One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Like Dr. Stockham’s importation of tantra, much of this late-nineteenth-century interest in India had sexual overtones. The revered Pandita Ramabai is frequently described as “slender” and “large-eyed,” clad in “her native costume of soft white draperies.” The guru tours sponsored by the Theosophical Society had an undeniable sexual edge and at times were advertised with a carnival barker’s sense of peep show appeal. With the promise of Swami Vivekananda revealing “his gorgeous Oriental turban,” the press took pleasure in reporting, his lectures were always “crowded with ladies.”

  There is much that could be said about the transformation of traditions thousands of years old into the hobby of affluent Americans. Indeed, upon Vivekananda’s death in 1901, the press collectively lamented that an unassailably moral teacher of wisdom had been made “faddish,” and that he had fallen in with such “flighty” women as the opera star Emma Calvé.

  Yet it would be too easy to dismiss the rising interest in Indian religion throughout the nineteenth century as a brief fixation with a mere spiritual bauble. To begin with, there was perhaps some karmic justice in the role of all these stubbornly independent women playing a part in a burgeoning equal rights movement of a religious tradition that included widow burning. It is no accident that the versions of Hinduism that found the most favor with American women and their Transcendentalist brethren were the same versions that in India are credited with the birth of nationalism and the eventual end of British rule.

  Moreover, in their promotion of Indian ideas as an attractive alternative to local traditions, these proponents of Hinduism and its representatives answered a curiosity that existed even before Mary Emerson’s time. The earliest references to “Hindoos” or “Hindooism” in the American press go back deep into the eighteenth century. Many of these references are concerned only with the odd ways of the “pagans” or “heathens,” as they were variously called, but beginning not long after the birth of the new nation, there were noticeable positive developments in the way Americans talked about India.

  Out of the shadow of the era of exploration, with trade between the East and West now commonplace, there arose an increased awareness (or at least the beginning of awareness) that non-Christian lands were not places suffering from a lack of belief but full of beliefs of their own.

  This shift in tone in the discussion of the subcontinent, its people, and its religious ideas came about due mainly to two influences. The first was the Eastern-curious romanticism of English writers whose work was then drifting across the ocean. The Orientalist poems of William Jones (whose name and verse appear frequently in Mary Emerson’s letters to Waldo) were delivered to enraptured audiences, including the one assembled on a May evening in 1787, when his Excellency George Washington was treated to a recitation of Jones’s “Hymn to the Hindu God of Love.” The Scottish writer Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—written by Hamilton in the voice of a fictional Indian royal—became an international publishing sensation, and the measure against which similar efforts of cultural ventriloquism would be judged.

  This desire to understand Indian culture from the inside can be seen with particular clarity in a proposal to publish “The Ordinances of Menu” made in 1800. A pre-publication advertisement described the ancient collection of Hindu law and custom in terms that strained to make its arcane contents relevant to an age of Enlightenment and revolution. “The work here offered to the American public contains abundance of curious matter for every intelligent reader,” the publisher wrote. “A spirit of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable tenderness to all sentient creatures, pervades the whole work; the style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language of legislation, and extorts a respectful awe; the sentiments of independence, on all beings but God, and the harsh admonitions even to kings are truly noble.”

  Interest in India was not all so earnest, however. In a widely syndicated newspaper column claiming to be “Letters of a Hindu Philosopher Residing in Philadelphia,” a writer using the name “Shah Coolen” regularly remarked on American culture in the voice of a sage of the East, sometimes to great comedic effect.

  “Often, when reclining on a sofa, by the side of a fair American, I have thought that her white bosom, scarcely veiled at all from my sight, and her finely proportioned limbs, which the extreme thinness and narrowness of her apparel rendered quite evident to the eye, would have excited impure emotions in any heart less subject to reason than that of a Hindu philosopher.”

  Shah Coolen goes on in subsequent dispatches to compare the biblical love verses of the Song of Songs to the twelfth-century Indian devotional poem known as the Gita Govinda, which describes in great detail the god Krishna’s trysts with a group of young women in the forest (“note how Krishna wantoned in the wood / Now with this one, now that”). This coupling of Hebrew and Sanskrit poetry would make a fascinating work in the study of comparative religious texts were the author not wholly concerned with the naughty bits.

  Shah Coolen’s “Letters” appeared in dozens of newspapers and were later compiled as a book, which the Boston Review dismissed as a knockoff of Elizabeth Hamilton’s earlier and better effort. In the eyes of proper society, however, the real problem with Shah Coolen was not his literary ability but the apparently immoral company he kept. As one critic sniffed, “We believe the profanity mentioned in the fourth letter applicable to no sect of females but that with which Shah Coolen seems to be so intimately acquainted.”

