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

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hermeneutical projects of Roy and Jefferson were one of the unplanned

concurrences of history. It was one of those extraordinary coincidences in

which similar patterns of thinking were developed simultaneously by two

different thinkers who had no direct or indirect contact. Moreover, their

intellectual and philosophical lineages were so dissimilar that any chance

of borrowing or mutual inﬂuence was extremely remote. Colonial histor-

ians would like to attribute Roy’s achievement to the introduction of

western forms of learning in India. But Roy’s intellectual landscape was

far more complicated and was derived from a number of philosophical,

religious and literary worlds. Before he was introduced to western learn-

ing, his intellectual thinking was stimulated by a fusion of Persian-Arabic

literature, Muslim rationalism, the secular historical writings of the

Mughals and Vedantic philosophy. The comparative religious studies

which he was to undertake later must have been inﬂuenced by Mushin

Fani’s seventeenth-century Persian tract, Dubistan-i-Mazahib, which

competently analysed ﬁve religions known to the author: Magism (the

ancient religion of Iran), Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This tract was quite well known in the eighteenth century, and William

Jones, the pioneer orientalist, looked upon it favourably. The traces of

rationalism, especially in his Tuhfat-ul (more about this later), could,

according to Brajendranath Seal, be tracked down to the Muslim ration-

alism of the Mutazalis of the eighth century and Muwahhidin of the

twelfth century. The Vedantic school of thinking which came to domin-

ate Roy’s thinking came from Hariharanda Tirthaswami, a leading expo-

nent of the time. Only after studying English in 1807 and settling in

Calcutta in 1815 did Roy come to have closer contacts with a variety of

English thinkers of the time – utilitarians, rationalists and Christian

missionaries. The later works of Roy show his acquaintance with contem-

porary western thinkers such as Locke, Hume and Bentham. It is possible,

as Sumit Sarkar has pointed out, that the Hindu intelligentsia of nine-

teenth-century Bengal ‘maybe Rammohun, too, to some extent . . . after

they had mastered English, turned their backs entirely on such traces of

secularism, rationalism and non-conformity in the pre-British Muslim-

ruled India.

158

Jefferson’s intellectual heritage was largely restricted to western and

Judaeo-Christian forms, namely individualism and rationalism, which

158 See Sumit Sarkar, ‘Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past’, in Rammohun Roy and the Process

of Modernization in India, ed. V. C. Joshi (Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1975), pp. 52–3. For the

various inﬂuences on Roy’s thinking, see also Shyamal K. Chatterjee, ‘Rammohun Roy and the

Baptists of Serampore: Moralism vs. Faith’, Religious Studies 20:4 (1984), 669–80.

Textually conjoined twins 53

were the distinctive markers of the newly independent nation, and both of

which saw dogmas and institutions as a menace to individual progress and

happiness. Jefferson’s interpretative practice could be traced to and placed

within the humanistic and Reformation traditions. The interpretative aim

of the humanists was guided by the high investment they placed on

ancient sources. Their urge was to go back to the beginning, to the

classical writings. This was the very aim of the Reformation too – to go

back to the Bible as a way of testing the doctrinal claims of the church

against the authentic teaching of Jesus. Jefferson’s hermeneutics clearly

falls within this category. The temptation is to attribute the normative

status which Roy accorded to the scriptures to the inﬂuence of the

Protestant tradition. But the strategy of employing scriptures for religious

and social reform is not an exclusively Protestant trait. The practice

existed in India even before it was energized by Protestant principles.

Indian reformers, especially various sects within Hinduism, had used both

texts and non-textual traditions for questioning idolatry, polytheism and

the evils of caste. Roy’s earliest tract, Tuhfat-ul, is suffused with allusions

to Koranic verses. He employed them to critique idolatrous practices.

Roy’s method, according to Saumyendranath Tagore, was based on that

of the Mimamsa method for arriving at the truth: ‘the method being to

start with a particular piece of evidence found in Sastra, to doubt its

validity, and question its authenticity, then begin a re-examination of the

issue and thus arrive at a conclusion’.

