The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  KSHETRAYYA’S COURTESANS IN ANDHRA

  Women’s voices, produced by men, played a central role in another lineage of devotional poets, who wrote in Telugu from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in southern Andhra and the Tamil region. The most important of these poets was Kshetrayya, who may have lived in the mid-seventeenth century, under the Nayakas, and who worshiped a form of Krishna that he called Muvva Gopala.101 His poems imagine a courtesan speaking to her customer, who is not only her lover but also her god and her king. The poems thus function on three levels, uniting the themes of ancient South Indian secular love poetry with bhakti poetry that was already simultaneously theological and royal; sex was a metaphor for religion and politics (kama for dharma and artha), and religion a metaphor for sex and politics (dharma for kama and artha).

  In early bhakti, the god was treated as a king, but Kshetrayya wrote at a time when the king had become a god, when the distinction between the king in his palace and the god in his temple had blurred to the point of disappearance.102 Money was the main characteristic that they shared; as Ramanujan, Narayana Rao, and Shulman put it, “If a king is a god and if anyone who has money is a king, anyone who has money is also god.”103 God is a customer of the worshiper, just as the worshiper may be the customer of a courtesan.

  Kshetrayya’s songs survived among courtesans and were performed by male Brahmin dancers who played female roles. We can hear the triple registers in the poems, some of which treat of such down-to-earth matters as a woman’s concern to find a drug or a magic potion (both of which were traditionally made out of roots, in India) to abort the child that she conceived from her lover—the king, the god, and her customer:

  A MARRIED WOMAN TO HER LOVER

  Go find a root or something.

  I have no girlfriends here I can trust.

  When I swore at you, you didn’t listen.

  You said all my curses were blessings.

  You grabbed me, you bastard,

  and had me by force.

  I’ve now missed my period,

  and my husband is out of town.

  Go find a root or something.

  I have set myself up for blame.

  What’s the use of blaming you?

  I’ve even lost my taste for food.

  What can I do now?

  Go to the midwives and get me a drug

  before the women begin to talk.

  Go find a root or something.

  As if he fell from the ceiling

  my husband is suddenly home.

  He made love to me last night.

  Now I fear no scandal.

  All my wishes, Muvva Gopala,

  have reached their end,

  so, in your image,

  I’ll bear you a son.

  Go find a root or something.104

  Abortion is, together with the killing of a Brahmin, the defining mortal sin in the dharma texts. Here, however, abortion is called for because the god has raped the worshiper, with overtones of the king’s power to possess sexually any woman in his realm. The mythological possibilities encapsulated in the last two lines—“so, in your image,/I’ll bear you a son”—are staggering; the whole mythology of gods fathering human sons (think of the divine lineages of the Mahabharata heroes!) is cast in a different light, for in the end the woman intends to bear the child, not to have an abortion after all. Sex, religion, and politics mirror one another through a man’s imagination of a woman’s imagination of god as customer and the poet’s vision of the love of god not as a lofty, abstract sentiment but as the most intimate, even sordid, of human concerns.

  CHAPTER 21

  CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH RAJ

  1600 to 1900 CE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)

  1600 (December 31) Queen Elizabeth I charters the British East India Company

  1750-1755 The Bengal Famine causes ten million deaths

  1756 The Black Hole of Calcutta causes dozens of deaths

  1757 The British East India Company defeats the Muslim rulers in Bengal

  1757 First wave of British Raj begins

  1765 Robert Clive becomes chancellor of Bengal

  1782-1853 Sir Charles James Napier lives

  1813 Second wave of British Raj begins

  1857-1858 The Rebellion, formerly known as the Mutiny, takes place; third

  wave of the British Raj begins

  1858 The British viceroy officially replaces Mughal rule (and the East India Company)

  1865-1936 Rudyard Kipling lives

  This matter of creeds is like horseflesh. . . . the Faiths are like the

  horses. Each has merit in its own country.

