MISSIONARY CONSPIRACY: LETTERS TO ARUN SHOURIE—A POSTMODERN HINDU
Preface to the First Edition
Five major interests shaped the British East India Company’s rule in Bengal:
(i) Individual need and greed drove the rank and file of the Company. They had come to a distant land to make money. Their salaries were meagre because it was assumed—and permitted—that they would engage in private trade on the side. Military success made Clive almost a millionaire; other Company employees therefore saw nothing wrong in using the political power they had acquired in Bengal after 1757 to accept, if not extort, bribes. Their corruption, Lord Macaulay later remarked, made them “a gang of public robbers.” It turned British rule into “an empire of evil genii,” far worse than the Mughal Empire it had replaced.
For the directors of the Company, India was simply (ii) a trading base. They had neither the interest nor the aptitude for military expeditions. Commercial rivalry from the French, Dutch, and Danish companies was challenge enough; they could not risk the very existence of their Company by turning it into a political rival of the Mughal Empire, Indian rulers, and other European powers. Their practical commercial outlook, for example, found Lord Wellesley’s empire-building military successes too costly for their ledgers—the reason he was eventually recalled. These traders understood that the best way to maximize profits was to minimize involvement in India. Consequently, they repeatedly insisted on closing Fort William College, their only college in India, where Company employees were trained for governance.
The importance of political and military power for securing commercial interests was recognized early enough as indispensable in a land frequently at war with itself. Yet the idea of assuming a moral responsibility to reform or uplift India remained as absent from their thinking as it was from their account books.
For British military leaders such as Clive and Wellesley, India became primarily (iii) territory to be conquered. Their chief concern was to weaken present and potential political rivals, not to empower Indians. They focused on combating forces that threatened British interests; the social and cultural evils that weakened and oppressed Indian society were not part of their agenda. This attitude explains why, although Lord Wellesley was convinced of the justice of Rev. Dr. William Carey’s campaign against Sati (widow-burning) in 1806, he did not prohibit the practice, as Lord Bentinck later did in 1829. For Wellesley, it was difficult enough to contend with Muslim and Hindu rulers; provoking Brahmanical opposition by interfering in socio-religious customs, however harmful, seemed politically unwise. A few widows being burned alive here and there affected neither British commercial interests nor imperial governance.
For secular British scholars, India offered a fascinating new field of (iv) research—Indology—in which they had the privilege of being pioneers. Many Indologists admired ancient India and encouraged the emerging Indian intelligentsia to study, appreciate, and preserve its cultural heritage. The European rediscovery of ancient India eventually contributed to the growth of Indian nationalism. Yet Indians themselves could not readily access these scholarly works, since very few knew English beyond what was necessary for conducting business with the British. India had no printing press capable of disseminating such scholarship widely, nor did it possess colleges where Indological research could be systematically studied. Indeed, the preceding seven centuries of Islamic rule had not produced a single college in India, and no Hindu ashram had evolved into a university. The audience that read and appreciated the painstaking work of the Indologists was largely Western. Their scholarship, therefore, had little immediate impact on India itself.
Several British humanitarians and philanthropists respected and even romanticized “the customs and wisdom of the natives.” These “Orientalists” patronized and promoted ancient Sanskrit literature, yet they had little trust in the Indians they encountered. As a result, British policy for many decades excluded Indians from positions of significant administrative responsibility. Some highly respected British officials, such as Sir Thomas Munro, agreed that dishonesty was widespread among Indians, yet opposed this discriminatory policy. They argued that if Indians were paid salaries comparable to those of the British, they too might develop higher standards of public integrity. Even so, these men generally dismissed the possibility that Indian society itself could be fundamentally reformed. Munro, Governor of Madras from 1820 to 1824, wrote in a letter dated 30 June 1821:
I have no faith in the modern doctrines of the rapid improvement of the Hindoos, or of any other people. The character of the Hindoos is probably much the same as when Vasco da Gama first visited India, and it is not likely that it will be much better a century hence. When I read, as I sometimes do, of a measure by which a large province has been suddenly improved, or a race of semi-barbarians, civilised, almost of Quakerism, I throw away the book.
The (v) reformers who advocated “the modern doctrine of the rapid improvement of the Hindoos” constituted the fifth force. They stood in opposition to the views of British scholars, the military and commercial interests of the Company, and the greed of individual Englishmen. At the turn of the nineteenth century, their influence within the Company was marginal. After 1813, however, their perspective gained ascendancy. It was strengthened and legitimised by the remarkable moral transformation that England had undergone during the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the Evangelical revival led by John Wesley. This close-knit group of reformers believed that what God had done for a morally degenerate England, He could also do for India. Indeed, in keeping with their doctrine of Providence, they argued that God had entrusted India to England because He loved India and desired to bless her. Consequently, they believed it was England’s moral obligation to bless India by “evangelising,” “Christianising,” “civilising,” “educating,” and “modernising” her. To them, these terms were essentially interchangeable.