159

In some respects, the compilations of Roy and Jefferson stand in the

heritage of Tatian. Tatian, in about 160 ce, harmonized the gospel

accounts by interweaving the four gospels into one single narrative and

produced the Diatessaron. Tatian was principally prompted by the prob-

lems caused by the plurality of the gospels, multiple accounts of the same

events, and the discrepancies enscripted in them. As we have seen so far,

the need to amend the narratives in the case of Roy and Jefferson, was

provoked by the need to free the teachings of Jesus from what were seen as

later accretions, corruptions and doctrinal glosses. Jefferson’s letter to his

nephew Peter Carr underscores the reason:

I forgot to observe when speaking of the New Testament that you should read all

the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have

decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists, because

these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration as much as the others, and you

159 See Tagore, Raja Rammohun Roy,p.14. For Roy’s use of mimamsa see The English Works of Raja

Rammohun Roy ,p.157.

54 The Bible and Empire

are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those

ecclesiastics.

160

The aspiration of Roy and Jefferson to make the scriptures simple

and uncomplicated did not always produce the desired results. Their

versions duplicate events. For no apparent reason, Roy has both Mark’s

and Luke’s versions of the Widow’s Mite. Jefferson includes Mark’s and

Luke’s instructions to the disciples not in his customary fashion of mixing

and matching them but as two separate narratives placed at different

locations. Jefferson makes Jesus drive away the moneylenders in the

temple twice – at the beginning of his ministry and in his last days in

Jeruasalem. Roy inserts a number of utterances of Jesus which stand in

The Precepts as orphans without immediate narrative habitat.

In their hermeneutical enterprise, Jefferson and Roy treated the Bible

differently. For Jefferson, the Bible was essentially a historical document.

When his neighbour, Robert Skipwirth, asked for a list of books which

would suit the taste and status of a Virginian gentleman for a private

library, Jefferson listed the writings of Locke, Xenophon, Epictetus,

Seneca, Cicero, Bolingbroke, Sherlock, and the sermons of Sterne under

religion whereas the Bible was placed under history. The religious books

that his nephew was advised to read included the works of Middleton and

Voltaire. The Bible was basically a record of human history rather than a

depository of divine revelation. He encouraged Peter Carr to ‘Read the

bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus’.

161

In the same letter he

called the New Testament ‘the history of a personage called Jesus’.

162

Jefferson turned to the Bible fairly late in his life, not until 1809, when he

found in its pages a set of moral teachings that eclipsed the standards set

by the classical philosophers: ‘We all agree in the obligation of the moral

precepts of Jesus, and no where will they be found delivered in greater

purity than in his discourses’.

163

For Roy, sacred texts were largely

theological documents which promoted faith in the Supreme, moral

works that led men to eternal happiness, but their authenticity and

reliability was judged by the type of social comfort they promoted.

The compilations of Roy and Jefferson undermined inerrancy, altered

the canonicity of the Bible and supported their hermeneutical aims. The

singular purpose of Roy and Jefferson was to move the interpretative base

160 Boyd (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. xii,p.17.

161 Ibid.,p.15.

162 Ibid.,p.16.

163 Letter to James Fishback, 27 September 1809,p.343.

Textually conjoined twins 55

away from priestly guilds and custodians of the canon, and particularly

from the power of the institutional authorities to corrupt the text and

control interpretation. Their deletion of histories, dogmas and myth-

ologies was not aimed at invalidating the Bible but at privileging their

own version of it. The hermeneutical principle at work here is, to use

Jefferson’s phrase, to weed out the ‘hay from stubbles’. In his view, the

gospel narratives were clear in distinguishing what Jesus thought was

central to moral life and what was peripheral to it. What Jefferson did

was to carry further the tradition of the gospels by deleting any material

which muddied the moral truth taught by Jesus. Similarly, Roy conceived

his task as removing any element which was ‘destructive of the comforts

of life, or injurious to the texture of society’.

164

Their interest was not

to analyse the gospels but to unearth their ethical component. The

compilations of Roy and Jefferson can be taken as counter-gospels, not

superseding the canonical versions but, rather supplementing them.

