CAPÍTULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
INICIAR Y DETENER EL MYSQL AUTOMÁTICAMENTE.
In this chapter I explore how Bankim came to formulate his ideas about the place of the Muslim in Indian history. I begin by looking at specific Orientalist ideas about India that influenced Bankim and the legacy of those ideas in modern day India. I follow this with a discussion of the two main ways that British historians and administrators viewed Indian history and the merits and problems of such views. Next, I analyze selected historical novels to understand how Bankim formulated his concept of a Hindu hero and used Muslim characters as foils. To round out this portrayal of the Muslim, I present a comparative study of British characters in the novels since the British, alongside the Muslim, is the “other” in Bankim’s novels. I end this chapter with a discussion of the some of the possible reasons behind Bankim’s decision to portray Muslims in a negative manner.
Bankim wrote eight novels which use history as a backdrop. Set in the thirteenth century, Mrinalini (the novel takes its title from the name of the heroine) deals with the earliest time period of Bankim’s historical novels, the beginning of Muslim occupation of Bengal and the eastern provinces. Durgeshnandini (The Daughter of the Lord of the Fort) is set in the sixteenth century during the time of the third Mughal emperor, Akbar. Rajsingha (named after the hero) depicts events that took place a century later during the reign of Akbar’s great grandson, Aurangzeb, in the seventeenth century. Sitaram
Mughal supremacy had effectively disintegrated, creating space for independent kingdoms of various stripes. Debi Chaudhurani (named after the heroine who is given the honorary title of a high-ranking lady) and Anandamath (The Monastery of the Anandas) are also set in this eighteenth century interregnum when Muslim sovereignty was on the wane and the power of the East India Company was on the rise without
having been fully consolidated. The events of Chandrasekhar take place in the post-battle of Plassey period when the East India Company became by all intents and purpose the ruler of Bengal. Yugalanguriya (The Twin Rings), a novella, is set in an indefinite time period which appears to be pre-Muslim (as I have indicated earlier, I don’t engage with this work.)
Collectively these works cover a wide swath of time, from the beginning of Bengal’s loss of independence to Muslim conquerors to the British period. The canvas is effectively all of India although in seven of the eight novels, all or most of the action takes place in Bengal and its surrounding regions. Rajsingha is the only novel that has the western state of Rajasthan as its backdrop. But, as scholars like Sudipta Kaviraj have remarked, Bengal comes to represent India and Bengalis come to represent Indians.219 Bankim’s readers recognized this, and that is why his novels had popular appeal and were widely translated from Bengali to other Indian languages and even into English. Each of these novels contains men and women who are heroic and while some employ their heroism in clearly patriotic ways, others prove their worth by being loyal to high ideals of personal duty and moral purity—traits that came to be valued in the nationalist
construction of the ideal Hindu/Indian who was capable of self rule.220 Although all of
the novels except Yugalanguriya are based on actual events (in Yugalanguriya history is nothing more than an unobtrusive backdrop), the imaginative recreation of the
circumstances surrounding those events rather than historical accuracy is Bankim’s goal. Critic Nicholas Rance’s statement about the historical novelists who came after Scott in England could be applied to Bankim: “where little was known, history was what one made it. Too removed from the age to perceive its motivating forces, they found themselves writing the kind of history in which they wished to believe.”221 Rance uses the example of the George Eliot novel Romola “set in Renaissance Florence, [demonstrating] the futility of political reform in the 1860s.”222 Although the characters and events portrayed in the novel belong to the past, the issues the novel presents belonged to Eliot’s own times. We see the same pattern in Bankim’s novels. Underneath the stories of remarkable men and women falling in love and fighting wars in bygone eras, there is the desire to portray issues dear to the novelist, the most important being awakening in his readers the memory of a history that they could be proud of. The truth that Bankim wanted to put forth in his historical works was that the Hindu was not always weak—as charged first by Muslim and later English historians and that there was a period when he had his bahubal,223 (which literally means “physical strength” but Bankim uses it in a general sense for both physical and moral courage). All eight224 of
220 Kalyani in Anandamath is a good example of the latter kind.
221 Nicholas Rance, The Historical Novel and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England. (New York: Barnes and Nobles, 1975) 26
222 Rance, 26
223 In his essay “Bangalir Bahubal” (“The Bahubal of the Bengali.” B.R. Vol II, 186), Bankim describes bahubal as “enterprise, unity, courage, and perseverance,” qualities that even the physically weak Bengali could acquire.
Bankim’s historical novels are celebrations of martial successes of Hindu men and women and use historical details in various degrees. A significant part of this imaginative recreation of history was the hearkening back to a pre-Muslim and glorious Hindu past. This was a complex process riddled with contradictions, some of which I will now explore.
