The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  Soon he felt a deeper affection for Sanskrit poetry. ‘By rising before the sun,’ wrote Jones, ‘I allot an hour every day to Sanscrit, and am charmed with knowing so beautiful a sister of Latin and Greek.’ It was the first time a familial bond was established between Sanskrit and the classical languages of European antiquity. And there were other dots of history that Jones joined through the medium of language. The Palibothra of the Greeks he connected to Pataliputra. Sadracottus, he discovered, was none other than Chandragupta. India’s past came alive in a wider context, with its own philosophers and emperors. ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity,’ he announced to fellow members of the Asiatic Society, ‘is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greeks, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a strong affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source.’

  But if there was one Sanskrit poet who gripped our polymath most, that poet was Kalidas. And through Jones’s obsession, as we have seen before, Europe was transfixed with Shakuntala . Translated in 1789, Jones’s Sacontalá: The Fatal Ring inspired Goethe to declare: ‘I should like to live in India myself … Sakontala, Nala, they have to be kissed.’ Friedrich Schlegel also came to consider Shakuntala the best example of Indian poetry. Interestingly, Jones did not merely translate—there was censorship also, given the moral predispositions of the West. Where Kalidas spoke of Shakuntala’s ‘breasts no longer firm’, Jones accepted his remarks on ageing cheeks and shoulders but omitted the breasts completely to avoid embarrassing himself and his Western audience. In a way, Jones modelled a new Shakuntala—a prototype of European virtue, as opposed to the sensuous Shakuntala Kalidas described; an Indian woman born of Western idealism rather than anchored in authentic Indian tradition. Indians too embraced this paragon of chastity over her erotically charged predecessor, much like so many Western slants came to be accepted as unquestionably (and ‘purely’) Indian.

  By 1794, Jones declared a new mission. His desiderata featured Panini’s grammar, the Vedas and the Puranas, and much more needed to be completed before he settled into a life of scholarly retirement. It was a tragic twist that within the year he was dead—the climate never agreed with him—and a grave was built for him at the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta where he still lies buried. ‘The best monument that can be erected to a man of literary talents,’ he once said, ‘is a good edition of his works.’ And so his widow published a collection dutifully, enshrining in it his legacy as the decipherer of India for the West. For a few years Jones’s reputation was treasured in a place of respect, and he was read by everyone from Thomas Campbell to William Blake and even William Wordsworth. But within a few decades, British attitudes began to change—as the growing empire in India took a racist turn, Jones was dismissed altogether. His researches came to be seen as useless and frivolous; Shakuntala, far from admirable, was now painted preposterous. And India, this new generation of Englishmen decided, was not only never great, it never could be. The India Jones saw was a myth, all his work a fallacy. And for Indians, soon enough, the likes of Jones withdrew and the cruelties of the Raj became our reality.

  THE GENTLEMAN REFORMER OF BENGAL

  When Raja Rammohun Roy landed in England in April 1831, among those who disembarked with him were his servants, an adopted son rumoured to be his bastard from a Muslim woman, a brahmin cook and a milch cow. The cow and cook were essential to the enterprise—Roy had already been written off in Bengal for defying rules of caste and custom, and needed to demonstrate some degree of ritual conformity to support his venture across forbidden seas. But while adversaries at home resented him, in England he became a celebrity, received to cheers of ‘Long Live Tippoo Saheb’, with the police summoned in Manchester to moderate public enthusiasm. Roy, for his part, ‘longed to see the country to whose keeping the destinies of his own had been entrusted—the country whose philosophy, liberty, and science had achieved their proudest triumphs’, but the view on the other side was somewhat different. The Times hailed him as a poster child of the West’s civilising mission, calling him ‘a harbinger of those fruits which must result from the dissemination of European knowledge’ in the exotic darkness that was the East.

  There was good reason for such romanticisation. On the one hand, Roy came on a mission from Akbar II, the Mughal emperor who sought a more generous pension from the East India Company after it had reduced him to a cipher. On the other, Roy, whose works on Indian philosophy had earned him a reputation as Hinduism’s Martin Luther, also wished to acquaint the British with his homeland. As he remarked, ‘One of my objects in visiting this country has been to lay before the British public a statement, however brief, of my views regarding the past conditions and future prospects of India.’ He was the emperor’s envoy, but he saw himself also as an ambassador for India itself, as the urbane face of a reforming society that would soon rise to find its destiny. Of course, none of this stopped him from telling Victor Jacquemont that India cried for ‘many more years of English domination’ to arrive at this destination: ‘Conquest,’ he felt, ‘is very rarely an evil when the conquering people were more civilised than the conquered’ (a position not likely to win him any friends among India’s hyper-nationalists today).

