History of Hinduism

Wesleyan University
Digging Wells while Houses Burn? Writing Histories of Hinduism in a Time of Identity
Politics
Author(s): David Gordon White
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 45, No. 4, Theme Issue 45: Religion and History (Dec., 2006),
pp. 104-131
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
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History and Theory,ThemeIssue 45 (December 2006), 104-131 C Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656
DIGGINGWELLS WHILEHOUSES BURN?

WRITINGHISTORIESOF HINDUISM IN A TIME
OF IDENTITYPOLITICS
DAVIDGORDONWHITE
ABSTRACT
Over the past fifty years, a numberof approachesto the recovery of the multiple pasts of
Hinduismhave held the field. These include that of the discipline of History of Religions
as it is constitutedin NorthAmericaas well as those of the Hindunationalists,the colonial
and post-colonial historians,and the SubalternStudies School. None of these approaches
have proven satisfactorybecause, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have
adequatelyaddressedhumanagency or historicalchange in their accountsof the pasts out
of which modern-dayHinduismhas emerged. The Hindu nationalisthistoriansharkback
to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remainedunchangeduntil
the corruptionsspawned by the Turkishinvasions of the eleventh century.Many Western
indologists and historiansof religion specializing in Hinduismnever leave the unalterable
ideal worlds of the scripturesthey interpretto investigate the changingreal-worldcontexts
out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historiansfocus on the
past two hundredyears as the period in which all of the categories throughwhich India
continues to interpretitself-including Hinduism-were imposed upon it from without.
Adducing examples of Hindu practitionersand thinkers from the colonial period, subal-
tern theoristsand others arguethat historicalthoughtis itself alien to the authenticIndian
mind. This article suggests a numberof interpretivestrategies for retrievingthe multiple
Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particularas that time out of which
most modern-daypracticesof Hinduismemerged.These include an increasedemphasison
non-scripturalsources and a focus on regional traditions.
In recent decades the craft of writing the history of South Asian religions has be-
come increasingly drawn into the fire of identity politics. This has been the case
especially in India, where at one extreme the religious populism of the Hindu
nationalists and at the other the postmodernist theory formations of the Subal-
tern School both reject out of hand the validity of the critical historical method,
the one because it is critical and the other because it is historical. In the first
case, the Hindu nationalists-who have internalized the theories of such mod-
ernist scholars as Max Miiller and James Frazer concerning the pristine origins
and subsequent decay of every religion-assume the truths of Hinduism to be
eternal and unchanging, and therefore not subject to historical scrutiny. In the
second, the Subaltern School rejects on ideological grounds the validity of the
historical enterprise, by denying, on the premise that the very concept of history
is Eurocentric, the objective validity of any attempt to describe the past on the
DIGGINGWELLS WHILEHOUSES BURN? 105
basis of historical data. Implicit in both positions is the assumptionof an Indian

exceptionalism,that is, that the Indian worldview(s), culture(s), tradition(s),and
race(s) are so different, so self-contained as to be uninterpretablethrough any
but indigenous Indian categories. Such claims are not unique to India:emerging
from the colonial experience, political and intellectualelites of new nation-states
throughoutthe world have been theorizing their national identities along such
exceptionalistlines.
I. REINVENTINGINDIA
For the Hindu nationalists,all indigenous categories are always already the cat-
egories of their eternal Hindu faith and all history the history of the struggle for
survivalof the pure Hindu traditionin the land of the Aryas (airvavarta)-identi-
fled with the boundariesof the presentIndiannation-state'--over and againstcor-
ruptionby foreign (mainlyMuslim) invadersand internalsecularists.It is an irony
of (critical) history that many of the Hindu nationalists' categories of the pure
and eternalHindu faith are themselves the very recent productof nineteenth-and
twentieth-centuryreconstructionsof Hinduism,which were themselves so many
reactionsto the colonial experience. Present-dayHindu nationalistshave mainly
embracedthe categories of the Hindu reform of the colonial period (which was
mainly limited to high-caste urbanelites in Bengal and the Punjab)-categories
that, following the Orientalists,often cast the pure Hindu traditionin an "Angli-
can" light of quietist devotion, spirituality,and self-renewal. Philip Lutgendorf's
appraisalof the situationis apposite:
Thenotionof a HinduRenaissancechampioned by a progressiveelite,eschewingcentu-
riesof superstitionandselectivelyrediscovering the bestin its own heritage,has by now
filteredbackthroughthe writingsof academicians to be pervasivelyconstitutiveof the
concept(thoughnotthepractice)of Hinduismheldby largenumbersof Indians.2
To these modem reconstructionsof the eternal Hindu faith the Hindu nation-
alist ideologues have graftedthe metanarrativeof a Hindu India under siege by
Muslim forces from without and secularistvoices from within. This is a metanar-
rativethatalso denies the rich historyof culturaland religious exchanges between
Hindus and Muslims, as well as the political patronage, by Muslim rulers, of
Hinduinstitutions.3Rather,it casts the Hinduand Muslim communitiesas homo-
geneous pan-Indianentities whose antagonismhas constituteda permanentstruc-
1. According to such law books as the Manu Smrti (2.22-23) the extension of rvryivartawas
limited to the land comprised by the eastern and western seas (i.e., the Arabian Sea and the Bay of
Bengal) and the Himalaya and Vindhya mountainranges. The same source (2.24) also speaks of a
broadergeographicalrange, "wherethe black antelope naturallyroams,"as distinguishing"thecoun-
try fit for sacrifices"from the "landof the barbarians"beyond.
2. Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanasof Tulsidas (Berkeley:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1991), 361.
3. As, for example, that of the eighteenth-centuryMuslim Nawabs of Oudh (Awadh) of such
Vaisnava institutionsas the Ratmanandimonastic order in Ayodhya itself (Peter van der Veer, Gods
on Earth: TheManagementofReligious Experienceand Identityin a NorthInldianPilgrimage Centre
[London:Athlone Press, 1988], 11-12 andpassim).
106 DAVID GORDONWHITE
turaldatumin the life of the countrysince the time of the Turkishconquests.4This

has been the theoreticalcornerstoneof the political agendaof the Hindunational-
ist BharatiyaJanataParty,which-especially during the period of its control of
the centralgovernmentfrom 1998 to 2004, but also in its control of several state
governmentsdown to the presentday-has engaged in a triumphalistprogramto
restore Rama Rafjya(or Ramraj),the reign of the god-king Rama, a Hindublend
of the days of Camelotand an imaginedkingdomof heaven on earththatpreceded
the Muslim invasion of the subcontinent.In this, the Hindu nationalistsare sim-
ply carryingforwarda political strategythatdates from the period of the Muslim
incursionsthemselves, at which time Hindukings began to self-identify with that
epic god-king, and to identify theirMuslimenemies with thatepic hero's demonic
adversaries.5In the colonial and post-colonial twentieth- and twenty-firstcentu-
ries as well, social, political, and religious leaders have all wielded the image of
the utopia of Rfmrtj--often at cross purposes with one another-in their social
and political strategies.6
The present-daycampaignof the Hindunationalistsagainstthe enemies of their
invented history of religion in South Asia has included, but has not been limited
to: 1) the "saffronization"of primaryand secondary school history curriculato
conform to authorizeddogmas;72) the increasing exploitation of the discipline
of archeologyto generatematerialproofs for the primordialityof Hindu dharma,
and for substantiatingclaims that the "Vedic Hindus" had an indigenous origin
within the subcontinent,as well as for the recovery, at Ayodhya, of traces of a
Rima temple from beneaththe foundationsof the BabriMosque, which was razed
in a campaignorchestratedby the BharatiyaJanataPartyin 19928;3) a program
of evangelization (or, to use Ashis Nandy's terminology, of "internalcoloniza-
tion"9) of the Indian territory,to purge syncretistic or "irrational"or "supersti-
4. ClaudeMarkovits,JacquesPouchepadass,and SanjaySubrahmanyam,"Lageste indianiste:Du

saint guerrieraux h6rospaysans,"Annales:Histoire,Sciences Sociales 60:2 (March-April2005), 233.
5. Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayanaand Political Imaginationin India,"reprintedfrom the Journal of
Asian Studies52:2 (May 1993) in Religious Moveminents in SouthAsia 600-1800, ed. David Lorenzen
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157-159, 161-164, 170-172. Many of Pollock's theses
are called into question by BarjadulalChattopadhyaya,"Anachronismof Political Imagination,"
reprintedfrom Representing the Other? ScinskritSources candthe Musliims(New Delhi: Manohar
Publishers& Distributors,1998) in Lorenzen, ed., Religious Movemelnts,209-226. As Hans Bakker
has noted in his detailed history, no extant worshipimage of Rama predatesthe tenthcenturyCE; no
temple was dedicatedexclusively to Rama priorto the twelfth century (Ayodhvci[Groningen:Egbert
Forsten, 1986], 64-65). Bakkerallows that"one of the oldest temples of Ramamay have been the one
in Ayodhya on the Janmabhhmi"(ibid., 64).
6. Lutgendorf, Life, 374-392; and idem, "InterpretingRamraj: Reflections on the 'Ramayan,'
Bhakti and Hindu Nationalism,"in Bhckti Religion in North Incldi:ConununitvIdentityandcl Political
Action, ed. David N. Lorenzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 253-255.
7. This campaign has reached the shores of the United States. Since the spring of 2006, Hindu
nationalistshave been lobbying the Californialegislatureand filing suits in Californiacourts to revise
the content of California public middle school history textbooks to incorporateelements of their
revisioning of Indianreligious history.
8. Sudehsna Guha, "Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation,"
ModernAsicanStudies 39:2 (2005), 399-426, especially 399-400.
9. Ashis Nandy, "Sati as Profit versus Sati as Spectacle," in Sacti,The Blessing and the Curse:
The Burning of Wives in India, ed. John StrattonHawley and Lindsey Harlan(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 141-142. For furtherdiscussion, see CatherineWeinberger-Thomas,Ashes of
Inunortcalitv: Widow-Burning in Indiaci(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 185-186.
DIGGINGWELLS WHILE HOUSES BURN? 107
tious" forms of religious practice and to replace these with its own orthodoxy;'0
and4) attackson "secularist"or "Marxist"historians,from both within India and
the United States, whose historiographydoes not conformto the Hindunationalist
metanarrative.All of the Hindu nationalists'historicalclaims are contradictedby
the Hindu scripturesthemselves, as well as by the archeologicalrecord.They are
nonetheless worthy of mention here because their claims need to be rebuttedby
critical historians,"and not least because of the blatanthumanrights abuses that
have been carriedout underthe aegis of theirbroaderagenda.
Among the many internalcontradictionsof this agenda, thereis one in particu-
lar thatstandsout. This is the claim, on the one hand,thatthe land mass comprised
by the presentbordersof the nation-stateof India has always been Hindu,and the
campaign,on the other,to convert the Indianhinterlandsfrom their popular,"su-
perstitious,"syncretisticpracticestowardan authenticform of Hinduism,that is,
the eternalHindu faith, which Hindu nationalistorthodoxymaintainshas always
been monotheisticandunchangedsince the time of the Vedas.Fully threequarters
of the "Hindus"of India practice a religion that is groundedin local or regional
traditionsof place, family, and ancestry,and thathas no connection whatsoeverto
the "translocal,"scripture-based,pan-IndianHinduismof the Hindunationalists.12
If the people of village Indiaare Hindus,then theirs are the majoritypracticesand
that of the (mainly urbanmiddle-class) Hindu nationaliststhe minoritypractice;
and if they are not Hindus,then Indiahas never been a Hindu nation.
By maintainingtheir position that the sole cleavage within the Indian nation-
state is that which obtains between polarized Hindu insiders and Muslim invad-
ers, the Hindunationalistsare obliged to impose uniformitywhere there is in fact
diversity-of deities, peoples, practices, and origins-within communal entities
(within Hinduism and within Islam, to say nothing of the other religious com-
munitiesof SouthAsia, includingthe Sikhs, whom the Hindu nationalistshave of
late been identifying, abusively,as Hindus).In this as well, the Hindunationalists
are simply carryingforwarda time-honoredhermeneuticalstrategythat extends
back throughthe reformmovements of the nineteenthand twentiethcenturiesto
the modus operandiof the classical Hindumythographersthemselves: to affirma
single (in this case Hindu) essence behind multiple forms, that is, the doctrineof
the one in the many. India is one nation comprised of one authenticpeople, with
one origin, one god, one tradition,and one destiny. For the Hindu nationalists,
then, the history of the Indianhomelandis a religious history,and this a history of
longue duree, going back to a time of origins, with the loss of its idealized golden
age, its Ramraj,occurringwith the Muslim incursionsof the eleventh century.
10. A compelling recent study of the phenomenonof vernacularethnohistoriographyas a form of
resistance to the totalizing strategiesof the Hindu nationalists, with specific reference to Himachal
Pradesh, is Mark Elmore, "States of Religion: Postcolonialism, Power, and the Formation of
Himachal Pradesh,"Ph.D. dissertation,Departmentof Religious Studies, University of California,
SantaBarbara,2005, especially 296-355.
11. An accurate and passionate debunking of these elements of the Hindu nationalist agenda is
Dwijendra Narayan Jha, "Looking for a Hindu Identity," Presidential Address to the 66th Indian
History Congress, Shantiniketan,January28, 2006: http://sacw.insaf.net/India_History/dnj Jan06.
pdf (accessed August 21, 2006).
12. On the local/translocaldynamic,see especially RichardCohen, "Naga,Yaksini, Buddha:Local
Deities and Local Buddhismat Ajanta,"History of Religions 37:4 (May 1998), 360-400.
II. PROVINCIALIZINGINDIA
As the SubalternSchool has evolved, many of its proponentshave also come

