Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Bengal: Beyond the Hindu Renaissance

The Legacy of Vaiṣṇavism 1 2 in Colonial Bengal 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Edited by Ferdinando Sardella and 13 Lucian Wong 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 1 2 First published 2020 3 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 4 and by Routledge 5 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 6 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 7 © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Ferdinando Sardella and Lucian 8 Wong; individual chapters, the contributors. 9 The right of Ferdinando Sardella and Lucian Wong to be identified as the 10 authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual 11 chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the 12 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 13 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now 14 known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in 15 any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing 16 from the publishers. 17 Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or 18 registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 19 British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data 20 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 21 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data 22 A catalog record has been requested for this book 23 24 ISBN: 978-­1-138-­56179-­3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-­0-203-­71032-­6 (ebk) 25 Typeset in Times New Roman 26 by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45  1 Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal 2 3 Beyond the Hindu Renaissance 4 5 6 Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella 7 8 9 10 11 12 Vaiṣṇavism—or, in the most general sense, the worship of the god Viṣṇu and his 13 associated forms—lays claim to a significant place in the religious history of 14 South Asia. Although a deity of ostensibly subsidiary importance in the earliest 15 layers of Vedic literature, Viṣṇu had assumed a central position within the 16 Hindu pantheon by the early centuries of the Common Era. Frequently referred 17 to by the epithet “Nārāyaṇa”, and fused with the identities of deities such as 18 Vāsudeva-­Kṛṣṇa and Saṃkarṣaṇa-­Balarāma, Viṣṇu was regarded by increasing 19 numbers as the supreme being and paramount object of religious veneration. 20 Viṣṇu’s ascent is attested to by, for instance, the emergence of cults like the 21 Pāñcarātra, which conceived of him as the fountainhead of divine emanations 22 (vyūha), as well as texts such as the great Sanskrit narrative the Mahābhārata, 23 wherein he is depicted as the transcendent Lord who descends to the material 24 plane in various forms (avatāra). A vast array of Vaiṣṇava ritual, textual, archi- 25 26 tectural, and organisational developments over the course of the following two 27 millennia in both North and South India would only serve to reinforce the regal 28 god’s prominence within the subcontinent’s multifarious religious world. Along 29 with Jan Gonda, we might say that Vaiṣṇavism has been pivotal to the determi- 30 nation of the character of that “many sided” and “all-­enfolding culture” that has 31 come to be designated as “Hinduism” (1996: 1). 32 It is customary to conceive of the manifold Vaiṣṇava trajectories and modali- 33 ties that find their source of inspiration in Viṣṇu or one of his numerous alternate 34 identities—most commonly, Rāma or Kṛṣṇa—as broadly constituting a cohesive 35 “religious current” (Gonda 1996: 1). Indeed, the term “Vaiṣṇava” is suggestive 36 of an “overarching” religion (Colas 2003: 229). Such an understanding is justi- 37 fied not least by the broad continuity of conceptions of the divine and the some- 38 what congruent textual and ritual foundations exhibited by the various Vaiṣṇava 39 traditions across several centuries and South Asian regions. It is nevertheless 40 essential to bear in mind that such a unitary construal of Vaiṣṇavism, even if at 41 times articulated in indigenous sources,1 can only ever be an “ideal view”, one 42 that in reality corresponds to the “aggregation of a multitude of varied tradi- 43 tions” (Colas 2003: 266). Any critical approach to Vaiṣṇavism cannot therefore 44 fail to attend to the specificities concomitant with a given Vaiṣṇava expression’s 45 2   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella geographical and temporal context. The present book proffers a focused examin- ation of Vaiṣṇavism in one such context. Bengali Vaiṣṇavism and Caitanya The region of Bengal in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent,2 with its historically eclectic religious climate, has long been a site of various forms of Vaiṣṇavism. Vaiṣṇava-­related iconography in the region can be traced to at least the seventh or eighth centuries ce (Stewart 2016), with some pushing this date as far back as the fourth century ce (Chakrabarty 1985: 1). While much of this early Vaiṣṇava activity centred on the figure of Viṣṇu in his majestic four-­armed form, worship of avatāras such as the boar Varāha and man-­lion Nṛsiṃha, would grow in popularity in the centuries that followed (Chakrabarty 1985: 3). It is not until around the eleventh century, however, that devotion to Kṛṣṇa, with