Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721–1893 by Michael J. Altman (review)

Michael J. Altman's Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 begins and ends with Swami Vivekananda's address to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religion. Many studies of American religion do the same, but Altman turns that traditional historical narrative on its head. Rather than see that 1893 event as the inaugural moment of Hinduism entering American religious discourse, Altman reads it as a culmination of more than a century of American engagement with Indian religion. Indeed, one of the many contributions the book brings to the field of American religious studies is to understand much American engagement with "Hinduism" as a construction of various and conflicting Indian religious representations in the early United States.

As the title suggests, Altman is not engaging with a fixed religion called "Hinduism." Instead, his book is a trenchant study of how "Americans used representations of India in their own constructions and arguments about 'religion'" (140). Altman's book analyzes "how Hinduism became conceivable in America," providing a genealogy of thinkers and writers beginning in the late eighteenth century who used information about religion in India to construct various images of heathenism, bloody cult practices, mystical religion, and proto-Christianity (xx). Altman's overriding point is that these constructions, whether labeled "heathen," "Hindoo," or something else, speak to how American thinkers wrestled with Christianity and the very idea of religion.

Altman begins in the late eighteenth century, primarily New England, where Protestant Christianity, and Enlightenment ideas of religion provide various early imaginings of Indian religious life. The Enlightenment strain of thinking comes through Hannah Adams's frequently revised book An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared in the World from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day, which attempted an "impartial and fair account of the world's variety of theological positions" (11). Despite claims of impartiality, Altman argues Adams's work is suffused with a Protestant Christian understanding of religion and, like other figures in this book, uses Indian religious practices to understand Euro-American ideas of monotheism and human reason.

Next, Altman moves to Anglo-American missionary activity in the early nineteenth century, which produced a print culture describing global missionary work. Its picture of Indian religious practices was lurid. Evangelical readers saw practices such as "sati," the immolation of widows on their husband's funeral pyres, as signals of an innate depravity of Indian religious practice. This picture of a violent, sexual "Hindoo" religion stands in contradistinction to Rammohun Roy, a Bengali writer who argued for an essentially monotheistic form of Hindoo religion, and who figured in battles between Unitarians and Trinitarians in New England. In the national discourse, school textbooks and magazines like Harper's constructed a white, Protestant American nationhood where India often served as its backward opposite. Similarly, transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Henry David Thoreau deployed India as the purest representation of a mystical, introverted, and ascetic "East" against a pragmatic and action-oriented "West" represented by the United States.

Later in the nineteenth century Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society would find in India the source of "occult power" and "esoteric truths" (99). Yet they also came into unprecedented conflict with actual Indian religious practitioners, finding their inventions of Indian religion did not fit with Indian traditions. When Altman returns the World's Parliament of Religion in his last chapter, he therefore reads it (and its voluminous historiography) as a culmination of a century-long engagement with Indian religion.

Altman leaves the reader with important questions about alternative ways of doing American religious studies, about thinking genealogically rather than descriptively, and about moving away from fixed, essential definitions of religious categories. Returning to Hannah Adams, Altman also reminds us that comparative religion and religious studies have a longer American history. Overall, the book does an excellent job investigating a forgotten genealogy of Indian religion in American while pointing towards new directions in religious history.