to theorize a time of origins and a fall of sorts into historical time, as well as
an "Indianexceptionalism"that defies Eurocentricor historicistconstructionsof
history. While the task its founders originally set for themselves was to decon-
structthe dominanthegemonic discourseof "modernizing"colonial and national-
ist elites in orderto allow the systematicallyocculted (and admittedly,by them,
irrecoverable)voice of India's "yet-to-be modernized peasantry"'3to be heard
in their own cultural idioms and through their own categories, a slippage has
graduallyoccurred,such that the elite/subalternpolarity has been elided into an
oppositionbetween Westernmodernityand indigenous culture,and by extension
into a valorizationof the precolonial(or premodern)over and againstthe colonial
(or modern).14 Therefore, whereas the Hindu nationalist project has comprised
a hermeneuticsof retrieval(albeit a systematicallydistortedone) to recover the
utopia of a Vedic India and a Ramraijthat existed before the fall, that of subal-
tern (and, by extension, of many colonial and postcolonial) historianshas been a
hermeneuticsof suspicion, to deconstructthe dystopiaof the time of the fall-that
is, of the BritishEmpirein India-as "a site of unidirectionalmentalcolonization
inflicted by a rationalizingscientific Europeon a pliable pre-modernOrient."'"It
thereforegoes without saying that such theoreticianshave shown little interestin
the precolonial period of Indianhistory, the past in terms of which they explain
the presentbeing the time of the British Raj.
This has led theoreticiansof the SubalternSchool into some essentializing of
their own, the most flagrantcase being the category of the subalternitself, ratio-
nalized in GayatriSpivak's famous call in 1985 for "a strategic use of positivist
essentialism in a scrupulouslyvisible political interest."'6 Now it is true that the
Indian(essentially Bengali) SubalternStudies projecthas been since its inception
a reaction against the reigning "orthodoxy"of Marxist historiographyin India,
which has generallyinstrumentalizedthe religious emotions of the Indianmasses
as so many irrationalfetters on their own emancipation,and thereby unworthy
of analysis. The ideal, then, of rehabilitatingthe worldview or "lifeworld"of the
subaltern-however essentialized-as a subjectworthyof analysis, as opposed to
simply relegatingit to the "premodern,"'7 is a laudable one. But very few mem-
13. Dipesh Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope: Postcolonial Thoughtand Historical Difference
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2000), 40.
14. JacquesPouchepadass,"Les SubalternStudiesou la critiquepostcoloniale de la modernit6,"in
Intellectuels en diaspora et theories inomads,ed. Jacky Assayag (L'Honuine156 [Oct.-Dec. 2000]),
174-175.
15. Vijay Pinch, "Bhaktiand the BritishEmpire,"Past & Present 179 (May 2003), 160.
16. GayatriChakravortySpivak, "SubalternStudies:DeconstructingHistoriography,"in Subaltern
Studies 4 (1985), 342 (emphasis in the original). "I read SubalternStudies against the grain,"con-
tinues Spivak, "and suggest that its own subalternityin claiming a positive subject-positionfor
the subalternmight be reinscribed as a strategy for our times" (345). Cited in Richard M. Eaton,
"(Re)imag(in)ingOther2ness:A Postmortemfor the Postmodernin India,"Journal of WorldHistory
11:1 (Spring 2000), 60.
17. Hereafter,I will employ the term "non-modern,"which was introducedby James Ketelaarat
the Religion and History Conference, held at Wesleyan University on November 11-12, 2005, out
of which the present volume was produced. "Non-modern"is preferable to "premodern"in that it
bers of the SubalternSchool have actually carried through in this regard, with
their cultural studies approachto religious phenomena being ahistorical if not
anecdotal.
This failure to actually write "minorityhistories" of India's subalternsstems
from a fundamentalaxiom of postcolonial studies in general:that is, that India's
experience of the colonial adventureof the Europeanpowers was so unusualthat
the deconstructionof the latter's discourse of power (throughthe writing of his-
tory, for example), which continues to colonize the Indian mind, is more urgent
thanthe retrievalof India'sprecolonialpast, or the linking of thatpast to the post-
colonial present throughhistorical methods, however flawed they may be. To be
sure,certaincolonial andpostcolonialhistorianshave succeededin laying barethe
asymmetriesof power with regardto religion that obtain between colonial elites
(andtheirIndiancollaborators)and the subalternmasses. But such deconstructive
post-mortems,of which therehave been an abundancein recent decades, require
a complementarymove on the partof historians,and that move is to reconstruct,
to recover,the precolonialhistory of SouthAsian religions. In an importantstudy,
Sheldon Pollock presentedthe issue in the following way:
Howit is possible,then,to surveythe constructionsof colonialdomination withouta de-
tailedtopographyof precolonialdomination,I cannotsee. Andthis topography, charted
the
throughout expanse of Sanskritculturalproduction,does not reallyexist, a lacunafor
Thefailureto tracewithanyadequacy
whichclassicalIndologyitselfis partlyresponsible.
a historicalmapof socialpowerin traditional India,whichalonecananchorourestima-
tionsof theimpactof colonialism,is all themoresurprising,
considering whatappearto be
theextraordinary and
density,longevity effectivity of authoritativepower... in thehigh
cultureof earlyIndia.'8
By way of example, Pollock demonstrates that the Krtyakalpataru of

LaksmidharaBhattaand othermajorworks of the Hindudharmanibandhacanon,
"those great encyclopedic constructionsof the 'Hindu way of life,"' were com-
piled precisely as a brahmanicreactionto the eleventh-centuryIslamic conquest
of the subcontinent.19An analogous situation from a thousandyears earlier has
been describedR. C. Hazra,concerningthe revalorizationof the orthodoxhouse-
hold rites by the brahmincompilers of the Mahabharataand the early Purinas.20
With their religious authorityunder assault on multiple fronts-due in particular
to the Mauryanpatronageof Buddhismover Brahmanismand the laterbarbarian
invasions of the Sakas, Yavanas, Bihlikas, and others-the brahminorthodoxy
respondedby reassertingthe old Vedic paradigmsin novel and exhaustive ways,
through the new canon of smrti literature.In other words, Hindu power elites
have been redefining themselves for millennia by generatingnew and compre-
hensive interpretationsof theirVedic heritageprecisely at those times when they
have felt their collective identity to be under the greatest pressure from hostile
describes the presence of the traditionalin the modernwithout chronologicalinflection.

18. Sheldon Pollock, "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj," in
Orientalismand the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Peter van der Veer and Carol A. Breckenridge
(Philadelphia:University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1993), 104.
19. Ibid., 105-110.
20. R. C. Hazra, Studies in the Puranic Records on Hindu Rites and Customs, 2d ed. (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1975), 213.
110 DAVIDGORDON WHITE
outside forces. Neither the colonial experience of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuriesnor the Islamic invasions of the eleventh to thirteenthcenturieswere the
unique events that the colonial and postcolonial historians,on the one hand, and
the Hindu nationalists,on the other,have made them out to be. In each of these
periods as well there were remarkablesynergiesbetween the "colonizingoppres-
sors" and their "colonized subjects."In the epic period, two of the most fervent
royal patronsof the cult of Vasudeva,a deity identifiedwith the Vedic god Visnu,
were the "barbarian"Indo-Bactrian(Yavana)kings named Heliodoros and Aga-
tocles.21Nearly every one of the "old"Hindu temples and images found in mod-
em-day Ayodhyawere built underthe patronageof the Muslim Nawabs of Oudh,
from 1722 onward.22Finally, as Vijay Pinch and Peter van der Veerhave recently
demonstrated,productiveencountersbetween British agents and theirIndiansub-
jects producedfascinating chains of influences, which transformedVictorian-age
religiosity in England as much as it did Hinduismin India.23
Returningto the SubalternSchool, I will focus here on Dipesh Chakrabarty,
who has, in many of his articles and monographs,nuanced the common opposi-
tion made between the non-modernenchantedlifeworlds of the subalternand
the modem, historicist worldview of the colonial powers and elites of the Indian
nation-state.Unlike the old-school Marxist historians with whose class-based,
materialist,historicist approachhe takes issue,24 and also unlike many subaltern
historians who simply do not address the topic, Chakrabartyhas attemptedto
bring religious precept and practice into his discussion. In his Provincializing
Europe, which opens with a manifesto for the establishmentof a school of an
India-specifichistoriographynot beholden to "a metanarrativethat celebratesthe
nation-state[of which] the theoreticalsubjectcan only be a hyperreal'Europe,'"25
Chakrabartyis often seen shuttlingbetween the elite/subalternpolarity that was
the focus of earlier theorizing on the one hand, and the precolonial/colonialof
the later SubalternSchool on the other.He is able to collapse the firstpolarityby
finding imprintsof an ahistoricalsubalternor "peasant"worldview even in the
lives of Indianelites,26 which in turnauthorizeshim to reinforcethe precolonial/
colonial opposition by asserting an Indian exception to Eurocentrichistoricism,
an exception thatthe subalternisthistorianmay appropriate,as Chakrabartyoften
repeats,"in the interestof social justice":27
[T]oquestionthe narrativestrategiesin academichistorythatallowits seculartemporal-
ity the appearanceof successfullyassimilatingto itself memoriesthatare... unassimi-
lable-these arethetasksthatsubaltern historiesaresuitedto accomplishin a countrysuch
21. Dennis Hudson, "TheSrimadBhitgavatain Stone: The Text as an Eighth-CenturyTemple and