whom Vaiṣṇava practice in the region is most commonly associated, appears to have gained any real traction. This broad re-­orientation toward the adolescent cowherd god is signalled, for instance, by the popular Kṛṣṇa-­centred composi- tions of the likes of the twelfth century Sena court poet Jayadeva of Gīta-­ govinda fame; the renowned vernacular lyricists Vidyāpati and Caṇḍidāsa of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and Maladhara Vasu (also known as Gunarāja Khān), the fifteenth-­century author of the Śrī Kṛṣṇa Vijāya. It is nevertheless the sixteenth-­century charismatic Kṛṣṇa devotee (bhakta) Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533) who has left what is undoubtedly the most pronounced mark on the region’s Vaiṣṇava landscape. Regarding the basic contours of Caitanya’s life, the several, at times diver- gent, hagiographies of him composed by his early followers—upon which any biographical reconstruction must principally rely—are in general agreement.3 Caitanya was born to brāhmaṇa parents of modest means in the Bengali town of Nabadwip, situated some seventy-­five miles north of present-­day Kolkata, on the full moon day of the month of Phālguna (February–March) in 1486 ce. Exhibit- ing a distinct proclivity for intellectual pursuits from an early age, by the time he was a young man he had become a teacher of Sanskrit grammar immersed in the famed intellectual milieu of the locality.4 It would have been expected for ­Caitanya—still known at this time as “Nimāi Paṇḍita”—to continue to grow into his role as a respected member of Nabadwip’s community of learned brāhmaṇas. Nevertheless, around 1508–09, a pilgrimage to the holy city of Gaya to perform obsequies (śrāddha) for his late father, Jagannātha Miśra, precipitated a radical re-­orientation in his life’s trajectory. Whatever it is that happened to him on that fateful trip—and on this subject the biographies maintain a conspicuous silence—Caitanya returned from it filled with rapturous devotion (bhakti) to Kṛṣṇa. With the intensity of his new- found faith rendering him unable to carry out his occupational duties, he gave himself wholly to practising and promoting an ecstatic brand of Kṛṣṇa-­bhakti centred on the impassioned chanting (kīrtana) of the dark-­hued Lord’s names. These activities soon attracted a coterie of dedicated followers. This appears to  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal   3 have unsettled Nabadwip’s Muslim rulers and its Śākta and Smārta-­dominated Hindu community. By the time Caitanya was twenty-­four, such opposition to his religious agenda had led him to take up the renounced order of Hindu socio- religious life (sannyāsa), whereupon he received the name “Kṛṣṇa Caitanya” (“one who arouses consciousness of Kṛṣṇa”) by which he has become most widely known. It is at this juncture that Caitanya relocated to the eastern coastal city of Puri in Orissa, where, bar a six-­year stint of travel in both the north and south of the subcontinent, he would remain, absorbed in ever more intense states of Kṛṣṇa-­bhakti, until his passing in 1533. Caitanya’s departure from Nabadwip prompted a dramatic re-­evaluation of his message among the region’s inhabitants. In his absence his following in Bengal swelled. Vṛṇḍāvanadāsa, for instance, reports in his Caitanya Bhāgavata (3.3), the first among the early vernacular hagiographies, that upon a brief return to his home town a few years after his relocation to Puri, Caitanya was greeted by crowds of admirers vying for sight of him so vast that jungles had to be cleared to facilitate movement. Whatever one makes of the historicity of such descriptions, it is evident that a tangible Vaiṣṇava upswelling inspired by ­Caitanya’s mode of Kṛṣṇa-­bhakti was already well in motion in Bengal during his lifetime. Caitanya, we might say, had become the conduit through which the “wave of devotional- ism” that had been sweeping across northern India in the preceding centuries (Dimock and Stewart 1999: 5) reached the Bengal region in full force. This surge in Vaiṣṇava interest would only continue to build in the centuries that followed, indelibly shaping Bengal’s socio-­religious terrain, as well as significantly impacting religious modalities in other regions of the subcontinent, including present-­day Orissa, Bihar, Assam, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. It would spawn manifold (often discrete, at times disparate) religious communities, some of which would in time coalesce to form a broadly cohesive community or tradition (sampradāya), variously styled “Bengali”, “Gauḍīya”, or “Caitanya Vaiṣṇava”.5 It would also generate a vast body of theological, ritual, and biographical Sanskrit and vernacular literature; provide vital inspiration for multiple generations of vernacular lyric writers in the mold of Vidyāpati and Caṇḍidāsa; and render kīrtana a ubiquitous mode of religious expression in Bengal. Thus, while Caitanya was by no means the progenitor of Kṛṣṇa worship in the region, he certainly lays legitimate claim to being viewed as its chief “revivalist” (Dimock and Stewart 1999: 10). Bengali Vaiṣṇava Studies Bengali Vaiṣṇavism has garnered a notable degree of scholarly interest over the years. Some indeed suggest that “no other Vaiṣṇava movement can claim such an abundance of secondary literature” (Elkman 1986: