Brian A.

Hatcher

R E M E M B E R I NG R A M MO H A N : A N E S S AY O N T H E ( R E - ) E M E RG E N C E O F MO D E R N H I N D U I S M

When do religious movements acquire their founders? It seems a straightforward enough question to ask. In the eld of religious studies, the teaching of religions in relation to their foundersnotably Laozi, Kongzi, Buddha, Moses, and Jesusis altogether commonplace. Indeed, the importance of such founders was underlined nearly a century ago by Max Weber, who dened the religious founder as a charismatic prophet who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment.1 Yet Weber understood that the charisma of the prophet was not sufcient in itself; it needed to evoke a response of trust among a group of followers.2 What is more, for a religious community to develop and persist over time,

I would like to express my thanks to Jack Hawley and Brian Pennington for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article; to Paul Courtright, both for taking an interest in this material and for calling attention to the utility of the concept of emergence in his keynote address at the 2005 Conference on the Study of Religion in India held at Albion College; and to April DeConick for sharing her knowledge of social memory studies. 1 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 46. This emphasis on founders is repeated in the phenomenology of religion; see Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 2:65054. For its more popular expression, see Clifford G. Hospital, Breakthrough: Insights of the Great Religious Discoverers (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985). 2 Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48 49.

2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2006/4601-0002$10.00

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Weber famously proposed that there would need to be routinization of prophetic charisma by disciples leading to stable forms of leadership.3 Although Webers model cast the prophet as the sole foundation upon which a religious movement is built, a recent anthology dedicated to revisiting the concept of the religious founder proposes adjusting this model. In it, Michael J. McClymond observes, Religious founders engender religious communities, but religious communities also engender founders. In this case there would be reciprocal causality rather than a one-way relationship of founder as cause to community as effect.4 Prophets do not drop into the world from above; they are situated in history. Likewise, their teachings are not created ex nihilo; if anything, they reveal the responsiveness of the founder to his followersand not infrequently the handiwork of later generations.5 We might even say that religious movements tend to obtain their founders retroactively. When we consider the creation of religious movements in a context like colonial South Asia, we must furthermore ponder the ways in which the entire process is colored or constrained by factors of colonial knowledge and power. Just as we acknowledge that communities have a hand in constructing their founders, today we also appreciate that scholars often have a hand in constructing the religious worlds they study. Indeed, one objection to Weber is that his theory itself enshrines a particular Western Protestant vision of religious experience.6 In an attempt to incorporate an awareness of the part played by native and nonnative agents (or we might say by insiders and outsiders) in the construction of religious traditions, Lionel Jensen recommends a method that emphasizes processes of what he calls reiterative invention.7 Jensen argues that Confucianism and its eponymous founder, Confucius (or Kongzi), have in fact been manufactured. By this he means they have been reinterpreted at crucial moments in history. At these moments, Confucius has been made to conform to the specic needs and desires that prevailed among a community of interpreters.8 As he points out, one such moment occurred during the sixteenth century, when one important
3 4

Ibid., 60. Michael J. McClymond, Prophet or Loss? Reassessing Max Webers Theory of Religious Leadership, in The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad as Religious Founders, ed. David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 616. 5 Ibid., 64955. 6 This is the substance of Richard S. Cohens response to McClymonds essay in Freedman and McClymond, The Rivers of Paradise, 66167. 7 See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 8 Ibid., 25. Emphasis is used in the original to relate the act of making to the polyvalent idiom of manufacturing.

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community of interpreters was the European Jesuits then active in China.9 Jensens approach to Kongzi and the Confucian tradition suggests a promising way to think about the manifold versions of Hinduism that have come into being in the past two hundred years (since the rst signicant incursion of European, largely British, colonial power into South Asia). On the one hand, we are accustomed to attributing the rise of modern Hinduism to the agency of a number of founding gures, men like Rammohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Swami Vivekananda, or Dayananda Sarasvati. On the other hand, it is now widely accepted that the reiterative imagining of modern Hinduism owes a great deal to the classicatory and disciplinary matrix of European knowledge.10 To say this is not to advocate a return to simplistic models of the European impact on South Asian religion, but rather to increase our awareness of the complexity of the intra- and intercultural processes that contributed to the emergence of modern Hinduism. If modern Hinduism reects this complicated process of reiteration and reformulation, then it becomes especially important that we think carefully about the role of those particular individuals thought of as founders. This essay takes up the man who routinely gures rst in our list of modern reformers, Rammohan Roy (17721833), founder of the Brahmo Samaj.11 While there are many manifestations of modern Hinduism, it seems the story always begins with Rammohan, who has been lauded as the Father and Patriarch of Modern India.12 As founder of the Brahmo Samaj, Rammohan has been hailed as the pioneer of all living advance, religious, social and educational in the Hindu community during the nineteenth century. 13 The question is, what does it mean to speak of Rammohan Roy as a founder? What is the origin of such a claim? When did Rammohan take on this status? And how might our answers to these questions help us think through the emergence of modern Hinduism more generally?
9 Jensen writes that the Jesuit invention . . . reveals the same mechanisms of canon construction and textual manipulation that were so critical to the ru tradition (ibid., 26). He also notes that Western and Chinese imaginings of ru are indeed indisociable (ibid., 27). 10 See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and the Mystic East (New York: Routledge, 1999). 11 Helpful background on Rammohan may be found in David Kopf s The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), and in Wilhelm Halbfasss India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 12 See Brajendranath Seal, Rammohun Roy: The Universal Man, reprinted in Rammohun Roy: The Man and His Work, Centenary Publicity Booklet (Calcutta: Satish Chandra Chakravarti, 1933), 96. 13 J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (1914; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), 29.

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When we nd Rammohan hailed as the Father and Patriarch of Modern India, we may rightly suspect that such a status emerges less from historical analysis than from the conuence of religious and patriotic fervor.14 How such a claim came to be made should interest us. What factors supported Rammohans elevation to the status of fatherhood? Pursuing the full development of what we might call the myth of paternity is beyond the scope and intent of this essay; what interests us here is the question of Rammohans status as founder of one particular modern Hindu religious organization, the Brahmo Samaj.15 Rather than illustrating the force of a singular creative personality, we can use the case of Rammohan Roy both to frame a more satisfying account of religious founders and, in the process, to get a better purchase on those processes that have contributed to the emergence of modern Hinduism in its multifarious forms. religion and the chain of memory If we are to speak of the emergence of modern Hinduism, we must come to terms with the rubric of modernity itself and, more precisely, the relationship between religion and modernity. The classical sociological understanding of religion in the modern world is one of decline rather than emergence. After Durkheim and Weber, what needed explaining was the progressive demise of religion or, at the very least, the curious case of its inexplicable survival. According to the secularization thesis, modernity would witness the inevitable withering away of religion. In a bureaucratic, technological, pluralistic world organized by instrumental rationality, appeals to the supernatural would be ruled out; legal, scientic, educational, and political discourse would be conducted on empirical and rational grounds alone.16
14 Rather than speaking of nationalism, patriotism seems the better word here, in light of the linkage of nation and paternity. For recent uses of patriotism in the context of Indian nationalism, see C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15 As with the Jesuits and Kongzi, the role of European observers in elevating Rammohan to fatherhood needs to be kept in view, from the status he earned in the eyes of his earliest Christian interlocutors and Unitarian supporters to his elevation by the likes of Max Mller to the status of the rst Indian practitioner of the comparative study of religion. Indeed, Mllers Biographical Essays (1883) was of immense importance for anointing several founders of modern Hinduism, including Rammohan, Keshub Chunder Sen, and Sri Ramakrishnaleading some to claim that Mller was himself in part responsible for Bengals so-called renaissance; see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Scribners, 1975), 38. 16 Weber spoke of the elimination of magic from the world (Entzauberung der Welt) in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1958), 105. Some recognized that the withdrawal of religion would not be total; see Bryan Wilson, Secularization and Its Discontents, in his Religion in Sociological Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 51.

