Sugirtharajah R.S. The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations

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THE BIBLE AND EMPIRE

At a time of renewed interest in empire, this stimulating volume

explores the complex relationship between the Bible and the colonial

enterprise and examines some overlooked aspects of this relationship.

These include unconventional retellings of the gospel story of Jesus

by Thomas Jefferson and Raja Rammohun Roy; the fate of biblical

texts when marshalled by Victorian preachers to strengthen British

imperial intentions after the Indian uprising of 1857; the cultural-

political use of the Christian Old Testament, ﬁrst by the invaders to

attack temple practices and rituals, then by the invaded to endorse

the temple heritage scorned by missionaries; the dissident hermen-

eutics of James Long and William Colenso confronting and com-

promising with colonial ambitions; and ﬁnally the subtly seditious

deployment of biblical citations in two colonial novels.

This innovative book offers both practical and theoretical insights

and provides compelling evidence of the continuing importance of

postcolonial discourse for biblical studies.

r. s. sugirtharajah is Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at

the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include

Postcolonial Reconﬁgurations (2003), Postcolonial Criticism and Bib-

lical Interpretation (2002) and The Bible and the Third World (2001).

THE BIBLE AND EMPIRE

Postcolonial Explorations

R. S. SUGIRTHARAJAH

cambridge university press

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru,UK

First published in print format

isbn-13 978-0-521-82493-4

isbn-13 978-0-521-53191-7

isbn-13 978-0-511-12508-9

2005

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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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Contents

Acknowledgements page vi

Introduction 1

1 Textually conjoined twins: Rammohun Roy and Thomas

Jefferson and their Bibles 9

2 Salvos from the Victorian pulpit: conscription of texts by

Victorian preachers during the Indian rebellion of 1857 60

3 Thorns in the crown: the subversive and complicit

hermeneutics of John Colenso of Natal and James Long

of Bengal 98

4 Texts and Testament: the Hebrew scriptures in

colonial context 145

5 Imperial ﬁctions and biblical narratives: entertainment and

exegesis in colonial novels 192

Afterword 222

Select bibliography 232

Index of biblical references 242

Index of names and subjects 245

Acknowledgements

I owe a considerable debt to a number of people.

Firstly, I am indebted to Dan O’Connor for his wisdom, time and

generosity. We have spent countless hours discussing details on the

phone, to the delight of the telephone-company shareholders. It was his

reading of the chapters and his astute comments which sharpened the

argument of this volume, and without his wit the whole project would

have been dull.

My thanks go to Kevin Taylor of Cambridge University Press, who saw

potential in the volume and commissioned it, and to Kate Brett, who took

over from him and provided continued enthusiasm for the project.

I am grateful to Vincent Kumaradoss, Daniel Thiagaraj, Kwok Pui-

Lan, Clara Joseph, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Daniel Smith-Christopher,

Susai Raj, John Perumbalath, Ngurliana and Hephzibah Israel for

generously getting for me some rare and inaccessible texts.

I appreciate also the prompt and cheerful assistance of Dorothy Wuong

of the Orchard Learning Centre and her excellent and ever helpful staff.

My sincere thanks also to Ralph Broadbent for, as ever, sorting out my

computing problems expertly and efﬁciently.

I am fortunate to have had Jan Chapman as copy-editor. This is our

second collaborative venture, and I am very grateful for the scrupulous

and perceptive way in which she has gone through the text.

Finally, to my wife, Sharada, whose support and encouragement are

beyond what I can express here. The sacriﬁces she has made, especially in

giving up her own research time to enable me to ﬁnish the project, are

more than I can ever compensate for.

Introduction

One of the celebrated colonial cliche

s is that the Bible and the gun go

together and that they are almost inextricably linked. One story goes even

further, in which the Bible and the gun are literally conjoined. William

Colenso (1826–99), who worked as a printer in New Zealand and was a

cousin of John Colenso, of whom we will hear later in this volume, picked

up a cartridge fashioned out of pages from a Bible. The rolled-up paper

came from 2 Samuel and bore the words ‘How long have I to live?’

(19.34).

The cartridge of rolled-up biblical verses gives a slightly different

meaning to the phrase ‘militant reading’, an idea later to be popularized

in liberation hermeneutics.

This volume is about what happens to colonial artefacts such as the

Bible, beer, a gun and a printing press, and especially, in our case,

the Bible, when it is imposed forcefully on the ‘natives’, or offered to

them for their beneﬁt. It is about the Bible and its readers and their

troubled journey through colonialism. It assembles essays which demon-

strate how the Bible has been used in a variety of ways by both the

colonizer and the colonized. It brings to the fore personalities and issues

which are seldom dealt with within the parameters of mainstream

biblical scholarship. It is an attempt to retrieve hermeneutical and cultural

memories in both western and nationalist discourses.

Brieﬂy, I offer some explanation of the three themes which hold this

volume together – empire, the Bible and postcolonialism. The empire

itself has come in different forms, and the word has gathered many

meanings. Before it became a term of abuse and acquired its current

meaning of one nation-state coercively ruling another, it meant simply

‘state’, ‘domain’ or ‘realm’. There were many ancient and modern

1 I owe this citation to D. F. McKenzie. See his Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 108. Other books which were used for this militant purpose

included works of Voltaire and Milner’s Church History.

empires in the former sense, their aim to conquer other people and bring

them under their control. Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Mongols and

Mughals had extensive empires. When the term empire is used today, or

at least in this volume, it does not refer to these empires. It is used in the

modern sense, as a speciﬁc term for a system that grew out of European

colonial expansion between the ﬁfteenth and twentieth centuries. These

European empires – Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Belgian and

British – were an outgrowth of industrial capitalism and were marked by

distinct cultural domination and penetration which have created the myth

of the West as the superior ‘other’, a myth which is continually evoked in

international disputes, and in political, cultural and theological dis-

courses. The empire that this volume deals with mostly is the British

empire; the Portuguese and the Spanish empires make only a brief

appearance.

The Bible referred to here is largely the King James Version, which

came to the colonies as the Englishman’s book – a landmark text in the

history of the English people. Before the First World War, this translation

reigned supreme. This provincial and vernacular text of the English

people became a cultural and colonial icon and eventually emerged as a

key text of the empire, playing a prominent role in colonial expansion. It

was more than a religious text, for its inﬂuence extended to the social,

political and economic spheres. The King James Version became not only

the arbiter of other peoples’ texts and cultures but also set the pattern for

vernacular translations and even acted as a role model for the printing and

dissemination of other sacred texts. It functioned sometimes as a rigid

instrument and sometimes as a ﬂexible one but was always evolving as a

medium for cultural and political expression. The focus here is not on the

extraordinary story of the making and marketing of the King James

Version but on some of the hermeneutical debates surrounding it, espe-

cially in the colonial world. It is about how different communities of

interpreters, among both the colonized and the colonizers, appropriated,

reappropriated and at times emasculated their favourite texts and how, in

the process, they themselves were shaped and moulded and their identity

redeﬁned. The colonial usage is a testimony to the notion that every era

produces the Bible in its own image and responds to it differently on the

basis of shifting political and cultural needs and expectations.

Finally, postcolonialism: it is not easy to deﬁne postcolonialism, and

those in the business of doing so are well aware that the task is fraught

with enormous difﬁculties. These difﬁculties are largely caused by the

theory’s association with many institutions. A theory which started its

2 The Bible and Empire