The idealizing of a pre-Greek Aryan golden age with its roots in India was an important element of German and British Orientalism which scholars believe was impelled in part by the desire to downplay the importance of the French Enlightenment associated with a Latinate culture (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon/Germanic culture) and Catholicism (as opposed to Protestantism225). (Raymond Schwab argues that this desire of European Orientalists to search for roots in a distant and alien past was impelled by their unease at the instability generated by the French Revolution.226) In this Orientalist version of history there was a cultural continuity from the Aryans of India and Greece through the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon races to the Germans and Britons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Europeans, especially the Anglo-Saxons, wanted to see their past in eighteenth and nineteenth century India. Commenting on the works of the historian Henry Sumner Maine (1822-88), Ronald Inden writes: “India was…in
224 As I mention in my introduction, Bankim editor J.C. Bagal divides Bankim’s novels into three categories: historical, social, and, nationalistic. Since some of Bankim’s nationalistic novels use historical backdrops, sometimes those are counted among his historical novels. Hence the number of Bankim’s historical novels varies from six to eight. I have decided to treat as historical novels all of the eight that use history in some measure.
225 Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance.” Antinomies of Modernity, 27
226 “Raymond Schwab’s insight that the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was associated with the threat of rapid changes, initiated by the French Revolution, is borne out by the revitalization of a conservative universalism that valued stability, which it ostensibly found in the ‘Orient’ (Kaiwar and Mazumdar , “Race, Orient, Nation in the Time-Space of Modernity.” Antinomies of Modernity 271).
Maine’s eyes, a living museum not just of the ancient, but of those ancients destined to rule the world, the Aryans.”227 In this highly selective version of a continuous Aryan history, the contributions of Egyptians, Jews, and Muslims, among others were systematically downplayed or erased.228 Also, while the contributions of ancient Hindu India were extolled by many Orientalists, the India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was deplored by some for its fallen condition. The difference between the images of India of the past and India of the present were explained by the theory of racial degeneration in a hot and humid climate—a point I will later cover.
Interest in ancient India led European Indologists to search for ancient Indian texts. This search was fueled by the Orientalist belief that the discovery of a lost part of the Aryan heritage would result in a cultural renaissance just as the rediscovery of Greek civilization had led to the European Renaissance. Hindu nationalists applied a similar logic in constructing their own history: the Hindu was the inheritor of a true Aryan heritage, the rediscovery of which would lead to an Indian Renaissance. Hindu scholars, who aided English Orientalists in their pioneering work of translation and interpretation, played a significant role in deciding which texts could be considered the true bearers of Aryan culture.229 Commenting on how a particular version of the Hindu Aryan past came
227 Ronald Inden, Imagining India (138). In his chapters on the caste system and Indian villages Inden writes about the Orientalist perception that castes and villages of India are ancient and unchanging features. While some Orientalists saw this essential and unchanging nature as hampering progress, others praised it as instrumental in preserving the essence of India.
228 Martin Bernal’s authoritative study Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994) deals with this subject.
229 In extreme cases these scholars sometimes inserted spurious materials into classical texts. Srinivas Aravamudan mentions several such examples in his book Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006) One of them involves the Orientalist Francis Wilford who “to his chagrin, …discovered that the pandit in his employ had composed over twelve thousand fake ‘Puranic’ verses as interpolations within existing texts, including a rousing account of Noah’s sons Ham, Shem, and Japhet as Sharma, Karma, and Jyapati” (34).
into being, scholars such as Uma Chakravarti have pointed out that the indigenous literati, on whom English Orientalist scholars depended to translate Sanskrit texts, often privileged certain texts or textual elements over others “to argue the debates of the present.”230 This highly constructed and sanitized version of a Hindu/Aryan past which was initially manufactured for publication in Orientalist journals “was taken over lock, stock, and barrel by nineteenth century Indian writers to build a picture of Indian civilization not just for a particular region like Bengal [where these translations were done] …but for the whole of India.”231
Some of the Orientalist ideas that had initially been formulated with reference to Greece and Europe came to acquire interesting connotations when applied to the new colonialist dynamic between India and Europe. Among the most striking features of this phenomenon were beliefs such as that the Aryan migration happened from the west and north and that the purest of Aryan elements were to be found in the northern territories; that the fair-skinned Aryans always vanquished the darker-skinned indigenous people, pushed them to the south, and decimated the culture of the latter; and that the Aryans excelled the non-Aryans in every field because they were genetically superior.232 This pattern conceived of in regard to Greece was so successfully applied toward India that it became an integral part of Indian self-identity formed during the colonial period and still endures. Bankim certainly was influenced by it; we see this set of beliefs at play in his
230 Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997) 32
231 Chakravarti, 30-31
232 Vasant Kaiwar discusses these points quoting from Orientalist of various stripes in his essay “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance.” Antinomies of Modernity.
version of Indian history. His historical novels all unfold in the northern half of India— Rajasthan, the Gangetic plains, and Bengal, and the heroes and heroines are of Aryan descent, as is evident from their lineage and physical appearance (all of them are upper caste, are beautiful by Caucasian standards, and none of them are dark) and demeanor (they are courageous, morally upright, and intelligent—virtues associated with noble birth). Their nobility seems to spring naturally from their character and is not something they have to acquire.233 Such characters, largely products of Orientalism-inflected history, held possibilities of pride and the hope for Bankim’s readers that the virtues that once existed in Indians, could be reawakened.