xiv). While this is likely something of an overstatement, its general thrust is not wholly misplaced.6 Recent decades in particular have witnessed something of a flourishing of the field in the West, augmented by, but by no means reducible to, a growing interest in Bengali Vaiṣṇava-­related global institutional developments—most 4   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella notably, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, popu- larly known as the “Hare Krishna” movement).7 Much of this recent critical engagement with the tradition has exhibited a discernibly greater sense of con- textual specificity than its antecedents, departing from an earlier tendency to extrapolate from fairly restricted data (most commonly, sources that form the early layer of the tradition’s vast textual corpus). Such work has often consisted of the focused examination of “particular figures, texts, periods, and places” (Wong 2015: 307). This turn to particularity in the field has taken shape in a variety of ways. At times it has assumed the form of the rigorous analysis of the momentous social and historical life of a canonical hagiography of Caitanya (Stewart 2010); at others the study of the impact of a particular early modern South Asian political context on the composition of a Gauḍīya Vedāntic treatise (Okita 2014). Some have accented it by bringing to light the theological uniqueness and idiosyncra- sies of an early Gauḍīya theoretician’s poetics (Lutjeharms 2018); others through the sensitive disclosure of the diverse experiences of sacred space and divinity among various living Bengali Vaiṣṇava communities (Sarbadhikary 2015). Regardless of how such particularity has taken form in recent scholar- ship, however, it would seem that the field has become increasingly attentive to the pitfalls of treating the Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition as a monolith. Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal One Bengali Vaiṣṇava context that has attracted a notable degree scholarly attention of late is that of the period of British colonialism in the subcontinent. Indian dominion by the East India Company from 1757 to 1858 and subse- quently by the British Raj from 1858 to 1947 bore witness to well-­documented, epoch-­defining technological, economic, political, and social developments in the region: the arrival of the press, the emergence of an influential British-­ educated urban elite, new forms of institutional structure, globalism, and the rise of nationalism, to name but a few. Such developments could not but have pro- found consequences for South Asian religious traditions and practitioners of all persuasions. Bengali Vaiṣṇavism and its representatives have no doubt been in constant negotiation with the concerns and challenges of particular contexts throughout the entire course of its development, exemplifying, in the words of Marilyn Waldman, a tradition as “a modality of change” (1986). Nevertheless, with Bengal being a key domain of the British Empire, and with Calcutta at its epicentre, the colonial period was naturally a juncture of major transformation and reconfiguration for Vaiṣṇavism in the region, having dramatic implications for subsequent expressions and representations of the tradition. The period is therefore undoubtedly a vital area of investigation for Bengali Vaiṣṇava Studies. Yet beyond simply facilitating a more complete picture of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism—however valuable a contribution this may indeed be in its own right—critical examination of the tradition during this pivotal period also ­proffers valuable opportunities for enriching our understanding of Hinduism in colonial  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal  5 Bengal and South Asia more broadly. For while over the years considerable atten- tion has been paid to a now familiar host of figures and currents of religious reform and revival associated with the so-­called Bengal or, more broadly, Hindu “Renaissance”, the place and legacy in this context of pre-­existing Hindu reli- gious currents and traditions (sampradāya), such as those of the Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas, and Śāktas, remains conspicuously neglected. Such currents were, of course, key features of pre-­colonial Hinduism; some indeed contend that the latter is in the final analysis wholly reducible to the former (Stientencron 2005). In vari- ous ways, these currents, which instantiate what one might call “sampradāyic” Hinduism, continued to play significant roles—religious, social, and cultural—in the lives of wide and diverse sections of Bengali society and elsewhere in South Asia throughout the colonial period. Their systematic investigation in this context thus promises to shed valuable new light on the richness and complexity of the texture and dynamics of colonial Hinduism beyond both the discursive and socio-­ historical parameters of the Renaissance-­dominated paradigm that has framed so much of the critical discourse pertaining to this subject. The “Renaissance” paradigm and colonial Hinduism It was elite British-­educated Bengali Hindus or “bhadralok” (“cultured folk”) themselves who first began to articulate the notion of a “Renaissance” against the alterity of a decadent medieval India. The view first found tangible expres- sion