  Mahbub Ali, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, 19011

  The tumult and the shouting dies—

  The captains and the kings depart—

  Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

  An humble and a contrite heart.

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget, lest we forget!

  Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional,” 1897

  This chapter will begin with a very fast gallop over the perilous steeplechase race known as the British Raj (the two centuries during which India was part of the British Empire), highlighting, like all reportage of equine events, the disastrous falls along the way, particularly those with consequences for religion. There was a chronological divide, between what we might call three waves of the Raj, in imitation of the feminist and cinematic nomenclature. The first wave took place in the eighteenth century, with the first consolidations of the previously scattered European presence in India, and, in scholarship, the discovery of the Indo-European language system; it began with the Black Hole and the subsequent government takeover in 1756. The second wave began in 1813, with the official entrance of Christian missionaries. And the third wave began in 1857-1858, with the aftermath of the event known to the British as the Sepoy, Bengal, or Indian Mutiny; to Indians as the National Uprising or First War of Independence; and to most others as the Insurrection or Great Rebellion,jw depending on where you stand. Like the three alliances of Hinduism, the three waves do not replace one another but build up like a palimpsest: The new ones develop, but the old ones remain, so that Rudyard Kipling, for instance, though he lived during the third wave, is really a first wave Anglo-Indian, with a difference.

  I will conclude with case studies of two riders in that race, Sir Charles James Napier and Kipling. Kipling’s ideas about horses and religion (as in the first passage cited above) are surprisingly pluralistic (as is his attitude to power in the second passage cited above). Then we will, as always, consider the horses. As for Hinduism, I am not even going to try to cover the many texts that were produced, and the many practices that evolved, during this period but will focus on ways in which the British affected Hinduism, for British voices too became part of Hinduism, along with Hindu voices raised in reaction and protest to those British voices. I will leave to the next chapter a discussion of religious reforms among Hindus during this period.

  EARLY HISTORY OF THE BRITISH IN INDIA

  In the eighteenth century all sorts of Europeans, mainly the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, and the British, were milling about in India. “The French and Indian Wars” can be read as a kind of historical pun; such wars took place on two continents (North America [1754-1763] and Asia [from 1751 until well into the nineteenth century]) and involved two different sorts of “Indians” but the same sort of British and French. During this period in India, while the Europeans fought one another and the British intrigued among themselves for personal advantage, Mughals killed Mughals, Rajputs killed Rajputs, Mughals killed Rajputs, Rajputs killed Mughals, British killed Mughals and Rajputs, Mughals and Rajputs killed British, and starvation and taxation kept killing the farmers and laborers of India as usual.

  At first a commercial rather than political or martial or missionary presence, the East India Company never lost that original priority; it was always
there for the cash, not for the glory. Its main trade was in cotton textiles, but it also bought silks, molasses, and saltpeter from Bengal, indigo from Gujarat, and much else.2 In addition to the private loot systematically grabbed by company officials, there were a number of grants, treaties, agreements, and understandings, which became “the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade, revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same time systematically violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament of England.”3 Those treaties and agreements, together with the company’s military and financial presence, allowed it to take part in the government and to make laws governing the people of India, even though it was a private trading company. When the East India Company declared bankruptcy (though all the members of the company were ostentatiously rich), the British government took over to protect its investment.

  BRITISH-MUGHAL ALLIANCES: NAWABS AND NABOBS

  The Urdu/Hindi word “nawab” designated both native deputy viceroys under the Mughals and independent rulers of Bengal, Oudh, and Arcot. The English called them nabobs (also spelled nawbob, nobob, nahab, and nobab). But then, confusingly, the English spelling (nabob) came to denote Englishmen who made fortunes working for the British East India Company and returned home to purchase seats in Parliament and retire to elegant country homes—or, finally, anyone of great wealth and/or power and/or prominence, just as the English word “mogul” (from “Mughal”) did. The whole lot of them, British and Mughal, were robber barons, all cut from the same (cotton) cloth. Debauched nawabs surrounded themselves with swarms of “eunuchs, courtesans, concubines and catamites,” while the nabobs were equally dissolute and in league with the nawabs.4 Some Hindus thought that the British and the Mughals, nawabs and nabobs, balanced (if they did not cancel out) each other and were equally alien to the rest of the people of India.