its Implications,"Journal of VaisnavaStudies 3:3 (Summer 1995), 147-149.
22. "Accordingto local tradition,it was notably ... Raja Naval Ray [a Hindu minister of the
Nawab Safdar Jang] who transformedAyodhya from a Muslim town to a Hindu one" (Bakker,
Ayodhyc, 152). See above, n. 3.
23. Pinch, "Bhaktiand the BritishEmpire,"159-196; andPetervan der Veer, ImperialEncounters:
Religion and Modernity' in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
24. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 244-245.
25. Ibid., 40.
26. Ibid., 11.
27. Ibid., 77, 108, 239.
DIGGING WHILE
WELLS HOUSES
BURN? 111
as India..... Of course,theempiricalhistorianswhowritethesehistoriesarenotpeasants
ortribalsthemselves.28.
Theact of championing minorityhistorieshasresultedin discoveriesof subaltern
pasts
... [W]edo minorityhistorieswithinthe democratic projectof includingall groupsand
peopleswithinmainstream history29... Whatgives us a pointof entryintothe timesof
gods and spirits-times thatare seeminglyvery differentfromthe empty,secular,and
homogeneous timeof history-is thattheyarenevercompletelyalien;we inhabitthemto
beginwith.30
Like most of the theoristsof the subalternschool, Chakrabartyis a scion of the
urbanBengali intelligentsia,the very bhadralokthat producedthe most Europe-
anized of India's political, reform-religious,and intellectualelites in the colonial
period, and an elite that has historically known its Hegel (or, in Chakrabarty's
case, Heidegger) better than its Hinduism.31Also like most of his fellow subal-
ternists (the "we" of the passages quoted above), Chakrabartyis an Indianbased
in an elite universityin the United States, in the light of which one must question
the extent to which his life has ever been imprintedby the "times of gods and
spirits"and the "nonmodern,rural,nonsecularlife practices"32that characterize
the "peasants"whose cause he is claiming to championand even to share.If the
implicit claim here is that certain members of the Indian expatriatecommunity
are empoweredbecause of the "peasant"in them to discover subalternpasts (but
that non-Indianhistorians who have attemptedto do so are Orientalists-itself
an Orientalistposition33),then Chakrabarty'sassertions,however well-meaning,
are groundedin an assumptionof Indian exceptionalismthat is not qualitatively
different from that of the Hindu nationalists.34If his "we" encompasses all hu-
mans, then there is no subalterndistinction,and there are no minorityhistories to
champion.
Ratherthancontinuing,however,in the line of such a proces d'intention,I wish
instead to examine the ways in which Chakrabartyhas attemptedto excavate In-
dian "times of gods and spirits"in his proposedrecovery of subalternpasts, since
it is here that he seeks to engage with Indianreligious history.In Provincializing
Europe, Chakrabarty'smost sustaineddiscussion of subalternreligious practices
28. Ibid., 94.

29. Ibid., 106.
30. Ibid., 113.
31. Chakrabartyidentifies himself as a "socially radical Indianintellectual"(ibid., 244). His pen-
chant for Heidegger is pronouncedthroughouthis work.
32. Ibid., 11.
33. On this, see Eaton, "(Re)imag(in)ing Other2ness," 67, quoting Dipesh Chakrabarty,
"Postcolonialityand the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations37
(1992), 1-2.
34. In Provincializing Europe (40-41), Chakrabartyattempts to have it both ways by invoking
a "double bind throughwhich the subject of 'Indian' history articulatesitself," in which historicist
history simultaneously appropriatesand subordinates"the antihistoricaldevices of memory and the
antihistorical'histories' of the subalternclasses" as it points to these as constitutingthe "'difference'
and the 'originality' of the 'Indian.'"Yet this is precisely what Chakrabartyis himself doing in his
own theoreticalexcavation of subalternpasts. Elsewhere, while he agrees with Hans-GeorgGadamer
(112) that "what allows historians to historicize the medieval or the ancient is the very fact these
worlds are never completely lost," the clear implication is that Indianhistoriansalone are capable of
historicizing Indianpasts or accessing subalternIndianlifeworlds (109).
112 DAVIDGORDONWHITE
concerns a topic upon which he had written at some length in earlier publica-
tions:35the worship,by Bengali mill workers,of theirtools:
How do we-and I meannarrators of the pastsof the subalternclassesin India-handle
thisproblemof thepresenceof thedivineor the supernatural
in thehistoryof laboras we
renderthis enchantedworld into our disenchantedprose-a renderingrequired,let us say,
in theinterestof socialjustice?... Andhow do we, in doingthis,retainthe subaltern
(in
whose activity gods or spiritspresentthemselves) as the subjectsof their histories?...
Considerthe followingdescriptionfromthe 1930sof a particularfestival(still quite
commonin India)thatentailstheworshipof machineryby workers:"Insomeof thejute
mills near Calcuttathe mechanics often sacrifice goats at this time (autumn).A separate
altaris erectedby themechanics.... Varioustools andotheremblemsareplacedon it."
... Thisparticular festivalis celebratedin manypartsof northIndiaas a publicholiday
for the workingclass,on a day namedafterthe engineergod Vishvakarma. Howdo we
readit?To theextentthatthisdayhasnowbecomea publicholidayin India,it hasobvi-
ouslybeensubjectedto a processof bargaining betweenemployers,workers,andthestate.
andis hencea partof thehistoryof emergenceof abstractlaborin commodityform.The
?. publicnatureof theholidayshowsthatit hasbeenwrittenintoanemergentnational,
very
secularcalendarof production. ... Thequestionof whetherornotthe workershada con-
sciousor doctrinalbeliefin gods andspiritswas alsowideof the mark;afterall, godsare
as realas ideologyis-that is to say,theyareembeddedin practices.36
Chakrabartyemploys the example of the worship of "tools"(hathiviirpija) or

of the Hindu "engineergod" (vis'vakarmapja) in order to hoist Marxisthisto-
rians by their own petardby pointing to an example of a proletariatworshiping
the tools of its own servitude. The presence of the divine, even on the factory
floor, discloses an enchantedsubalternworldview, a non-secularphenomenology
of labor, which contests the modernistassumptionsof Europeanhistoriography.
There are problems with this analysis. To begin, Chakrabartyfails to addressan
importantpoint: as Dina Siddiqi has observed, hathiyx'rpfja7 is conspicuously
absent from Bangladeshi garment factories.37 Of course, Bangladesh is a Mus-
lim majoritynation-state,and its factory workersare overwhelminglyMuslim in
theirreligious orientation-which gives rise to the questionof whethersomething
otherthanresistancesto modernityor the repressivestrategiesof Eurocentrichis-
toricismmight be at work in Chakrabarty'sexample.More importantly,the Indian
specificity of hathiyvrr
pu-a shouldorientthe historianto a specifically Indian(and
Hindu)body of ritualpractice.Further,if we were to follow the logic of the ques-
tion that this body of ritual practiceposes for us, as Gadamerwould have us do,
we would find thatmore than "gods or spirits,"it is a precolonialIndianideology
of warfareand conquest that is embeddedin this non-moderntradition.Because,
however, he has chosen to take this as an exemplary case study of a "minority
history" whose parametersare limited to colonial and postcolonial modernity,
Chakrabartyis unableto engage with the logic of the question.
In north Indian languages, the term hathivyr refers not only to factory tools,
but also to agriculturalimplements such as plows, as well as to the weapons of
35. Dipesh Chakrabarty,Rethinking Working-class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton:

Princeton
UniversityPress,1989).
36. Chakrabarty,
ProvincializingEurope,76-78.
37. "MiracleWorkeror Womanmachine? Realitiesin Bangladeshi
Tracking(Trans)national
Factories,"Economic and Political Weekly(May 27, 2000), L-15.
war. Advin (September-October),the lunar month in which this worship ritual

falls, correspondsto the end of the rainy season, precisely the time in which metal
tools, rusted and corrodedfrom exposure to the elements, have for thousandsof
years been cleaned and oiled by their owners in orderto returnthem to service.
In the traditionalIndiancalendar,this practicaland ritualpreparationof weapons
falls on the ninthnight of the autumnfestival known as Dagahara,the "TenDays,"
whose many militaryreferences harkback to the fact that it was precisely at the
conclusion of the monsoon rains that the season of militarycampaignsbegan on
the subcontinent.38 It is on this night (or the night that follows, known as Vijaya
Daiami, "VictoryTenth")that exemplary acts of India's greatestepic heroes, the
Pandavasof the Mahcbharata andRamaof the Rmayavana, arecommemorated.In
the case of the Pandavas,it was on the ninthnight of the monthof AMvinthat they
took down theirweapons, which had been hiddenfor one year in a Camirl (margosa)
tree, to launch an attackon their Kauravarivals. As for Rama, he worshiped the
war goddess Durga on VijayaDabami,the eve of his final combat with his demon
adversaryRdvana.These mythic acts were models for Indiankings who, as the
commandersin chief of their armies, celebratedDaiaharathroughthe worship of
weapons, the ritualworshipof theirlocal and lineage goddess in or as the K?ami (or
a substitute)tree-which they identifiedwith Aparajita,the "Unvanquished"god-
dess of victory-and througha ritual"crossingof the boundary"(simnollahghana)
out of the royal capital and onto the paths of war.39Since the passing of the Indian
kings following independence, the overtly military symbolism of these rituals
has been eclipsed, with purely ceremonial kings taking part in "popularsubsti-
tutions at the brahmaniclevel" for what were originally ritual preparationsfor
war.4"In Nepal, where the king remains the pivot of the national territory,the
Da-aharafestival (called Dasai in Nepal) continues to mobilize every stratumof
society, down to the peasantryand the Pode ("Sweeper")castes.41So it is that a
historicalexcavationof the antecedentsof hathiyir pujaii-type practicespoints to a
ritualcomplex in which kings, identifying themselves with divinized epic heroes,
sought to conjurevictory priorto a season of militarycampaignsthroughthe wor-
ship of local goddesses. In the light of this historical and ethnographicdata, the
worship of tools by factoryworkersin HinduWest Bengal is seen to be a survival
among subalternpopulationsof a traditionalritualcomplex. The "gods and spirits
... embeddedin the[ir] practice"are those of the local or regional pantheons,as
have been worshipedby kings and their subjectsin SouthAsian societies since the
medieval period. However, as the precedinghas shown, this modern-dayworship
38. Militarycampaignscommenced at this time for altogetherpracticalreasons. The roads, paths,

and rivers of the subcontinentwere impassable not only for armies, but also for itinerantmerchants
and religious specialists. The rainy season retreatsof the Buddhist and Jain monastic communities,
which were instituted by the founders of those religions themselves, were established for the simple
reason that travel outside of the monastery was difficult, if not impossible, during this period.
39. Madeleine Biardeau, Stories about Posts: Vedic Variations around the Hindu Goddess,
transl. Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 295-299; and Alf Hiltebeitel,
"Draupadi Cult Lilds," in The Gods at Play: Lild in South Asia, ed. William S. Sax (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 215, 217.
40. Hiltebeitel, "DraupadiCult Lilds,"218.
41. G6rard Toffin, Le Palais et le tenmple:La fonction rovale cldansla vallde du Ndpal (Paris: CNRS
Editions, 1993), 105-110.
rite does not offer a window onto a "minority"lifeworld, butratherconstitutesthe