in the 1880s and soon gained traction among educated Hindus across the subcontinent. It would in time assume axiomatic status for observers of the period, becoming the entrenched historiographical paradigm. As Brian Hatcher observes, some of the defining features of this Renaissance paradigm include: (1) the assumption that the period marks a radical break or rupture with a static, “benighted” pre-­colonial Indian past; (2) the prioritisation of the role and con- cerns of the English-­educated Bengali bhadralok, who are framed as the prin- cipal “agents of change”; (3) an inordinate focus on a narrowly circumscribed corpus of primarily English-­language sources; and (4) the attempt to interpret almost all Hindu religious activity in this period within the frame of national- ism (2001: 137). The latter decades of the twentieth century saw this paradigm come under sustained fire from various quarters of the academy. This assault took shape most notably in the writings of Marxist historians such as Barun De, Asok Sen, and Sumit Sarkar, and subsequently, based on a rather different set of premises, in the work of scholars associated with the Subaltern Studies project.8 The para- digm nevertheless continues to hold sway over a notable section of observers. This is nowhere more evident than in relation to discourse about Hinduism during the colonial period. In this regard, Hatcher points out that scholarship on Hinduism in this context pays disproportionate attention to currents that bear the distinct marks of “Western, Christian values”, restricting its analytical lens to an implicit canon of largely English-­language texts (2015: 8).9 While traceable to works such as J. N. Farquhar’s Modern Religious Movements in India (1915), 6   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella this tendency is clearly on display in a number of other, more recent treatments of the subject, which, in effect, purport to represent the “essence” of Hinduism in the modern period.10 The paradigm has additionally been perpetuated by many introductory books on Hinduism, which, when treating the British colonial period, almost invariably restrict their focus to the same list of Hindu Renaissance-­associated figures and institutions.11 In privileging the contributions of these religious currents—most commonly those associated with, or deeply shaped by, the institution of the Brahmo Samaj—such treatments implicitly assume something of a “domino theory” in which leading bhadralok lights are seen as serving as the “motive force” for the ensuing “ ‘reformation’ of Hinduism along ‘modern’ lines” (Hatcher 2015: 9). Hinduism in the colonial period thus comes to be represented as more or less co-­ terminous with the work of figures and institutions that sought to “purge” the tradition of ideas and practices associated with colonially shaped notions of the so-­called “non-­modern”, among which currents influenced by bhakti, tantra, and India’s Purāṇic corpus were especially targeted. There is certainly no denying the importance of such developments to an understanding of Hinduism in colo- nial Bengal and South Asia more broadly. Yet to emphasise their role to the point of occluding all else is not only to submit to outmoded narratives of a uni- linear and hegemonic modernity, but is also to posit a dramatically impoverished picture of the colonial Hindu landscape. Beyond the Hindu Renaissance Contrary to what their frequent neglect within scholarship in this area might sug- gest, the various currents of sampradāyic Hinduism that so dominated the history and dynamics of pre-­colonial India’s religious terrain do not simply disappear with the advent of British colonialism and the emergence of modern Hindu Renaissance discourse in the subcontinent. Rather, they continued to exert a potent hold over the Hindu imaginary in various ways, a fact often observable across far broader sections of indigenous society than that exerted by the elite figures and institutions associated with the Renaissance paradigm. Moreover, and at least in part because of their more expansive demographic reach, these currents often evinced a far greater spectrum of religious and cultural forms than their Renaissance counterparts did. Exploration of the legacy of sampradāyic Hindu currents in colonial South Asia thus potentially offers a much richer, more representative picture of religious life in this context than that afforded by ana- lyses determined by the Renaissance paradigm. The present volume’s focused examination of Vaiṣṇavism in its array of manifestations in the colonial Bengali context holds out opportunities for forming just such a picture. Genesis, structure, and content This book is based primarily upon material delivered at an international work- shop on the theme “Bengali Vaishnavism in the Modern Period” organised by  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal   7 the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) at Worcester College, University of Oxford, in March 2015.12 The workshop, which marked the official inaugura- tion of the Bengali Vaishnavism in the Modern Period Research Project,13 brought together both leading and rising scholars from across the disciplines of social and intellectual history, philology, theology, and anthropology to show- case research on Vaiṣṇavism in its manifold forms—elite