  The company had native troops to defend it, called sepoys (from sipahis, a Turkish word for “soldiers.” The rank-and-file sepoys, many of whom were left over from the Mughal armies, were soldiers for hire and had been, in their day, defenders of kings, hardened bandits, grooms for horses and camels, and skilled spies. Often sepoys of the Indian nawabs and maharajas fought against sepoys of the British nabobs; the old sepoy in Kipling’s novel Kim, written in 1901, was proud to fight for the British and against his own people, whom he regarded as traitors. In battle, sepoys were known to switch sides depending on who they thought was winning the battle, to make sure that they got a share of the spoils of war. Under these circumstances, allegiance was a very slippery thing indeed. The British rank-and-file soldiers usually came from the British or Irish working class and were predominantly unskilled laborers. Most of them were small by today’s standards (between five feet two inches and five feet five inches tall), dwarfed by the six-foot-tall sepoy grenadiers. Yet until 1857- 1858, though the ratio in the British army was nine Indian soldiers to one British soldier, the British kept the whip hand; they had the guns, as well as an equally powerful weapon, a highly efficient public relations machine that befogged both their own troops and the sepoys. Until 1857.

  THE FIRST WAVE: CONSERVATIVES AND ORIENTALISTS IN THE BRITISH CASTE SYSTEM

  Social theories of both race and class propped up the British. Often class trumped race. At a party in 1881 the Prince of Wales insisted that King Kalakaua of Hawaii should take precedence over the crown prince of Germany, his brother-in-law, and when his brother-in-law objected, the prince of Wales offered “the following pithy and trenchant justification: ‘Either the brute is a king, or he’s a common or garden nigger; and if the latter, what’s he doing here?’ ”5 Whatever their social origins in Britain, the British generally joined the upper classes when they entered India. They saw the native princes, not the Brahmins, at the top of the multistory Hindu hierarchy and generally treated them as social equals.6 Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” laid bare to the bone all the aristocratic pretensions of the British ruling elite in his unblinking portrait of two lawless scoundrels who came to India precisely in order to throw off the class-bound shackles of their old identity and to get rich, indeed to become kings and even, for a while, gods (to the point of one of them being crucified). The British adventurers in India snubbed everyone but the rajas, for they felt themselves to be rajas, and their political domain became known as the Raj; they called their public court and assembly, the setting for elaborate pomp and circumstance, a durbar, the word that the rajas had used for their own audiences, also known as darshan (the word for a glimpse of a god or a king). Yet it was all pomp and circumstance. Under colonial rule, kingship was moored no longer in power but in a royal ritual devoid of power, a “hollow crown,”7 and privilege was preserved primarily in pageantry.8

  The Hindu caste system—more precisely the class system within which the caste system was imperfectly assimilated, awkwardly interleaved—enabled the British to fit into Hinduism as one more Other, another Other. The sahibs (as the British were called and addressed: “sir”) belonged to the castes of horsemen who came to India throughout Indian history, beginning with the authors of the Rig Veda and continuing through the Kushanas and Scythians and the Mughals/Mongols. Along the lines of the process of assimilation within the caste system, called Sanskritization, this was an instance of Kshatriyazation, assimilation into the class of Kshatriyas, kings and warriors, a term originally applied to certain non-Hindu tribes that came to be regarded as Kshatriyas but later also to the British.