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By the late twentieth century, scholars began to recognize that the concept of religion presupposed by the grand theorists of secularization harbored a normative judgment. It was not just that religion would disappear from public life; according to this view, religion should disappear. At the same time, it became all too clear that religion would not be going away. The rise of so-called fundamentalist forms of religious faith, the popularity of new religious movements (NRMs), the continued force of religion in political processes from the United States to Europe to South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, all gave ample reason for sociologists to rethink the secularization thesis.17 One problem with the secularization thesis was that it traded in rather neat dichotomies like faith/reason and tradition/modernity. With the rise of postmodern epistemologies and deconstructive modes of criticism, these cherished dichotomies came in for attack. What if traditions could be modern inventions?18 What if modernity could itself be seen as a kind of tradition, most particularly one shaped by the experience of western Europeans living in the wake of the Reformation and Enlightenment and reaching out aggressively to colonize the remainder of the globe? Without reviewing here all the ways in which this debate has played out in the elds of history, anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and religious studies, sufce it to say that returning to the problem of religion and modernity was inevitable. The logic of the tradition/modernity dichotomy seems to force certain intellectual moves when it comes to the study of Hinduism. We might presume, for instance, that we can identify a recognizable break with tradition. Identifying Rammoham as the father of modern Hindu reform is to see in him the marker of such a break. However, the counterpoint necessarily follows. Dont Rammohans endeavors build upon important elements of previous intellectual and religious life in South Asia? If so, one is compelled to conclude that no radical break took place.19 Yet another move might be to isolate the features of an authentic traditional Hinduism, thereby equipping the scholar to judge the continuity (or validity) of its modern forms. If pressed to its extreme, such an approach might nd modern Hinduism to be so new that it makes no sense

17 For an early critique of the air of inevitability surrounding the secularization thesis, see Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 18701930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 266. A signicant example of an attempt to revisit the problem may be found in Peter Berger, ed., Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). 18 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 19 See Sumit Sarkar, Rammohan Roy and the Break with the Past, in his Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985).

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to call it Hinduism.20 A further response might be simply to acknowledge that we have tried all these options and remain unsatised. One might conclude, as Partha Chatterjee once did after reviewing a set of essays on Rammohan, that crucial categories such as tradition or modernity can never be precisely dened in terms of a general theory of change in society.21 Is Chatterjees the nal word? One scholar who might disagree is Danile Hervieu-Lger, who has attempted to use the categories of tradition and modernity to arrive at a general theory of change, most notably in her book Religion as a Chain of Memory.22 Though working within the sociological tradition, Hervieu-Lger understands that what needs explaining about the modern world is not the demise of religion, but its transformation. The categories of tradition and modernity together capture the systole and diastole of such transformation. Hervieu-Lger views religion as a social and ideological mechanism for creating and sustaining both an individual and a communal sense of belonging. In short, religion is the mobilization of collective memory.23 The powerful hold of memory within a religious group is maintained by a groups awareness of itself as a lineage of belief.24 One belongs within a chain of memory, a liation of traditions that provide location and meaning. Put somewhat differently, a groups identity is predicated on the continued attempt to renew or revive memories of its origins.25 Hervieu-Lger underscores how the chain of memory experiences stresses and strains under conditions of modernity. She conceives of
20 For a critique of this approach to modern Hinduism, evident in the work of scholars like Paul Hacker and Agehananda Bharati, see Brian A. Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 21 Partha Chatterjee, Our Father, Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 44 (October 30, 1976): 1727. 22 Danile Hervieu-Lger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), trans. Simon Lee from the French original, La religion pour mmoire (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1993). While Hervieu-Lgers work is grounded in the study of religion in modern Europe, she nevertheless provides a useful conceptual tool for thinking about the creation of modern Hindu movements. 23 On collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F. Ditter and V. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), and Dominique MacNeill, Extending the Work of Halbwachs, Danile Hervieu-Lgers Analysis of Contemporary Religion, Durkheimian Studies 4 (1998): 7386. For a recent summary of theoretical concerns surrounding Halbwachss work, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1924. 24 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 12425. 25 See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4. As this reference suggests, Hervieu-Lgers work may be protably read alongside the growing eld of social memory studies. See Barbie Zelizer (Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 [1995]: 21439), who denes social memory as the shared dimension of remembering (214).

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modernity less as a period than as a set of processes that include the rise of the autonomous individual, the spread of bureaucratic rationality, and the shift from communal to societal systems. Such processes serve to undermine the plausibility structures of religion by challenging the hold of collective memory.26 As she puts it, the immediatism of modern worldviews based on functionality and consumption leads to an attenuating of inherited traditions. This is the problem of amnesia. At the same time, the fragmentation of memory in a pluralistic world opens up spaces of belief in which new visions of the future can be formulated.27 This is the utopian dimension of modernity.28 Secularization theory fails to account for the persistence of religion in the modern world because while it may highlight the decomposition of tradition, it neglects the recomposition of collective memory. While modernity may threaten the plausibility of received traditions, the opening up of new spaces for belief means that given the right measure of religious innovativeness, moderns are able to reinvent the chain.29 Religion survives by reinventing and restructuring itself. Rather than positing a collision between dynamic modernity and stagnant tradition, Hervieu-Lger nds tradition and modernity engaged in an ongoing dialectic of loss and renewal. Traditions are forgotten, but they are also reenvisioned. This helps to explain why modernity witnesses the eforescence of smaller, elective religious groups.30 And the ability of these new groups to persist depends upon their ability to identify reasons for believing in their permanence. Continuity of the group becomes a paramount concern, something that is often achieved by latching onto specic emblems selected from the repertoire of the so-called traditional religion. These emblems then become the building blocksor better, new linkswith which a group is able to forge its collective identity.31

26 Hervieu-Lger sees two broad tendencies at the root of the challenge: (1) the expansion and homogenization of memory, and (2) the fragmentation of memory (see Chain of Memory, 12829). Following Halbwachs, she connects these developments to the rise of a bourgeois social system. 27 See MacNeill, Extending the Work of Halbwachs, 80. 28 For a succinct statement of this dynamic, see Hervieu-Lgers introduction to Identits religieuses en Europe, ed. Grace Davie and Danile Hervieu-Lger (Paris: ditions la Dcouverte, 1996). 29 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 143. 30 One thinks of the so-called new religious movements that survive in relation to the larger society by creating alternate communal structures; see Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective, chap. 5. 31 For discussion of the role of symbolic emblems in French culture, see Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 199698).

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While Hervieu-Lger thus carries forward the standard view that modernity witnesses an increasingly contracted sphere for so-called organized religions (a process that is certainly borne out by statistics for religious belonging in present-day France, for instance), she simultaneously calls our attention to the efforts of any number of smaller religious groups to imagine for themselves new communities of belonging. The goal for any new religious group is to discover new reasons for belief in its own permanence, over and beyond the perils that threaten its existence . . . or beyond the atomization that constitutes a multiple threat to its own cohesion.32 What one believes in is the continuity of the group, a continuity to which the preservation of emblems carefully selected from the passing traditional religion may attest. rammohan the founder By calling attention to the way religious groups come to imagine themselves, Hervieu-Lgers model opens up some interesting perspectives on Rammohan Roy, the Brahmo Samaj, andby extensionother modernist Hindu movements. While Rammohans life and his contributions to the religious, political, and intellectual life of early colonial Bengal are well known, a brief summary will serve to raise the most important issues for consideration in the present context. Rammohan promoted a version of monotheism he hoped would restore the rational and moral basis of Hinduism; he translated the ancient Upanisads into Bengali and English; he publicly debated the truths of Hinduism and Christianity with a variety of interlocutors, Hindu and Christian; he supported the spread of English education in India; and he campaigned to suppress the practice of widow immolation, known to the British as suttee. But in the present context, Rammohans most relevant accomplishment was the founding of a society in 1828, the Brahmo Samaj, to foster his vision of Hindu monotheism. Though born a Brahmin, Rammohans spiritual development took him down a number of intellectual avenues. Early in life he is said to have studied in both Patna and Benares, centers for Arabic and Sanskrit learning, respectively. His rst published essay was a lengthy rationalistic appeal for monotheism, written in Persian, Tuhfat al-Muwahhidin (A present to the believers in one god).33 Much of his most mature work
32 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 162. Where Grace Davie has described the postreligious attitude in contemporary Britain as one of believing without belonging, HervieuLger speaks of belonging without believing (see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994]). 33 On Rammohans debt to Islamic thought, see Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, repr. ed. by D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1988), 32.