Of course the dismal present intervened between the past and the future and it had to be explained in a manner satisfactory to the Hindu (since they were not Aryan-derived, non-Hindus did not count in this version of history). Several theories were put forward by both European Orientalists and their Hindu counterparts to explain the fallen state of the nineteenth-century Hindu—removal from the original stock of vigorous Aryans; the settling of Aryans in a land where the enervating climate and the ease of food production made the once-warrior-like race lazy and effeminate; continuous invasion of foreigners inimical to Hindu religion and culture, and others. While in his essays Bankim alludes to many of these theories, in his novels—especially the later ones, Muslim intervention in the continuous development of a vigorous Hindu culture comes across as being the most detrimental. As a result, what one finds in many of these novels is a denigration of the long Muslim rule and its accomplishments. The belief that the Muslim period in India
233 The correlation between physical beauty and moral superiority is inherent in the tradition of romance. One of the many authors who discuss this is Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1987, 2002).
was one of darkness was of course common between both Europeans and Indians, especially Hindus; 234 like most Indians of his generations Bankim had been exposed to this idea in the writings of European historians. The upshot was that Bankim’s version of a history leading to a free India did not include Muslims in any significant way. Tanika Sarkar relates the nineteenth century revivalist tendency to single out the Muslim as the arch enemy to the Hindu reluctance to believe that “internal reform” could be “a way of self-redemption.” Sarkar argues that once the Hindu male accepted that there was no need for internal reform and that the Hindu way of life was fine as it was, then the cause for Hindu degeneration and the way out had to be located elsewhere. This cause of course could be conveniently located in the long Muslim rule of India and became the justification of “an apocalyptic war against the Muslims.”235
In eliding the positive aspects of the non-Hindu elements of Indian history and in deciding to follow the path trodden by European Orientalists who had mastered the art of conjuring up a timeline of universal history, whereby all non-Aryan, especially Semitic, elements were systematically downgraded, Bankim inherited a legacy of anti-Muslim bias that still continues. The proponents of the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) ideology in modern India, who hold up a distorted, historically inaccurate, and selective version of Hinduism as the only acceptable culture and religion in India, clamor for the suppression and expulsion of non-Hindus. The logic that they produce to disguise their intolerance of entire groups of people is that Hindutva is not simply a religion but a culture that
demands allegiance to one’s place of birth over allegiance to one’s religion and that it
234 Among the many who held this view are Tod, and Elliott and Dawson whose accounts I refer to later in this chapter.
was indeed possible to have Hindu mosques and Hindu churches.236 What this ideology does is privilege one particular religion (Hinduism) over others and promotes cultural practices associated with it (Hindutva) as the preconditions for being “authentically” Indian.
In adamantly pushing for the continuation of what the proponents of the Hindutva ideology see as the “eternal religion” (the term “sanatan dharma” or “eternal religion” was used in the nineteenth century—just as it is used now, to describe Hinduism), what is forgotten is that the concept of a uniform and homogeneous Hinduism is a relatively new one. In the editorial introduction to Representing Hinduism, Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron write
If at all unity and uniformity existed in the Hindu religions of the pre- nationalist period, it was within the various denominations of sa pradāys or the Vai avas [Vishnu worshippers], Śaivas [Shiva worshippers], Śāktas
[worshippers of the Mother goddess], etc. But the lumping together of all these smaller religious communities, and their identification as parts of one so-called religion of national proportions called ‘Hinduism’, is a relatively modern phenomenon.237
Scholars such as von Stietencron argue that the idea of a homogeneous Hinduism “was introduced by Christian missionaries and scholars from the West”238 and was adopted by Hindu nationalists. When religion was conflated with peninsular geography (whereby Hinduism became the religion which sprang up in the land bounded by the
236 In her essay “Politics of National Origin: Rediscovering Hindu Indian Identity in the United States,” Sucheta Mazumdar quotes Ashok Signal the general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as stating in the “Seventeenth Annual Calendar (1995), ‘The Hindu Rashtra can only be a state where there must be Hindu churches and Hindu mosques for Hinduism is not a religion…in Hindu India everyone has to call himself a Hindu.’” Antinomies of Modernity 241.
237 Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron eds. Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage
Publication,1995).
238 Heinrich Von Stietencron, “Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim India and the modern Concept of Hinduism.” Representing Hinduism. 50
Himalayas on the north and the oceans on the south), even those non-Hindu children of the soil who were converts or had lived in the peninsula for generations239 were branded as unassimilable because they followed a religion that originated outside of India. While Bankim’s novels have not yet been thrust to the forefront by Hindu supremacists as legitimizing examples of the impossibility of the Muslim being a true Indian (the logic being that if the Muslim was not fully integrated in nineteenth century India, there was no hope of his being integrated in twenty-first century India), it is important for his modern-