  Thus assimilated to the class of some Hindus (the rajas), the British tended to look upon their own people as members of a class so exalted above the Indian rank and file that friendly association with them was taboo.9 They supported caste in many ways, both because they unconsciously tended to adopt the ideas of social stratification of the people they were ruling and because the Indian caste system echoed their own subtle and deeply entrenched social hierarchy.10 The British therefore raised the caste consciousness of the Brahmin sepoys of the Bengal army, encouraging them to regard themselves as an elite and to become more particular about the preparation and eating of their food. Thus “notions of caste, which in India had traditionally been relatively fluid, underwent a process of ‘Sanskritization,’ as the sepoys came to understand such issues being central to their notions of self respect.”11

  Despite their assimilation to a Hindu class, the British tended to prefer the company of Muslims to Hindus for a number of reasons: Muslims were, like them, the rulers of India; they were better horsemen than the Hindus; Islam was a monotheism that revered the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament; and it was quite easy to convert to Islam, much easier than to convert to Hinduism. The native elites (nawabs) collaborated with the British residents (nabobs) so that the latter became part of the Mughal entrepreneurial class; in 1765, one of the last Mughals formally inducted Robert Clive, governor of Bengal from 1755 to 1760, into the Mughal hierarchy as diwan, or chancellor, for Bengal.12

  In the early years of the Raj, British employees of the John Company (as the East India Company was also called) went native in more intimate ways, hanging out in India, as the hippies were to do centuries later. This was the Lawrence of Arabia crowd, the White Mughals (as William Dalrymple calls them) who admired Indian culture in general and Muslim culture in particular. They were equal opportunity thieves, robbers but not racist robbers. Often they married native women—both Muslim and Hindu, both noble and working class—and treated them well, as legitimate wives, regarding their sons as their legitimate heirs and leaving their fortunes to the women and their children. The practice of keeping an Indian mistress was common; one in three wills from Bengal in 1780 to 1785 contains a bequest to Indian wives or companions or their natural children. And surely many more did this off the record. The young company officials had an after-dinner toast that took the traditional popular song “Alas and Alack-the-Day” and turned it into “A Lass and a Lakh [a hundred thousand rupees] a Day,” which expressed what
had brought most of them to India in the first place. Similarly, the practice of keeping an Indian mistress became so common that Urdu poets in Lucknow changed the old Hindustani romantic formula—“Muslim boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences”—to “English boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences.”13

  Native women met the British as equals on the royal level. One Maharashtrian leader, Malhar Rao Holkar, whose son and grandson had died, relied on his daughter-in-law, Ahalyabhai, during his lifetime, and after his death in 1766 she took over and ruled Malwa for thirty years of peace and prosperity. She was said to be “an avatar or Incarnation of the Divinity,” according to oral traditions collected by the British. She built forts and roads that kept the land secure, and she patronized temples and other religious establishments as far away as Varanasi and Dvaraka (in Gujarat). In 1772 she wrote a letter likening the British embrace to a bear hug: “Other beasts, like tigers, can be killed by might or contrivance, but to kill a bear it is very difficult. It will die only if you kill it straight in the face. Or else . . . the bear will kill its prey by tickling.” (Presumably, the “other beasts” were the Muslim enemies of the Maharashtrians; as in Mughal times, the Maharashtrians were major players, who controlled the most territory, revenue, and forces.14) Clearly Ahalyabhai had the British number.

  This first wave of British colonizers didn’t need to erect elaborate barriers to separate themselves from the people of India in order to preserve, or to construct, their identity. They knew who they were: Englishmen with a God-given right to rule. The scholars of this period, the first Orientalists, were genuinely curious about India and open to the possibility that its civilization might have something of value to teach them; they abetted the government indeed, but primarily in their attempts (misguided as some of those turned out to be) to govern India by its own traditional rules. The men of the East India Company in this period often romanticized India; they learned local languages and went native in various ways, adopting local dress (robes and turbans) and furnishing their houses with Indian fabrics and furniture. In matters of religion too, as we will see, the British were open-minded and fair at the start. This batch of British, typified by Warren Hastings (governor-general, 1773-1786), might be called conservative: Like the Mughals, they provided stable government and law and order, did not interfere with local customs and religions, and supported indigenous arts, education, and festivals.