One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  If the visitor’s explication of Hinduism was very different from descriptions of Indian religion offered by missionaries like Reverend Parish, it was perhaps because he was a follower of a Bengali reformer named Rammohan Roy, who early in the nineteenth century had begun to rid traditional devotions of widow-burning and other practices he believed impeded social progress. This, too, appealed to Mary Emerson. A feminist by circumstance long before the word existed, she lived her life as an expression of women’s rights, even if she would not have spoken of it in those terms.

  Given her prickly temperament, she was not close to many people, but she did have a nephew—then newly graduated from Harvard—whom she had taken under her wing as confidante and protégé. She had lived several years with the young man’s family after his father had died, and found herself in the unlikely role of mentor and spiritual guide to a crowd of brothers at various stages of adolescence. Following the visitor’s lecture on Hindu mythology, she excitedly wrote a letter, in her tidy hand, to the favorite of her four nephews:

  My Dear Waldo,

  I have been fortunate this week to find a Visitor here from India, well versed in its literature and theology. He showed us some fine representations of the incarnation of Vishnoo. They are much akin to Greecian fable—and from his representation I believe the incarnations to be much like the doctrine of transmigration. At bottom of the histories of the incarnation is often the doctrine of the universal presence & agency of the One God…

  Our Stranger had made a gift to her of several of these images, she added, and in each illustration—whether it showed the deity as a fish, as a lion, as a whale, or as a dwarf—there was something that reminded her of her own Christian faith as she understood it. In all the strange new beliefs the visitor described to her, “there was a strong resemblance” to Christianity—or, as she noted in her informal shorthand, “to the xtian facts.” Eager to share the Hindu devotional pictures she had received, Mary wrote to her nephew, “I will send some of those he gave to me, if you have not met them.”

  The education of this promising young man, she had decided, would be her life’s work. Given a new view of the world and its gods by this visitor from India, she saw it as her responsibility to share it with her nephew first of all.

  Mary’s nephew was Ralph Waldo Emerson, founder of the Transcendentalist movement, which would give the United States its first poetic and philosophical vernacular. Emerson was the earliest man of letters in America to take a sustained interest in the region of the world broadly called “the East.”

  Genius though many of her contemporaries claimed Mary Emerson to be, we likely know her name only because of her connection to this great man in the making. In this she joins uncountable other women of talent and intellect who were not allowed either by family life or social constraints to meet their potential. Yet in Mary’s case we might find some solace in the possibility that we know Ralph Waldo’s name only because of the inspiration she offered, and the challenges she put to him, throughout his life. From an early age she urged one of the nation’s first great public intellectuals to look beyond his own provincial experiences, leading him eventually, though not intentionally, to shrug off his family’s expectations that he would join the long line of Christian ministers from which he came. She was, to the say the least and the best of her, an unsettling force in the lives of those around her, perhaps most of all in the life of her bright nephew. “If Aunt Mary finds out anything is dear or sacred to you, she instantly flings broken crockery at that,” Ralph Waldo later said of his aunt. She was the stone against which he sharpened the edge of his mind.

  She was also the originating source of much of what seemed to make him original in his day. Before he became synonymous with the virtue of “Self Reliance,” as his most famous essay is called, she was the self upon whom he relied. Even the “nonconformity” he claimed as a spiritual path he learned by her example. The frequent employment of tropes and images of Asia for which Emerson became known, for instance, came to him covered with his aunt’s fingerprints.

  Their correspondence concerning the arrival of Our Stranger at Byfield was not a singular moment but rather part of an ongoing conversation. It was a conversation that led Waldo to begin writing poems using the spiritual paradigms of India to explore an alternative to the religious orthodoxies of his own time and place. Initially he suspected that these traditions might contain too much superstition to withstand intellectual scrutiny, but his Aunt Mary’s interest, and the new model of Hindu devotion advocated by the visitor’s teacher Rammohan Roy, convinced him otherwise.

  In time, the religious philosophy of India would become one of Emerson’s great subjects, giving the faith of Reverend Parish’s “sixty millions of people bowing to thirty millions of gods” a permanent place in the American canon, and in the process remaking the spiritual imagination of the nation.

  Insofar as it is discussed at all, the history of Hinduism in America is often told as if it began nearly seven decades after Mary Emerson’s meeting with the Vishnu-devoted stranger. It was then, during a much more high-profile meeting of religious perspectives, that another visitor from India, the Calcutta-born Hindu holy man Swami Vivekananda, made an attention-grabbing appearance at the 1893 Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions. Appearing on stage with a number of other exotic gurus of the east, Vivekananda treated the assembled luminaries—for the most part white Protestants not too many years away from the missionizing perspective of Reverend Parish—to words perhaps similar in spirit to those Mary Emerson had heard in the parsonage.

  “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance,” Vivekananda said. “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” Well received though those words were, the words that meant the most to his audience were apparently his first, the greeting that by all accounts brought the house down: “Sisters and brothers of America.”