  Indeed, it was such presumption that made him enemies, including in his household. Roy was born to the junior wife of a junior son in a brahmin line that had served the Mughal state. His father, with whom he disagreed uncompromisingly, had brought upon the family great ignominy by going to prison for failing to honour his debts. His formidable mother was even less pleased with Roy, when at ‘about the age of sixteen, I composed a manuscript calling in question the validity of the idolatrous system of the Hindoos’. He went away from home very young, and in Patna upset Muslim leaders with his observations on their faith, while his The Precepts of Jesus rubbed Christian missionaries the wrong way when he presumed to pass comment on their hallowed shepherd. Some called him a lapsed Hindu and threw bones and garbage into his yard. Others created obstacles at work during the years he served the Company government, rising from munshi or language instructor to the post of head clerk at a British court—all this before he inherited a fortune and through that, financial independence.

  Roy, most widely known for his campaign against widow burning and for founding what would become the Brahmo Samaj, was educated in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and is rumoured to have ventured as far as Tibet in his quest for learning (a somewhat unlikely claim). He was suave and polished but acutely conscious that his recommendations on reform were seen as the toyings of a dilettante, the newspapers he published in English, Urdu, Persian and Bengali notwithstanding. As one biographer notes, ‘Rammohan was an anomaly to many of his Bengali contemporaries. In his … English language skills and European tastes, he was the image of the prosperous nineteenth-century Calcutta babu. Yet in private he hankered for distinction as a shastric scholar.’ His Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (A Gift to Deists) was seen as an effort to flaunt his Persian (badly), while his first Vedantic essay in 1815 invited scorn from traditionalists as far away as Madras. But he remained steadfast. ‘For many years,’ he said, ‘I have never ceased to contemplate … the obstinate adherence of my countrymen’ to various ‘superstitious puerilities’. And the only means to change this was to increase access to sacred books and their lofty ideas, even if the orthodox and rigid sneered at him on the way.

  But local disdain did not mean unpopularity or hatred. Roy stood up to the colonial state when censorship was attempted, pointing out that every ruler must acknowledge his inability to do everything well, and be willing, therefore, to embrace criticism from his subjects: ‘To secure this important object, the unrestrained liberty of publication is the only effectual means that can be employed,’ argued Roy. Even as he railed against colonial po
licy, he explained Hindu scripture in English to that very same Western audience. Like William Jones, he persuaded them of the value India’s past held even if its present was corrupted. There was conviction here—he refused, scandalously, to participate in his father’s funeral rites because he thought them meaningless. He produced such texts as Questions and Answers on the Judicial System of India even as he expounded A Tract on Religious Toleration . He had a curious mind, vision and clarity of expression, all united in a desire to serve as spokesperson for a more pristine Hinduism in a reinvigorated India. It alarmed his contemporaries, but also surprised others. As Bishop Heber declared with a pinch of racial condescension, this brilliant ‘Asiatic’ with his ‘good English, good sense and forcible arguments’, not to mention excellent ideas, was nothing short of ‘a real curiosity’.

  To a great extent Roy succeeded in his efforts—a fascinating intellectual movement was born through his and his contemporaries’ efforts in Bengal, while his two years in England saw him impress individuals from King William IV down to Benjamin Disraeli. Lord Macaulay, otherwise no admirer of the Indian mind, waited hours one evening hoping to introduce himself to Roy, while Jeremy Bentham began a campaign to elect him to parliament. There was also a christening where the infant was named Thomas Rammohun Roy, and stories floated of a romance in Bristol. There was no doubt that Roy was immensely popular in English society, for he was also on the side of introducing Western education in India—Sanskrit schooling, he argued, ‘would be best calculated to keep [India] in darkness’. As he wrote to Lord Amherst, the governor-general, Sanskrit was ‘so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its perfect acquisition’. This had been ‘for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge’, and in any case ‘the learning concealed under [its] almost impervious veil’ was ‘far from sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it’. Educational reform was the need of the hour, therefore, and the language of such reform did not matter to him—tradition might offer security, but for progress change must actively, he felt, be welcomed.

  The brahmin had no place in Roy’s reformed Hinduism—‘If in doubt,’ he recommended, ‘consult your conscience,’ not your priest. He rejected brahmin domination, calling them ‘self-interested guides, who, in defiance of the law as well as of common sense, have succeeded … in conducting [ordinary people] to the temple of idolatry’, hiding ‘the true substance of morality’. Roy would have had even more to express had he not died in 1833 on a moonlit night. It took 120 days for the news to reach India but his message had already taken root: that Indians ‘are capable of better things’ and ‘worthy of a better destiny’. Indeed as one obituary put it, despite the ‘extreme interruption and inconvenience’ his views caused him, Roy remained true to his convictions and that which he believed was right for the good of India and his fellow Indians. And, despite any flaws in his message and the human limitations of his character, for this alone he deserves to be remembered.

  THE COLONIAL STATE AND INDIA’S GODS

  In 1812, the fortunes—quite literally—of hundreds of temples in southern Kerala found themselves in the hands of a man who was born in faraway Scotland. It was one of those strange ironies of colonial rule in India, for Colonel Munro had originally come to princely Travancore as the East India Company’s representative. Quickly, however, he was also elevated as minister by the ruling princess, a formula designed to give the British the power they desired while ducking actual annexation. Munro’s goal, with his split loyalties, was to balance the government’s books and ensure the company received regular tribute. And as part of his campaign to augment revenues, he took over 348 significant temples and 1,171 smaller shrines across the land, so that 62,000 gardens and 63,500 acres of cultivable land became state property overnight. Hereafter, sums were disbursed to the temples for their upkeep, but so valuable was the real estate seized that it still produced an enormous balance—an amount that could be used for other purposes, including to service political obligations to the company.

