[INDOLOGY] Interview with the new ICHR Chairman

Sun Jul 13 18:30:24 UTC 2014

The question of Christian influence on the nineteenth century reformist
thought has been raised but there are some misconceptions about it.

There was not much of Christian influence on the reformist movement since
about 1850. In Bengal the Brahmo religous leader Keshub Chandra Sen sang to
the glory of the Christ but he was forsaken by mainstream Brahmos. Keshab
Candra was pragmatic. He wanted to remove possible obstacles to his own
missionary work. But Debendranath Tagore was against him. The main reformer
of Bengal, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, was an atheist. The Brahmo priest
Shivnath Shastri has narrated how Vidyasagar ridiculed a Christian
missionary who had come to covert him. The revolutionary Brahmabandhab
Upadhyay was Christian but he called himself 'Hindu Catholic'. The
reformist Arya Samajis of North India were strongly anti-Christian. There
was Western influence on the Prarthana Samaj of Western India but one
cannot discern specific Christian influence.

Among those who had really taken moral inspirational ideas from
Christianity one can count Mahatma Gandhi of the twentieth century but not
the leaders of the nineteenth century enlightenment movement. Gandhiji was
probably influenced by the ideas of Leo Tolstoy and some American thinkers.
But Gandhiji himself and  his followers consider themselves religious
minded Hindus

The missionaries were successful mainly in Central India and fringe areas
of the South. The intellectual movement, on the other hand, started with
religion but, with the exception of the Arya Samajis, it progressively
spoke for and leaned towards the secular way of life and thought. Religious
activities thrived among Hindu Missionaries - the Arya Samajis, the
Ramkrishna Mission, the Bharat Sevasram Sangha etc. They took the idea of
organized missionary activity from the Christian organizations but competed
with it in theology.

Best

DB

On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:42 PM, Bijlert, V.A. van <v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl>
wrote:

>  This is very fascinating. But may I play the advocate of the devil and
> suggest that Madhva who lived in the 12-13th century CE (AD) could have
> been influenced by both Islam and Nestorian christianity, or perhaps knew
> about them and reacted in the way some nineteenth century Hindu apologists
> reacted? Besides, without more details as to how and what exactly Madhva
> wrote, I cannot form a definite opinion. I also do not believe ancient
> Indians did not have any notion of factual history. I do believe that the
> texts that are called itihasa may never have been meant to provide factual
> history, quite like the Thorah and the prophetic books in the Tanakh were
> not meant to provide accurate literal history. Even many of the New
> Testamental miracles and stories are now regarded as not historical
> accounts but as enacted parables (signs in the language of the gospel of
> John).
>
> In this context I would argue for more, serious and politically unbiased
> religious studies in Hinduism (backed up by philological indology), Hindu
> theology and Hindu exegesis of texts. I do not think, Hindus are well
> served when the sacred Sanskrit narratives are flattened down to some sort
> of early twentieth century Hindu Pentecostal literalism.
>
> Victor van Bijlert
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> Dr. Victor A. van Bijlert
>
> Associate professor Religious Studies
>
> Department of Philosophy of Religion and Comparative Study of Religions
>
> Faculty of Theology, VU University
>
> De Boelelaan 1105, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
>
> v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl
>
> +31613184203
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Howard Resnick [hr at ivs.edu]
> *Sent:* Sunday, July 13, 2014 5:43 PM
>
> *To:* Bijlert, V.A. van
> *Cc:* Indology List
> *Subject:* Re: [INDOLOGY] Interview with the new ICHR Chairman
>
>  I agree with you on the source of 19th and 20th century influences on
> Hindu propagandists and their theories of shastric historicity. Prior to
> this, faithful Vaishnavas, for example, did not have “scientific”
> historiography on their radar as they do in modern times. Thus the notion
> that itihasa is indeed history developed in other ways in pre-modern
> times.
>
>  I will cite merely one example, Madhva’s Mahabharata-tatparya-nirnaya
> (13c), in which he states (2.3-4) that the Mahabharata text available to
> him is rife with corruption — interpolations, extrapolations, and
> transpositions of text. Yet he accepts the basic Mahabharata story as real
> history, in all its supernatural abundance.
>
>  Best,
> Howard
>
>  On Jul 13, 2014, at 11:22 AM, Bijlert, V.A. van <v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl>
> wrote:
>
>  Do you know of any other source in the nineteenth and early twentieth
> century that Hindu propagandists could have used? Is there any early
> pre-modern or even pre-islamic discussion in Indian thought about the
> Mahabharata and Ramayana as accurate depictions of historical facts?
>
>   ------------------------------
>
> Dr. Victor A. van Bijlert
>  Associate professor Religious Studies
>  Department of Philosophy of Religion and Comparative Study of Religions
>  Faculty of Theology, VU University
>  De Boelelaan 1105, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
>  v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl
>  +31613184203
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Howard Resnick [hr at ivs.edu]
> *Sent:* Sunday, July 13, 2014 1:49 PM
> *To:* Bijlert, V.A. van
> *Cc:* Indology List
> *Subject:* Re: [INDOLOGY] Interview with the new ICHR Chairman
>
>  Can we really attribute to modern Christian influence the Hindu belief
> in Mahabharata and Ramayana as sacred history, apart from the many other
> meanings of the texts?
>
>
>  On Jul 13, 2014, at 7:43 AM, Bijlert, V.A. van <v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl>
> wrote:
>
>   It seems to me there is a task for hermeneutics rather than pure
> philological indology. We are dealing with rather simplistic views of what
> the Mahabharata and Ramayana (and other puranas as well?) represent. The
> idea that these texts are historical seems to derive from the rather
> fundamentalist evangelical christian view of the Bible as containing
> undiluted historical truth. Hindus since the nineteenth century were
> confronted with this view propounded by missionaries and as a reaction
> claimed that their own Sanskrit texts were also historical. In christian
> hermeneutics and Biblical philology as indeed in theology such simplistic
> historical views have long been discarded. But apparently not so among some
> Hindus with regard to epics and the puranas.
> Victor van Bijlert
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> Dr. Victor A. van Bijlert
>  Associate professor Religious Studies
>  Department of Philosophy of Religion and Comparative Study of Religions
>  Faculty of Theology, VU University
>  De Boelelaan 1105, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
>  v.a.van.bijlert at vu.nl
>  +31613184203
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