prolongationof a ritualcomplex of the subalterns'non-modemmasters:the kings
of precolonialSouthAsia.42
These data give rise to a numberof questions concerningthe accuracyand the
relevance of Chakrabarty'sproject.To begin, traditionhere is not, as Chakrabarty
would have it, simply the invented antonym of modernity.43As its etymology
indicates, traditionis simply "whathas been passed on."Traditionspreexistedthe
onslaughtof colonialism in SouthAsia, and many of those traditionspersistin co-
lonial and postcolonial India. Furthermore,the fact that ritualpractices identical
to those found in Indiaexisted and persist in Nepal-a SouthAsian kingdom that
was never subjectto colonial occupation-undermines the SubalternSchool's ar-
gument thatit has been the hegemonic, historicistdiscourse of Eurocentrichisto-
riansandthe elite proponentsof the colonial andpostcolonialnation-statethathas
occulted the voice of the subaltern.On the one hand, subalternself-expression,
throughritualpracticeslike hathiyarpuj-a,remainsconstantregardlessof whether
the political or intellectualhegemons are "modem"or "traditional."On the other,
the fact that their ritualforms of self-expression may not be directly translatable
into historicalnarratives(which is also debatable)may be of no concern to them.
Do subalterns,whoever they are, need intellectualelites to championtheir cause,
to translatefor them "in the name of social justice"?
This is not all. In seeking to draw a sharp line between subalternlifeworlds
inhabitedby gods and spiritsand the disenchantedworld of modernelites trapped
in historical time, Chakrabartyhas elided two different ways of thinking about
history.To be sure, subalterns,and indeed, the vast majorityof the earth'spopula-
tion, do not subscribeto or even think of history in a Hegelian or Marxist mode
as a sui generis power that trumpsthe humanagency of any but World Histori-
cal Individuals.Such theorizing is historicist. However, like every other human
being on the planet, subalternsdo think historically,chronologically.Subalterns
continueto representthemselves, throughtheirreligious andritualpractice,in the
same way as they did before their encounterwith "modernity,"but so too do all
SouthAsian populations,something thatChakrabartyrecognizes when he asserts
that thereis some of the "peasant"in all of us,44and "thatwe inhabit[the times of
gods and spirits]to begin with."45However,to argueon the basis of such practices
42. In places, Chakrabartyappearsto argue for the subalternworldview as a simple window upon
that of all precolonial Indians,regardlessof class or caste: Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope, 14-
15. This is simply the critical (but not Marxist)historian'sview of traditionalIndianreligious precept
and practice,which is recoverablewithout the need first to "provincializeEurope."
43. Ibid., 46. Chakrabartywrestles with this issue throughouthis book, but it appears that such
issues would only be problematicfor members of urban Indian intellectual elites like himself, as
evidenced by his citation of RanajitGuha that what seems "traditional"in this modernity were "tra-
ditional only in so far as [their]roots could be tracedback to pre-colonial times, but [they were] by
no means archaicin the sense of being outmoded."(ibid., 15, citing RanajitGuha,"On Some Aspects
of Indian Historiography," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 4).
44. Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, 11, uses the term "peasant,"as "a shorthandfor all the
seemingly nonmodern,rural,nonsecularlife practicesthatconstantly leave their imprinton the lives
of even the elites in India and their institutionsof government."Here, "peasant"would simply be a
synonym for "subaltern."
45. Ibid., 113.
that the subaltern'slifeworld of gods and spirits is incompatiblewith, because

not encompassedby, a Eurocentric"frameof a single and secularhistoricaltime
that envelops other kinds of time"46is to abusively exoticize the subaltern.South
Asian peasants and laborershave and always have had an awarenessof time as
both linear and cyclical. The terms "before"and "after"have the same mean-
ing for them as they do for all other humans. Subalternsare as fully concerned
with issues of primogeniture,precedence, and planning for the future-concepts
and activities anchoredin linear notions of time-as are their elite counterparts:
anyone who has been party to an argumentover who has the right to a seat on
an overcrowded Indian bus is fully aware of this. "I was here first" is an elo-
quentexpressionof the subalternexperienceof the secularcode of historicaltime.
Conversely,all humans,includingEurocentrichistorians,have both "neutral"and
"special"experiences of time.47 More than two decades ago, Krzysztof Pomian
abundantlydocumentedthe fact that every humanpopulationhas always ordered
time in multipleoverlappingways-now cyclical, now linear,now "special,"and
now "neutral"-according to its situation.48Linear,neutraltime is a default mode
thathistoriansresortto when they are writinghistory,even as they find their own
lifeworlds inscribedwithin the roundof the seasons and the recurringholidays of
the civil religious year.
In this regard,it shouldbe recalledthatthe names of the seven days of the week,
as well as those of the twelve signs of the zodiac, are the same in India as they are
in Europe,andhave been so since the early fourthcenturyCE, when they appearin
an astrologicaltreatiseby Minardija.49The Indiannamesof the seven weekdaysand
twelve zodiacal signs are simply those of the seven planetarydeities of the Greco-
Romanworld,translatedinto Sanskrit.Both of these cyclical systems of time reck-
oning, which, as theirnames indicate,are squarelysituatedin a world of gods and
spirits,were freely adaptedfrom the West by Indianastrologers,who graftedthem
onto their pre-existing"indigenous"systems of time reckoning(includingthat of
the lunarmonth,whose sequenceof the twenty-eight"lunarmansions"[naksatras]
is identical to those found in ancient Chinese and Arabiansystems50).These im-
ported systems were graduallyembracedby royal patrons, who built them into
the iconographicprogramsof theirtemples,51followed by the broaderpopulation,
which made them their own. Neither colonialism nor coercion nor modernitywas
operative in these Indianvariationson a Westerntheme of cyclic time pervaded
by the presence of astrologicalgods and spirits. In fact, all of these systems-of
46. Ibid., 16.

47. Terrorists,for example, experience a dilation, fragmentation,and accelerationof time as they
prepare for and eventually launch their attacks: Michel Wieviorka, Socidts et Terrorisme(Paris:
Fayard, 1988), 86.
48. Krzysztof Pomian, L'ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
49. Stephen Markel, Origin of the Indian Planetary Deities (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
1995), 79 and passinm.
50. Hermann Oldenburg, "Naksatra and Sieou," Nachrichten von der Kiniglichen Gesellschaft
der Wissenschaften zu Gittingen (1909), 544-572; Arthur A. Macdonnell and Arthur Berriedale
Keith, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1912), s.v. "Naksatra,"
2, 428-431.
51. Markel, Origin of the IndcianPlanetary Deities, 9-10, 16, 85-94.
the seven planets,the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the twenty-eightlunarman-
sions-have theirorigins in ancientBabylonianastrology.52
In the light of this, one is forcedto questionthe relevanceof Chakrabarty's proj-
ect, which at times appearsto be a searchfor a realm of subalternPure Ideas, the
lifeworld of the subaltern"thingin itself" thathas constitutedunalloyedtradition,
which historicistconsciousness has degradedas the mere antonymof modernity.
As has been shown here, subalternspracticinghathiyarp-ija have been express-
ing themselvesthroughtheirpracticein the ritualidioms of warriorkings. Thatis,
even priorto the colonial period, subalternswere not speakingin their own voice.
Does the minorityhistorian'stask then become one of peeling away such earlier
"accretions"of precolonial,pre-Eurocentricdiscourseupon a prior"pure"core of
subalternexperience and expression, to returnto an Edenic pre-contactworld of
isolated tribes?This appearsto be Chakrabarty'sposition in anotherexample that
he evokes to theorize an alternatesubalternlifeworld.53This is the Santal rebel-
lion of 1855, as analyzedby RanajitGuha in a groundbreakingwork of subalter-
nist historiography.54 The Santals,a tribalpeople living in the Jharkhandregionof
northeasternIndia, statedthat the power of their god Thakur-who was for them
the sole truewarriorin theirinsurgency-rendered theminvulnerableto the bullets
of the British military.55On the groundsof such statements,Chakrabarty,invok-
ing the "radicaluntranslatability" of subalternlifeworlds,56 posits a "whollyother"
subalternconsciousnesswhose expressionsareuntranslatableinto the secularcode
of history writing. "Whatdoes it mean, then," he asks, "when we both take the
subaltern'sview seriously-the subalternascribesthe agency for theirrebellionto
some god-and wantto confer on the subalternagency or subjecthoodin theirown
history,a statusthe subaltern'sstatementdenies?"Pronouncementsby the current
presidentof the United States indicate that he, like many of the fundamentalist
Christianswho form the electoralbase thatensuredhis election in 2000 and 2004,
ascribes agency to his God, his "higherfather."Following Chakrabarty'sline of
reasoning,a futurehistorianwould also have to qualify the 2000-2008 historyof
the United States as a subalternpast, a past "thatcannotever enter academichis-
tory as belonging to the historian'sown position... ."57
In fact, it is only among certain South Asian populations-mainly the "urban
society"58that has comprisedthe brahminintelligentsia,urbanpatriciansand the
52. Perhapsa postmodernistmanifesto entitled ProvincializingBabylon is in orderhere.
53. Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, 103-109.
54. Ranajit Guha, ElementaryAspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983).
55. See below, n. 95.
56. Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, 76. As an example, Chakrabarty(75) speaks of the
untranslatabilityof the Hindi word pmniinto the Eurocentricuniversal "water"or H20, arguingfor
the richness of signifids for the Hindi term (in much the same way as the multiple words for "snow"
in the Inuitlanguage).An identical argumentwas made by AnandaCoomaraswamyin 1942 ("Eastern
Religions and Western Thought,"Review of Religion 6 [1942], 136). In fact, a EuropeanIndologist
has writtena very sensitive articleon the myriadnuancesof the multipletermsfor "water"in Sanskrit
and modernIndo-Aryanlanguages: Arion Rosu, "L'eau dans la vie et la pens~e de l'Inde: Philologie
et r6alitds,"Bulletin d'Etudes Indiennes 17-18 (1999-2000), 33-112.
57. Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, 105.
58. For a discussion, see HaraldTambs-Lyche,Power, Profit, and Poetry: TraditionalSociety in
Kathiawar,WesternIndia (Delhi: Manohar,1997), 18-19.
merchantclasses since the medieval period, as well as the growing urbanmiddle

class and South Asian diasporapopulations-that a breakhas occurredwith the
traditionalritual complexes that Chakrabartytakes as exemplary of subaltern
lifeworlds. This is no doubt what makes such survivals of non-modernreligious
practices so problematicand exotic for him and the other expatriatemembers of
his school. In his attemptto provincialize the historicistEuropeanmetanarrative
of modernity,he has only succeeded in exoticizing, even instrumentalizingsubal-
terns(in the name of social justice!), accentuatingtheirdifferencefor the purpose
of theorizingthe writing of minorityhistories.Whetherhe is attemptingto return
to the original subaltern/elitepolarityof the SubalternSchool, or eliding the same
with the colonial/pre-colonialpolarity (and thereby robbing the subalternof his
specificity,making him a reified IndianEveryman),the projectis doomed to fail-
ure by its own flawed methodologies.
In the end, the question that a historian must ask is not whether a minority
history written in a purely Indian idiom, and according to special rules,59 would
not be salutary,but ratherwhether such a project is worth the cost of studiously
refusing to engage with the precolonialpast. Chakrabarty'swager is a lost wager,
since it neitheraids the historianto understandthe presentin terms of the past nor
furthersthe cause of social justice. As Richard Eaton demonstratedeloquently
in 2000, the SubalternSchool showed itself to be simply irrelevantwhen, in the
wake of the destructionof the BabriMosque in December 1992, its theoreticians
had absolutely nothing to say60-and this in markedcontrastto the courageous
analyses of such critical historiansas Romila Thapar,who has been under attack
by the Hindu nationalistsever since.
III. ROMANTICIZINGINDIA
Five years before the publication of Chakrabarty'sProvincializing Europe, the