How do we assess the work of the President and the Raja? There is no

ruling model by which to judge their enterprise. Those interpreters who

were brought up with the Bultmannian proclivity for slicing up the

gospels into various chunks and who engaged in the modernistic task of

demythologizing would, up to a point, relish the work of Roy and

Jefferson. In an era when the gospels as stories were treated as plot and

characterization, Jefferson’s and Roy’s way of breaking the stories

into little segments would not ﬁnd favour. Unlike the writers of the

nineteenth-century ‘lives’ of Jesus, Jefferson and Rammohun Roy did

not ﬁnd it necessary to make a long and detailed study of the linguistic

evidence or of the complex questions of the sources, nor did they engage

in a comparative analysis of contemporary biblical scholarship. Both

undertook their enterprise before biblical criticism became the preserve

of linguistic specialists.

Jefferson and Roy trusted the texts that are much more to the liking of

today’s liberal voices within the scholarly guild. They did not question the

integrity of the redacted gospels but only of the doctrinal, historical and

supernatural elements included in them. They also did not dwell on the

question of why the stories surrounding Jesus had been invented or

remembered. In one sense, both were literalists. They were literalists not

in the traditional sense of believing everything to be true, but what they

believed as authentic they took to be literally true. Jefferson did not

hesitate to accept that the moral teachings which he extracted from the

164 The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy,p.119.

56 The Bible and Empire

gospels had come from ‘the mouth of Jesus himself ’.

165

Roy, too, believed

in the actual words of Jesus and their ‘excellent authority’. In his Second

Appeal, Roy made it clear that neither in his introduction to The Precepts

of Jesus nor in the defence of these precepts had he ‘expressed the least

doubt as to the truth of any part of the gospel’.

166

Roy and Jefferson were

not blind literalists who believed that every word was dictated by God.

Jefferson did not feel it necessary to accept all of Jesus’ teachings, because

he perceived him as a mere man and the ‘ﬁrst of the sages’. He made it

clear to William Short that ‘it is not to be understood that I am with him

in all his doctrines’.

167

His material outlook did not endear him to the

‘spiritualism’ advocated by Jesus. The other teaching which troubled

Jefferson was the eternal punishment awaiting unrepentant sinners.

Roy, too, exposed the hazards of too much dependence on ancient

textual authorities, and held the view that truth was to be upheld and

followed whether there was textual warrant or not: ‘the truth of a saying

does not depend on the multiplicity of the sayers, and the non-reliability

of a narration cannot arise simply out of the paucity of the number of

narrators’.

168

For him, it was pointless to hold on to texts irrespective of

their status if they advanced idol worship, polytheistic practices and selﬁsh

gains. This does not mean that Roy rejected the authority of the scrip-

tures. For him, the ultimate realization was attained not through the

evidence of the scriptures alone but also on the basis of commonsense,

rationality, praxis and God’s grace. He redeﬁned praxis as serving the

betterment of the everyday life of people rather than sacramental or

ritualistic acts. For Roy, the ultimate criterion of truth was that it should

be ‘followed’ and put into practice and should not be ‘remote from reason

and repugnant to experience’.

169

In his view, the practical aspect of

Christianity was important, otherwise Christianity would be ‘altogether

regarded as existing only in theory’.

170

Finally, as a way of bringing this chapter to a close, let me engage in a

hypothetical speculation. How would Jefferson and Roy react to today’s

world, where there is a virulent form of fundamentalism which is trying to

forge a uniﬁed and single form of religion whether Christianity, Islam or

Hinduism. Both men, in their own way, thrived on dissension and

advocated an inclusive and open form of faith – they would have been

165 Letter to John Adams, 12 October 1813,p.352.

166 The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy,p.567.

167 Letter to William Short, 13 April 1820,p.391.

168 The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy,p.957.

169 Ibid.,p.956. 170 Ibid.,p.571.

Textually conjoined twins 57

appalled to see such intolerance within religions and between religions. In

his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote: ‘Difference of opinion is

advantageous in religion’.

171

He made it clear that in the newly freed

country ‘neither Pagan, nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded

from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion’.

172

would have been particularly horriﬁed to hear the words ‘Missed you at

the Bible study’ being spoken in the White House nowadays. Jefferson’s

Bible was vastly different from that of President Bush, which is replete

with angels, miracles and a Messianic attachment to American moral

values and their applicability to the rest of the world.