  The forward-thinking American attendees of the Parliament were naturally predisposed to respond favorably to the Indian’s suggestion that there was a familial connection between his tradition and their own. Yet one wonders if the largely male audience even noticed the order of his greeting: sisters first, then brothers. Perhaps this was simply a nod to Western chivalry, but it would have been appropriate if he had intended to give women pride of place in his address. The outsized role they had played in the introduction of Eastern religions to America was largely responsible for his attendance.

  It was not just Mary Emerson who had held open the door to the East for her male acquaintances. Another woman in the Transcendentalist orbit, Ralph Waldo’s former Latin student Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, became the first publisher and translator of a Buddhist text in America. Her edition of the Lotus Sutra, translated from an earlier French rendition and published and sold in her own bookshop on West Street in Boston, has been mistakenly attributed to Henry David Thoreau (about whom we’ll hear more in a moment), but in truth the work was hers alone.

  Still another woman without whom Vivekananda might not have received such a warm reception was Margaret Fuller, who hosted a series of conversations in Boston, beginning in the spring of 1841, during which the city’s self-styled intellectual elite attempted to describe connections between all the world’s philosophies. Though the room was packed with the sharpest wits and biggest egos in New England, Fuller first held court, giving a genealogy of mythology as it developed from one culture to another. Her audience would have taken for granted the primacy of the Greek and Roman pantheons, but Fuller proposed that all attempts to capture the mysteries of the universe in narrative form actually began in India.

  “The Hindus dwelt in the All, the Infinite, which the Greeks analyzed and to some degree humanized,” she said. The earliest attempts to make sense of the two sides of existence could be found in the scriptures of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and the Upanishads. “All things sprang from Coelus and Terra,” she added, �
��from Heaven and Earth, or spirit and matter.”

  In the generation after Fuller and Peabody, other women were the driving force behind the newly birthed Theosophy movement, which borrowed liberally from both Hinduism and Buddhism. Thanks to their well-heeled sponsors, Theosophists began bringing Indian religious teachers like Vivekananda to the United States for speaking tours that packed music halls and libraries in cities large and small. Such guests were not welcome everywhere, it must be noted. Vivekananda, for one, was denied a room at a number of hotels in Baltimore. No matter what kind of wisdom he offered, in some parts of the country he was seen as a brown man first of all.

  So common were these exotic visitors in the Northeast, however, that by the 1890s, a few months after the Parliament of the World’s Religions, even before Vivekananda had made his way to New England, a Massachusetts Sunday paper remarked, “Boston finds India a fascinating topic, and its swarthy representatives are always well received.” Among those mentioned in the article that followed were Pandita Ramabai, an Indian social reformer who had become well known in her native Bengal as one of India’s few female Sanskrit scholars. In Boston she spoke to the learned people of the city on the education of child widows, who were often as young as five years old, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where Ramabai had founded an organization called Arya Mahila Samaj, the “Noble Women’s Society.”

  Other Indians gaining attention in America at this time included the Pune-born teenager Anandi Gopal Joshi, who wrote a letter at the age of fifteen to an American missionary expressing her desire to study medicine in the United States. The year before, she had given birth to her first child, but owing to a lack of medical care, the baby had died in infancy. When the missionary published Joshi’s letter along with his opinion that no unconverted Hindu should come to America, the young woman’s cause was taken up by a benefactor in New Jersey, who began a lengthy correspondence and soon sponsored a trip to Philadelphia. In 1886, Dr. Joshi became one of the first Hindu doctors trained in the United States, and certainly the first Hindu woman to earn an American degree. Unlike many of the marquee celebrities “from the East” then filling concert halls up and down the East Coast, Dr. Joshi did not remain for a speaking tour but returned to India, where she received a hero’s welcome.

  Regular public appearances were also made by well-traveled American women who had been to India, including Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham (referred to in the Boston press as “physician, editor, traveler, lecturer, mother and housekeeper”), who brought back from India information about tantric sexual techniques. Dr. Stockham later became famous for secularizing these ritual practices as maithuna, the withholding of seminal emission during intercourse. As she wrote in her book The Ethics of Marriage, she had learned of this approach to marital relations when visiting “a peculiar people” on India’s west coast. The peculiarity of this people, she explained, lay in the fact that among them, “women are the lords of creation.”

  “They are called the free women of India,” she writes. “They seek their husbands, control business interests, and through them only is the descent of property. The family and the whole fabric of society is founded upon the mother. She is the key-stone of the arch, for she chooses who shall be the father of her child and bestows her worldly goods according to her desires and discretion. She marries the man of her choice. If for any reason, however, she deems him unfit to be a husband or a father of her child, it requires no ceremony of church or state to free her from him. Her wish and word are law.”

