Richard S.Weiss: The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religion on the Margins of Colonialism . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019; pp. xi + 203 (original) (raw)

2020, Journal of Religious History

This engaging and impressive book is centered on the question: "Is it possible to consider a history of modern Hinduism that does not begin, and end, with colonialism?" (p. 11). The standard histories, focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Calcutta and other centers of colonial rule, depict modern Hinduism as emerging through movements initiated by cosmopolitan leaders impelled by European and Christian ideas to reform and modernize their religion. In The Emergence of Modern Hinduism (henceforward Emergence) Richard S. Weiss makes a compelling case for a more accurate historiography of Hindu modernity, one that shifts attention away from the colonial contact zone and foregrounds projects of modernization whose origins can be traced to resources that existed within Hinduism. The dominant narrative, says Weiss, is founded on a false dichotomy between a singular, largely derivative "modernity", and an equally monolithic "tradition". Even those scholars who are careful not to characterize modernity as a purely Western phenomenon fall into the trap of identifying Hindu cosmopolitan movements alone as "modern", relegating initiatives that do not follow the trajectory of reformist religion to the pseudo-category of "the traditional". In reality, Weiss argues, modern Hinduism emerged out of diverse visions of the modern, drawing on multiple, already hybrid traditions, indigenous and foreign, and inventing and shaping new traditions in the process. What those visions had in common was a modern self-consciousness with respect to a congeries of phenomena and intellectual positions, ranging from time and space to notions of individuality, community, and agency. Rather than offering a panoptic survey of non-reform Hindu movements, Weiss focuses on the career of a single leader, Ramalinga Swami a.k.a. Vallalar (1824-1873), who propagated the religion of The True Path (caṉm arkkam) in provincial south India. Immensely influential in his own time, Ramalinga remains a celebrated figure in the Tamil region to this day. In posing radical challenges to caste, ritual and other elements of pre-modern Hinduism, in founding new institutions such as the Society of the True Path, and in using print as a medium for disseminating his ideas, Ramalinga resembled leaders of reform Hinduism. At the same time, however, his popularity owed much to his personal charisma, poetic gifts, and claims of magical powers, features that affiliated him with a lineage of Tamil saints, philosophers, and bhakti devotional poets. As Weiss points out in his excellent introductory chapter, historians of Hinduism have variously written off Ramalinga and his radical moves as a conundrum, or pegged him as a "traditional" bhakti saint who embraced random features of the "modern" streams in colonial Indian society in response to Christian 1