Indiansocial theoristAshis Nandy publishedan articleentitled"History'sForgot-
ten Doubles," in which he arguedthat the secular,Eurocentric"historicalmode"
was itself a minority worldview, as opposed to that of "culturesthat have lived
with open-ended concepts of the past or depended on myths, legends, and epics
to define their culturalselves."61Like Chakrabarty,Nandy's main quarrelis with
(mainly Indian)historiansand elite theoreticiansof the modernnation-state,and
like Chakrabarty,Nandy's strategyis undergirdedby a polemic that posits the ab-
solute incompatibilityof "ahistorical"versus historicistrevisionings of the past.62
59. Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope,93: "subalternhistories ... will thus have a split running

throughthem. On the one hand,they are 'histories' in thatthey are constructedwithin the mastercode
of secular history. . . . On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grantthis master code its claim
of being a mode of thoughtthat comes to all humanbeings naturally."
60. Eaton, "(Re)imag(in)ingOther2ness,"64-65.
61. Ashis Nandy, "History'sForgottenDoubles," History and Theory34:2 (May 1995), 44.
62. This position is an expansion on Nandy's earlier opposition between cross-national/modern
"religionas ideology" and rural/traditional"religionas faith," arguedin "The Politics of Secularism
and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,"in Mirrors of Violence, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 69-94. This position is critiqued by Peter van der Veer in "The Politics
of Devotion to Rama," in Lorenzen, ed., Bhakti Religion, 292-294; and idem, "Syncretism,
Multiculturalismand the Discourse of Tolerance," in Syncretism/Antisyncretism:The Politics of
118 DAVID GORDON WHITE
So it is thatin the openingparagraphsof his article,Nandyreifies the two interpre-

tive approachesby rejectingout of handthe possibility thatculturesor individuals
(or historians)might be capable of "situationally"reflecting on the past, now in
a historical mode and now in an ahistoricalmode. This he does in a footnote.63
Having noted Shail Mayaram'snuanced position that "[n]o civilization is really
ahistorical.In a sense, every individual is historical and uses his/her memory to
organizethe past. ... The dichotomybetween historyandmyth is an artificialone.
History and myth are not exclusive modes of representation,"Nandy counters
with the following: "In this paperI reject formulationsthat impose the category
of history on all constructionsof the past or sanctionthe reductionof all myths to
history."64 Yet even as he chastises historiansfor never exploring or critiquingthe
idea of history itself, Nandy acknowledges thatWilliam Thompson,in his At the
Edge of History, "at least mentions the possibility of using myths as a means of
'thinkingwild' about the futureby reversing the relationbetween myth and his-
tory."65This is precisely the position of Mayaram,which Nandy had dismissed a
few pages earlier.He cannot have it both ways.
I would begin by asking who Nandy's "strawmen"are, whose historicalmode
is so historicist, imperialist,and hyper-rationalistas to crush the unique pasts of
all individualsand culturesunderthe same steamrollerof historicaldeterminism?
Curiously,the hegemonic "historicalconsciousness"Nandy so frequentlyevokes
is a consciousness without an agent: nearly no historianswho think and write in
the historicalmode are ever namedin the article,with the exceptions of KarlMarx
and Francis Fukuyama,who "have in mind the triumphof Hegelian history."66
Time and again, Nandy identifies "history"itself as the agent of oppression, a
decidedly historicistposition from a self-proclaimedadversaryof historicism.
Because Nandy takes traditionalIndiato be exemplaryof the ahistoricalworld-
view,67 and because to supporthis argumenthe chooses to exemplify the ahis-
torical worldview with Indian(mainly urbanBengali intellectual)appropriations
of Hindu scripture,his thesis is relevant to the present study. In his portrayalof
Indiannotions of time, Nandy conflates his distinctionbetween the historicaland
ahistoricalworldviews with that between linear and non-linearconstructionsof
time:
IndianotonlylackstheEnlightenment's
Traditional conceptof history;it is doubtfulthatit
findsobjective,hardhistorya reliable,ethical,orreasonableway of constructing thepast.
Theconstruction of timein SouthAsia mayor maynotbe cyclical,butit is rarelylinear
Religious Synthesis,ed. Charles Stewartand Rosalind Shaw (London:Routledge, 1994), 201-203.

63. Here, Bruce Lincoln's position concerning footnotes is apposite. In his Theorizing Myth:
Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 209), Lincoln
asserts that "scholarshipis myth with footnotes."
64. Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles," 45, n. 2, quoting Shail Mayaram,Oral and Written
Discourses: An Enquiry into the Meo Mythic Tradition, unpublished report to the Indian Council of
Social Science Research(New Delhi, 1994), 6.
65. Nandy, "History'sForgottenDoubles," 51-52.
66. Ibid., 52. Nandy does mention the names of historianswhom he considers to be testing the
hegemonic paradigmwithout entirely succeeding to overturnit: in additionto Thompson,mentioned
above, these include Gyan Prakash,Dipesh Chakrabarty,and Vinay Lal.
67. Nandy allows, nonetheless, that "the idea of history is not entirely unknown to certain older
civilizations like India and China"(ibid., 45).
or unidirectional.As in someotherculturesandsomeof the naturalsciences,the Indian

attitudeto time-includingthe sequencingof thepast,thepresent,andthe future-is not
givenorpreformatted. Timein muchof SouthAsiais anopen-ended Thepower
enterprise.
of myths,legends,itihhsas (whichatonetimeusedto be mechanically translatedas primi-
tiveprecursors of history),andpurilias mayhavediminishedbutis notyet entirelylost.68
Like Chakrabarty,Nandy wants to assert on the one hand that Indian "mod-
ems," including certainmembersof the intellectualelite, are capable of resisting
historicalconsciousness, while on the otherhe refuses to allow that individualsor
groups might be capable of situationallyplotting their lives along the dual tracks
of linear and non-lineartime, the "neutral"time thathistoriansassume when they
arewritinghistory,and the "special"time of gods and spirits.A compromiseposi-
tion, which underminesboth Nandy's and Chakrabarty'sreificationsof historical
andahistoricalconsciousness, was articulatedin the firsthalf of the twentiethcen-
turyby the eminent Sri Lanka-bornhistorianof SouthAsian art,AnandaCooma-
raswamy.Although himself a passionate Hindu traditionalistand proponent of
Indianexceptionalism(to the point of championingwidow-burningas exemplary
of the superiorEasternWoman69),Coomaraswamywas awareof the possibility of
individualsinhabitingtwo lifeworlds simultaneously:
Theweaknessof the modem"intellectual" positionis its inabilityto entertainat one and
thesametimeempiricalandtranscendental "explanations" of experience:theHinducanbe
a completeastronomer in themodemsense,andalsotakepartin traditional ritesdesigned
to releasethe Sunor Moonfromthejaws of thedragonat thetimeof eclipse;theRoman
Catholicmaywellbe awarethatin theEucharist thereis no replacement of a carbohydrate
a and
by protein, yet accept the of
doctrine transubstantiation in theory practice.. .70
and
In fact, SouthAsia was possessed of linearconstructionsof history long before

the imposition of "modernity"by the Europeancolonizers and their historicist
ideologies. Ample evidence for this may be found in the vanmYiavalis of the kings
of Nepal, Kalhana'swell-known twelfth-centuryroyal chronicle of the kings of
Kashmir,"as well as in the purana-itihasa literaturethat Nandy evokes both in
the quotationabove and in the portion of his article devoted to the Bengali psy-
choanalyst GirindrasekharBose's (1886-1953) reading of "the Puranas them-
selves [as] a form of history."72Referring to Bose's reading of the Puranas as
a psychoanalyst'sattemptto decipher the rules and techniques that the purana-
itihiisagenre followed to (psycho)analyzethe past in such a way as to exorcise the
demons of the present,Nandy asks:
If Bosewerelivingtoday,wouldhe talkof thepuranasas alternative historyor as alterna-
thepurainas
tivesto history?Do we haveto interpret intohistory?Orshouldwe, thosewho
havelivedthroughtheblood-drenched historyof thiscentury,learnto cherishthefew who
wouldratherinterprethistory puranasto get outof theclutchesof history?73
into
68. Ibid., 63. See also ibid., 49.

69. Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality, 124.
70. Coomaraswamy,"EasternReligions and WesternThought,"138, n. 9.
71. Kalhana's Rijatarahgini, Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir, 2 vols., ed, M. A. Stein [1900]
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,1979).
72. Nandy, "History'sForgottenDoubles," 60.
73. Ibicl.,60.
120 DAVIDGORDON WHITE
Regardless of his intellectualheritage and political motives, Nandy's sugges-

tions concerningthe (psycho)analyticuses of historymay be seen to resonatewith
the techniques of village oracles in modern-dayGarhwal,as have been recently
documentedby the anthropologistWilliam Sax. When a person is afflicted with
some sort of hardship,the role of the oracle is to constructa plausible history of
the affliction. As he tosses his oracularrice in the air, the "path"to his patient's
affliction appearsbefore his eyes, and the oracle "sees history in the landscape,"
history in this case often being a history of conflict embedded in the land (and
conflict over the land) where he or she lives. Here, the most common cause of
afflictionis family disunity,with the afflicting agentusually being a form of Bhai-
rava, the SouthAsian "Lordof Spirits,"who has been mobilized by an aggrieved
person's (or more rarely,a sorcerer's)curse. The work of the oracle thus consists
of drawingon his patient'spowers of "memoryand forgetting"-powers that are
always alreadyembeddedin the collective memory of the village or family of its
prior history of quarrels-to reconstructhis patient's "history."For with it, the
oracle will be able to identify and thereby combat the curse that issued out of a
priordispute, which is the root cause of his patient'saffliction.74
Two points must be made here. First, as has alreadybeen suggested, the same
"subalterns"who read history in such an "ahistorical"mode will, when not en-
gaged, for example, in an oraculardivination session, revert to linear ways of
reasoning also common to all humans, thinking through issues of priority and
primogeniturein a chronologicalmode. Indeed, the Garhwalioracles were most
often called upon precisely to adjudicateintra-familyconflicts arising out of land
disputes, disputes over "who came first"in mattersof inheritance.Second, the
above example comes to us from a Western scholar who is not insensitive "to
the culturalpriorities,psychological skills, and perhapseven the ethical concerns
representedby the societies or communities that in different ways still cussedly
choose to live outside history ... "75 Theorists like Nandy and Chakrabartyare
disingenuouswhen they tar all historiansor social scientists with the same Marx-
ist, Orientalist,or Eurocentricbrush;and theirrefusalto engage in a hermeneutics
of retrievalbars the way to understandingthe presentin terms of the past.
Nandy's focus on the Puranas,those medieval encyclopedias of Hindu myth,
precept, and practiceas the loci of a particularlyIndianmode of thinkinghistory,
is not original.A similarposition was taken by Coomaraswamyin 1942: "[t]here
are things to which the historicalmethod, valid only for the classificationof facts
and not for the elucidation of principles, does not apply. . . . [A] single page
of a Purdnais worth all the writings of Tagore, a fact that would be obvious to
any orthodoxHindu."76 Nandy's dichotomizationof India's subjectsinto ahistori-
cal masses and historicizing elites partakesof the same romanticismas that of
Coomaraswamy,and it is freightedwith the same internalcontradictions.In fact,
both it and Chakrabarty'sanalysis appearto differ but little from the early-twen-
74. William S. Sax, "Landscape,Historyand Society," unpublishedlecturepresentedat the Ecole

des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, March 21, 2006; and ideim,God of Small
Persons: Healing and Social Justice in the Garhwal Himalayas, forthcoming.
75. Nandy, "History'sForgottenDoubles,"46.
76. Coomaraswamy,"EasternReligions and Western Thought,"134.
tieth-centuryarmchairanthropologistLucien L6vy-Bruhl'sdivision of the world