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would focus on mastering and translating Sanskrit texts on Vedanta from the Upanisads to the Brahma Sutras. In addition to his immersion in Indo-Persian and Vedantic learning, Rammohan also studied Tantra and had worked in close contact with the English collector, John Digby, for a dozen years in the outlying districts of Bengal. Thus, by the time he settled in Calcutta in 1815, he had amassed the kind of experience that would earn him acclaim as a polymath scholar and polemicist. After settling in Calcutta, Rammohan created one restorm after another, attacking both Christian Trinitarian doctrine and what he took to be the idolatry of Hindu religious life. Whether drawing upon Muslim mutazilite theology or Enlightenment ideals of reason, Rammohan was a quintessential rationalist. That his rationalist critique of religion could build upon Hindu and Muslim intellectual traditions suggests the degree to which his work challenges any neat dichotomy of tradition/modernity. Was he modernizing traditions? Was his modernity tradition-based? Was he a traditional modernizer or a modern traditionalist? These word games are by now either overworked or underwhelming; their rhetorical force depends upon the dichotomy they challenge while doing little to extend the analytic usefulness of either category.34 Here is one area in which we may benet from the work of Hervieu-Lger. Rammohans rationalist critique was at times Deistic in its tone (this is most noticeable in his English works) and at others it retained its indebtedness to sacred Hindu scripture (something made very clear in his Bengali writings). What was central to his vision was what he once referred to as a simple code of religion and morality.35 This simple code could be found at the heart of all religions, and Rammohan worked to explicate both its Christian and its Hindu articulations. The core of authentic religionwhich for Rammohan would need to be disentangled from the fanciful myths and idolatrous rites of his own daywas belief in one ultimate Being who is the animating and regulating principle of the whole collective body of the universe and who is the origin of all individual souls. All that was required to worship such a Being was compassion or benevolence towards each other.36
34 Early works challenging the dichotomy include Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and Amales Tripathi, Vidyasagar: The Traditional Modernizer (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1974). 35 See Rammohans introduction to Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness (1820), in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of Tuhfatul muwahhiddin (Allahabad: Panini Ofce, 1906), 485. 36 The Brahmunical Magazine, or the Missionary and the Brahmun. No. IV, in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 198. These words from 1823 emerge from a Hindu context, but may protably be compared to what Rammohan elsewhere says with regard to Christianity; see his Second Appeal to the Christian Public in Defence of The Precepts of Jesus, in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 566.

One Line Long

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This was the theological and moral bedrock upon which Rammohan established a new religious organization, the Brahmo Samaj, or the society of the worshippers of the absolute, that met for the rst time in north Calcutta on August 20, 1828 (6 Bhadra 1750 aka). At this point there was no organization, no membership, no creed.37 Those gathering with Rammohan were encouraged to know the Supreme God according to Rammohans reading of the Upanisads, which he referred to as the Vedant (i.e., Vedanta). Following the classical Hindu tradition, acquisition of such knowledge would require study, meditation, and diligent restraint of the passions. But Rammohan also insisted that everything done in this world should be done in a spirit of dedication to God.38 He was just as opposed to renunciatory forms of Hindu worship as he was to idolatry and polytheism. His ideal was the brahmanistha grhastha, the godly householder.39 On January 23, 1830 (11 Magh 1752 aka), meetings of the Brahmo Samaj were shifted to a new building on Chitpur Road in north Calcutta. This date marked a new level of organization and self-awareness for the group, as evinced by the publication of the Brahmo Trust Deed. This document testies to Rammohans desire to create a public form of worship open to all people without distinction and dedicated to worship of the Immutable Being who is Author and Preserver of the Universe.40 We shall see below that the 1830 date would assume great liturgical signicance in the later Brahmo movement. The year 1830 was also signicant insofar as it was in November of this year that Rammohan set off on a mission to England. There he had many supporters, chiey among the Unitarians, who saw in him a fellow rationalist and theist. While in England, Rammohan had an opportunity to deepen his Unitarian contacts while completing a mission on behalf of the Mughal emperor in Delhi, Akbar II. However, his visit ended in his untimely death in 1833, while staying with friends in Bristol. In most accounts of modern Hinduism, this sort of narrative would serve as justication enough for thinking of Rammohan as the founder of the Brahmo Samaj. But from the vantage point provided by Hervieu-Lger, it scarcely tells us anything at all. Most telling is the relative absence of reference to the group who constituted the early Brahmo community. The one thing we do note in this regard is the ongoing transformation of the
See Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, 34. See Dilipkumar Biswas, Ramamohaner dharmacinta, in Ramamohana Smarana, ed. Pulinbihari Sen et al. (Calcutta: Ramamohana Raya smrtiraksana samiti, 1989), 36869. 39 See Brian A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2016. 40 Quoting from the Trust Deed as cited in Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, 35. The editor of The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy tells us that though the Trust Deed was not composed by Rammohan, it was nevertheless inspired by him (213).
38 37

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group between 1828 and 1830. We might well ask if this is all there is to the story. the brAhmo samAj as elective fraternity In Rammohans voluntary religious association, the Brahmo Samaj, we have just the sort of elective fraternity about which Hervieu-Lger has written in her attempt to understand the ways religion transforms itself in the modern world. Most importantly, Hervieu-Lger remarks that such voluntary associations, constructed to reect the shared interests and experiences of a group of people, often move to create narratives of ancestry for themselves. These narratives stand in the place of the genealogical ties that had dened membership in the passing majority tradition (French Catholicism, for instance). Often the creation of such a narrative involves the group imagining itself as an ideal family, united around a father gure. In the rapidly changing modern societal system, these imagined genealogies provide just the kind of emotional stabilization and validation of the groups stability that sociologists have taken as evidence of religions persistent appeal.41 However, there is a seeming paradox here insofar as the modern domain of religious believing . . . has its source in the rationale of modernity.42 Unlike others, Hervieu-Lger does not take this paradox as proof that the persistence of religion reveals the limits of rationalization.43 Rather, she argues that the modern validation of individuality necessarily implies that individuals must construct their own worlds of meaning. But such meaning must be attested by others; it requires social conrmation. What paradox there is consists in the fact that individualism itself produces anti-individualist moments in which relationships of afnity are formed in order to conrm belief.44 Hervieu-Lger writes, In societies where there is no sense of permanence or certainty, the production of collective meaning and the social authentication of individual meaning are a matter for voluntary communities.45 To return to Rammohans world, we can note that early nineteenthcentury Calcutta witnessed the rapid emergence of any number of voluntary associations or elective fraternities. The earliest of these is usually

See Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 156. Ibid., 97. For an example of a scholar who does draw this conclusion, see Bryan Wilson, Secularization and Its Discontents, in his Religion in Sociological Perspective, esp. 5051. 44 Summarizing Hervieu-Lger, Grace Davie remarks that the paradox of modernity is that in its amnesiac forms it destroys the sense of religion, but in its utopian forms it fosters a sense of the religious; see Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31. 45 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 95.
42 43

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said to have been Rammohans Society of Friends (Atmiya Sabha), which he formed in 1815.46 Over the next three decades, a wide variety of other voluntary associations were formed in Calcutta: the Indian Agricultural and Horticultural Society (1820), the Gaudiya Samaj (1823), the Dharma Sabha (1830), the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge (SAGK, 1838), the Landholders Society (1838), and the Hindu Theophilanthropic Society (1843), to name but a few of the most prominent organizations in the rst few decades of the century.47 Interestingly enough, the origin stories of these societies do often turn upon the founding role of a leader, or father, to borrow HervieuLgers term. The Brahmo Samaj had Rammohan; the conservative Hindu organization known as the Dharma Sabha had Radhakant Deb; Henry Derozio is routinely viewed as the guiding light of the Young Bengal faction within the SAGK. Clustering around these fathers, members of such associations conrmed their shared sense of identity and memory. While each of these associations can be seen as a particular response to the fractured continuity of the collective memory, it is clearly not the case that all such associations were religions. Hervieu-Lger herself recognizes that something has to happen for any given elective fraternity to become a religious association. As she explains, this happens when a group nds . . . a representation of itself that can incorporate the idea of its own continuity beyond the immediate context that brought its members together.48 Having exited the collective memory of a particular religious tradition, members of new religious groups resocialize around their own localized traditions of memory. With the ongoing deregulation of authorized memory . . . [and] the burgeoning of elective fraternities, . . . [one witnesses] the pluralization . . . of forms in which these same fraternities can bring about . . . their own religious consolidation.49 If we take a moment to examine the Brahmo Samaj and its development during and after Rammohans life in these terms, we notice some interesting patterns. It goes without saying that during the early nineteenth century, the Hindu tradition in Bengal began to feel the full force of critiques
46 This was apparently little more than an informal gatheringSophia Dobson Collet calls it not quite publicfor conversation and debate (Life and Letters, 76). 47 It has been estimated that in the sixty years from the founding of the Atmiya Sabha to the founding of the Indian Association in 1876, at least 200 voluntary associations were formed in Calcutta; see Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (18151876) (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), 14. 48 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 152. She refers to Hegels claim that the early communities of Jesus disciples were elective fraternities rather than a religion since their fraternal love did not also contain a representation of their union. 49 Ibid., 156. A cognate approach, which demonstrates familiarity with Hervieu-Lgers arguments, may be found in Olivier Roys treatment of contemporary Islam; see Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).