Granted that the Hinduism that Roy propounded was too elitist,

abstract and beyond the understanding of ordinary people, he would have

been alarmed at the virulent form of Hinduism manifesting itself among

certain sections of the Indian population. He would have sympathized with

the attempts of nationalist Hindus to ﬁnd an answer to the seemingly

insurmountable religious differences and cultural diversities which charac-

terize India. But he would have found it difﬁcult to support them when

they argue for an exclusive India which equates with Hinduism. While

unashamedly acknowledging his Hinduness, it was Hinduism which

enabled Roy to argue for an inclusive, plural and tolerant India. It

was the truth he saw in Hinduism that allowed him to see truth in

Christianity and Islam. This represented a positive strategy capable of

containing conﬂict and promoting tolerance. The religious tolerance he

aspired to came not necessarily from western secular values but from

within Hinduism. Like Asoka and Akbar before him, who sought to base

religious tolerance on the teachings of Buddhism and Islam,

173

Roy was

trying to derive religious tolerance from within Hinduism and discover

connections between religions. He would have been dismayed to see the

current revivalists, be they Hindu or Muslim or Christian, trying to forge

religions as mutually exclusive, bounded, rigid and closed traditions.

While encountering different religions, Roy was enchanted by and en-

grossed in them, whereas the current religious revivalists are perplexed and

apprehensive about them. He was for collaboration and reciprocation,

whereas the present mood is to sever ties, show mutual hostility and

limit understanding. The Hinduism that Roy championed was not the

Hinduism for which the present Hindu nationalists are arguing. What his

171 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia,p.160.

172 Boyd (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. i ,p.548.

173 Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (Delhi, Permanent

Black, 2001), p. 80.

58 The Bible and Empire

hermeneutical enterprise tried to do was to show us the richness of the

pluralistic qualities of Hinduism. He exhibited openness and had conﬁ-

dence in his own faith. When there was a murmur among Hindu students

about Alexander Duff ’s distribution of Bibles to them, Roy intervened:

Christians like Dr Horace Hayman Wilson have studied the Hindu Shaster and

you know that he has not become a Hindu. I myself have read the Koran again

and again; and has that made me a Mussalman? Nay, I have studied the whole of

the Bible, and you know I am not a Christian. Why then do you fear to read it?

Read it and judge for yourself.

174

This is an appropriate text with which to end the chapter, because Roy’s

advice should be the guiding principle for any hermeneutical undertaking.

174 Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy,p.281.

Textually conjoined twins 59

chapter 2

Salvos from the Victorian pulpit: conscription

of texts by Victorian preachers during the

Indian rebellion of 1857

We ﬁght for independence. In the words of Lord Krishna, we will,

if we are victorious, enjoy the fruit of victory, if defeated and

killed on the ﬁeld of battle, we shall surely earn eternal glory and

salvation.

Rani Lakshmi Bai

The Englishman never goes to a place without a Bible. It precedes,

or closely follows, his sword.

A. Madhaviah

‘Bring me a sword.’

1 Kings 3.24

If the ﬁrst casualty of war, as the cliche

goes, is truth, the second casualty

to sustain heavy collateral damage is text. In war, along with truth, texts of

various kinds, ranging from reports of the battle to religious texts that

justify it, also fall victim to the hands of both proponents and opponents.

This chapter is about the misuse of biblical texts when they were con-

scripted by Victorian preachers and employed as potent textual weapons

during the Indian insurrection of 1857.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a passionately ﬁerce

and violent reaction against the penetration, presence and powerful

inﬂuence of the British in India. Hindus and Muslims fought side by

side, their collective outrage directed at their common enemy, the

British – in the form of the East India Company – who were blamed

for disrupting both the religious and the political traditions of the country

and intensifying the suffering of the people. This rebellion, or mutiny,

was an affair mainly restricted to the northern states of India. It became

embedded in the consciousness of the British and was more than the term

implies, becoming brieﬂy an all-out war, though in today’s geopolitical

parlance it would have been called terrorism, and the rebels terrorists. It

was a momentous event and has been exploited in both India and

Pakistan to support national movements.

