Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity

CHAPTER 6 Text-based Identity: Dayanand Saraswatı’s Reconstruction of the Aryan Self

CHAPTER 6 Text-based Identity: Dayānand Saraswatı̄’s Reconstruction of the Aryan Self INTRODUCTION In chapter 5, we saw that the founding of the Brāhmo Samāj in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy initiated a religious and political movement for the cultural purification of Hinduism. It was his belief that India had strayed from the true model for Indian culture and religion, the ancient Aryans. As a cure for India’s political subjugation, he proposed a recuperation of the former Aryan vision and glory. Rammohan’s method of reading the past as a means of reaffirming or undoing the present set a precedent. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth-century, Indian readings of the Aryan past revalorized ancient Indian history and contributed to social reform. Perhaps the most radical reformer was Dayānand Saraswatı̄ (1824–83), who founded the Ārya Samāj in 1875. In much the same manner that Rammohan Roy based his reform on the translation and dissemination of the Upanishads, Dayānand developed his notion of the Aryan through a continued rearticulation of the authority vested in Vedic texts. Like the Brāhmo Samāj, the Ārya Samāj was a movement that rejected much of what passed as current Hinduism. It based its reform on eradicating differences in language, religion, education, customs, and manners that prevented Indians from fully effecting the mutual good of society as a whole. The ten principles (niyams) of the Ārya Samāj (written in 1877) provide a summary statement of Dayānand’s position with respect to social reform and ethics. Many of the issues raised in the niyams address ethical concerns for the physical, spiritual, and social welfare of others that the Brāhmo Samāj and Western critics had found lacking in Hinduism.1 As did Rammohan Roy, Dayānand rejected polytheism and posited the existence of a single and abstract God. He also condemned idol worship. Since God is formless, He cannot be captured by plastic representation. For 105 106 Aryans, Jews, Brahmins both thinkers, the issue of idolatry was emblematic of a degenerate Hinduism as opposed to an earlier pure faith. Both focused on idolatry as a medieval excrescence totally foreign to Aryan religion. By debunking idol worship, both sought to reform Hinduism and return to its source. However, Dayānand took arguments against idol worship one step further. He asserted that idolatry led to India’s political slavery and degradation. By depending on idols and not exerting themselves, Indians had lost their government, independence , wealth, and pleasures. Dayānand maintained that the Indians themselves were responsible for having become a subject race. In addition to approximating the Brāhmo Samāj’s stand on monotheism and idolatry, Dayānand also advocated other issues that were fundamental to Rammohan’s reform: female equality in education, postponing the age of marriage, marriage by choice (Dayānand 1981: 315), and widow remarriage (Dayānand 1981: 282). In matters of caste reform, Dayānand far exceeded the efforts of the Raja.2 While the Brāhmo Samāj challenged caste with arguments based on Western Enlightenment concerns for social utility, Dayānand condemned caste as a Hindu distortion of Aryan social values.3 The means for rehabilitation existed and could be rediscovered in the Vedas. It was, therefore, a question of relying on Aryan solutions to social and religious problems. No foreign inspiration or models for reform were necessary. TheĀrya Samāj rejected the universalism of the Brāhmo Samāj, particularly in its later configurations.4 Rather than accommodating different religious writings, the Ārya Samāj challenged scriptural eclecticism. Hinduism was not equal in the brotherhood of religions, but superior to all others (Jordens 1978: 278–79). Underlying the Ārya Samāj’s mandate was its founder’s profound belief that modern Indians needed only to return to Aryan values articulated in the Vedas in order to effect reform and regain independence.5 Since the techniques for a return to the Aryan social system were to be found in the teachings of the Veda, Dayānand based his entire program on these texts. They possessed the necessary learning (Dayānand 1981: 117), including all scientific knowledge (Dayānand 1981: 404, 130). Unfortunately, the fundamentals of all types of knowledge do not appear in the Veda in their fully developed form. To access this knowledge, one needed the interpretive skills that Dayānand ’s reading of the Veda purported to offer. With the Satya...