The Hindus (102 page)

The British Orientalists of the first wave reached back into the past, to Sanskrit texts, and began to translate them. (By the third wave, after 1858, the government severed support for the study of Sanskrit and Persian, disparaging the culture even of ancient India.
⁷⁶
) European translations began in the eighteenth century with a fittingly fraudulent document, the so-called Ezour Veda (presumably a corruption of
Yajur Veda
), a French text in the form of a dialogue between two Vedic sages, one monotheist and one polytheist, who find that the monotheism of “pristine Hinduism” points to Christian truth. The text was, for a while, believed to be the French translation of a document composed in Sanskrit by one Brahmin and translated by another Brahmin in Benares who knew both French and Sanskrit. The Chevalier de Maudave gave a copy to Voltaire in September 1760, claiming to have received it from the hand of the Brahmin translator; Voltaire was deeply impressed by it and cited it often.
⁷⁷
In 1822, Sir Alexander Johnston claimed to have found, at the French settlement of Pondicherry, in South India, the manuscript copy of the “Ezour Vedam” in French and Sanskrit. His colleague Francis Whyte Ellis then published an article in which he argued that the work was not the French translation of a Sanskrit original but a work entirely composed in 1621 by the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who was accused of having written it in order to deceive Brahmins and convert them to Catholicism. Its authorship remains unknown, but it is now certain that it was an original French composition that claimed to be a copy of a lost Sanskrit text.

The first books genuinely translated from Sanskrit to English were Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the
Bhagavad Gita,
Sir William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s
Shakuntala
(in 1789), and then, in 1794, Jones’s
Laws of Manu.
The statue of Jones in St. Paul’s Church in London holds a volume of
Manu
in his hand, thus commemorating
Manu
in a Christian church, an honor accorded him by no Hindu temple, to my knowledge. As chief justice of the High Court of Calcutta, Jones had searched for something that the Hindu witnesses could be sworn in on that would put the fear of god(s) in them, since perjuries were rife. He tried the Ganges River, but when that failed to produce the desired effect, he sought expert counsel from the local learned men, who gave him
Manu
and inspired him to learn Sanskrit.
⁷⁸
Jones’s
Manu
translation became the basis of much of British law in India (including the disastrous treatment of suttee); the text became instrumental in the construction of a complex system of jurisprudence based on the British belief in a unified Hinduism, the privileging of the “classical” language, Sanskrit, over local languages, and the Protestant bias in favor of scripture. In the courts of the Raj (and later independent India), “general law” (based on British law) was supplemented by a “personal law” determined by one’s religious affiliation (such as Hindu law). “Hindu law,” or rather the British interpretation of Jones’s translation of
Manu,
was applied to nearly 80 percent of the population of colonial India in matters of marriage and divorce, legitimacy, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, and religious endowments.

Yet
Manu
had never been used in precisely this way before; the British system completely bypassed the village governing units (called
panchayats
) that actually adjudicated in vernacular languages on the basis of case law built up over many centuries. This is not to say that the British invented
Manu;
it had been (primarily through its many commentaries) an important text both in local law and in the Brahmin imaginary, which still exerted a heavy influence on many Hindus. What the British did was to replace the multiplicity of legal voices and the centuries of case law with a single voice, that of Jones’s
Manu.
It was as if U.S. courts had suddenly abandoned case law to rule only by the Constitution.

The translations of the
Bhagavad Gita
had equally long-lasting repercussions. Wilkins’s
Gita
had a preface by Warren Hastings,
⁷⁹
a brute of the first order, who was impeached (though acquitted) on his return to England, in 1793. Gandhi first read the
Gita,
in 1888-1889, in a later translation by Sir Edwin Arnold; the American transcendentalists too, led by Emerson and Thoreau, read and loved the
Gita
. Yet just as
Manu
was not the most important Hindu legal text, so too texts other than the
Gita
—both Sanskrit texts, like the Upanishads and the Puranas, and vernacular texts, such as the Tulsidas and Kampan
Ramayanas,
and, most of all, oral traditions—were what most Hindus actually used in their worship. The highly Anglicized Indian elite followed the British lead and gave the
Gita
a primacy it had not previously enjoyed, though like
Manu,
it had always been an important text. The fraction of Hinduism that appealed to Protestant evangelical tastes at all was firmly grounded in the renunciant path of Release and philosophical monism. The evangelists in India assumed that God had prepared for their arrival by inspiring the Hindus with a rough form of monotheism, the monism of the Upanishads;
^ke
pukka monotheism, in their view, was available to Brahmins but not to the lower castes, who were fit only for polytheism.
⁸⁰

Many highly placed Hindus so admired their colonizers
^kf
that in a kind of colonial and religious Stockholm syndrome, they swallowed the Protestant line themselves and not only gained a new appreciation of those aspects of Hinduism that the British approved of (the
Gita,
the Upanishads, monism) but became ashamed of those aspects that the British scorned (much of the path of rebirth, polytheism, the earthy and erotic aspects) and even developed new forms of Hinduism, such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, heavily influenced by British Protestantism. Scholars have noted a pattern in which colonized people take on the mask that the colonizer creates in the image of the colonized, mimicking the colonizer’s perception of the colonized.
⁸¹
This group of Indians became just what the Anglicists wanted, typified by Macaulay’s hope of developing in India “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect,”
⁸²
or, as Sumit Sarkar has paraphrased it, “brown in colour but white in thought and taste.”
⁸³
Such people are what present-day South Asians refer to as coconuts, the opposite of the U.S. term “Oreos” (and with more precise resonances; in Hindu rituals, coconuts are often offered to gods in place of human heads).