The background and the causes

of the rebellion remain an embattled terrain and are more complicated

than merely a response to cartridges lubricated with pig fat or cow tallow,

as claimed in popular myth-making. Equally complicated are the theories

of interpretation which emerged in the aftermath of the event.

bad company, bad conscience

The history of the event has been competently chronicled elsewhere, as

well as the analysis of it, so all we need here is a brief note on the

background, the causes, and how it was perceived by the different protag-

onists. The rebellion was triggered off by a series of religious and political

measures introduced by the East India Company, which by this time had

become more than merely a mercantile outﬁt and had come to act as a

surrogate British government in the Indian subcontinent. Indians became

increasingly suspicious of some of the changes and regulations introduced

by the British, and viewed these measures as threatening their way of life.

In the early part of the nineteenth century the colonial administration,

spurred on by some of its overtly Christian ofﬁcers and some Christian

missionaries, at times supported by Indian reformers, passed a series of

acts which were perceived by other Indians as unnecessary and an arrogant

attempt to intervene and disrupt their ancient customs. The granting of

freedom to Hindu widows by abolishing sati and allowing their remar-

riage, the suppression of female infanticide and the dissolution of gangs

known as ‘Thugges’

are some of the examples of foreign intrusion into

indigenous habits. Besides meddling with Indian practices, the general

tone of the British at the time was one of cultural arrogance. This was

exempliﬁed by T. B. Macaulay, the legal member of the Council in

Calcutta, who, in spite of the discovery of a gloriﬁed India by the

orientalists, dismissed Indian culture as made up of ‘medical doctrines

which would disgrace an English farrier, Astronomy which would move

laughter in girls at an English boarding school, History, abounding with

kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and Geog-

raphy, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’.

What he said about

1 For how school textbooks in Pakistan and India selectively narrate the event as a national

struggle for independence, see Krishna Kumar, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the

Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan (New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 87–101.

2 Criminals, alleged to be followers of the goddess Kali, who were held up as prime examples of

moral degradation in India.

3 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Minute of the 2nd of February 1835’, in Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His

Minute on Indian Education, ed. G. M. Young (London, Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 351 .

Salvos from the Victorian pulpit 61

Indian literature was equally damaging: ‘It is, I believe, no exaggeration to

say that all the historical information which has been collected from all

the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may

be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in

England’, and he went on to claim that ‘a single shelf of a good European

library was worth the whole of native literature’ – a claim which has now

become one of the most celebrated and castigated in postcolonial dis-

course.

The fear and scepticism of Indians were further fuelled by a

circular letter to the government by a certain E. Edmund which proposed

that ‘The time appears to have come when earnest consideration should

be given to the subject, whether or not all men should embrace the same

system of Religion.’

There was a widespread belief that the covenanted

ofﬁcers were using their privileged position to impart the knowledge

of Christianity and that the government wished to convert Indians to

Christianity.

The ordinary people might not have had access to the devious designs

of Edmund or the chauvinistic writings of Macaulay; what really caused

discontent among them was the way the traditional governing arrange-

ments which affected their daily life had been rapidly altered by the

British. Some of the political actions of the government went against

the customs and practices of India and increasingly marginalized the

people in their own land. Among their grievances were: the resumption

of revenue on free lands, which increased poverty; the forced sale of lands

for unpaid debts and revenue arrears; the abolition of taluqdar, who

enjoyed the status of minor rajahs; the introduction of stamp duty; the

isolation of the Muslim rulers and failure to show respect to them; the

creation of a market in property; heavy assessment of land, which ruined

both landlords and cultivators who depended on it; the abolition of the

custom of bestowing Jagirs (grants of lands or presents), which had

increased prosperity; the power accorded to bankers and moneylenders

to manipulate civil courts to evict traditional landed families from their

properties; and the ruthless and gluttonous employment of the doctrine

of lapse in order to annex a number of Indian states which had no direct

heir. Syed Ahmed Khan, a leading Muslim reformer of the time and

himself a beneﬁciary of Company patronage, writing soon after the tragic

events, summed up the mood thus: ‘It [i.e. the rebellion] results from the

4 Ibid.,p.349.

5 Syed Ahmed Khan, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, Oxford in Asia. Historical Reprints

(Karachi, Oxford University Press, [1873] 2000), p. 55.

62 The Bible and Empire