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based on Enlightenment rationality. The combined forces of rationalism, historicism, and scientic empiricism all worked to threaten the collective chain of memory that constituted the broader web of Bengali Hindu tradition. At the same time, Christian missionaries mounted a sustained polemic against what they took to be the most egregious errors of Hinduism, namely, polytheism, idolatry, and mystical withdrawal. The classic example of a break with tradition during the early colonial period can be found in the Young Bengal group, those English-educated youth who adopted a stance of radical rejection of the collective tradition. Far more moderate was Rammohans exit from tradition, though in his creation of the Brahmo Samaj we notice the attempt to reestablish a set of traditions that could anchor identity and provide meaning. Rammohans strategy was to retrieve the Vedanta of the Upanisads from oblivion and to identify in it a religion that could both answer the challenges of modernity and provide new norms of collective identity. Toward this end he created the conditions for a small group to meet, discuss, and worship according to this Vedantic monotheism. It is telling that the decision to form the Brahmo Samaj seems to have grown quite directly out of a desire to ll what Hervieu-Lger might call the space for belief that was opened up by Rammohans decision to step away from both Hinduism and Christianity. Initially that space was lled by Unitarianism, but this was a tradition to which Rammohan and his associates could not fully commit. Instead, a contemporary account tells us that two of Rammohans closest associates, Candrasekhar Deb and Tarachand Chakravarti, suggested to him that rather than attending Unitarian services as they had been doing, they should establish their own place of worship analogous to what the Christians had.50 The initial success of Brahmoism could be ascribed, following Max Weber, to the charisma of Rammohan, who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment.51 And given all we know of Rammohans wide learning, polemical skills, and undoubted spiritual calling (to use another of Webers concepts), it is not hard to see the Brahmo Samaj as the direct expression of his vision. But as we have seen, Weber also spoke of the routinization of charisma that had to occur to guarantee the continued existence of a religious movement. The crisis brought about by the death of the founder can only be resolved

50 See Tattvabodhini Patrika 50 (1769 aka), 107; cf. Collet, Life and Letters, 220; and Sibnath Sastri, Ramtanu Lahidi o tatkalina Bangasamaja, repr. ed. (Calcutta: New Age Publications, 1983), 103. 51 Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 46.

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through the groups ability to maintain the permanence of his preaching and the congregations distribution of grace.52 The question to be asked is, do we see this process occurring after Rammohans departure for England in 1830 and his death there in 1833a mere ve years after the creation of the Brahmo Samaj? How did the movement fare in those subsequent years? Can we rightly speak of a movement at this point? Had the elective fraternity acquired in those early years the requisite sense of its own story, its own identity, to warrant calling it a religious association? The argument of this essay is that the Samaj had not by this time realized itself as a religious association, let alone a movement. The evidence indicates, in fact, that after Rammohans departure for England, the affairs of the Samaj suffered greatly. More importantly, as Benoy Ghosh once remarked, during the 1830s the Brahmo Samaj was little more than a group of people who gathered to worship God.53 Ghosh was implying that something else had to happen before it could become a religious organization, properly speaking (what he called, in Bengali, a dharmagosthi). He provides 1843 as the date for this transformation. We shall see presently what makes 1843 such a special year. For now, what is important is Ghoshs insight into the fact that the birth of the Brahmo Samaj as religious movement should perhaps not be dated to Rammohans founding act of 1828. While Ghosh offered no theoretical interpretation to make sense of his remark, the purpose of this article is to suggest that the creation of the Brahmo Samaj as a religious movement can be identied with the moment whenas Hervieu-Lgers theory would suggestthe members created a narrative about themselves that included reference to a founding gure. That gure was, of course, Rammohan Roy. the brAhmo samAj after rammohan In the wake of Rammohans departure and death, the energy and activities of the Brahmo Samaj were severely weakened. The death of the Founder was almost fatal to the infant society, remarked J. N. Farquhar in his inuential early study of the period.54 Attendance dwindled at its weekly
52 The relevant passage is, a religious community arises in connection with a prophetic movement as a result of routinization (Veralltglichung), i.e., as a result of the process whereby either the prophet himself or his disciples secure the permanence of his preaching and the congregations distribution of grace, hence insuring the economic existence of the enterprise and those who man it (ibid., 6061). 53 See Benoy Ghosh, Samayik-patre banglar samaj-citra, pt. 2 (Calcutta: Viksan, 1963), 1718. Compare J. N. Farquhars comment about the early Brahmo Samaj under Rammohan: There was no organization, no membership, no creed. It was merely a weekly meeting open to any who cared to attend (Modern Religious Movements in India, 34). 54 Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, 39.

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meetings. To those familiar with the association it must have seemed as if Rammohans vision and his Samaj would both soon fade from memory. Such might well have been the case, were it not for the dedicated work of Rammohans closest associates. None was more instrumental in keeping the Brahmo Samaj alive than Ramacandra Vidyavagia (17861845). As rst preceptor, or acarya, of the Samaj, Ramacandra had delivered the inaugural discourse before the Samaj in 1828. After Rammohans departure he faithfully presided over weekly meetings, continuing to deliver discourses on the Upanisadic theology rst enunciated by Rammohan. As one later Brahmo commented: Only the faithful Ram Chandra Vidyabagish remained steadfast; and for seven years he regularly and punctually conducted the weekly service, as directed by Rajah Ram Mohun Roy, often alone like the solitary watcher by the dim-burning pyre at the burningghat.55 We should note that the image evoked here is one of the death of a movement, rather than its birth. For the Brahmo Samaj to survive would clearly require the agency of men such as Ramacandra. Like Rammohan, Ramacandra was a Brahmin by birth. Unlike Rammohan, he had trained as a Sanskrit pandit.56 However, his world was drawn close to Rammohans in many ways, not least because Rammohan had studied under Ramacandras older brother, who had renounced worldly life and become a tantric ascetic known as Hariharananda Tirthasvami. It may even be that Rammohan and Ramacandra met one another through Hariharananda. Clearly the two formed a powerful intellectual friendship. Ramacandras mastery of Sanskrit literature was a valuable asset to Rammohan. In fact, Rammohan sent Ramacandra to study Vedanta, which he is said to have mastered in very little time.57 Sources indicate Rammohan also gave Ramacandra funds with which to open a Sanskrit school for teaching Vedanta. In some respects it is remarkable that a rationalist reformer like Rammohan could nd common cause with a custodian of Brahmanical tradition. But this should only serve to remind us how difcult it is to generalize about ideological orientations in colonial Calcutta. It is not that one man was more modern than the other; rather, both men worked creatively within a modern context to reinterpret the traditions most meaningful to them. Having said this, it should be noted that Calcutta society was at this time fractured by competing ideologiesreligious, social, economic and
55 Hem Chandra Sarkar, The Religion of the Brahmo Samaj, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: Classic, 1931), 5. 56 On the relationship between Rammohan and Ramacandra, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, chap. 8. 57 These facts are reported in a short life of Ramacandra published in Tattvabodhini Patrika, no. 21 (1 Vaiakha 1767 aka), 16567.

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political. We must attend to these fractures if we are to appreciate why the Brahmo Samaj went into decline following Rammohans death. The Samaj faced intellectual challenges on at least three fronts: (1) from Englisheducated Hindu youth, (2) from Christian missionaries, and (3) from advocates of existing forms of Hindu orthodoxy.58 The pressures of this pluralist ideological matrix help explain, in Hervieu-Lgers analysis, how collective memories were threatened and new spaces for belief were opened. Strident rationalists, like the English-educated youth of the Young Bengal faction, had no patience for religion. They were notorious in Calcuttan society for outing all religious orthodoxies.59 Their motto was, He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who does not is a slave.60 To the members of Young Bengal, even an indigenous religious movement such as the Brahmo Samaj would have appeared to be simply another form of religious sectarianism. Over against the enlightened rationalism of the college educated, there was the evangelical zeal of the Christian missionaries. No friends to Hindu custom or theology, the missionaries would have been just as impatient with Rammohans attempt to reform Hinduism. Not only had Rammohan dared to subject the Gospels to rational analysis, in the Brahmo Samaj he offered a monotheism devoid of both grace and atonement. To the missionary, what Rammohan offered was not simply heathen error, but worse, the means to be a theist without becoming a Christian. Thus the missionaries found themselves having to combat not just stereotypical notions of heathen idolatry, but also the revamped arguments of such modern Hindu theists. Finally, there were those Bengali Hindus who took offense at Rammohans critique of idolatry, his rejection of the myths and ceremonies associated with Puranic Hinduism, and his attempt to seek a ban on the ritual of sati, or widow immolation. Indeed, in their eyes Rammohan seemed to have mounted an assault on the entire mythic and ritual framework of Puranic Hinduism. Among these so-called conservative Hindus, Rammohan was truly persona non grata; he was openly scorned and vilied, especially in connection with his appeals to abolish sati.61