  Immoral or no, all of these entries in the canon of Western Orientalism pivot around another influence that brought interest in India to the fore in America at the turn of the nineteenth century. The war—or rather, the series of wars—then being fought on the subcontinent had made it a place not unlike North America. The Polygar Wars, waged from 1799 to 1805 against the British in the area of southern India that now comprises the state of Tamil Nadu, were the first attempts to win Indian independence by force. Likewise, the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 found Indians fighting governing outsiders for the survival of their culture and beliefs. When restrictions were placed on both Hindus and Muslims making outward displays of their faith—via tilak forehead markings for the former and beards for the latter—the ensuing uprising killed more than a hundred British troops. Though neither the mutiny nor the wars were ultimately successful, these skirmishes recast longtime rivals in familiar roles on a novel stage, with the English attempting to put down rebellion while the French covertly funded and supported it. Becoming another New World that served as a battleground for Old World grudges, India offered the young United States, for the first time, a mirror that was not Europe. Seen in this looking glass, Americans saw the “land of the Hindoos” as a country that could not be more different from their own. Yet it, too, was being formed by an ongoing clash of beliefs.

  If there was a single Hindu to whom Americans looked most often to make meaning of this reflection, it was Rammohan Roy, who was at the time becoming a subject of considerable interest in America, particularly among the Unitarians of New England.

  Born in Bengal in 1772, Roy appealed to the liberal and literary classes in the United States as one who, just barely older than their own young nation, put a relatively youthful face on an ancient culture. Reports of his reform efforts in India, and occasional erroneous claims of his conversion to Christianity, appeared regularly in Boston’s Christian Register, which was regular reading for Unitarians, including the Emerson clan. The secular press, too, hailed him as a one-man civilizing force among the heathen masses of a non-Christian land. Taking some perverse pleasure in providing detailed accounts of grieving widows throwing themselves (or being thrown) onto their husbands’ funeral pyres, American journalists introduced Roy as the only hope of a backward people.

  As early as 1817, the Otsego Herald in Cooperstown, New York, gave Roy credit for attempting to convince would-be suicides that their understanding of the practice of following their husbands into the f
unerary flames was not found in any sacred text. “We also have reason to believe that the Bengalee writings of Ram Mahon Roy, have made a deep, though at present not very obvious, impression on the Hindoos of Calcutta and its neighborhood, which may actually lead to the entire extinction of this, as well as many other practices, alike abhorrent to reason and humanity.” As the report continued, “It was suggested.… by Ram Mahon Roy, that in the actual mode by which females are burnt on the funeral pyre of their husbands, there had been a wide departure from the method described in the holy books of the Hindoos.” Within five years, the Newburyport Herald referred to him as “the celebrated Hindoo reformer Ran Mahun Roy,” and praised his efforts for bringing about such widespread change that many of the “superstitions” against which he had fought were no longer common in Calcutta.

  The support Roy received among Unitarians no doubt had something to do with the fact that the reforms he proposed amounted to a kind of Unitarian Hinduism. In his struggle over an exotic multiplicity of local gods and practices in favor of a more unified national religion, Unitarians saw their own struggle over the concept of the Trinity, which they took to be unnecessarily complicated and idolatrous by nature. Thanks in large part to this cross-cultural resonance, Roy’s version of Hinduism would ultimately become even more dominant in the West than in India itself. His modernized faith was to some extent a vast religious system simplified and shorn of its problematic history and local customs to achieve greater uniformity and broader appeal. To some of his admirers, it seemed positively American.

  Simplified though it may have been, Roy’s version of Hinduism was tremendously influential, both in India and abroad. It became a philosophy that might be discussed anywhere—even in the sitting rooms and lecture halls of Boston intellectuals. In the first part of the eighteenth century, in other words, Hindus became another “people of the book,” and their beliefs became something not practiced in far-off temples but thought to be containable between covers on a library shelf.

  That is precisely where Ralph Waldo Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau found them. He borrowed books from Emerson’s library when he was composing his first published works. Emerson may not have known that his younger friend planned to rough it with his own precious tomes in tow, but Thoreau brought a few of these purloined texts with him to Walden Pond. The volume of writings he produced there, Walden—the book that many would say birthed American environmental consciousness—is in fact a marriage of Hindu religious ideas with the burgeoning romantic attachment to the American wilderness, a mapping of India within the borders of the United States: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

  So moved was Thoreau by Emerson’s books on Hinduism—a collection begun, it seems, with Mary Moody Emerson’s gift to him of the materials she had received from Our Stranger—that he soon heard echoes of Indian religious texts as he traveled through crowded New England in search of moments of solitude. As he wrote in On the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the Vedas, and I associate with it the idea of infinite remoteness, as well as beauty and serenity, for to the senses that is furthest from us which addresses the greatest depth within us. It teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real experience.”