To reshape British involvement in India according to their moral vision—that is, to empower, emancipate, and modernise India—this group of Evangelical Christians, led by Charles Grant and William Wilberforce of the Clapham Sect, had to overcome British interests that conflicted with their missionary commitment. They fought rival lobbies in Parliament, the Company’s boardrooms, the churches, the press, and, of course, in India itself. They had to answer the argument that any interference with India’s cultural traditions would jeopardise the very foundations of British rule. They also had to demonstrate that Britain could fulfil its duty to God and its obligation to India without undermining its genuine interests. It was this line of reasoning, combined with the broad scope of the struggle, that later gave rise to the distinctive postmodern suspicion that the missionary movement was merely an instrument of colonialism—that it sought to consolidate Britain’s military conquest by subverting the hearts and minds of Indians.
This postmodern theory has circulated for some time and has been effectively challenged by scholars such as Brian Stanley and Stephen Neill. In 1994, one of India’s most respected public intellectuals, Mr. Arun Shourie, restated the theory in his widely discussed book, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. Out of my deep respect and admiration for Mr. Shourie, I began responding to his arguments through the letters that form this book. I had hoped that he would reply, enabling us eventually to publish our exchange—perhaps even as a joint work. Since he chose not to do so, these letters are now presented to the reader as a monologue.
My interest in this subject is not merely historical. My concern is with India’s future. I believe that the spiritual and intellectual force that initiated India’s regeneration two hundred years ago, and achieved considerable success, can once again halt and reverse India’s rapid drift toward a pre-modern condition.
Mr. Shourie is one of India’s most prominent commentators on contemporary political and public affairs. Born in Jalandhar in 1941, he earned a doctorate in Economics from Syracuse University in the United States. He has worked as an economist with the World Bank and served as a consultant to the Planning Commission of India. As editor of the Indian Express newspaper group, he became a household name and received numerous honours, including the Padma Bhushan, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the International Editor of the Year Award, and the Astor Award.
Mr. Shourie began his public life as a Marxist thinker. He says that he is still an atheist. Yet he is now perceived by many readers as being aligned with forces that seek to transform India from a religiously neutral (“secular”) state into a Hindu one. Mr. Shourie does, indeed, describe himself as an “ardent idolater.”
But why would an atheist worship idols? This is possible because Mr. Shourie is no longer a modern man, for whom logical consistency is a necessary requirement of intellectual integrity. Along with a growing number of Indian intellectuals, he appears to have drifted, perhaps partly unconsciously, into postmodernism.
Simply put, postmodernism is like eating curry with pizza instead of rice or chapati. In other words, it permits people to borrow, according to their tastes, whatever they wish from diverse and even contradictory traditions—religious, intellectual, cultural, political, artistic, architectural, medical, and so on—without concern for consistency or Truth. Thus, within a postmodern framework, one is free to believe in and worship idols of gods even while maintaining that no god exists.
This is possible because postmodernism assumes that the human mind cannot know the Truth. Anyone who claims to know the Truth is dismissed outright—without discussion, examination, or tolerance—as a “fundamentalist.”
The pre-modern mind submitted unquestioningly to external authority—for example, the authority of the Church, tradition, or caste. The modern mind, by contrast, committed itself to Truth alone and was therefore willing to challenge human authority. This “Protestantism” fostered freedom and helped spread the biblical idea of individual rights. Authorities, society, and even the majority could be wrong; an individual who had discovered a truth overlooked by others could be right. Therefore, that individual had to be granted the freedom to live according to conscience and to propagate belief. This concept of individual freedom rested on the conviction that human beings can know the Truth and that the Truth is worth living and dying for. Those who oppose falsehood and die for Truth are therefore honoured as martyrs. The modern commitment to truth thus nurtured tolerance and pluralism. It also inspired heroism—a willingness to struggle to improve the world.
But how do we know what is true? The modern age offered two different answers, both emphasizing the role of reason, rather than mystical intuition, in knowing the Truth. The Jewish-Christian tradition held that we can know the Truth with our minds and express it in words—through theology, science, or history—because our minds are made in God’s image, and because God has revealed Truth both in His works, that is, nature, and in His Word, the Bible.
The second stream of the modern age, which emerged later through the Enlightenment, also began with an unequivocal commitment to rationally knowable Truth. However, it chose to follow what the author regards as the failed path of Greek rationalism. As a result, it downplayed the idea that God is the source of all wisdom and that He reveals truth to His children as parents do to theirs. Enlightenment thinkers increasingly believed that the human mind alone was sufficient to discover truth and that divine revelation was unnecessary. Yet this stream began to question its own intellectual foundations when it became apparent that, if the human mind is not made in God’s image, it may be nothing more than an animal brain—an accident of chemistry. If your brain chemistry produces ideas very different from mine, then there is no compelling reason for me to abandon my beliefs and accept your brain chemistry as “true.”