It is one of the great ironies of the history of sexuality that the Victorian British, of all people, should have had control of India during one of the great ages of sexual and gender reform, the nineteenth century.
⁸⁴
When confronting the earthier aspects of Hinduism, such as the worship of the linga, the British were not amused.
^kg
And some nineteenth-century Hindu movements internalized British Protestant—indeed Victorian—scorn for Hindu eroticism and polytheism. That attitude was simultaneously scornful and prurient: “Look how dirty and naughty these people are. Look! Look!”

There was a rebound Orientalism in the Hindu reaction to the Protestants, as upper-caste Hindus scurried to get the low-caste temple dancers and prostitutes (Devadasis) out of the temples and swept the village sects and stories out of sight, in shame, in shadow. These right-hand Hindus hastened to put Hindu eroticism into a kind of purdah, behind a veil formed of the
Gita
and Indian philosophy and the more Protestant than thou nineteenth-century Hindu reform movements. Some Hindus took pride in every aspect of Hinduism that appealed to Europeans such as Schelling and Goethe and Hegel and to Americans such as Emerson and Thoreau, holding up those parts of their tradition like cover-up Mother Hubbard gowns as if to say, “We are
not
the filthy savages some of you think we are.” This sanitized brand of Hinduism is now often labeled
sanatana dharma,
“perpetual, eternal and universal” Hinduism, although that term was previously used in a very different sense, to designate the moral code that applied to everyone, in contrast with the particular moral code for each particular caste. British legislation of all aspects of Hinduism, including sexual aspects, owed as much to Calvin as to Manu. It was a deadly one-two punch. But British prudery was not “simply an exotic attitude forced on an innately sensual subcontinent. The sexual economics of empire were no less complex than any other form of colonial exchange.”
⁸⁵
For some of the British played an important role in revalidating Indian eroticism against the puritanical tradition of the Hindus themselves, translating the
Gita-Govinda
and tracking down and preserving
Kama-sutra
manuscripts in decaying libraries (the first translation of the
Kama-sutra
into English appeared in 1883).
⁸⁶
Nor are the British alone to blame for the sanitizing of Tantrism or the quasi-Tantric aspects of Hinduism. Long before the British presence in India, from at least the time of Abhinavagupta in the eleventh century, Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina, and Christian critics X-rated Tantrics in India, and later some orthodox Muslims objected too. The British just made it all worse, so that thenceforth sexuality in India was subjected to the triple whammy of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian Puritanism.

While the British provided the impetus for changes in Hindu law, society, and religion, Hindu art and literature made their impact on Europe. Some forty years after the “Ezour Veda” captivated Voltaire, the myth of the transposed heads of the Brahmin woman and the Pariah woman inspired Goethe (who also went mad for Shakuntala). Working apparently from Richard Iken’s translation of a Persian version of a Tamil version of the story,
⁸⁷
in 1797 Goethe wrote a poem, “The Pariah,” which can be summarized as follows (from the moment when the Brahmin woman has lost her magic chastity):

Note the reference to the possibility of suttee (which got into just about everything that any European wrote about India for several centuries, though here it is also the suttee of a son for his mother) and the judgment that the Brahmin woman is wise and loving, while the Pariah woman is wild in action, mad, and raging in lust. Yet the poem concludes that heaven watches over both Brahmin and Pariah, especially when their souls are “riven” as the women in the story are riven. The word “Pariah,” originally found in ancient Tamil literature, referring to a particular low caste, then entered German and English in its broader sense. In 1818 the Irish clergyman and dramatist Charles Robert Maturin called all women “These Pariahs of humanity,” and in 1823, Michael Beer’s play
Der Pariah
likened the Jews to the Pariahs. Goethe’s poem became a best seller (and inspired several imitations) in Germany.

The myth of the transposed heads was also picked up in France and, eventually, England and America, undergoing several gender transformations along the way. In 1928, Marguerite Yourcenar published a story in French entitled “Kali Décapitée,” republished in 1938 in English (“Kali Beheaded”).
⁸⁹
In her retelling, the goddess Kali’s amorous escapades with Pariahs lead the gods to decapitate her; eventually they join her head to the body of a prostitute who has been killed for having troubled the meditations of a young Brahmin. The woman thus formed is a creature who becomes “the seducer of children, the inciter of old men, and the ruthless mistress of the young.” In the English edition, Yourcenar explains that she rewrote the ending, “to better emphasize certain metaphysical concepts from which this legend is inseparable, and without which, told in a Western manner, it is nothing but a vague erotic tale placed in an Indian setting.”
⁹⁰
This is a very different story indeed, combining Hindu ideas of caste rebellion (Brahmin women sleeping with Pariahs and disturbing male Brahmins) with misogynist European ideas about feminist rebellion (seducing children, exciting old men).

The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943) knew both the Goethe poem and a different Sanskrit version of the story, in which two men, rather than two women, are decapitated, and the woman, who is the wife of one and the brother of the other, switches the heads when she restores them to life.
⁹¹
Zimmer brought the Sanskrit story to the attention of Thomas Mann, who, in 1940, wrote a novella (
The Transposed Heads
) in which the woman, who is married to one of the men and in love with the other, accidentally, or not so accidentally, switches the heads.
⁹²
And in 1954, Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote an opera based on the Thomas Mann novel, also entitled
The Transposed Heads.
The notes for the 1984 ABC Classics CD of the opera say, “The original source is in the
Bhagavad Gita
,” a lovely leftover from the colonial heyday of the
Gita
, when it was regarded as the source of everything Indian. Ms. Glanville-Hicks herself said, “Many of the themes are taken freely and in some cases directly from Hindu folk sources,” and she also described the heroine’s inadvertent transposition of her lovers’ heads as “the greatest Freudian slip of all time.”