into pre-logical "primitives"and logical "moderns,"even if they do so in orderto
vindicateand valorize the formerover and againstthe latter.It should nonetheless
be recalled here thatL6vy-Bruhlchanged his position when the early "fieldwork-
ing" anthropologistsEvans-Pritchardand Bruno Malinowski returnedfrom the
field and informedhim that the "natives"were not walking aroundin a mystical
fog all the time. In the end, L6vy-Bruhltook the more measuredposition that all
humans engaged in both "pre-logical"/"mystical"thinking on the one hand and
"rational"thinkingon the other,albeit in differentproportionsaccordingto their
particularculturalformations.77
More than Coomaraswamyor the early L6vy-Bruhl,Nandy's position with its
evocation of a totalizing historical consciousness and the "shacklesof history"78
most closely resembles that of Mircea Eliade, whose most importanttheoretical
work, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History,79 served as the
ideological foundationfor the work of more than a generationof scholars in the
field of History of Religions as constitutedin the United States. In many ways,
Eliade's work forms a mid-twentieth-centurybridgebetween old-worldRomanti-
cism and Orientalismon the one hand, and the NorthAmerican discipline of the
Historyof Religions on the other.
As is well known, the Eliadean homo religiosus lives in a timeless moment
known as eternity,a mode of being enjoyed before the "fall"into historical time
inauguratedby the compact of the Jewish people with the God of the Hebrew
Bible.80In contradistinctionto the historicalheirs to thatfall, thatis, those cultures
that are now subject to the "terrorof history,"the peasant societies of Eliade's
Romania and other Europeanhinterlandshave remained grounded in cycles of
"eternalreturn,"in which people find meaning in being and interactwith the sa-
cred-gods and spirits-through the round of the naturaland agriculturalyear.
However, among the great world civilizations, both past and present, it is the
religions of India-and most particularlyHinduism-that have epitomized the
ahistoricalworldview of the Eliadeanhomo religiosus.And so it has been thatfor
nearlya half centurythe religion of choice of the University of Chicago-schooled
historiansof religions has been Hinduismas viewed througha lens thathas privi-
leged the scripturesof the so-called classical traditionsof the pre-medieval pe-
riod. This has translatedinto a markedemphasis on timeless myths and doctrines
that were revealed in a time before secular, linear history began-a history that
remains subordinated,accordingto the explicit ideology of the scripturesthem-
selves, to truthsthat are uncreatedand timeless.
This perennialistview also differsbut little from those of the Hindunationalists
and the SubalternSchool, with the principaldifference being that for the histo-
rians of South Asian religions who continue to embrace the Eliadean approach,
77. Lucien L6vy-Bruhl, L'expirience mystique et les sxymboleschez les primitifs (Paris: F.
Alcan, 1938).
78. Nandy, "History'sForgottenDoubles," 45.
79. Mircea Eliade, TheMythof the EternalReturnor, Cosmosand Histonry, first paperbackedition
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1971).
80. Ibid., 148, in which Eliade parallels Hegelian historicism with the theology of history of the
Hebrewprophets.
the golden past continues to endurein the presentthroughthe same hierophanies

that inspiredthe Vedic poets to sing their hymns and devotees of Krsnato search
for traces of their god in Brindavan.There has been no catastrophicbreak with
the Vedic or subalternpasts, eitherthroughMuslim incursionsor the "modernity"
imposed from without by the colonial experience. For the idealized Hindu homo
religiosus who remains untouchedby the secular time of history because his re-
curringritualre-enactmentsof the acts of the gods in illo temporeabolish history,
the past is the same as the presentbecause the presentis the same as the past.
This History of Religions approachis one that also draws on the old classicist
models of indology bequeathedby the EuropeanOrientalists,for whom the world
of the text (with a privileging of the earliest texts as those least touched by later
"corruptions")has constitutedthe sole authenticobject of study. This limits the
purview of the scholar to establishingcritical readingsof texts, elaboratingstan-
dardtext-based iconographies,and discussing the technical aspects of ritualand
practice (by relying, in the main, on eruditecommentarialtraditions)as so many
facets of a pristinespiritualitynot groundedin the real world.
IV. RETRIEVINGTHE RELIGIOUSPASTS OF HINDUISM
None of the approachesto the history of Hinduismreviewed to this point can aid
the historianin understandingthe present in terms of the past, or in accounting
for historicalchange, because none of them engages with the past in a meaningful
way. The Hindu nationalisthistoriansharkback to an extended Vedic golden age
in which religious practiceremainedunchangeduntil the corruptionsspawnedby
the Turkishinvasions of the eleventh century.Many Westernindologists and his-
toriansof religion specializing in Hinduismnever step back from the unalterable
ideal worlds of the scripturesthey interpretto investigatethe changingreal-world
contexts out of which those texts emerged.The colonial and postcolonial histori-
ans focus on the past two hundredyears as the period in which all of the catego-
ries throughwhich Indiacontinuesto interpretitself-including Hinduism-were
imposed upon it from without.81Adducing examples of Hindu practitionersand
thinkersfrom the colonial period, theoreticianssuch as Chakrabartyand Nandy
take matters a step further,arguing that historical thought is itself alien to the
authenticIndian mind. For differentreasons, each of these approacheschooses
not to addresshumanagency or historicalchange in its accountof the pasts out of
which modern-dayHinduismhas emerged.In each case, humanagency becomes
subordinateto reified superhumanor trans-humanforces: Vedic revelation,time-
less tradition,colonial discourse,82or "history"themselves become the sole true
actors, with people either their witting vessels or theirunwittingvictims.
In addition, when taken as a group, these four approachesin their respective
choices of historicaltimeframesfactor out the most importantperiod for the for-
81. Among the multitude of books on this topic, see especially Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of
Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001).
A thoughtfulrejoinderis David N. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?"ComparativeStudies in
Society and History 41:4 (1999), 630-659.
82. For the SubalternSchool, see Eaton, "(Re)imag(in)ingOther2ness,"64-66.
mation of Hinduism as it is practicedtoday. Between the times of the Hindu na-

tionalists' Vedic heritage83and the colonial and postcolonial historians' British
Raj lie some sixteen centuriesof religious change.84This is a period that is rich in
non-scripturalhistoricaldata, data that can be "triangulated"from a combination
of art-historical,archeological,epigraphical,and numismaticsources, as well as
from Buddhist, Jain, and secular literature,accounts of foreign travelers, and,
when such is done with care, from data from the ethnographicpresent."85
In addition,the scripturalsources themselves-when they are read against the
grain of their explicit claims to timeless authorityor exaggerated antiquity,and
when read in the context of data from the types of sourcesjust mentioned-can
also aid the historian in retrieving many voices from modern-day Hinduism's
multiple pasts. The Purainas,for example, can serve as a window onto more than
the Sanskritichigh cultureof the brahminpriesthood.As Romila Thaparhas dem-
onstrated,these encyclopedic compilationsof Hindupreceptand practice-which
generally refer to themselves as itihiisa-purcina,with the first term of the com-
pound meaning "history"86-comprise a mine of historical data for the multiple
social and political contexts of medieval Hinduism, expressed throughroyal ge-
nealogies, narrativesof state-formation,and descriptionsof a rich variety of re-
ligious lifestyles.87Similarly,the HinduTantras,like their Buddhisthomologues,
are invaluable documents for reconstructingthe changing relationshipsthat ob-
tainedwithin "feudal"Indiansociety between kings andreligious orders,men and
women, lords andvassals, allies andenemies, centerand periphery,and so on.88In
both of these bodies of scripture,as well as in the Hinduepics thatprecededthem,
the religious ideologies of ksatriyasare very much in view, alongside those of the
brahmincompilers of those works.
Data from non-scripturaland non-Hinduliteraturemay also be marshaledfor
the retrievalof Hindu religious history.For example, the worship of trees, often
associated with the cults of a class of supernaturalbeings known as yaksas (and
their female counterparts,the yaksis) is richly documentedin early Buddhist and
Jain scripture,demonological works, medieval fantasy and adventureliterature,
and royal inscriptions and chronicles. When juxtaposed with data found in the
83. This correspondsto the period of the productionof the scripturesbelonging to the Hindu emic
categoryof s'ruti,"revelation,"whose terminusante quemiis fixed by the latest "classical"Upanisads
and Vedic Sftras.
84. It may be arguedthat many, althoughnot most, Western textualist scholars of Hinduismhave
in fact focused their attentionon the overlookedperiod of 200 to 1800 CE. However, given their pro-
pensity to emphasize continuityratherthan change, and to superimposethe past of the text upon the
presentof Hindu practice (or other texts), their analyses do little to furtherhistorical understanding.
85. For example, the reconstructionof the history of hathiyavr pija, presentedabove, relies in part
upon descriptionsof modern-dayritualperformance.
86. Literally, the term means "so indeed it was."
87. See especially Romila Thapar, "Society and Historical Consciousness: The Itihasa-Purana
Tradition," in idem, Cultural Pasts (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123-154, reprinted
from Situating Indian History, ed. S. Bhattacharyaand R. Thapar(Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1986), 353-383.
88. On the Hindu Tantras,see David GordonWhite, Kiss of the Yogint: "TantricSex" in its South
Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially 123-159; on the Buddhist
Tantras, see Ronald M. Davidson, Icdian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric
Movement(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2002), 75-168.
Hindu epics, Purainas,and Tantras,a patternemerges that points to the universal-

ity of tree worship throughoutthe South Asian subcontinentfrom the last centu-
ries BCE (if not before) down to the present day. Of far greatervalue than such
literarysources, however, are the art-historicaldata on tree worshipand the cults
of the yaksas, and here it is worthnoting that in spite of an importantarticlewrit-
ten in 1991 by GregorySchopen-which laid bare the Protestantpresuppositions
undergirdingthe sola scripturaapproach,and which arguedconvincingly in favor
of a religious historiographybased on archeology and epigraphy-relatively few
scholars have attempteda more balanced use of sources.89The sculpturalrecord
from the majorBuddhistreliquaries(stfipas) at the archeologicalsites of Sanchi,
Bharhut,and Gandharaindicates that tree worship was a principalform of reli-
gious practicein SouthAsia in the centuriesaroundthe beginningof the common
era. Hindu temple architecture,the worship of the lifhgamby Saiva sectarians,90
the cults of the TantricYoginis,91as well as many elements from the Puranicmy-
thology of Krsna,92may all be seen to have their origins in tree-basedyaksa cults.
These data may be further compared with medieval inscriptions93and modern
ethnographicaccountsof royal ritualsinvolving tree deities,94 as well as the ubiq-
uitous phenomenon,observablein every village (andmany urbanneighborhoods)
of India, of the worship of local tutelarydeities (grimnadevatas)in or as trees.95
The scope of the historicalstudy of Hinduismcannotbe limited to the modem
geographicalboundariesof the Indian nation-state.On the one hand, the Vedas
that form the foundationof much of Hindu orthodoxyand orthopraxywere com-
posed in a region correspondingto modern-dayAfghanistan and Pakistan.96On
the other, Hinduism prosperedand in some cases continues to thrive across the
culturalarea of "greaterIndia."Modern-dayNepal and the Indonesianisland of
Bali have retainedthe vibrantform of TantricHinduismthat was importedfrom
India in the medieval period; archeological sites across much of southeastAsia
89. Gregory Schopen, "Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian
Buddhism," History of Religions 31:1 (August 1991), 1-23. See also Richard S. Cohen, Beyond
Enlightenment:Buddhism,Religion, Modernity(London:Routledge, 2006).
90. Gritli von Mitterwallner,"Evolutionof the Lihga," in Discourses on Siva: Proceedings of a
Synmposium on the Nature of Religious Imagery, ed. Michael Meister (Philadelphia:University of
PennsylvaniaPress, 1984), 12-31.
91. White, Kiss of the Yogini,55-58, 63-66.
92. CharlotteVaudeville, Myths,Saints, and Legends in MedievalIndlia (Delhi: OxfordUniversity
Press, 1999), 1-139.
93. For example, a tenth-centuryinscriptionof the Pratihdraking MahendrapalaII, recordingthe
grantof a village to Vatayaksinidevi(Banyan-TreeYaksi): Michael D. Willis, "Religious and Royal
Patronagein NorthIndia,"in Gods, Guardians,and Lovers: Tenmple Sculpturesfrom NorthIndiaA.D.
700-1200, ed. VishakhaN. Desai and Darielle Mason (Ahmedabad:Mapin Publishing, 1993), 57.
94. See above, n. 39.
95. David Gordon White, "The Goddess in the Tree: Reflections on Nim-Tree Shrines in
Varanasi,"in The Anandca-Vanaof Indian Art: Dr. Anand Krishna Felicitation Volume,ed. Naval
Krishnaand Manu Krishna(Varanasi:Indica, 2005), 575-586. When male, these local protectorgods
are often called thckur-ji,a term derived from a word for a Rajput"master"or "chief."The god to
which the Santals ascribedagency in their rebellion against the British would have been a local tute-
lary deity of this order.See above, n. 55.
96. See especially Michael Witzel, "Surle chemin du ciel," Bulletin d'dtudes indiennes 2 (1984),
213-279, and idem, "On the Localisation of Vedic Texts and Schools," in India and the Ancient
World:History, Tradeand CulturebefoireA.D. 650. P .H. L. EggermontJubilee Volume,ed. Gilbert
Pollet (Leuven: DepartementOrientalistiek,1987), 173-213.
DIGGING WELLS WHILEHOUSES BURN? 125
are replete with epigraphicaland sculpturalrecords that bear witness to Hindu