See Ghosh, Samayik-patre banglar samaj-citra, 2425. For reports of upper-caste Hindu members of Young Bengal buying meat kebabs from a Muslim vendor and eating them in plain view, see Sastri, Ramtanu Lahidi, 172. 60 Ramgopal Ghosh, cited in Susobhan Sarkar, Derozio and Young Bengal, in Studies in the Bengal Renaissance, ed. A. C. Gupta (Jadavpur: National Council of Education, 1958), 19. 61 I would like to thank Paul Courtright, who has studied this period and the sati controversy in particular, for suggesting to me how vilication of Rammohan could have worked to shape or even suppress public memory of him after his death. For further context, see Brian
59

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Clearly, after Rammohans death there would have been many who would have been happy to see the Brahmo Samaj fade into obscurity. Given the explosion of print journalism in Calcutta at this time, these contending groups had ample means to advance their ideological positions. It is against this backdrop that we should return to Hervieu-Lgers concept of amnesia. One corrosive effect of modernity is to break down collective memories, leading to a more pluralistic world of competing claims and social groups. In light of the ideological strains placed on the Samaj from the groups identied above, it is easy to see why the vitality of the Samaj diminished throughout the 1830s. Attendance at the Samaj fell off drastically. In such a climate, even if one were sympathetic to the goals of the Samaj, it would have been far easier simply to stay out of public view. As Amiya Kumar Sen has noted, many members of the Samaj at this time simply accepted its principles intellectually and did not follow them in their daily lives and activities.62 Sen also notes that what was lacking was the institutional means to counter the charges leveled at the Brahmo Samaj by each of these opposing constituencies. Most important, Sen observes, There was nothing in the Samaj itself to unite them into a community. Even the works of Raja Rammohan Roy became scarce and did not wield that inuence which they did when he was alive. There was thus a void in the social and religious thought in the country.63 It is precisely this sense of a void that corresponds to the kind of amnesia identied by Hervieu-Lger. If that is soand Sens remark about the scarcity of Rammohans work seems to support thisthen the solution would have to come through some attempt to remember Rammohan, to incorporate his story into the story of those who continued to call themselves Brahmos. The Brahmo Samaj needed a representation of itself that could incorporate the idea of its own continuity.64 brAhmoism without rammohan Ironically, the means to save the Brahmo Samaj came neither through aggressively recruiting new members nor through more active advocacy of the Samaj in print, but inadvertently by the creation of yet another voluntary association. This new association would take up Rammohans

K. Pennington, Constructing Colonial Dharma: A Chronicle of Emergent Hinduism, 1830 1831, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 3 (2001): 577603, as well as his Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 5. 62 Amiya Kumar Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1979), 12. 63 Ibid. 64 Hervieu-Lger, Chain of Memory, 152.

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cause, but it would do so under the terms of a new synthesis.65 The name of this new association was the Tattvabodhini Sabha, or the Society for the Propagation of Truth. It was established in 1839 under the leadership of Debendranath Tagore (18171905). The creation of the Tattvabodhini Sabha was to become, in retrospect, a dening moment in Brahmo history. It has claimed the attention of readers of Bengali literature for over a century and a half. In the simplest of terms it is a story about the meeting of two men, Rammohans old friend Ramacandra and Debendranaththe latter anxiously seeking God, the former faithfully tending to the legacy of Rammohan. Their encounter would not only mark an upswing in the fortunes of the Brahmo Samaj, it would also contribute signicantly to the areas of Bengali literature, social reform, and scientic learning. We can only summarize the story of the creation of the Sabha here.66 Debendranath was the eldest son of Dwarkanath Tagore, patriarch of the Tagores of Jorasanko, a family whose history is intimately bound to the history of the Brahmo movement in particular and the renaissance of Bengali culture more generally. Dwarkanath was a businessman with extensive contacts with European traders and a wide range of commercial interests.67 Dwarkanath had also been a great friend and patron of Rammohan. He was a trustee of the Brahmo Samaj and one of the few stalwarts who attended meetings of the Brahmo Samaj after Rammohans death. He paid the bills to keep the Samaj aoat during those lean years.68 When Debendranath was eighteen, his father went on a journey to north India. While he was away, Debendranaths grandmother died. Debendranath was close by throughout this period. Sitting near her on the night before her death, he felt his worldly concerns melt away, along with his desire for worldly power. In their place, he experienced a profound sense of bliss that led him to ask about the meaning and purpose behind life. Finding no earthly cause for such bliss, Debendranath concluded it was a

See Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance, 13. The best source on Debendranath is his autobiography, Maharsi Debendranath Thakurer atmajivani, repr. ed. by Arabinda Mitra and Aim Amed (Calcutta: Chariot International, 1980), trans. Satyendranath Tagore and Indira Devi as The Autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri, 1909). Compare the early account of the Sabha found in Raj Narain Boses discourse, Brahmadiger sadharana sabha, in Rajanarayana Basur vaktrta, pt. 1, 3rd rev. ed. (Calcutta: Valmiki, 1871), 91106. See also Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, 21314. 67 He has been called Indias rst modern-style entrepreneur (Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj, 162). On Dwarkanath, see Blair Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 68 See Sastri, Ramtanu Lahidi, 171. Dwarkanath does not appear to have done much publicly to promote the Samaj, perhaps out of fear of being associated too closely with Rammohan in the eyes of his conservative opponents in the Dharma Sabha.
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gift from God. Subsequently Debendranath fell into extended meditation on the religious life. Around this time he remembered the work of Rammohan Roy. Rammohans books on religion had been stored in his fathers library and his father had also arranged for Debendranath to attend the school Rammohan had established in north Calcutta. Debendranath even remembered playing in Rammohans garden as a boy, picking fruit and being pushed on the garden swing by the great reformer himself. Recalling that Rammohan did not take part in any image-worship or idolatry, Debendranath vowed to adopt the same practices.69 It was at this point that Debendranath chanced upon a stray page of Sanskrit text. Although he had studied Sanskrit, he could not decipher it. He sought help from the familys pandit. Recognizing it as the kind of wisdom popular among the Brahmos, the pandit referred Debendranath to Rammohans friend Ramacandra. When Ramacandra was shown the page, he was instantly able to identify the passage as the rst verse of the Ia Upanisad.70 He read the passage for Debendranath and explained its meaning. Of this moment, Debendranath would later write, nectar from paradise streamed down upon me.71 He had found the Brahmo God. Suddenly the position he held at this fathers bank meant nothing to him. Instead, Debendranath now saw a divine presence (and purpose) behind creation. And he saw a new purpose for his own life. Henceforth, he would work to translate the content of his awakening into a coherent spiritual message. Indeed, he spoke of a strong desire to spread the true religion.72 This desire was manifested in the creation of the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839. Debendranath described the goals of the Tattvabodhini Sabha: Its object was the diffusion of the deep truth of all our shastras and the knowledge of Brahma as inculcated in the Vedanta. It was the Upanishads that we considered to be the Vedanta,we did not place much reliance on the teachings of the Vedanta philosophy.73 At this point, Debendranath and the other members of the new Sabha were not thinking of themselves as Brahmos, nor do the goals of the Sabha yet make explicit reference to Rammohan. This, despite the fact that the knowledge of God, or brahmajana, sought by members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha was understood in precisely the terms Rammohan had understood itas a monistically
Tagore, Autobiography, 1314. There is reason to believe that the page Debendranath had found was in fact torn from an edition Rammohan had made of this Upanisad (see Maharsi Debendranath Thakurer atmajivani, 169). 71 Tagore, Autobiography, 15. 72 Ibid., 16. 73 Ibid., 18.
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oriented monotheism, to borrow Wilhelm Halbfasss characterization.74 The path described is one based on both reason and scripture. Worship was understood as knowledge and love of God coupled with the performance of those deeds that are pleasing to God. The absence of Rammohan from the picture at this point is made strikingly clear in a little-known set of discourses delivered by members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha in Calcutta in its inaugural year, 183940, and subsequently published as a small volume in 1841.75 In these discourses, a range of different members present their interpretations of what it means to live according to a rational, monotheistic theology of this-worldly worship that is accountable both to the astras and to reason. In their recourse to Upanishadic scriptural emblems (e.g., passages from the Katha and Mundaka Upanisads), in their attempt to balance the demands of reason and scripture (or astra), in their marvel at the purpose behind Gods creation, in their rejection of the renunciatory ethic, and in their call to an active expression of moral diligence and spiritual reection, these discourses remind us in concrete ways of the teachings of Rammohan. However, at no point in the published collection of these discourses is any mention made of the Brahmo Samaj or Rammohan Roy. This is Brahmoism without Rammohan. These discourses allow us a glimpse of yet another new elective fraternity formed in Calcutta, a group that gathered to discuss, ponder, and worship according to a particular vision of reasonable Hinduism. But if the Brahmo Samaj was at this time languishing with no active memory of Rammohan, this group also seemed to lack the dening characteristic of a religious fraternitythat is, a clear representation of themselves. They, too, lacked a collective memory that could, in Durkheims terms (which clearly underwrite Hervieu-Lgers analysis), renew the sentiment they had of themselves and their unity.76 If the Brahmos struggled to carry on Rammohans teachings in the absence of their founder, the Tattvabodhini Sabha appears to have adopted the teachings without any reference to the founder. In an interesting turn of events, the revival of the fortunes of the Brahmo Samajindeed its real constitution as a religious bodywould come only when the members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha remembered

