Hindu Iconoclasts: Rammohun Roy, Dayananda Sarasvati, and Nineteenth-Century Polemics against Idolatry

Preface

vii Preface In 1992 I held an internship in the India section of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. Every day, walking to work, I would pass 48 Bedford Square, the London house where the Indian reformer and staunch opponent of Hindu “idolatry” Rammohun Roy lived for much of the last year of his life in 1833. I had been studying the writings of Rammohun, and I wondered what he would have thought of my working in that vast treasure trove of “idols” which constitutes the galleries and storage vaults of the magnificent Indian collection. I once told a staff member at the Museum that I was studying the writings of Rammohun and trying to get at the roots of his Indian version of iconoclasm. His immediate reaction was, “Oh, well clearly, his attack on images must be derived from Muslims or Protestant missionaries.” In other words, this is not Indian; it must be a by-product of contact with the Semitic religions . To this spontaneous reaction, this study replies, “No, it’s not that simple.” This book on the apparent incongruity of Hindu attacks on image-worship is intended first for a general audience interested in controversies over religious imagery and visual art. Perhaps the most explosive area of overlap between the study of art and the study of religion is the religious rejection of sacred art as idolatry. Why is it that some religious communities have seen in the veneration of cultic images the worst form of blasphemy and the font of moral degradation while other communities (sometimes within the same religious tradition) have seen in these images and icons the revelation of God, the means of grace, or the embodiment of divinity on earth? Why is the same image seen by one person as an icon and construed by another as an idol? Further, is contention over these polarized concepts (icon versus idol) a truly cross-cultural phenomenon or is it found across cultures only by reason of diffusion? Is the repudiation of visual sacra a foible of the ancient Israelites that, when it arises later and elsewhere, is always to be seen as a borrowing from biblical sources? Thus, secondly, my hope is that this study will engage those interested in the methodological and theoretical problems associated with the comparative study of religion and in particular with the question of how to explain similarities across traditions—in this instance, the apparent similarity of nineteenth-century Hindu attacks on imageworship to non-Hindu anti-idolatry polemics. Finally, my hope is that this study will inform even specialists in Indology and Hinduism (who have long known of image-refusal in the Brahmo and Arya Samaj) of the extent of the arguments made against images by the founders of these reform movements. Perhaps a further autobiographical word is excusable here in order to explain my own interest in this subject. Brought up in the Anglican tradition of Christianity—a denomination that prides itself on being both Protestant and catholic, a sort of via media between the two major forms of Western Christendom (which may explain my interest in seeing both sides of the image debate)—I was exposed to the “High Church” end of the Anglican spectrum. This mode originated in a nineteenth-century revival in the Anglican tradition of the Catholic forms of worship and ritual that had been chucked out in the sixteenth-century split with Rome. Anglo-Catholic Anglicans had brought back ritual and iconic modes of worship with a vengeance. However, as a child, I was always intrigued by the custom of veiling all the statues and crucifixes in the church with sackcloth covers or shrouds during the season of Lent. The images were put under wraps, the altar was stripped bare of its embroidered cloths, the tabernacle door was left open, showing the void within. Here, it seems, the intensely iconic environment went over, however briefly, to its opposite, the negation of images. This oscillation in the ritual of the liturgical year could be juxtaposed with oscillations in the histories of religious traditions in their attitudes to sacred imagery. Does this point to some intrinsic “problem of images” even within iconic traditions ? One of the ironies of religious history is that in the same period in which a movement in England sought to re-ritualize and re-enchant Anglicanism, in colonial India the movements founded by the Hindu figures studied in this book were attempting to move Hinduism in the opposite...