  The reason for this, she notes, is maithuna (often referred to by its alternate name kareeza in her work), which, practically speaking, amounted to a form of birth control and a limit on the size of families. Stockham would later become a suffragist and early advocate of women’s rights not just for the “peculiar people” of India but in America as well. Similarly, references to India generally and Hinduism specifically in early feminist writing suggest that the subcontinent provided the nascent movement with a testing ground for its ideas. Among the writers thus influenced were Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, together with Susan B. Anthony, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Matilda Gage found much to admire in the treatment of women described by Indian religious texts. In her monumental work Woman, Church and State, Gage sifted through thousands of years of history to find examples of women both respected and abused by religion. Gage suggested that in this comparison, Hinduism fared better than most other traditions—and far better than the faith practiced closest to home.

  “In Sanskrit mythology, the feminine is represented by Swrya, the Sun, the source of life, while the masculine is described as Soma, a body.… The marriage of the man to the woman was symbolized as his union with the gods.… In the same manner, woman representing spirit, by her marriage to man became united with a body.”

  In the India of bygone days, she explained, “marriage was entirely optional with woman and when entered into frequently meant no more than spiritual companionship.” This companionship, according to Gage, was based foremost on religious equality. “Woman equally with man was entitled to the Brahminical thread; she also possessed the right to study and preach the Vedas, which was in itself a proof of her high position in this race. The Vedas, believed to be the oldest literature extant, were for many ages taught orally requiring years of close application upon part of both teacher and student. The word ‘Veda’ signifies to-know; the latter from ‘Vidya’ meaning wise. The English term ‘widow’ is traceable to both forms of the word, meaning a wise woman.”

  Contrasting the equality she saw in the long-ago time of a distant shore with the dominant tradition of her own time and nation, she could only find the latter wanting. Closer to home, she wrote, “woman is told that her present position in society is entirely due to Christianity… Church and State both maintaining that she has ever been inferior and dependent, man superior and ruler.”

  Gage provided a list of “maxims from the sacred books” that “show the regard in which the Hindoo woman is held”:

  “He who despises woman despises his mother.”

  “Who is cursed by woman is cursed by God.”

  “The tears of a woman call down the fire of heaven on those who make them flow.”

  “Evil to him who laughs at woman’s sufferings; God shall laugh at his prayers.”

  “It was at the prayer of a woman that the Creator pardoned man; cursed be he who forgets it.”

  “Who shall forget the sufferings of his mother at his birth shall be reborn in the body of an owl during three successive transmigrations.”

  “There is no crime more odious than to persecute woman.”

  “When women are honored the divinities are content; but when they are not honored all undertakings fail.”

  And perhaps most ominous, in its combination of specificity and threat:

  “The households cursed by women to whom they have not rendered the homage due them find themselves weighed down with ruin and destroyed as if they had been struck by some secret power.”

  In contrast to Gage’s cross-cultural optimism about the role of women in India, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that there was also much to learn from the female oppression in Hinduism, which she felt mirrored Christian society in harsher ways. When Stanton looked East she saw only more to rail against, particularly suttee, or widow burning.

  “Man has ever manifested a wish that the world should indeed be a blank to the companion whom he leaves behind him,” Stanton said in an address to the New York State Legislature in 1860. “The Hindu makes that wish a law, and burns the widow on the funeral pile of her husband; but the civilized man, impressed with a different view of the sacredness of life, takes a less summary mode of drawing his beloved partner after him; he does it by the deprivation and starvation of the flesh, and the humiliation and mortification of the spirit.”

  These contrasting views reflected two approaches to the question of rights generally. While Stanton
dismissed the entirety of Indian culture as uncivilized, Gage took the time to argue against disputed practices such as widow burning on the religious terms of those who stubbornly championed them: “The comparatively modern custom of suttee originated with the priests, whose avaricious desires created this system in order thereby to secure the property of the widow,” she wrote. “The Vedas do not countenance either suttee or the widow’s relinquishment of her property, the law specifically declaring if a widow should give all her property and estate to the Brahmins for religious purposes, the gift indeed is valid, but the act is improper.”

  As Gage points out, even this ability on the part of Hindu women to make a gift of their own property was an improvement over laws of some supposedly more civilized nations. “During long centuries while under Christian law the Christian wife was not allowed even the control of property her own at the time of marriage, or of that which might afterwards be given her, and her right of the disposition of property at the time of her death was not recognized in Christian lands, the Hindoo wife, under immemorial custom could receive property by gift alike from her parents, or from strangers, or acquire it by her own industry, and property thus gained was at her own disposal…”

  Hinduism, then, represented an alternate cultural framework to suffragettes like Gage, one that, if implemented in its ideal form, would provide women with more rights than they enjoyed in nineteenth-century America. As a conceptual substitute for the spiritual status quo, it was a faith that seemed to Gage to make a place for the feminine in both theory and practice. As she wrote hopefully, “An ancient scripture declares that ‘All the wisdom of the Vedas, and all that has been written in books, is to be found concealed in the heart of a woman.’ ”