and popular, urban and rural—in the context of colonial Bengal. In several instances, papers have been entirely reworked for the purposes of this book. Three chapters of the book (i.e. those of Stewart, Sarbadhikary, and O’Connell and Sen) are not based on material presented at the workshop, but are nevertheless authored (or co-­ authored) by scholars who were key participants in it and have been included on the basis of their thematic pertinence. The book is structured according to a bipartite division that corresponds to two particularly salient themes of colonial Bengali Vaiṣṇava discourse and activ- ities. Part I of the book pertains to the creative retrieval and reshaping of Vaiṣṇavism as a modality of modern Bengali religious and cultural expression. The fortunes of Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal are intimately bound up with the emergence of the bhadralok. By the nineteenth century Vaiṣṇavism in the region had come to assume three general forms, none of which appealed to this small but impactful social group: the first was its popular form, which the bhadralok considered to be licentious and the religion of the illiterate; the second was its caste-­oriented form, which they considered to be elitist and out of step with modern times; and the third was its mystical-­ascetic form, which they considered to be too otherworldly (Sardella 2013: 9). The bhadralok were thus initially dis- posed to denounce the tradition as a significant source of cultural embarrassment (Fuller 2005: 124). Yet by the latter decades of the century, as the cultural climate began to change, increasing numbers of bhadralok turned to Vaiṣṇavism for religious and cultural inspiration (Bhatia 2017). With the printing press, bureaucratic training, and other newly imported resources at their disposal, bhad- ralok Vaiṣṇava enthusiasts set about fashioning a “ ‘modern’ urban Vaiṣṇavism” (Clooney  & Stewart 2004: 180). It is, of course, essential to bear in mind that this flurry of bhadralok Vaiṣṇava activity in colonial Bengal was not solely the work of individuals and organisations formally affiliated with, or theologically invested in, Vaiṣṇavism, but also those whose engagement with the tradition lay more properly in the domain of “culture”. These various strains of bhadralok Vaiṣṇava retrieval in colonial Bengal represent notable forms of modernisation that collectively constitute, as Jason Fuller puts it, an “independent tradition of modernity that challenged the models presented by the Enlightenment thinkers from Europe and early nineteenth-­century Bengal alike” (2015: 91). Part I opens with Varuni Bhatia’s examination of the late nineteenth-­century Bengali bhadralok’s creative reframing of the figure of Caitanya. Caitanya, as we have seen, is absolutely central to Vaiṣṇavism’s legacy in the region. His divinity nevertheless became a source of suspicion among educated Hindus of the period. Situating her analysis firmly in the context of rising anticolonial nationalism, Bhatia highlights the ways in which prominent modernising 8   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella b­ hadralok intellectuals—both religious and secular—deployed terms and con- cepts acquired through their Enlightenment-­inflected education and exposure to Christian missionary discourse so as to render Caitanya relevant once more. Underscoring in particular the prevalence of secular and humanist categories in these attempts, Bhatia suggests that they can be read as participating in and shaping the wider discourse about Bengali “culture” that had begun to emerge during these years. In the chapter that follows, Amiya Sen undertakes a study of the late ­nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vaiṣṇava flourishing in Bengal that sim- ilarly attends to both its theological and cultural registers, with specific reference to the life and thought of the prominent nationalist intellectual Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932). Sen’s chapter serves as a vital supplement to his earlier, now classic work on Hindu “revivalism” in colonial Bengal (1993), with its (by his own admission) conspicuous omission of Vaiṣṇava developments in this context. The chapter proceeds with a broad overview of the various strands that consti- tuted the Vaiṣṇava revival in colonial Bengal, proferring explanations for why the tradition came to assume such “a vital intervening cultural and theological space” in the lives of educated Bengalis during this period. The chapter’s focus then turns to Pal, who, as both a prominent nationalist and Vaiṣṇava ideologue, straddled the various registers of Bengali Vaiṣṇava revival in complex ways. The next three chapters of this section of the book treat the more directly reli- gious attempts at modern Bengali Vaiṣṇava community building and propagation. Dey’s chapter takes its cue from O’Connell’s observation that the colonial period marks the emergence of distinctly “hard” institutional forms in the ­Bengali Vaiṣṇava sphere. Dey examines a cross-­section of these largely bhadralok-­led initiatives, which were in full force by the latter decades of the nineneenth cen- tury. In addition to probing their objectives, activities, and social bases, he reveals the ways in which these colonial Vaiṣṇava institutions negotiated the key issues of authority and legitimacy. Such societies would dramatically reshape the Vaiṣṇava landscape of the region, producing new spatial networks and institu- tional practices while also often retaining discernible links with traditional Vaiṣṇava institutional forms, thus sharing a “complex relation” with the past. A number of modern Vaiṣṇava institution-­builders in this context evinced notable universalising proclivities. Gerald T. Carney’s chapter provides an account of the life and work of one such figure, namely Baba Premananda Bharati (Surendranath Mukherjee). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bharati made the first tangible attempt to lay the institutional foundations for a global Bengali Vaiṣṇava movement. In California, he founded the first Kṛṣṇa temple in the West and published an acclaimed account of the life-­story of Kṛṣṇa in English based on the narratives of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Carney’s chapter mines both Bharati’s own writings and the biographies of some his Vaiṣṇava contemporaries in order to chart key moments of his devotional trajec- tory, paying attention in particular to the wider Bengali Vaiṣṇava “religious matrix” from which Bharati emerged. Carney’s biographical essay provides vivid insight into the pluralism of Vaiṣṇavism in the colonial Bengali context,  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal   9 signalling “the many stories yet to be told” from this phase of the tradition’s history. Kenneth Valpey’s chapter turns to another Bengali Vaiṣṇava institution ­oriented toward the West, namely the Gaudiya Math and Mission, parent institu- tion of the now globally established ISKCON. Through the vehicle of its ­English language periodical, The Harmonist, the Gaudiya Math sought to project itself as a representative of Vaiṣṇava authority and progressive religious vision in the wider world of imperial Britain. Valpey undertakes a close reading of two essays from The Harmonist to consider the rhetorical means by which their respective authors argued and defended their perspectives on the issues of image worship and temple entry restrictions against untouchables. He argues that both authors deploy a strategy of “claiming high ground”, or staking out what is taken to be the more reasonable and inclusive, if not universal, position, so as to validate the institution’s missionising strategy in the modern context, while maintaining practices of temple worship that were typically associated at the time with reactionary Hinduism. The final chapter of Part I is based on an unfinished piece of writing by the late Joseph T. O’Connell (1940–2012), who played a key role in establishing the field of Bengali Vaiṣṇava Studies in the Western academy, and to whose memory this book is dedicated. The chapter—one of the final examples of O’Connell’s incisive reflection on the tradition14—indicates potentially fruitful avenues for further research into Vaiṣṇavism in the context of modern Bengal. O’Connell spotlights in particular several relatively unknown but not unimpor- tant figures from this period, who contributed meaningfully to the growth of the modern Bengali Vaiṣṇava movement. The chapter has been edited and expanded by Amiya Sen, whose work on Hinduism in colonial Bengal is drawn upon repeatedly by O’Connell in the chapter. With the gamut of colonially imported technologies and corporate appara- tuses at their disposal, the bhadralok were undoubtedly the most vocal quarter of indigenous Bengali society to engage in shaping Vaiṣṇavism’s portrayal during this period. Bhadralok Vaiṣṇavas were, however, by no means the only section to participate in this process. Currents of Vaiṣṇavism rooted beyond the bhadralok-­fold also remained a significant feature of the broader Vaiṣṇava land- scape at this time. While some of these currents may have found “commonality of purpose and shared values” with bhadralok Vaiṣṇava enterprises (Wong 2018: 17), many others were fundamentally at odds with bhadralok Vaiṣṇava self-­representation. Central among these were groups bearing the mark of Tantric-­based transgressive body-­oriented practices and precepts. Emerging pre- dominantly among marginal castes and occasionally among brahmaṇas in the district of Nadia and other rural regions of Bengal likely soon after the passing of Caitanya, these currents tended to privilege corporeality and bodily substance over abstract metaphysics. Such currents came under severe ethical scrutiny from various sections of Bengali Vaiṣṇava society during this period. They nevertheless remained an important, if increasingly covert, feature of the wider colonial Bengali Vaiṣṇava world. The chapters in Part II of the book thus 10   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella examine these dissident Vaiṣṇava voices, either directly or through their promi- nence in, and impact upon, bhadralok Vaiṣṇava discourse. For no history of Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal is complete without careful consideration of the strategies of subversive appropriation and secrecy employed by such currents in this context, as well as the colonial Bengali Vaiṣṇava establishment’s concerted attempts to marginalise and expunge these groups. Part II of the book begins with Tony K. Stewart’s chapter on the subject of Sahajiyā currents and their critical study.15 The chapter is less