See Halbfass, India and Europe, 205. Sabhyadiger vaktrta (Calcutta: Tattvabodhini Sabha, 1841). The book features twentyone discourses by a variety of different members. However, identifying specic authors is made difcult by the fact that the discourses are signed with what appears to be a system of initials for which there is no key. I address the question of authorship as well as the historical and theological context of the work in an annotated translation of Sabhyadiger vaktrta (currently in progress). 76 mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 420.
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the one man to whom their vision could be traced, Rammohan. As the discourses from 1839 40 reveal, this had not happened in the rst years of the Sabhas existence. But within a few short years this would change. remembering rammohan The discourses printed in Sabhyadiger vaktrta were published in 1841. The very next year, Debendranath attended a meeting of the Brahmo Samaj. He tells us that it was on this visit that he witnessed how far the Samaj had declined.77 In response, he pledged to revive the Brahmo Samaj by arranging for the Tattvabodhini Sabha to begin managing its affairs. Simultaneously, he mandated that the spiritual activities of the Sabha would henceforth be carried out by the Brahmo Samaj. In this moment, the Tattvabodhini group acquired a representation of themselves; they became Brahmos. One index of this transformation can be found if we examine changes that were made to the liturgical calendar. Up to this point, the Tattvabodhini Sabha had met weekly and monthly on Sundays; the discourses collected in Sabhyadiger vaktrta would have been delivered at these meetings. Annually the founding of the Sabha was celebrated on October 6 in memory of the meeting at which the group decided on its name and conrmed its mission (21 Avina in 1761 of the aka era, to be exact). 78 By contrast, the Brahmo Samaj was by this time meeting weekly on Wednesdays and monthly on Sundays. The anniversary of the Samaj was celebrated not on the date of its rst meeting in August of 1828, but on the date of the formal inauguration of the Samaj, namely, January 23, 1830 (11 Magha 1752 aka).79 Now, under Debendranaths new arrangement, the Tattvabodhini Sabha abandoned its own monthly Sunday meetings in order to meet during the Brahmos regular worship time. In a nal mark of the absorption of the Sabha into the Samaj, it was decided that henceforth anniversary meetings would be held on the date of January 23 (11 Magha). In time this date would acquire an aura of great sanctity, thanks in large part to the work of the Tattvabodhini group.80 In this way the dynamism of the Sabha began to contribute to the revitalization of Brahmo worship. Under Debendranath, the Brahmo Samaj would begin a new phase of self-denitionliturgical, theological, and social. The process of redenition was marked by two further developments during the following year, 1843.
See Maharsi Debendranath Thakurer atmajivani, 76. The title page of Sabhyadiger vaktrta reads (in Bengali): This society was established on Sunday, the 14th day of the dark fortnight, in the month of Avin, in the year 1761. 79 See Tattvabodhini Patrika, pt. 2, no. 9 (1 Vaiakha 1766 aka), 72. 80 One later Tattvabodhini author praised the date as a joyous holy day (anandajanaka pavitra divasa); see Tattvabodhini Patrika, pt. 1, no. 103 (1 Phalguna 1773 aka), 146.
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First, the Tattvabodhini Sabha launched a new Bengali periodical, the Tattvabodhini Patrika. As with the original Sabha, it was dedicated to the goal of propagating Vedanta. However, the Patrika also announced its commitment to republishing the writings of Rammohan Roy, which it noted had fallen into near obscurity since his death.81 In a second major development, four months after the publication of the Patrika, Debendranath joined twenty-one other members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha in taking formal initiation (diksa) into the Brahmo Samaj. The old Brahmo stalwart Ramacandra presided over the ceremony as acarya. As Debendranath later wrote: This was an unprecedented event in the annals of the Brahma-Samaj. Formerly there had existed the Brahma-Samaj only, now the Brahma Dharma came into existence.82 As this comment indicates, by this point Debendranath had come to see the Brahmo path as dharma, a code, a religion, a way of life. And as the explicit commitment to republishing the works of Rammohan suggests, this dharma was clearly traced to the founding efforts of Rammohan. Not surprisingly, this is the moment Benoy Ghosh had in mind when he commented on the transformation of the Brahmo Samaj in 1843 from a mere association into a religious organization (dharmagosthi). Like Ghosh, David Kopf also remarked that it may well be argued that the Brahmo Samaj as we have known it since began with the covenant ceremony in 1843 and not earlier. But while Kopf highlights the signicance of Debendranaths initiation for marking the beginnings of a distinctly new sense of Brahmo community, he focuses so closely on the leadership and initiative of Debendranath that he fails to give due weight to the groups simultaneous attempt to reconnect with Rammohan.83 However, if we follow Hervieu-Lgers analysis of how modern elective fraternities become enduring religious entities, we are able to see that this transformation in the identity and collective memory of the Sabha coincided with an explicit return to Rammohan. Preserving the memory and propagating the vision of the groups father now became the mission of the Sabha. Ironically, the decision made by the Tattvabodhini group to embrace Rammohan and the Brahmo path would also mark the beginning of the end of the Sabha. While the Sabha continued to meet independently until 1859, it was eventually dissolved, its identity and its mission by then synonymous with the Brahmo movement. It is as if the followers of Debendranath had originally been moved by a vision, but could not conceptualize themselves as standing in a tradition.
81 82

See Tattvabodhini Patrika, no. 1 (1 Bhadra 1765 aka), 1. Quoted in Frans L. Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj (18601884) (Leuven: Catholic University, 1988), 34. 83 See Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj, 163.

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Living as they did at the end of the 1830s, a turbulent decade during which contests over religion, culture, and politics had driven Rammohan and the Brahmo Samaj underground, the members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha suffered from a kind of amnesia. The discourses of 1839 40 reveal them to be proponents of Brahmo thought, but the absence of Rammohan from those discourses suggests the degree to which the message had oated free of any collective memory. In order to understand themselves, the Tattvabodhini group needed to remember Rammohan. They needed to reincorporate him within their story. Clearly, in this case remembering is not a matter of recall, but a selection and reorganization of traditions so that the present can be better understood in light of its past and a sense of continuity between the present and the past is achieved.84 Remembering Rammohan required a critical resolution such as that taken by Debendranath in merging the interests of the two groups. This resolution was then conrmed in the new rites of commemoration established when Debendranath highlighted the Brahmo anniversary date. We might say that by 1843 the Sabha found itself facing a memory crisis, the resolution of which required these new ritual expressions.85 These rites and the memory they expressed are thus evidence of a major transformation in the groups self-understanding. Once the Tattvabodhini group began to think of themselves as Brahmos carrying on the work of Rammohan, the integrity and plausibility of their religious movement was secured. At this point, members began to say explicitly, as they did in an English-language proclamation from 1844, We follow the teachings of Rammohan Roy.86 Rammohan could now clearly be called a founder.87 A report for the year 1843 44, composed in English and published in the Tattvabodhini Patrika, shows the Sabha in the process of rewriting the story of their establishment to include explicit mention of their newly remembered founder: The TUTTUVOADHINEE SUBHA was established . . . by a select party of friends, who believed in god as the One Unknown True Being, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the Universe,. . . The avowed object of the members was to sustain the labours of the late
84 April DeConick, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas (New York: Continuum, 2005), 12. 85 See R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 86 Quoting from an English-language statement of beliefs found in Tattvabodhini Patrika, pt. 2, no. 16 (1 Agrahayana, 1766 aka), 12527. Incidentally, this may help us understand why certain prominent members of the Sabha, notably, Ivaracandra Vidyasagara, chose to dissociate themselves from the group. While membership initially demanded little or no religious commitment, this would have changed once the Sabha became overtly Brahmo. On Vidyasagaras involvement with the Sabha, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, chap. 9. 87 See Tattvabodhini Patrika, no. 9 (1 Vaiakha 1766 aka), 66, where Rammohan is referred to as the sthapanakarta, or founder of the Brahmo Samaj.

