock of time, modes that make history a scientific discipline clearly distinct from myth. This hidden hierarchy of time in history — accompanied by evolutionary principles that have variously shored up a great deal of modern anthropology — divided the world in terms of temporal sequence between Western societies grounded in history and reason and non-Western cultures held in place by myth and ritual.

Such presumptions have long and chequered genealogies that go back to the Enlightenment and earlier. In addition, they are intimately linked to the gradual secularization of Judeo–Ghristian time which entailed a changeover from time conceived as the medium of a sacred history specific to a chosen people to a generalization and universalization of time by denuding it of its specificity. What lay at the heart of the transformation of particular time to general time was a corrosion of the eschatological content of time, leading to a break from 'a conception of time/space in terms of a history of salvation' to 'a secularization of Time as natural history.' It bears pointing out here that European Enlightenment itself was marked by formative differences that make it difficult to speak of a single Enlightenment. It is also true that the 'secularization of Judeo–Christian time formed an 'influential' idea but a 'circumscribed' process. This is because Enlightenment philosophers could not by themselves bring about the secularization of Judeo–Christian time in broader social and political contexts, tasks that had to be undertaken by the state. At the same time, neither philosophers nor governments had complete control over the manner in which their ideas and reforms were 'understood and articulated by citizens and subjects'. Unsurprisingly, messianic time has shown deep provenance and wide prevalence in western worlds, continuing up to the present. Such qualifications notwithstanding, it must be registered that by the second half of the nineteenth century secularized time acquired a natural aura, at the very least in the protestant West. This naturalized time in turn provided the basis for the mapping of peoples and cultures hierarchically in the developmental schemes that underlay the grand designs of human history. Universal time and universal history evolved in conjunction, simultaneously marking out 'others' — societies and cultures where time and temporality were construed differently.

Changes in notions of time were accompanied by shifts in 'technologies in measurement', signalled by the changeover from stationary clocks that showed the hour alone in late medieval Europe through to watches that displayed minutes and seconds and then onto bureaucratic, industrial structures of time, a process that took almost five hundred years. These long drawn out and fiercely contested alterations in conceptualizations of time and time-reckoning formed part of wider articulations of capitalism and colonialism. All of this established Europe as the site and the centre of the modern. Here, the break with the past turning on the modern West brought in its toe other dichotomies, such as those between myth and history, ritual and rationality, religion and politics, community and state and emotion and reason. Together, the enduring legacies of developmental schemas of a natural, universal history and of dominant representations of an exclusive, western modernity have made the past of Europe into the standard through which to assess other societies. The world stands divided into modern, dynamic societies and static, enchanted communities, placed upon an axis of space and time, gauged on the basis of the distances cultures had advanced on the path of modernity, a modernity that is seen as nothing but the West. Needless to say, the milestones on this path have been determined by the place and the presence of history.

The alleged indifference to historical consciousness in India was often mentioned by early travellers and forcefully reiterated by British administrators and scholars. It served to reinforce the definition of India as 'traditional' and 'static' by early colonialists. Volumes were written by Indologists and Orientalist scholars on the notion of 'cyclical' time depicted in Sanskrit texts of classical Hinduism, where four ages Satya, Treta, Dwapar and Kali, defined by definite norms and specific values, were meant to succeed each other in endless cycles. Tied to the notion of the cycle but of even greater significance was that of 'duration'. Early Europeans were intrigued and troubled by the very long time span of Hindu ages contrasted with the short extent of Biblical times. The supposed inconsequentiality of duration in Hindu time was strengthened by the scheme of the cycle where the end of the era was to be marked by a deluge and the appearance of an incarnation, which was to herald a 'return' to the earlier age. This idea embedded in the Mahabharata and the Puranas and current in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism formed the basis for Mircea Eliade's well-known thesis on the 'myth of eternal return'. The rotation of time in cycles posited on eternal return was, in Eliade's opinion, a direct opposite of the Judeo–Christian concept of linearity which had made possible the emergence of modern time.