polities and religious institutions; and one may discern Hindu rituals and pan-
theons beneath the surface of both "Buddhist"and "popular"religious practice
across much of the Asian world.97
In addition,in spite of the often adversarialrelationshipamong religious elites,
Hindus and members of the other religious communities of south and south-
east Asia have never hesitated to engage in what Michael Carrithershas termed
"spiritualcosmopolitanism.""98 Since the adventof Zoroastrianism,Jainism,Bud-
dhism, Sikhism, and Islam in Hindu southAsia, hybridsand partnershipsof every
sort have flourished.Sikhs and Hindus have worshiped at the tombs of Muslim
saints;99entirecommunitieshave self-identifiednow as Muslims and now as Hin-
dus;'" Jains have engaged in the worship of "Hindu"Tantricdeities;10'and the
Hindu and Buddhist strands of the Tantricreligious culture of the Kathmandu
Valley have become so intertwinedover the centuries as to be inextricablefrom
one another.
The dictum of the FrenchmathematicianHenri Poincar6that "the scale creates
the phenomenon"is found to be applicablein writing the history of Hinduismto
the extent that, as in politics, most religion in HinduAsia has always been local
as opposed to translocal.The lifeworlds of India's ruralcommunities (seventy-
two percent the country's total population)have only recently begun to extend
beyond the horizons of the village and its surroundingfields throughimproved
modes of transportationand communication.And so it has been with the gods
they have worshiped:family or lineage deities (kuladevatiis),the deified ances-
tors, evil spirits of the dead ruled over by a lord of spirits (bhitanotha), and gods
of the place-sacred groves, rivers, pools, mountains,and trees-have historical-
ly been the prime objects of venerationin southAsia. For most south Asians, the
translocalhigh gods of the scriptures,the great temples, and the pan-southAsian
pilgrimage networks have always been as distant as the political, religious, and
social elites that have been the translocal gods' patrons and primaryclienteles.
This is not to say thattherehas never been any cross-pollinationbetween the local
and the translocal.As RichardCohen demonstratedin a groundbreakingarticle,102
when royal and religious elites laid new claims to a given locality by installing
theirtranslocaldeities there,they consistentlydid so by identifyingthe local gods
97. For China, see Michel Strickmann,Mantras et mandarins:Le bouddhismetantriqueen Chine

(Paris:Gallimard,1996); for southeastAsia, see Paul Mus, "Cultesindiens et indigenes au Champa,"
Bulletin de l'Ecole Frangaise d'ExtremeOrient 33:1 (1933), 367-410.
98. Michael Carrithers,"On Polytropy:Or the NaturalConditionof SpiritualCosmopolitanismin
India:The DigambarJain Case," ModernAsian Studies 34:4 (2000), 831-861.
99. Harjot Oberoi, The Constructionof Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity
in the Sikh Tradition(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 147-162; Jackie Assayag, Au
confluent de deux rivibres:Musulmanset hindous dans le Sud de l'lnde (Paris: Presses de l'Ecole
Frangaised'Extr~me-Orient,1995); and Anna Barrie Bigelow, Sharing Saints, Shrines, and Stories:
Practicing Pluralism in North India, Ph.D. Dissertation,Departmentof Religious Studies, University
of California,Santa Barbara,2004.
100. Dominique-Sila Khan, Conversion and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in
Rajasthan(Delhi: Manohar,1997).
101. John Cort, "Tantrain Jainism:the Cult of GhantakarnMahavir,the GreatHero Bell-Ears,"in
Bulletind'dtudes indiennes 15 (1997), 115-133.
of the place with the translocalgod of the royal capital and the scripture-based
pantheons.
It would be incorrect,however,to assume that all interactionbetween local and
translocaltraditionshas operatedin an "internalcolonization"mode.103Whereas
all Hindus, includingurbanelites, have worshipedtheir ancestorsas well as fam-
ily or local gods under the same circumstancesas have their ruralsubalternand
elite cousins-because every Hinduhas always belonged to a family andhas come
from somewhere-only a relatively small percentageof Hindus will resortto the
translocalgods of the Hindu scriptures.In this respect, the Hindu "mainstream"
has always consisted of the worshipof local and ancestraldeities: devotion to the
high gods of the bhaktitraditionhas historicallybeen limited to an elite minority.
Here, LeonardPrimiano'smodel of "vernacularreligion"is a useful one. 04
By the same token, it should be borne in mind thatin spite of scripturalclaims
to the contrary,every translocalHindu god has always come from somewhere,
from a constituency and a cult groundedin a particularhumanand geographical
context. When, for example, the supreme being states in the Bhagavad
Gitc~ that "I am the Vasudeva of the Kr.sna
this
Vrsnis,"10' is a reference to the regional
cult of a deity named KrsnaVasudevathat was worshipedby peoples named the
Vrsnis and Yadavasin the first centuriesof the common era. It was only at a later
time thatVaisnava sectariansbegan to conflate this regionallineage god (together
with many othersuch divinities) with the one god Krsna.106The art-historicaland
epigraphicalrecordsof westernIndia,'07as well as a Buddhistsource datingfrom
no later than the fifth century CE, supportthis reading. In its list of yaksas, the
Mahamnav'uri presentsa numberof the gods of the Hindu scripturesas the tutelary
deities of particularlocales, together with their "city of origin." These include
the yaksa Visnu of in coastal Gujarat);Karttikeyaof Rohitaka
Dvatraka(Dwarka,
(Rohtak, in present-dayHariyana);Arjunaof Arjunavana;Kuberaof Adakavati
(near Rajagrha);Garuda of Vipula; Mahesvara among the Viratas; Mahakala
of Varanasi; and Siva of Sivapurahara.'08 The local specificities of these dei-
ties become immediately apparentwhen one shifts from scripturalsources to
art-historicaland epigraphicaldata, where local names and iconographies take
precedence.
Like Werner Herzog's dwarfs, even the Hindu gods startedsmall. However,
one should not assume, as far too many scholars have done, that the many (the
local and regional gods of South Asia) simply evolved, accordingto some sort of
naturalevolutionaryprocess, into the one (one of the three high gods of modern-

104. LeonardPrimiano,"VernacularReligion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,"
WesternFolklore 54:1 (1995), 37-56.
105. Bhagavad Giti 10.37.
106. For a discussion, see Vaudeville, Myths,Saints, and Legends, 18.
107. Ibid., 1-139; and Andr6 Couture and Charlotte Schmid, "The Harivamia, the Goddess
and the Iconographyof the Vrsni Triads,"Journalof the AmericanOrientalSociety 121:2
Ekanam.a,
(April-June 2001), 173-192.
108. Sylvain Levi, "Le catalogue des Yaksa dans la Mahamayuri,"Journal Asiatique 11 srrie,
tome 5, vol. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1915), 19-138, especially 32-37, 55. Although the text was translatedfour
times between the fourthand eighth centuriesCE, the earliestversion of the Mahmin~iyurti
in which the
comprehensivelist of tutelary"yaksas"is found dates from the fifth centuryCE (ibid., 20-26).
day bhakti,Hindudevotionalism).Such evolutionist assumptionshave long been

embeddedin the hermeneuticalstrategiesof the bhakticommentatorsthemselves:
it has been precisely by affirming that the multiple gods of different scriptures,
regions, lineages, and historicalperiods were but aspects, portions, incarnations,
or alternativenames of theirsupremebeing, thatthe sectarianauthorsconstructed
their argumentsfor the universalityof a Krsna,a Siva, or a GreatGoddess.
Whenever a scholar asserts that one divinity is the "forerunner"of, or the
"same as," another, he or she is interpretingthe past in terms of the present,
and thereby engaging in a type of evolutionist reasoning analogous to that of
uncriticalevolutionarybiologists. Stephen J. Gould questionedthis faulty line of
reasoningin a 1989 publication,which took as its startingpoint the way in which
the fantasticfossil recordfound at a geological site in British Columbiaknown as
the Burgess Shale-a fossil recordin which multi-headedthree-, four-, and five-
eyed arthropodswere the rule ratherthanthe exception-was systematicallymis-
interpretedby the greatestevolutionarybiologists of the early twentiethcentury.
CharlesDoolittle Walcott, the directorof the SmithsonianInstitution,proceeded
in 1909 to misinterpretthe fossils of the Burgess Shale in a comprehensiveand
thoroughlyconsistent mannerarising directly from his conventionalevolutionist
view of life. In short,he shoehornedevery last Burgess Shale fossil creatureinto
a modern group, viewing the fauna collectively as a set of primitive or ancestral
versions of later, improvedforms.109
Walcott's errorwas to view the past (the fossil record) in terms of the present
(surviving arthropodspecies, as well as the well-documented but extinct trilo-
bite). Any extraheads or eyes or otherbody partsthat fell outside the parameters
of what he knew-which included the evolutionary theory that structuredthe
way he viewed what he thought he knew-he rationalized away. In so doing,
he denied the existence of twenty to thirty singular species, if not phyla, of life
unique to that site. Why he did so may be explained in terms of old evolutionary
theory, which, in additionto equatingevolution with progress (with humanityas
its endpoint), ignored the distinctionbetween "diversity"(variationson a single
or limited numberof anatomicalthemes) and "disparity"(recognitionof a multi-
plicity of differentanatomicalplans), and rejected contingency out of hand. The
historical contingency of an explosion of life in a 570-million-year-oldCanadian
mudhole, with its remarkabledisparity (as opposed to diversity) of arthropod
life forms, was drainedof all significance or specificity. But the Burgess shale,
which, all by itself, likely contained a greater anatomicalrange of species than
that found in the entire spectrum of invertebratelife in all the world's oceans
today, is but one of a multitudeof sites at which the fossil record entirely over-
runs and overturnsreceived notions of the history of life on our planet.
In fact, the old evolutionist master code-of steadily increasing excellence,
complexity, and diversity (but not disparity)-flies in the face of the history of
life-forms on our planet, which has been one of massive removal followed by
differentiationwithin a few surviving stocks.1"The same assumptionsundergird
109. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of Historyv(New York:
Norton & Company, 1989), 24.
110. Ibid., 24-25, 47.
the interpretivemodels of Hindunationalistswho claim Hinduismalways to have