  Nor were the Transcendentalists the only nineteenth-century American writers drawn to this exotic literary soil. Following Emerson’s lead in finding poetic inspiration in Indian texts, the far more conventional (and at the time far more popular) poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turned to the Ramayana for the source of one of his most beguiling poems. Longfellow used a tale well known among Hindus to tell a story of man suspended between worlds, King Trishanku, a ruler who wanted to be transported to the realm of the gods but instead became caught for eternity between the mortal and the divine: “Thus by aspirations lifted / By misgivings downward driven / Human hearts are tossed and drifted / Midway between earth and heaven.”

  Unlike the writers who borrowed Indian characters and tropes earlier in the century for their exotic allure, those writing after Emerson popularized Eastern philosophy sought to highlight the universal stories that could be told in Hindu terms. Walt Whitman went so far as to use the metaphor of the “Passage to India,” as he called one poem, to suggest a journey to the varied kinds of knowledge that might be found among the diverse peoples of the earth. It was only through a personal “passage to India,” he wrote, that the soul could approach “the far-darting beams of the spirit!—the unloos’d dreams!,” “the deep diving bibles and legends,” and “the daring plots of the poets,” all those things that were to be found in “the elder religions.”

  Even Herman Melville, who at times was a scathing critic of Emerson (upon hearing him lecture, Melville once derided the “sage of Concord” as “a Plato who talks thro’ his nose”), drew inspiration from the Transcendentalists’ eastward turn. Unlike the other celebrated writers of his day, Melville had actually seen many of the places where worship of exotic gods could be found. For nearly four years he traveled the Pacific, becoming well acquainted with the beliefs of a number of non-Christian peoples. While his travels did not take him as far as India, his return to American shores in the late 1840s corresponded precisely with the moment at which the Transcendentalists were publishing their Indian-influenced essays and verse.

  In 1849, he attended a lecture given by Emerson in Boston and, despite previous quips at his elder’s expense, wrote of the experience, “I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow.… I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he dont attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” He was talking not only of Emerson, he stressed, “but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.”

  With Moby-Dick well begun, Melville’s comparison of those, like Emerson, who seek out the depths of existence to “a great whale” is intriguing on its own, and it becomes all the more so when one considers how often he described the whale of his own creation in explicitly Hindu terms.

  Much like Emerson’s aunt, Melville was drawn to the devotional symbols of India that considered the great creature of the deep among ten forms taken on by the divine. The chase at the heart of the book is not merely after an image of God or death but “the Hindoo whale… depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan.” Later in the book, even the whale itself—its flesh, its form—comes to stand in for the religion of India. The smell of its burning blubber, our narrator Ishmael relates, “has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it,” adding, in a nod to one of the pressing social concerns of the day, that it was “such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.” As local and specific as that reference is, however, when Melville’s whale-obsessed captain speaks of Indian religion it is far more expansive, comprising one part of the duality of existence: “Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature,” Ahab prays, “rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.”

  Most interesting, given his earlier skepticism of the Transcendentalists as self-important blowhards, Melville seems at the heart of the book to recall the praise of “men who dive” with whi
ch he responded to Emerson’s lecture. As the doomed Pequod floats toward its reckoning (perhaps “swim[ming] near the surface” like “any fish”), Ishmael recounts a tale about another figure who dared to dive: “the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos… who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.”

  When Brahma, or the God of Gods… resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?

  With his white whale established as an incarnation of Vishnu, Melville crafted a great American novel with unmistakably Hindu depths. And more than that, he also paid homage to those “who dive,” all those like Emerson—and perhaps too, unbeknownst to Melville, Emerson’s aunt—who brought Indian beliefs to the surface far from where they had been submerged.

  Of course, the desire of some writers to explore Hindu themes did not automatically translate into widespread interest or understanding of traditions that seemed unbridgeably foreign to most Americans. Writing in response to Emerson’s celebrated poem “Brahma,” for example, the poet and critic Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. scoffed, “[T]o the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself.” Holmes was himself a former student of Margaret Fuller, Emerson’s protégé and occasional promoter of Hindu ideas, yet the pluralism of Emerson’s imagination was to him meaningless, or worse. “The oriental side of Emerson’s nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish.” At best, Holmes suggested, “they lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them.”