Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung

Titel

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Editorial

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Honour Matters

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What do we know about honour-based emotional practices of the various social groups in early modern Tamil-speaking south India? And which emotions were
involved in honour practice? This case study applies a well-known approach in emotion history studies to this new terrain, a terrain that is largely uncharted and deserves to be explored. By examining two honour-sensitive social groups and their respective key narratives—on one hand, a lower status group, on the other, an elite and privileged group—it will be shown what kinds of practices were highlighted or evoked in conflict settings, and how honour-bound emotional practices came to the fore. Against the backdrop of a pre-modern Tamil culture, where practices were shaped by traditional normative social attributions and demarcated group boundaries, this study offers ample details of the fluid boundaries in the new literary genres of the time, where gender-specific emotions compete strongly with the clear boundaries for emotions in normative orders. The study will further show that an investigation of pre-modern Tamil emotion treatises, lexicons/glossaries (nikaṇṭu), moral canons, and proverbs counter the Western tendency of considering honour an emotion. Examining community-specific situated honour practices and the sets of emotions surrounding them not only gives us insight into the self-understanding, emotional life and needs of these groups. It also provides insight into questions pertaining to new political facts, internal literary dynamics, and social expectations. These insights are also relevant to questions about honour concepts and practices in India today.

Zwischen gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen und dem Festhalten am vermeintlichen Status Quo

2023-02-22T13:03:35+00:00

Die bengalischsprachige Kurzgeschichte Puruṣ-ratna („Das Mann-Juwel“) von Jogendra Chandra Basu thematisiert die Einflüsse der britischen Kolonialzeit auf die bengalische Gesellschaft, insbesondere auf das Verhältnis von Mann und Frau in der Ehe, am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Mithilfe der satirisch dargestellten Hauptfigur seiner Kurzgeschichte bringt Jogendra Chandra Basu sein Missfallen über das Streben nach englischer Bildung und Lebensweise zum Ausdruck und erschafft mit dieser einen klassischen Vertreter der satirischen Figur eines die europäische Lebensweise nachahmenden Babus. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden Essays steht die Analyse der Darstellung dieser Figur und ihrer Herausforderungen im Alltag.

Contributors

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Introduction: Negotiating Religion in South Asia-European Entanglements

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From Theology to Culture

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This article explores the Hindu thought of Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), a prominent actor-thinker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and often considered an ideological ancestor of Savarkarite Hindutva. Focussing on Rai’s thought between the 1880s and 1915, it argues that at the same time that Hindu
beliefs and practices were undergoing a process of ‘religionisation’ in the late nineteenth century, in a prominent strand of thinking about Hindu identity, represented by Rai, Hindu religion was being ‘thinned down’. It was being defined less by reference to theological detail and complexity and more in broad and simple terms. Second, Hinduism also underwent a process of ‘culturalisation’. It was decoupled from faith and practice and re-formulated as secular ‘culture’. In Rai’s definition of Hindu identity, Hinduism progressively lost ground to ‘Hindu culture’, which by 1909 formed the centrepiece of his imagined ‘Hindu nation’. ‘Hindu culture’ served to include within Rai’s ‘Hindu nation’ various groups of Indians who were not followers of Hinduism, and simultaneously excluded India’s Muslims and Christians. Yet, I argue that this Hindu nationalism remained different from Savarkarite Hindutva. Through its examination of Rai’s thought, the article makes broader analytical points. One, that Hindu identity can be defined in various senses—thickly religious, thinly religious, broadly non-religious and ‘cultural’, apolitical, openly political, or implicitly political. Second, the thinning of religion can be viewed as a form of both religionisation and secularisation, and the secularisation of Hinduism via its culturalisation was co-eval with the larger process of religionisation. Third, it challenges the dichotomy drawn by Hindu nationalists and secularists alike between the process of secularisation and articulations of Hindu nationalist identity. Finally, Rai’s thought reveals that the secularisation and culturalisation of Hindu identity can culminate in a conception of ‘Hindu nationalism’ distinct from Hindutva.