been a monotheistic faith and of scriptural-basedscholars who read the history
of Hindu polytheism throughan evolutionist lens. But they and we ought to har-
ken to Gould's words concerning the fossils of the Burgess Shale that refuse to
be forced into our pre-formattedevolutionist categories: "They are grubby little
creaturesof a sea floor. .. but we greet them with awe because they are the Old
Ones, and they are trying to tell us something."111
The task of writingan adequatehistoryof Hindupolytheism,which has yet to be
accomplished,will requirethe retrievalof both the humanand divine economies
of the local in the translocaland the translocalin the local across a span of some
two thousandyears. It may be that such a history will never be written,if only
because a pan-southAsian canvas is simply too large to fill. At the otherextreme,
local micro-historiesare rarely practicabledue to the fact that very few locales
have bequeathedhistorianswith sufficient textual, archeological,and art-histori-
cal data to reconstructtheir multiplepasts in a meaningfulway.112 Between these
two extremeslie two scales of writingthe historyof Hinduismthatarepracticable.
The one is thematic,and consists of tracingthe historyof a body of practiceacross
time and space, attendingto multiplehumanactors,voices, conflicts of interpreta-
tion, change over time and across space. CatherineWeinberger-Thomas'sstudyof
widow burning(sati) in India and MadeleineBiardeau'sreconstructionof surviv-
als of the Vedic sacrificialpost across south and centralIndia are two models of
this type of approach."13The second consists in writingregionalhistoriesof Hindu
religious lifeworlds, histories that are attentiveto the lives and words and acts of
humanreligious practitionersin relationto gods of the place, family, occupational
group,landscape,and so on. A significantnumberof such religioushistoricalstud-
ies alreadyexist for many of the modern-daystates and regions within India--the
Punjab,"14the Deccan,"5 Karnataka,"116 Maharashtra,"117 Rajasthan," Gujarat,"9
Orissa,120 andTamilnadu'21-as well as for Nepal'22 andtheislandof Bali.'23
111. Ibid., 52.
112. One such locale is Ayodhya, for which an outstandinglocal historyhas been written(Bakker,
Ayodhyxi).
113. Weinberger-Thomas,Ashes of Inunortality;Biardeau,Stories about Posts.
114. Oberoi, The Constructionof Religious Boundaries, 139-203.
115. RamendraNath Nandi, Religious Institutions and Cults in the Deccan (c. A.D. 600-A.D.
1000) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973).
116. Assayag, Au confluent.
117. Giinther-Dietz Sontheimer, Pastoral Deities in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
118. Ann Grodzins Gold, Fruitful Journeys: The Way'sof RcajasthaniPilgrims (Berkeley:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1988); and Khan, Conversionand ShiftingIdentities.
119. Tambs-Lyche,Power, Profit, and Poetry.
120. The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, ed. AnncharlottEschmann,
HermannKulke, and Gaya CharanTripathi(New Delhi: Manohar,1978).
121. Hudson, "SrimadBhigavata," 137-182; idem, "Madurai:The City as Goddess," in Urban
Fonrmand Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed.
Howard Spodek and Doris Meth Srinivasan(Washington,DC: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 125-
142; and idem, "Vgsudeva in Theology and Architecture:A Backgroundto Srivaisnavism,"
K•sna
Journal of VaisnavaStudies 2:1 (Winter 1993), 139-170.
122. Mary Slusser, Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley, 2 vols. (Princeton:
PrincetonUniversity Press, 1982).
123. ChristiaanHooykaas,Agama Tirtha:Five Studies in Hindu-BalineseReligion (Amsterdam:
N. V. Noord-HollandscheUitgevers Maatschappij,1964).
An exemplary regional religious history of this type is Kunal Chakrabarti's

recent book, Religious Process: The Purinas and the Making of a Regional
Tradition.124 While it focuses mainly on a body of Hindu scripture-the Bengal
Puranas-Chakrabarti's study is nonetheless outstanding in the use it makes
of the data found therein for generating a critical history of medieval Hindu
religious history. Furthermore,in so doing, Chakrabartichallenges nearly every
one of the sweeping assumptionsthat the Hindu nationalists,the theoreticiansof
subalternand postcolonial studies, and the indologists and historiansof religions
have made concerning India's special relationshipto history. He does this in no
small part by foregroundingthe roles, motivations, and strategies of the human
actorswho made thatreligious history:kings, brahmins,Buddhists,peasants,and
tribals.
The Bengal Purainas,which were compiled in the region correspondingto
modern-day Bengal, Orissa, and Assam in the eighth to thirteenthcenturies,
are a record of the "internalcolonization"125 of a South Asian hinterlandby the
brahminagents of Hindu kings. However, this colonization was not one in which
"colonizing"hegemons alone had agency, with "colonized"subalternstheir pas-
sive victims. As Chakrabartimakes clear, citing chapterand verse of a wide array
of these regional texts, the encounter-between local and translocal traditions,
and between various actorsand communities-left the collective identity of none
of these individuals or groups unchanged.Chakrabartidescribes the sociopoliti-
cal context of these texts in the following terms:
The Purinas werecomposedwith a view to revitalizethe [Veda-based] brahmanical
socialorderwhichwas seriouslyundermined duringthe earlycenturiesof the Christian
era [by Buddhism,Jainism,the new Hindusects, andso on]. The briihmanas attempted
to meetthischallengeby drawingpeoplefromthenon-brahmanical fold intotheirsphere
of influence.Thusan interaction betweenthebrahmanical traditionandmanylocaltradi-
tionswas initiated,whichresultedin thecreationof a composite,syncreticsocio-religious
systemdelineatedin thePurMnas.Butthelevel of assimilationachievedin thesePurinas
musthaveprovedinadequate to suitthe needsof a particular
region,for when,fromthe
post-Gupta period,large-scalebrhhmanamigrationsstartedreachingareasperipheral to
theirinfluence,such as Bengal,a new categoryof regionallyidentifiablePur5nas was
composed,whichoffereda balancebetweenthe Puranicbrahmanical traditionand the
exclusivelylocaltraditionsof a region... Th[isPuranic]processinvolvedrepeatedasser-
tionof Vedicauthority on theonehandandtheaffirmation of localpopularcustomson the
other.TheBengalPurinas attempted to makethesetwo appearconsistent.126
Brahmins were, in this respect, the culture brokers and interpretersof one
traditioninto the religious idioms and language(s) of another.As I have already
argued above, this has been the brahmins' perennial role in the encounter be-
tween Hindus and their social and political Others. On the one hand, this has
affordedthem special statuses and privileges: like the pundits whom the British
remuneratedin various ways for their expositions of Hindoo law, the brahmins
who played this role in earliertimes often did so in exchange for royal grantsof
124. Kunal Chakrabarti,Religious Process: The Pur1nasand the Making of a Regional Tradition
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
126. Chakrabarti,Religious Process, 32.
expropriated(agrahara) lands, which they homesteadedin the same borderlands

they were evangelizing. However, even as it was they who took the initiative
in opening up a dialogue as a means to establishing their own sociocultural
hegemony, the evangelizing brahminsremained vulnerable to their hosts, both
their royal patronsand the local populationsupon whom they dependedfor their
materialsurvival.127
Obviously, the content of the Bengal Puranasis not a perfect transcriptionof
the content of these brahmins'teachings to their unconvertedflock. The Puranas
are written in Sanskrit,a language not known to their tribal interlocutorsof the
eastern confines of the Indian subcontinent,and are thereforean idealized rep-
resentationby their authorsof the syncretistictraditionthey had negotiatedwith
the local populations(who have left us no record of the encounter).This is what
makes the content of the Bengal Puranasso astonishing:for in one of them, we
read, for example, thatwhen a "Vedic"(vaidika)prescriptionconflicts with local
(grmna-aclra), regional (deia-acc~ra),or popular (laukika-eiciira)tradition,it is
the local that ought to take precedence.128 Elsewhere, these documentsbear wit-
ness to the agency of their authorsin creating the regional goddesses of eastern
India,by singling out particularlocal goddesses as emanationsor instantiationsof
the one GreatGoddess.129This is but one example among many that Chakrabarti
adduces for the "process of tacit adjustment"by which religious elites, in this
medieval contact situationas well in those of the Vedic and "classical"Puranic
periods, constantly accommodatedand reformulatedthe definitions of their own
orthodoxyin the course of their contacts with local traditions.130
South Asia is engulfed in the fires of identity politics, fires fed on a constant
basis by claims by all communities concerned of historicalprimacy and entitle-
ment. Many of these claims are withouthistorical foundation,but when repeated
often enough, they take on an aura of authenticity.It is in this respect that, as
Eric Hobsbawm stated a decade ago, "bad history is not harmless history. It is
dangerous."'31 Armchair theorizing on the victimization or the grandeurof an
essentialized being termed "non-modern,""ahistorical,"or "colonized"man, or
homo religiosus, has not proven to be a viable strategyfor puttingout these fires.
The craft of critical history is the sole means by which we, as heirs to the past,
may hope to learn from that past and to contributein a meaningful way to the
currentdebate.To be sure,historiansmust always be awareof the power thatthey
wield in theirroles as culturebrokersand interpretersof otherpeople's traditions.
But when self-consciousness translatesinto self-flagellation, and self-scrutiny
replaces engagementwith historicalothers,theoristsare reducedto talking about
themselves talking aboutthemselves. Underthe currentcircumstances,such proj-
127. Ibid., 33, 40, n. 66, 202. See also HermannKulke, Kings and Cults: State Formationand
Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 3, 5, 10, 12-13.
128. BrahmavaivartaPurina 3.7.49-50, cited in Chakrabarti,Religious Process, 62.
129. Chakrabarti,Religious Process, 212.
130. Ibid., 70.
131. Eric Hobsbawn, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 277, cited in Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe, 97.
ects are inappropriate,if not irresponsible.An Indian aphorismmakes the point

well: "Praytell, what fool would dig a well when a house is on fire?"'32
Universityof California,
Santa Barbara
132. KulcirnavaTantra 1.25: sudiptabhavaneko va kapam khanatidurmatih.

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Wesleyan University

DIGGINGWELLS WHILEHOUSES BURN?

basis of historical data. Implicit in both positions is the assumptionof an Indian

turaldatumin the life of the countrysince the time of the Turkishconquests.4This

4. ClaudeMarkovits,JacquesPouchepadass,and SanjaySubrahmanyam,"Lageste indianiste:Du

As the SubalternSchool has evolved, many of its proponentshave also come

By way of example, Pollock demonstrates that the Krtyakalpataru of

describes the presence of the traditionalin the modernwithout chronologicalinflection.

21. Dennis Hudson, "TheSrimadBhitgavatain Stone: The Text as an Eighth-CenturyTemple and

28. Ibid., 94.

Chakrabartyemploys the example of the worship of "tools"(hathiviirpija) or

35. Dipesh Chakrabarty,Rethinking Working-class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton:

war. Advin (September-October),the lunar month in which this worship ritual

38. Militarycampaignscommenced at this time for altogetherpracticalreasons. The roads, paths,

rite does not offer a window onto a "minority"lifeworld, butratherconstitutesthe

that the subaltern'slifeworld of gods and spirits is incompatiblewith, because

46. Ibid., 16.

merchantclasses since the medieval period, as well as the growing urbanmiddle

Five years before the publication of Chakrabarty'sProvincializing Europe, the

59. Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope,93: "subalternhistories ... will thus have a split running

So it is thatin the openingparagraphsof his article,Nandyreifies the two interpre-

Religious Synthesis,ed. Charles Stewartand Rosalind Shaw (London:Routledge, 1994), 201-203.

or unidirectional.As in someotherculturesandsomeof the naturalsciences,the Indian

In fact, SouthAsia was possessed of linearconstructionsof history long before

68. Ibid., 63. See also ibid., 49.

Regardless of his intellectualheritage and political motives, Nandy's sugges-

74. William S. Sax, "Landscape,Historyand Society," unpublishedlecturepresentedat the Ecole

tieth-centuryarmchairanthropologistLucien L6vy-Bruhl'sdivision of the world

the golden past continues to endurein the presentthroughthe same hierophanies

IV. RETRIEVINGTHE RELIGIOUSPASTS OF HINDUISM

mation of Hinduism as it is practicedtoday. Between the times of the Hindu na-

Hindu epics, Purainas,and Tantras,a patternemerges that points to the universal-

are replete with epigraphicaland sculpturalrecords that bear witness to Hindu

97. For China, see Michel Strickmann,Mantras et mandarins:Le bouddhismetantriqueen Chine

103. See above, n. 9.

day bhakti,Hindudevotionalism).Such evolutionist assumptionshave long been

the interpretivemodels of Hindunationalistswho claim Hinduismalways to have

An exemplary regional religious history of this type is Kunal Chakrabarti's

expropriated(agrahara) lands, which they homesteadedin the same borderlands

ects are inappropriate,if not irresponsible.An Indian aphorismmakes the point

132. KulcirnavaTantra 1.25: sudiptabhavaneko va kapam khanatidurmatih.

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