In recent years, important works in history and anthropology have thoroughly questioned the presumed binary of linear-cyclical time. Studies of societies from different parts of the globe have demonstrated with clarity the co-existence and combination of the two conceptions. With regard to India, it has been argued that the notion of the four Yugas is sequential since they follow each other in a particular order. It needs to be stressed here that sequence is significant since there is a progressive degeneration in morality, a vital element of time, in each succeeding epoch. This confers on each era distinctive qualities making a change of Yuga as much a new beginning as a return to the old.

In a different vein, scholars have also interrogated the Indological assumption of the prevalence of a single notion of time in pre-colonial India. Apart from the fact that there were Indo-Islamic configurations of time, texts of pre-Islamic India bore testimony to the presence of different modes of time reckoning. If cyclical time featured in the Mahabharata and certain other Sanskrit texts, chronicles of rulers and genealogies of dynasties displayed perfect familiarity with linear time. Indeed, it has been argued that the Puranic tradition itself was not bereft of historical content. The tradition was actually that of itihasa-purana in which iti-ha-asa literally translated as 'so it has been'. Hence the compound word signified a conjunction of perceived past and historicity and texts represented a move from 'embedded history' to the 'prising of historical consciousness' in ancient India, which was a corollary to the transformation of the political order from lineage-societies to state-systems. This has been further extended in analyses demonstrating the 'completely unproblematic' transition from the mythic to the contemporary in the rendering of 'histories' of ruling dynasties in puranetihasa (puranaitihasa).

While there is consensus on the currency of distinct temporalities in India, there is disagreement over whether consciousness of the past in pre-colonial India can be termed 'historical'. The issue assumed urgency in the early 1990s in the context of the political success of parties of the Hindu right and their strident demands for a history based on a specific, singular construction of the past. The participation of right-wing and 'secular' historians in a vigorous debate that ensued on the veracity of the claims made on the past — and on the nature of the 'facts' adduced — led some prominent thinkers to foreground basic assumptions about modernity and history. Historical consciousness in the 'modern' sense of the term, argued Ashis Nandy, was absent in India since history itself originated with modernity which in turn was a result either of Enlightenment or colonialism and nationalism. Hence, the ways in which the past and its relationship with the present were perceived in India prior to British rule did not in any way conform to the standards of western history.

This stance was extended further to valorize the 'ahistoricity' of India. The idea of progressive degeneration in successive Yugas and the characterization of evolution 'as a move from authenticity to inauthenticity' in certain important trends of Hindu thought were taken to be crucial indicators of the 'rejection' of history in early India. Arguing that this was one of the most attractive features of pre-colonial India, Vinay Lai concluded that 'the past of India' cannot be 'read from historical records' since a tradition of historical enquiry and writings did not exist for 'compelling reasons'. The need to establish the early traditions of ordering the past as 'historical', he stated, stemmed from a naive belief in and uncritical acceptance of modernist traditions. Though persuasive and thought-provoking, these arguments in privileging the 'ahistoricity' of India seem to abide by the same rigid notion of history as 'rational' and 'scientific' they accuse others of subscribing to. Such a point of view identifies history as an essentially modern discipline intimately tied to the nation and construes the earlier imaginative and 'irrational' modes of ordering the past as not-modern and hence ahistorical, ruling out the possibility of a wider and more comprehensive definition of history.

Changing Times

What I have said so far point to the critical reflection on the uses of time in history and anthropology. A wide range of scholars, with different backgrounds and orientations have probed the process that led to the separation of the past and the present and problematized the switch from religious time to clock time. This has involved contemplation on the 'pertinence' of the opposition between the past and the present in different societies and the ramifications of this demarcation on the future, provocative suggestions about the disciplinary aspects of modern clock-time in the West as well as a searing critique of 'distancing' posited on 'temporalization' and the denial of co-evalness between anthropological discourse and its referents. These extremely valuable contributions however, have not negated the premise that there has been a definite changeover — albeit awkward and somewhat incomplete — from sacred time to modern 'secular' time.