The Prophetic-Protestant commitment to Truth was not a rebellion against all authority. It accepted the authority of the Church and wisdom derived from various sources, provided these did not conflict with the demands of Truth. The Enlightenment stream, by contrast, gradually rejected all authority except the thoughts, emotions, feelings, and will of the individual.
After 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species suggested that nature might be understood without reference to a Creator, the Enlightenment tradition increasingly questioned whether a Supreme Creative Intelligence—God—even existed. By the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the beginning of the twentieth century in America, the secular and increasingly godless stream of modern thought had overshadowed the Christian stream and came to be identified simply as “Modernism.” Many modernists then refused to acknowledge Christianity as the principal modernizing influence that both respected legitimate authority and remained committed to Truth above all else.
Although this book does not directly discuss European history, my letters to Mr. Shourie argue that, in India, the booster rocket that launched the country into the orbit of modernization was the Christian missionary movement—both Protestant and Catholic, for Catholicism underwent its own “Counter-Reformation.”
After the East India Company had already begun to rule and, in the author’s view, damage India, British Evangelicals sought to transform the Company into a force for good. They worked to share European knowledge with India. Above all, however, they wanted India to know God and the Bible that they believed had transformed England. In the process of reforming the Company and seeking India’s welfare, Christianity became associated with colonial rule—mistakenly in the eyes of some and deliberately in the eyes of others.
The Evangelicals’ simultaneous involvement in Christian missions and in the affairs of the Company helped reform colonial governance and educate India for freedom. Yet this involvement appears suspect to the postmodern “hermeneutic of suspicion,” which resents colonialism and often assumes that a fragmented and lawless subcontinent would have fared better under competing Muslim, Maratha, Sikh, and Hindu rulers. Postmodern scholars and many Indian leaders have often failed to distinguish between those who colonized India and those who sought to use colonial rule as a means of emancipation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, colonialism and the missionary movement had become inseparably linked in many minds. This occurred largely because, as Christianity declined in Europe, the British increasingly lost confidence in the Gospel—the very force that had contributed to their nation’s greatness. Some of the later missionaries, especially those teaching in universities and colleges, no longer understood the intellectual and moral roots of Western civilization. Consequently, they were unable to proclaim the God who judges all cultures and calls all people to repentance.
The ability to critique culture makes social reform possible while guarding against cultural arrogance. Some sceptical modernists arrived as Christian missionaries, but, as sceptics, they had little to promote beyond the external trappings of Western civilization—the very thing Indian nationalism was resisting. Indian nationalism, which emerged from the nineteenth-century Social Reform Movement and was later institutionalised in the Indian National Congress, did not wage its struggle against God, Jesus, or the Bible; it opposed British rule. Yet these missionary-teachers, despite doubting God, exalted England while advocating rationalism, scepticism, and atheism. In doing so, they undermined the biblical ethic that had helped shape modern India.
That era, however, has passed. The contemporary mind has largely moved beyond Greek rationalism and modernism. It has embraced the postmodern view that the human mind is incapable of arriving at truth on its own. This rejection of rationalism echoes a central premise of mysticism—whether Buddhist, Advaitin, or Gnostic. In contrast to modernism, postmodernism is deeply suspicious of rationality, morality, and truth, including objective historical truth. As I explained in my letters to Mr. Shourie, committed postmodernists do not seek the objective facts of history, nor do they interpret texts within their historical contexts, as modern historians traditionally did. Instead, they deconstruct history in an effort to uncover what they assume to be a hidden “lust for imperial power” behind movements such as Christian missions.
During the modern era, truth was regarded as superior to all forms of power, whether ecclesiastical or political. But what are we to do when we become convinced that absolute truth cannot be known, discussed, debated, or demonstrated? And what if we are told that, if truth can be known at all, it can only be encountered through a private, non-rational, mystical experience of silence and ecstasy—an experience inaccessible to verbal communication, investigation, or public discussion? If truth cannot be known, then, in a postmodern world, its moral demands can no longer restrain the “will to power.”
Modern institutions such as the press, parliament, and the courts served not only as centres of governance but also as forums for the pursuit and debate of truth, much like scientific laboratories, archaeological excavations, and theological institutions. But what becomes of these institutions if truth itself is unknowable? These letters explore both the benefits of modernity that the missionary movement brought to India and the consequences of the postmodern, truth-denying, mystical, and “idolatrous” Hinduism that Mr. Shourie defends.
The letters are presented in their original sequence, with one exception: the second letter was actually written last. In general, I have retained the original dates, although the letters were revised and edited between October and December 1995. These dates may occasionally be misleading, since some refer to the day a letter was completed, while others indicate the day on which most of the letter was written.
My chief regret is that, because I was writing actual letters to an individual rather than an academic work, and because much of my research was conducted between other commitments using borrowed books, I did not preserve complete details for all the footnotes. Serious students are justified in finding this unsatisfactory, and I offer my sincere apologies. If time permits, I will be happy to respond to any specific queries.
Vishal Mangalwadi
Mussoorie
December 20, 1995