Engaging Bhakti as/in Translation

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The analysis in this article suggests that M G Ranade’s reflections in his essay about the ‘Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra’ are significant because they offer a site to unravel shifts from a premodern to a modern conception of moral order on the Indian subcontinent, in the context of the encounter with colonialism.
For its role in allowing such unravelling, and for the way it permits attention to hitherto neglected dimensions of Ranade’s comparison between bhakti and the
Protestant Reformation, this article argues for the value of investigating Ranade’s reflections through the framework of translation. While doing the above, the article also seeks to gesture toward methodological issues involved in the study of ideas and clusters of concepts that bear transtemporal resonance and relevance.

Enlightened Religion?

2023-02-22T13:48:40+00:00

In the broader discourse regarding the relationship between religion and secularism in modern Imperial Germany (1871–1918), this article focuses on the impact of Arthur Schopenhauer and his understanding of Indian philosophy on debates on a ‘regeneration of Christianity’. In the early 20th century, thanks to the mediating
activities of philosophical societies and cultural magazines, these debates spread from academic circles and spilled over into popular culture. This article explains how the popularisation of Indian texts by scholars such as Paul Deussen and Karl Eugen Neumann aimed to reorient Western philosophy and Christian faith. Karl Gjellerup’s once-famous, now almost forgotten, novel Die Weltwanderer (The Wanderers of the World, 1910) will serve as a literary example of an attempt at a nationalistic reorientation of Christianity between artistic fantasies of redemption and nationalist and racialised beliefs.

The Theosophical Reception of Buddhism

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When the Theosophical leaders developed the intricate ‘esoteric doctrine’, many aspects of Buddhist philosophy became prominent points of reference. Even though Buddhist teachings are commonly held to be a central aspect of Theosophy to the present day, it is not clear how exactly ‘Western esotericism’ became ‘Orientalised’—and if at all. This paper reconsiders the connection between Theosophy and Buddhism that is predominantly depicted as an encounter of ‘East and West’, assuming two distinct spheres meeting in the course of the globalisation of ‘Western esotericism’. Furthermore, H.P. Blavatsky commonly appears as the central agent who explored Buddhism and (Asian) Oriental thought while shaping her Theosophical doctrines, particularly during her years in India. Such viewpoint excludes important aspects as it is based on categories that are themselves products of this discourse. This article focuses on the historic (discursive) production of ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Theosophy’, as opposed to the ‘West’. The analysis of the debates and disputes between Theosophists and a wide range of interlocutors will illuminate how and why Buddhism emerged as a central subject. These positions often defy clear cut categories (e. g., spiritualist, Christian, Theosophical) and I will demonstrate how much ‘Buddhism’ in its esoteric Theosophical reading depended upon the quarrels between the Theosophists in India and their opponents.

Religious Criticism, Public Reason and Affect in the Reformist Age

2023-02-22T14:05:14+00:00

Several movements for religious and social reform emerged among the religious communities in 19th century India as varied responses to the colonial ‘civilizing
mission’. The work of reform among the Hindus and Muslims involved both the defence of their respective religious traditions and simultaneous critiques of established religious practices and institutions seen as corrupt or inauthentic. Both Hindus and Muslims inherited rich traditions of reason, reasoning and rational argumentation as well as of internal religious innovation and reforms. What is new about the 19th century reformist discourses, is the imbrication of these concepts with the Western conceptions of reason and science. The public sphere that emerged in this wake involved diverse forms of polemics and contests within religious traditions (i.e., between the orthodox and the reformers within a tradition) and between the religious traditions. The colonial state protected religious criticism, subject to public peace and order. However, public order frequently became a concern for the state as both these dimensions of religious controversies tended to generate affects—hurt feelings, passions, public enthusiasm—often leading to violence. A large number of court cases were also filed as a consequence. The public sphere of the religious controversies was also exposed to the global circulation of concepts, images and rhetorical figures. This article attempts to explore the rational and affective dimensions of the religious controversies in the early 20th century India by focusing on an important document related to the history of the reformist organisation Arya Samaj relevant for this theme.