The discussions with regard to India also seem to follow the same pattern, postulating a presence of distinct temporalities in pre-colonial India yet holding on to the move from religious to secular time during the period of colonial rule. As noted above, this transformation has been associated with the emergence of modernist history in India. The break with religious time is also seen to have effected a rupture with the itihasa-purana tradition. From the late-nineteenth and increasingly over the twentieth century history in India has come to be determined by 'what happened' and not 'what is imagined', displaying a particular preference for events and facts. This has resulted either in a lack of interest or understanding of modes of ordering the past that blend sacred and secular time or a celebration of the non-modern who understands his/her past 'mythically as a resistant subject who has successfully evaded the tropes of modernity. Time in and for History, is widely believed to have changed irrevocably from sacred and salvational to linear and progressive. The remnants of distinct ways of perceiving the past are seen as non-historical and not-modern.

As stated before, these dichotomies — the founding 'myths' of modernity — have been seriously questioned in recent years. And yet, they continue to exert influence both as categories of thought and as ways of understanding societies. This is because 'these oppositions emerged within formidable projects of power and knowledge, turning on modernity, Enlightenment, empire and nation.' These conscious projects did not simply look at and record but 'recorded and remade' the world. Although these projects were neither singular nor uniform and often combined contradictory trends of thought that lay at the heart of modernity, through their ambivalences and inconsistencies they came to acquire salience as they were 'assiduously articulated'. The significance of such antinomies is only too palpable in the way the world continues to be perceived in terms of 'enchanted spaces and modern places.' As such, it is not enough to have a 'new and inoffensively correct consensus' on the interpenetration of the oppositions. What is required is the assertion of the validity and legitimacy of thought and understanding that fuse and scramble dichotomies and through it question the authority of thought that relies on these oppositions. Such moves, affirms Fernando Coronil, turn our attention to an understanding of the 'relational nature of representations of human collectivities' and reveal 'their genesis in asymmetrical relations of power, including the power to obscure their genesis in inequality, to sever their historical connections, and thus to present as the internal and separate attributes of bounded entities what are in fact historical outcomes of connected peoples.'

To reiterate, Religion, Law and Power does not simply invert binaries, it questions the implicit assumption of an earlier Ur moment in which the dualisms bore an original, unadulterated character. While it acknowledges the lasting presence of such analytical oppositions, my account interrogates their modular division of social worlds by attending to the murkiness and jumbles that characterize such worlds. Further, my exploration of the intermeshed workings and novel combinations of several dualities in the career of Mahima Dharma brings into relief varied articulations of history, innovative reformulations of Hinduism through the construction of a modern 'timeless religion', and discrete engagements with stipulations of the state and the law by a contingent community. This in turn, serves to unpack the wider entanglements of history, religion, law and power. All along, the analysis is informed by and grounded in important debates and reflections that have caused significant shifts in understandings of history.

History, Event, Narration

History is a true novel, writes a French historian and historians tell of true events in which man is the actor. This apparently simple response to what history is raises some critical issues challenging history. What constitutes an 'event' and how true is the representation of the 'true event' in historical narratives? Do the perception and understanding of events remain constant over time? How does history deal with its inherent ambivalence relating to the interface of action and narration, of what happened and what is said to have happened? Indeed, it is this unresolved ambiguity that causes wide divergence in historical narratives and interpretation and renders the past 'unpredictable'.

For some, the 'unpredictability of the past' is salutary rather than problematic since it adds to the vivacity of thought. History, in the words of a celebrated American historian, 'is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what "happens", but the finer complexity of what we read into it and think in connection with it.' Such historians readily accept that the understanding of standard historical occurrences inevitably varies from generation to generation because, of necessity, the occurrences are viewed through the prism of a changing present. If this makes historians operate in 'cycles of historical interpretations', in the end they come up with increasingly sophisticated understandings of the past. In the 1940s, the French historian Marc Bloch had stressed that although nothing in the future can change the past, knowledge of the past 'is something progressive which is constantly changing and perfecting itself.'

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Religion, Law and Power by Ishita Banerjee-Dube. Copyright © 2009 Ishita Banerjee-Dube. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents

Preface; Maps; Introduction: Tales of Time; Formations of Faith; Poets and Texts; Ascetics, Histories and the Law; Contemporary Contours; Epilogue; Bibliography; Appendix; Glossary; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'This is a lucid and richly documented account of the mutual penetration of religion and politics; it should be read both by historians of religion and by historians of South Asia.' —Richard M. Eaton, Professor of History, University of Arizona