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Rajah Rammohun Roy. However, the conclusion of the report makes it clear not only that there had been a hiatus in the collective memory brought on by Rammohans departure and death, but also that the revitalization of the Brahmo movement was dependent upon the work of the Sabha:
The members are fully aware of the extent, to which the cause of religion was carried during the time of the celebrated Rammohun Roy. But it is no less a fact that, in his lamentable demise, it received a shock from which it was feared it could hardly have recovered. The exertions of the Tuttuvoadhinee Society, however, have imparted renewed energies to the cause. They have led a large number of the educated and respectable members of society, to appreciate the knowledge of God. The meetings of the Braumhu Sumauj are now attended by overowing congregations, and religious discussion are extensively maintained in Native society.88

Further evidence of the elevation of Rammohan to the status of founder is given in a passage from an annual report of the Sabha for 1846, which describes Rammohan as having descended (avatirna, semantically akin to the concept of avatara) into Bengal to establish the Brahmo Samaj.89 This is the background against which we should also read an Englishlanguage passage written by Debendranath in 1846 in which he outlines the moral and theological tenets of his new dharma. While Rammohan is not explicitly invoked, the concept of the godly householder (brahmanistha grhastha)to which we have seen Rammohan gave pride of placeis clearly emphasized: As spiritual worshippers of our All-Benevolent Legislator and followers of the Vedantof Ooponeshud, . . . we are Bhrummunistha Grihustha, or monotheistic householders. . . . The object of our humble exertions is not merely a negative reformation in the religious institutions of our countrymen, but a positive one too,not merely the overthrow of the present systems, but the substitution in their place of more rational and proper ones.90 Clearly Rammohans Brahmo ideals provided the Tattvabodhini Sabha with the means to ratify their own identity as a movement. This rearticulation of the groups self-understanding was made clear at a meeting held

88 See Report of the Tuttuvoadhinee Subha, 1843 44, Tattvabodhini Patrika, no. 13 (1 Bhadra 1766), 103 4. 89 1768 aker Samvatsarika aya vyaya sthitir nirupana pustaka (Calcutta: Tattvabodhini Sabha, 1846), 12. Interestingly, the rst biography of Rammohan appeared around the same time. Writing in the Calcutta Review for December 1845, Kishorychand Mitra cast Rammohan in the role of cultural progenitor, remarking that Rammohan was evidently the rst who consecrated, so to speak, the Bengali language. See J. K. Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and Progressive Movements in India (1941; repr., Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1983), 279. 90 Tattvabodhini Patrika, pt. 3, no. 40 (1 Agrahayana 1768 aka), 382.

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on May 28, 1847. Hitherto the Tattvabodhini Sabha had dened its goal as the propagation of the true religion as taught by Vedanta (vedanta pratipadya satyadharma). At the May 1847 meeting it was resolved to formally replace this language with the explicit rubric of brahmadharma; the Sabha would now propagate the Brahmo religion of Rammohan.91 Years later, in 1864, Debendranath gave a Bengali address in which he looked back over the previous twenty-ve years of the Brahmo Samaj. In that address, Debendranath clearly identied Rammohan as the founding father of the movement, referring to him as the countrys rst friend (deer prathama bandhu). 92 Indeed, Debendranath crafted a virtual creation myth that depicts Rammohan appearing in the midst of darkness and lethargy to plant the seeds of monotheistic worship. In this evocation of Rammohan as pioneer, father, and founding guru, Debendranath offered the Brahmo Samaj a representation of itself as an ongoing lineage of belief traced to a founder whose memory now served to unite them as a religious association. And, as Debendranath remarked toward the close of his address, it was not as if he and Rammohan had different visions; their goals were one and the same.93 What is equally striking about this address is that while it takes us back to the time of Rammohan and his founding of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, if read carefully, it also becomes clear that the scope of this twentyve-year retrospective really only takes the reader back to 1839, the year the Tattvabodhini Sabha was founded. We are thus led to see in rather graphic terms the very time lagthe lapse of memory, if you will between Rammohans creative action and the birth of the organization that was to revive his vision. Of course, this was not the end of the process. As J. N. Farquhar remarked laconically, there were difculties.94 The pressures of colonial modernity would continue to threaten the plausibility structures that supported the Brahmo movement. In the decades after Debendranaths adoption of the Brahmo faith, it was repeatedly forced to review and revise its store of memories. Space permitting, one could go on to explore the way the movement struggled in the coming years with such issues as the proper weight that should be accorded to scripture versus reason, as well as with the authority of personal intuition. At critical junctures new
91 See Dilipkumar Bivas, Tattvabodhini Sabha o Debendranath Thakur, Itihasa 5, no. 1 (1954): 47. The textual expression of this new identity would soon follow in the form of Debendranaths new Brahmo scripture, entitled simply Brahmo Dharmah (Calcutta, 1850). 92 Brahmo Samajer pacavimati vatsarer pariksita vrttanta (1864; repr., Calcutta: Sadharan Brahma Samaj, 1957), 2. 93 Ibid., 35. 94 Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, 40.

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developments were accommodated to new memories. What is more, in time the creative agency of other father gures would need to be invoked to integrate and commemorate the evolving sense of group continuity. In time Debendranath himself would become one such father, as would Keshub Chunder Sen (183884) later still, when he founded the New Dispensation (nava vidhana) in 1879.95 In fact, Keshubs views on Rammohan from the mid-1860s are particularly interesting. While he recognized Rammohan as the great man who brought his fellow citizens together to worship the One God, Keshub did not credit Rammohan with founding a religious movement. His views in this respect seem to anticipate Benoy Ghoshs observation about the early Samaj. As one scholar has remarked, Keshab especially emphasized that Roy did not found the Brahmo community of the decades to come, emphasizing only that he created a place and reason for people to worship.96 At this point, Keshub was clearly less interested in historical observation than in the ongoing validation of the movement, its memories, and its leaders. Chief among his concerns around this time was the question of leadership. Who would be granted creative agency? Even as he broke with Debendranath to form the Brahmo Samaj of India, Keshub could praise the role of his former patron and spiritual mentor, Debendranath: When the patriotic, virtuous, great-souled Raja Ram Mohun Roy established a public place for the holy worship of God in Bengal, the true welfare of the country began. . . . But that great man being within a short time removed from this world, the light of Divine worship kindled by him came very nearly to be extinct.97 Referring to Debendranath, Keshub went on to say, God raised you, and placed in your hands the charge of the spiritual advancement of the country. . . . Thus have you generally served the Brahma community after the ideals of your own heart, but you have specially beneted a few among us whom you have treated as affectionately as your children. These have felt the deep nobleness of your character, and elevated by your precept, example, and holy companionship, reverence you as their father.98 Keshubs break with Debendranath and his subsequent move to form the New Dispensation are striking illustrations of the very uid process that was the construction of Brahmo religious identity throughout the
95 In Debendranaths case, the date of his formal adoption of the Brahmo path (7 Pousa) would in time become another important liturgical date for later Brahmos. 96 Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj, 30, referring to Keshubs remarks in the Indian Mirror (January 1, 1865). 97 Life and Works of Brahmananda Keshav, 2nd ed., compiled by Prem Sundar Basu (Calcutta: Navavidhan Publication Committee, 1940), 12627. 98 Ibid., 12728.

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nineteenth century. Part of that process, as Hervieu-Lger makes us aware, was the imagining of chains of memory and afliation, forged in relation to stories of founders, and uniting all those who claimed to participate in the movement. If hitherto it has been customary to tell the story of the Brahmo Samaj as a narrative of persistent tension and schism, perhaps Hervieu-Lger provides us with a different theoretical lens through which to view this history. conclusion Who, then, created the Brahmo movement? Was it Rammohan, or was it the Tattvabodhini Sabha under Debendranath? Obviously there would have been no Brahmo Samajand most likely no Tattvabodhini Sabha without Rammohan. One could indeed argue that Debendranath would not have undergone his spiritual awakening without Rammohan, since that awakening was precipitated by a reading of Rammohans beloved Ia Upanisad as mediated by Ramacandra Vidyavagia. And yet would Rammohan have become Rammohan Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj, without Debendranath? That is, how much depended on those crucial acts of collective remembrance sparked by Debendranath and members of the Tattvabodhini Sabha?99 We began this essay by asking how religions acquire their founders. As we anticipated then, and as I have shown, this apparently unambiguous question can be rather difcult to answer. Great individuals may create communities, but as the case of Rammohan and the Brahmo Samaj demonstrates, communities also create their founders. Weber told us that founders are prophet gures.100 He distinguished between renewers and founders, on the one hand, and reformers on the other. However, rather than assigning such labels to religious leaders based on what we take to be their inherent qualities (the ideal type), it may be more useful to think of a leaders status in the eyes of the communities he or she helped to establish. Perhaps it might even help to see founder as something of an emic category that points primarily to a communitys memory of its leaders creative agency. By contrast, reformer could perhaps nd better use as an etic term, one chosen to highlight the historicity of a particular leaders activities. Where Weber forces us to decide whether Rammohan was a founder or a reformer based on our assessment of his prophetic agency, this article explores the ways in which one individuals reformist activity
99 It is worth noting that the Trust Deed of the Brahmo Samaj, the document that appears to enshrine the founders vision, was rst published in the Tattvabodhini Patrika in 1850; see The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 213. 100 See Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 54.