an investigation of the first-­order data of particular Sahajiyā texts, ideas, or rituals as it is a “metahistory” of scholarship on the Sahajiyās and a reflection on some of the principal epistemological and methodological challenges with which any critical engagement with them must inevitably contend. It first lays bare the “pheno- menological, ahistorical, synchronic essentialism” of influential mid-­twentieth-­ century studies in this area, which have encouraged the positing of a unified Sahajiyā “Tradition” that subsumes within it all resonant religious currents and practices irrespective of provenance. As Stewart observes, not only do such studies reflect the ideological presuppositions of an emerging “New Human- ism”, but also bear the marks of the effects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century bhadralok Vaiṣṇava “sanitising” processes. With reference to Victorian-­era moral discourse and its influence in colonial Bengal, his tour de force then turns to address the phenomenon of the enduring grip of the themes of sex and secrecy on both scholars and the public at large. Stewart argues that it is not the sex per se that is key here but rather its attendant secrecy, highlight- ing some of the epistemological and ethical problems entailed by attempts to lay bare such secrecy. The chapter that follows by Sukanya Sarbadhikary, whose anthropological work on Sahajiyā communities (2015) Stewart spotlights as a vital “step in the direction of truly intersubjective encounter” with these groups, turns to examine the tradition of esoteric Sahajiyā writing. Textual production, ­Sarbadhikary explains, constitutes a crucial component of Sahajiyā life and self-­representation, embodying as it does the processes by which these groups have sought to dis- tance themselves from “outsider” discourses while simultaneously rendering their identities public. In her chapter, Sarbadhikary discloses some of the salient themes and modalities that characterise Sahajiyā textual production, underscoring in particular the key strategy of “double-­meaning”, which these texts deploy to great effect. Although based principally upon fieldwork conducted among con- temporary Sahajiyās in Nabadwip and the broader Nadia district, Sarbadhikary’s analysis sheds important light on the strategies that have allowed these groups to persist to the present day “despite elite efforts at reform or revival since the colo- nial period”. With a similar focus on the domain of text, Jeanne Openshaw’s chapter explores another prominent, somatically oriented Vaiṣṇava-­related current, namely that represented by those popularly known as Bāuls, or, as Openshaw prefers, Bartamān-­panthīs (lit. “followers of the here and now”). While Bāuls are famed above all for their songs and vibrant oral tradition, Openshaw calls atten-  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal   11 tion to how these intersect in complex ways with various genres of written texts. Her chapter delves into an autograph manuscript by Bāul guru Raj Khyapa Misra produced toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Composed during a period of personal crisis and transition, the text serves as crucial link between Raj Khyapa’s life and Bāul songs. Openshaw maintains that the text sheds important light on the impact the domain of the personal can have on a genre often read without regard for context. It also indicates a correlation between a high valuation of women and a committed love relationship, and, in turn, between these factors and a radicalism toward conventional social, religious, and gender boundaries. The remaining chapters of this part explore how these subversive Vaiṣṇava-­ related currents played a shaping role in bhadralok Vaiṣṇava discourse during the colonial period. They pervade the backdrop of Kiyokazu Okita’s chapter, which examines Bengali Vaiṣṇava perceptions of the moral status of Kṛṣṇa’s love with the gopīs. The chapter looks closely at the varied ways in which this issue has been dealt with by orthopraxically oriented theological representatives of the tradition in both early modern and modern contexts. Okita suggests that ethical concerns about Sahajiyā practice featured implicity in both of these con- texts. He further argues that an understanding of early modern negotiations of the issue allows for better appreciation of the theological “complexity” with which colonial Bengali Vaiṣṇava thinkers dealt. In the final chapter of Part II, Lucian Wong problematises the prevalent notion that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Vaiṣṇava anti-­Sahajiyā polemics can be taken as a definitive index of colonial-­wrought rupture within Bengali Vaiṣṇavism. He proceeds by, first, drawing attention to oblique, yet unmistakably polemical, forms of response to Sahajiyā currents in popular ­pre-­colonial Gauḍīya literature that are indicative of a movement towards a brahmanically aligned Vaiṣṇava normativity; and, second, highlighting how this movement towards normativity was further fostered in colonial times in Bengal by leading representatives of traditional Bengali Vaiṣṇava gosvāmī communities, who were often extensively involved in bhadralok Vaiṣṇava domains. Collectively, then, in exploring the many dimensions of Vaiṣṇavism in colo- nial BengaI, the ensuing chapters of the book provide fresh insight into