  It was an act that birthed repercussions felt to this day, for some of Kerala’s celebrated shrines—including Sabarimala, for example—remain under government control, provoking persistent questions about what business precisely the state has in institutions of faith. To be fair, Munro’s action was not unilateral—temples, with their unregulated funds and powerful trustees, were a political threat to the emerging modern state on the one hand, while on the other, there were complaints that revenues were being embezzled; in some instances, trustees stole even the idols of their deities. In neighbouring Tamil provinces, too, the story was similar: the collector of Thanjavur, John Wallace, noted that temple custodians in his jurisdiction had piled up debt to the tune of 2 lakh (a colossal figure at the time). Like in princely Travancore, in British territories too, the company was embroiled without delay, then, in the business of religion. And here, too, profits followed: in 1846, after all expenses were deducted, officials of the Madras Presidency found themselves with 8 lakh in surplus from temples, a figure promptly diverted to the ‘general education fund’, while another lakh was ‘expressly devoted’ to a highway project between cotton-producing Tirunelveli and the port of Thoothukudi. Gods were now building roads.

  To be clear, as political sovereigns, the company did possess certain prerogatives where these establishments were concerned. Hindu rulers reserved the right to intervene in the affairs of shrines should the need arise, and in eighteenth-century Madras, the Christian British often continued traditions instituted by previous powers, intervening when necessary. So, for instance, in 1789, when quarrels arose in the Thiruvallur temple and officials discovered that the brahmins in charge ‘had mortgaged part of the property for their own private use’, the company saw to it that the men were made ‘answerable for the few things missing’. Devotees also, without means to stand up to influential trustees, approached the company, inviting the latter to proactively intervene in temple affairs. This led, in 1817, to the earliest official legislation in Madras on the subject, to ensure incomes from temple endowments were disbursed ‘according to real intent and will of the granter’ and not frittered away by untrustworthy trustees. It was a good step in theory, though in about two decades, the company found itself involved in as many as 7,600 temples—a state of affairs it had not quite expected when it set out to uphold tradition.

  As it happened, despite financial gains, this was an uncomfortable position for the company. Missionary propagandists, for instance, lambasted British officials for promoting ‘idolatry’: by protecting temples, organising festivals, supervising repairs and settling disputes, the company had become the primary trustee for assorted Hindu deities. As one reverend complained in 1831, ‘When we point out to [the Hindus] that idolatry is not the worship of god … they ask, “How can you say so? Who keeps our pagodas in repair?… Do you not do it yourself? If you do these things, where is the reasonableness and propriety of saying idolatry is sinful?”’ In fits and starts and under growing pressure, then, the British attempted to extricate themselves from this knot. While in Travancore the Hindu ruler clung on to the temples, in Thanjavur over 2,000 shrines were returned to locals, and bigger temples were placed in the hands of committees, panchayats and in some cases, ‘influential’ individuals. This, predictably, led to its own politics, featuring caste competition, sectarian rivalries and much confusion, made worse by flawed legal interventions through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  In the end, what the colonial regime began, secular India inherited, and this peculiar mix-up of government with temples continues to this day. For the British, the issue eventually became one of several complications to negotiate in the subcontinent—from the start, the company ruled through bureaucracy and centralisation, essential instruments for a foreign power in an alien land. One-size-fits-all rules were put in place despite contradictions, which in independent India raise valid questions that the colonial power wasn’t obliged to answer. In Sabarimala, for example, this was
one of the arguments posed by critics of the 2018 Supreme Court judgement—that different temples have different features which cannot be guided by a singular principle. Certainly, there is room for a new framework to preserve the individuality of India’s countless shrines—a new vision with an accommodative mechanism—though some overarching principles must still prevail. After all, even before the days of Colonel Munro and the British, Indian sovereigns intervened in temple affairs. Now, the constitution is supreme, and while diversity should be respected, this paramount document must necessarily be obeyed.

  WHEN A TEMPLE WAS BESIEGED IN AYODHYA

  On 6 December 1992, when a howling mob tore down the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, a nation watched in horror as governments of the day stood by, pleading helplessness. Decades have elapsed since that shameful event, and many more may pass before anything close to a real—and sensible—resolution is reached for what is essentially a festering wound. But if in living memory Ayodhya has gone down as a symbol of the worst manifestation of communal politics in contemporary India, there is an episode in its past that could be construed as the inaugural chapter of this ugly narrative, pitting Hindu against Muslim, man against man. And unlike recent times, many years ago it was a temple that attracted the attentions of a fanatic crowd, their actions becoming linked in several ways to the larger discussion around the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation.