Abstract
Rammohun’s life can be read as an exemplary encounter of the East with the West. As one of the progenitors of Indian modernity, Rammohun helps us construct a genealogy for the present besides helping predict a course for the future. His life also provides us the wherewithal to retrieve a trajectory of rationality from our recent history, helping us to reinforce those aspects of India’s past that are imperative to the construction of a modern state and civil society. Reconstituting recent Indian intellectual history thus, we might add our efforts to the project of svaraj or the decolonization of the Indian mind. Examining Rammohun’s encounter with Christian missionaries and his views on the question of the education of Indians, this chapter argues that his was a kind of “right” response to the power of the west. It is “right” because it shows a way for the powerless to cope with the powerful without loss of dignity or self-respect. Rammohun’s response was “right” also because it was framed in terms neither of denial nor capitulation, neither yielding to the West nor rejecting it. Instead, his was the way of the comprehension of the Other and of responding from one’s strength rather than from insecurity. The way of comprehension consists in using knowledge to counter power. Furthermore, Rammohun’s response foreshadows and points to the Indian consensus of how to deal with the West, a consensus which Mahatma Gandhi was instrumental in consolidating. Rammohun’s life proves that within every colonized people is someone who can embody the strength of its indigenous culture and thus resist the coloniser from an alternate centre, a centre that is not itself already co-opted. It proves, moreover, that whoever dismantles the false logic of colonialism belongs not to one nation or people, but to the human race. The chapter is also about disciplinarity and boundaries, questioning the methodological scienticism of a certain kind of historiography and arguing in favour of the heuristic value of stories as not inferior to that of histories.
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Notes
- 1.
In a sense, this is how Rabindranath Tagore saw him. Gandhi, in contrast, did not consider Rammohun’s role as that significant. Comparing him with Chaitanya, Gandhi felt that Rammohun’s modernity was not as consequential as it was made out to be. See footnote 18 for a more detailed analysis.
- 2.
My early work on Rammohun was presented at the Conference on the Nineteenth Century, organized by Alok Bhalla at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, from 10–12 December, 1987.
- 3.
Svaraj at its simplest means “self-rule.” But to Gandhi, who wrote his classic denunciation of colonialism and modernity, Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 1999), it was nothing short of a total plan to transform both self and society. I have written extensively about the idea of svaraj not only in Decolonization and Development: Hind Svaraj Revisioned but also in Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India.
- 4.
The University of Chicago library lists almost 100 works on him in English and Bangla; the total number published is probably more. In some of the Bangla works he is called “Mahatma” (great soul) and “Rishi” (great seer).
- 5.
The secondary literature on Rammohun Roy is extensive. Kotnala (1975), for instance, lists 73 books in his “Select Bibliography,” 219–222. For the biographical and factual details in the chapter I have relied on Carpenter, Chatterjee, Collet, Crawford, Joshi, Kotnala, Majumdar, Nag, Sen, and Tagore (see Works Cited). S. Cromwell Crawford’s Ram Mohan Roy: His Era and Ethics (1984) has been particularly helpful in the writing of the first section of this chapter. Since then, only a couple of significant titles have been published including Noel A. Salmond’s and Lynn Zastoupil’s.
- 6.
Saraswati is also the Goddess of knowledge and wisdom; the symbolism is thus unmistakable.
- 7.
- 8.
See, for instance, his Preface to Ramabai Ranade’s biography of her husband translated as Ranade: His Wife’s Reminiscences (1963, 9–11).
- 9.
Franz Fanon, for instance, has spoken eloquently about the adverse psychological effects of colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1976); see for instance, Ch. 5, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” 200–250.
- 10.
For the close resemblance between histories and stories, see Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse (1978): “the techniques or strategies that [historians and imaginative writers] use in the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same, however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional, level” (121) or Wallace Martin’s Recent Theories of Narrative (1986): “at present we have no standards or even suggestions for determining how the connections between events in fictional narratives might differ from those in history” (73). On how stories shape the way we see the world, we might cite Native American Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories (2003).