prevalent forms of Hindu religious thought, practice, and community that fall beyond the discursive and/or socio-­historical parameters of the Hindu Renaissance paradigm that has so dominated the study of Hinduism in colonial South Asia. In doing so, the book illustrates the advantages of taking a sampradāyic Hindu current such as Bengali Vaiṣṇavism as a critical entry point onto the colonial Hindu land- scape. At a more field-­specific level, the book’s focused anaylsis of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism in the colonial context further nurtures the productive tendency toward particularity that has been evinced by recent scholarship on the tradition. The chapters of the book attest to the importance of remaining attentive to the dangers of reification when approaching the tradition; as they make clear, ­Bengali Vaiṣṇavism exhibits a palpable heterogeneity even in a single context. It 12   Lucian Wong and Ferdinando Sardella is thus perhaps not so the much the adjectival portion of the tradition’s nomen- clature (i.e. Bengali/Gauḍīya/Caitanya) that is the basic issue, as some recent observers have implied,16 but rather uncritical applications of the nominalising suffix “ism”. Note on transliteration and spelling On the whole, bar geographic and colonial and modern period personal and insti- tutional names, we have applied standard academic transliteration for Bengali and Sanskrit words and names. We have, however, made exceptions in certain chapters in recognition of the different academic disciplines represented in the book. In such cases, we have prioritised internal consistency within a chapter, allowing the individual author to employ their own preferred standards. Notes   1 The notion of Vaiṣṇavism’s unitary nature underpins, for instance, the concept of the catuḥ sampradāya, or four (bona f ide) Vaiṣṇava traditions, that began to take concrete shape in North India in the seventeenth century, and that has had a lasting impact on scholarship on bhakti (Hawley 2015).   2 “Bengal” here broadly corresponds to the present-­day Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh.   3 For succinct overviews of the contents of the early vernacular and Sanskrit biog- raphies, see Dimock and Stewart (1999: 82–97). For contrasting views on the histo- ricity of these textual sources, see Dimock (1976) and O’Connell (1993).   4 For more on Nabadwip’s prominence in the intellectual culture of early modern India, see Ganeri (2011: 39–59).   5 These terms are often used interchangeably in scholarship. There are some, however, who seek to draw distinctions between the appropriate application of this nomenclature; see, for instance, Bhatia (2017: 17), O’Connell (2019: 3), and Sen (see Chapter 2).   6 One thinks, for instance, of the profusion of studies, in both European and Indian lan- guages, on the South Indian Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition.   7 For a survey on recent (primarily English-­language) critical literature on the tradition, see Wong (2015).   8 For helpful analyses of some of these revisionary attempts, see Hatcher (2001) and Raychaudhuri (2002: 345–62).   9 This has been paralleled by a lack of consideration of the peristence and creative adaptation of medieval and early modern textual traditions in modern Hindu dis- course. On this issue, see, for example, Madaio (2017) and Nicholson (2010). 10 See, for example, Richards (1985) and Sharma (2002, 2005). 11 This tendency is so ubiquitous that it would be unfair to single out any source in particular. 12 https://ochs.org.uk/research/bengali-­vaishnavism-­modern-­period-­workshop, viewed on 30 June 2018. 13 www.ochs.org.uk/research/bengali-­vaishnavism-­modern-­period, viewed on 30 June 2018. In the context of the project, “modern” is defined as “roughly, the mid eight- eenth century to the mid twentieth century”. 14 The piece originally formed part of the concluding chapter (“Concluding observa- tions”) of a book manuscript O’Connell was still working on at the time of his passing, published posthumously in the OCHS/Routledge Hindu Studies Series as Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal: Social Impact and Historical Implications (2019). It  Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal   13 made its way into this volume at the suggestion of the book’s editor, Rembert 1 ­Lutjeharms, and with the kind permission of Joe’s wife, Kathleen O’Connell. 2 15 The chapter is a revised and updated version of an influential yet hitherto unpublished 3 paper, “Sex and Secrecy in the Politics of Sahajiya Scholarship [of Caveats from a Faint-­Hearted Student of Tantra]”, penned in 1990 and first delivered at a workshop 4 at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. 5 16 See note 5 above. 6 7 8 References 9 Bhatia, Varuni. 2017. Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in 10 Colonial Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press. 11 Chakrabarty, Ramakanta. 1985. Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal 1496–1900. Calcutta: Sanskrit 12 Pustak Bhandar. 13 Clooney, F. X. and Stewart, Tony K. 2004. Vaiṣṇava. In Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby 14 (eds.). The Hindu World. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 162–84. 15 Colas, Gerard. 2003. 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