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may be remembered as the work of a communitys founder.101 Not insignicantly, using the categories of reformer and founder in this fashion also provides us with a more nuanced way to handle the tradition/modernity dichotomy. As an emic category, founder carries echoes of rupture and novelty; as an etic category, reformer reminds us that communities emerge from particular historical processesprocesses we may understand as a series of tradition-making and tradition-breaking events. In this respect, our consideration of founders benets from attention to the work of Hervieu-Lger, who calls attention to the dynamics of memory and community. Hervieu-Lger also helps us rethink the problem of religion and modernity. She moves us gently away from either functionalist views that fail to appreciate religions resilience under the conditions of modernity or overly simplistic substantive views that speak of the quest for meaning but cannot articulate the active, processual, and communal quality of the quest. Hervieu-Lger allows us to see that modernity may both destroy forms of religious faith and open up new spaces for belief. Likewise, tradition may work to restrict religious growth, but it may also provide the very mechanism to ensure it. All of this puts us in a position to contemplate the vexing problem of modern Hinduism itself. Does it exist? Does it not? Was it created, invented, or constructed? If so, when, and by whom? Before the rise of postcolonial studies no one really thought to raise such questions; today they wont seem to go away.102 How might our consideration of Rammohan and the Brahmo Samaj assist us in tackling this issue? In some ways the question, Is there such a thing as modern Hinduism? operates like an academic koan. Like Joshus mu, it seems to hold out the reward of deepened insight while nevertheless denying that such insight will come from a denite answer. Deny the existence of modern Hinduism and invite immediate rebuttal in the form of lists of modern reformers and contemporary movements, from Rammohan Roy to Sai Baba. Assent
101 For a Weberian approach to Rammohans charisma, see David Kopf, Rammohun Roy and the Bengal Renaissance: An Historiographical Essay, in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. V. C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), esp. 22; cf. his earlier essay, The Brahmo Samaj Intelligentsia and the Bengal Renaissance: A Study of Revitalization and Modernization in Nineteenth Century Bengal, in Transition in South Asia: Problems of Modernization, ed. R. I. Crane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970), 7 48. 102 Recent literature on this topic is extensive. Inuential studies include David N. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism? Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 63059; Brian K. Smith, Questioning Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions of Hinduism, International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 3 (1998): 31339; Wendy Doniger, Hinduism by Any Other Name, Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 35 41; John Stratton Hawley, Naming Hinduism, Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 3034; Robert Frykenberg, The Emergence of Modern Hinduism as a Concept and as an Institution, in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 29 49.

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to the existence of modern Hinduism and risk attack from those who would deconstruct modern or Hinduism or both. But spend too much time looking at the question, and nd yourself ridiculed for focusing on the nger pointing at the moon rather than on the moon itself (which could be another way of saying, too much theory). Perhaps, then, if the question is a koan, the most satisfactory answer is both yes and no. This seems to be the solution promoted by Brian Pennington, though absent any reference to koans. According to Pennington, it seems unnecessarily fussy to argue that modern Hinduism does not somehow show the effects of developments taking place during the colonial period. However, Pennington also rejects the utter discontinuity with the past that seems to follow from a strict constructionist reading of colonial history. 103 As Pennington suggests, while it is entirely reasonable to assert that such a thing as modern Hinduism does exist, it is also clear that speaking this way about Hinduism can be misleading. He reminds us that theories should seek both to clarify things and to problematize them; when we err too far in one direction, we run into problems.104 The present attempt to reconsider Rammohans status as a founder of modern Hinduism, adopting as it does a processual view of tradition and modernity, suggests that one way to see modern Hinduism is as a chain of memory-events, an ongoing, multifarious process of destruction and creation, forgetting and remembering, rejection and selection.105 If we have difculty pinning down the essence of modern Hinduism this is surely because it has taken many forms, just as the Brahmo Samaj itself was one thing when rst convened under Rammohan and another when subsequently remembered and reconstituted by Debendranath (not to mention Keshub). Hervieu-Lgers work suggests that when the corrosive effects of modernity open up new spaces of belief, individuals invariably move to occupy those spaces. At the same time, they reach back to retrieve memories of signicant individuals, events, emblems, and other sources around which to begin telling their story. Sometimes those spaces of belief may even open up in the midst of recently congured groups, leading as we have seen in the history of the Brahmo Samaj, to further iterations and manifestations of the original movement. The South Asian contextand the Hindu tradition aloneoffers a rich range of philosophies, soteriologies, and forms of practice from which to cobble together new patterns of religiosity. There already is, in HervieuLgers terms, a lot of space for belief. Add to this the catalyzing effect
103 104

See Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? 17071. Ibid., 17475. 105 On the process of selection involved in the poesis of religious creation, see Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse, chap. 2.

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of European modernity and colonial agency in the realms of education, theology, and Orientalist scholarship and the context becomes highly conducive to both the emergence and the reconguring of any number of modern Hinduisms. A mere sampling would include modernist movements like the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Parthana Samaj, and Ramakrishna Mission; neodevotionalist movements like the Radhasoamis, Brahmakumaris, and Swami Narayanis; any number of associations dedicated to preserving the Sanatana Dharma (or eternal religion); and a variety of lesser-known movements of varying durability and scope, such as the Kartabhajas and recent variants of Baul spirituality.106 Yes, modern Hinduism exists, but it exists in many forms. If we struggle to pin down what Hinduism is, it is not because it is an articial construct, but because under the conditions of modernity it has almost ceaselessly gone about regenerating itself, whether by splitting up, mutating, or giving birth to new forms. And sometimes, in certain places and for certain reasons, it has died out, whether by being forgotten, denied, or co-opted.107 We no more need to deny the existence of modern Hinduism than we need to look for the precise moment when it was created. The more interesting question is to ask what we might mean when we use a word like creation. Yes, modern Hinduism was created. No, it was not created all at once, by some singular creative agency, in one bold stroke, or in an abrupt rupture with past traditions. While members of religious movements and patriotseven members of academic disciplineslike to speak of their founders, we need to be careful not to confuse creation myths with historical explanations. Here the Brahmo Samaj provides a valuable cautionary note insofar as it has been tempting for some to see in the Brahmo Samaj the paradigmatic example of modern Hinduism.108 To read the story of modern Hinduism as the story of the Brahmo Samaj is not merely to privilege one kind of Hinduism at the expense of
106 On the Kartabhajas, see Hugh B. Urban, Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The reinvention of the Bauls in modern Bengal suggests the same process of reiterative invention we have been reviewing here; see Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 107 This has been the fate of the Brahmo Samaj. One of its last great proponents was the nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who assumed leadership of the Adi Brahmo Samaj in 1911. Ironically, Rabindranath was so successful in articulating a t between the modern Bengali identity and the ideals of Brahmoism (rationalism, meliorism, humanism, universalism) that in a sense Brahmoism was itself diffused into the social and intellectual values of elite Bengalis; for more, see Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj, chap. 11. 108 On the tendency to take the history of the Brahmo Samaj as shorthand for the history of the so-called Bengali Renaissance, see Brian A. Hatcher, Great Men Waking: Paradigms in the Historiography of the Bengal Renaissance, in Bengal: Rethinking History. Essays in Historiography, ed. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 13563.

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numerous others; more importantly, if our argument is correct, it is to make the fundamental error of thinking that the Brahmo Samaj itself can be viewed as having emerged once for all time. If the Brahmo Samaj is to be taken as paradigmatic, it should be taken to represent only the kinds of processes that have given (and continue to give) rise to various forms of modern Hinduism. Needless to say, these processes could be illustrated by examining other modern movements. The goal, therefore, in thinking through the origin and nature of modern Hinduism is to look for evidence of its continual emergence as a process of reiterative imagining. When we do this, we may be better able to appreciate all the times and places it (re-)emerges. Illinois Wesleyan University