- 11.
- 12.
If the remarkable but not well-studied history of Anglo-Scottish Calvinism is to be traced, then Carey was probably influenced by the American Puritan revivalist, preacher, and theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), who made it his life’s mission to take Christianity to the “Indians” in North America; Carey extended that mission to the “real” Indians in India. Edwards’ revivalism, an attempt to temper the fervour, some might say the fanaticism, of Calvinism with Enlightenment ideals, was extremely influential during his times.
- 13.
See for instance Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1600–1880 (1984) which is one of the many books that documents how important the “discovery” of Sanskrit knowledge systems was to Europe’s own development. It is fairly clear, for instance, that the discipline of philology, which later gave rise to modern linguistics, was born out of the comparative linguistics that pioneers like Sir William Jones initiated in India in the late eighteenth century.
- 14.
It was, in other words, not merely a “mask of conquest” as Viswanathan (1989) in her well-known Saidian account contends.
- 15.
Gandhi gave a talk at Cuttack, Orissa, on 24 March 1921, a report of which is available in volume 22 of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999). During the Question and Answer session that followed, he criticized English education for enslaving Indians: “The present system enslaves us without allowing a discriminating use of English literature” (1999, Volume 22, 462). He clarified, “I don’t want to destroy the English language but read English as an Indian nationalist would do” (ibid). He also called Rammohun a “pigmy” in comparison to “Chaitanya, Sankar, Kabir and Nanak” (ibid). Earlier he called himself a pigmy too: “I am a miserable pigmy” (ibid). A year later, Gandhi received a letter asking him to clarify his views on English education. Writing in Young India of 27 April 1921, Gandhi repeated his criticism of English education: “It was conceived and born in error, for the English rulers honestly believed the indigenous system to be worse than useless” (1999, Volume 23: 93). He also added that “Chaitanya, Kabir, Nanak, Guru Govindsingh [sic], Shivaji, and Pratap were greater men than Ram Mohan Rai and Tilak” (ibid). The issue, however, refused to die. On 10 May 1921, Tagore wrote to his friend and supporter C. F. Andrews that Gandhi was mistaken (Das 1996, 972). Andrews published an essay in the May issue of The Modern Review called “Raja Rammohun Roy and English Education” (ibid). Tagore once again took up the issue in his article “The Cult of the Charkha” in the September 1925 issue of Modern Review: “The difference in our standpoints and temperaments has made the Mahatma look upon Rammohun Roy as a pygmy—while I revere him as a giant” (rpt. in Das 1996, 538–548). Gandhi’s response was published as “The Poet and the Charkha” (Young India, November 5, 1925). He said, as quoted in the Collected Works, “One thing, and one thing only, has hurt me, the Poet’s belief, again picked up from table talk, that I look upon Ram Mohan Roy as a ‘pigmy’. Well, I have never anywhere described that great reformer as a pigmy, much less regarded him as such. He is to me as much a giant as he is to the Poet. I do not remember any occasion save one when I had to use Ram Mohan Roy’s name. That was on the Cuttack sands now 4 years ago. What I do remember having said was that it was possible to attain highest culture without Western education. And when someone mentioned Ram Mohan Roy, I remember having said that he was a pigmy compared to the unknown authors, say, of the Upanishads. This is altogether different from looking upon Ram Mohan Roy as a pigmy” (1999, Volume 33, 200–201).
- 16.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Mohan_Roy; accessed on 22 Nov 2007.
- 17.
His English secretary during his stay in Britain, Sandford Arnot, says, “The Raja was acquainted more or less with ten languages: Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Bengali, English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French. The first two he knew he knew critically as a scholar, the third, fourth, fifth and sixth he spoke and wrote fluently; in the eighth, perhaps, his studies did not extend much beyond the originals of the Christian Scriptures; and in the latter two his knowledge was apparently more limited” (quoted in Poddar 1970, 48).
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Paranjape, M.R. (2013). “Usable Pasts”: Rammohun Roy’s Occidentalism. In: Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4661-9_2
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