In his memoir Childhood Days, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray remembers growing up amidst the austerity of the Brāhmo Samaj in early twentieth-century Calcutta. He presents the lack of any fun and festivity as a counter to what children normally would enjoy. The Brāhmo Samaj, significant for Ray's life given his family's membership in the group, as well as a large swath of prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists in twentieth-century India, is sometimes seen as the origin point for modern Indian religion, based on its broad and all-encompassing engagement with a variety of textual sources regarding religion and philosophy. How did a broad appreciation of different texts and comparative understandings of religion and philosophy transform into an organization with specific rituals, scriptural references, and the trappings of a new religion? Ray mentions how Brāhmo ācāryas (ministers) would enunciate Sanskrit prayers and hymns in an elongated, monotonous way. As he notes, they would say “asato ma sadgamaya” in English, using elongated enunciation familiar to anyone who has attended a Brāhmo service: “Le-e-ad us from/Untr-u-uth into Tru-u-th/Le-e-ad us from Da-a-arkness into Li-i-ght/Le-e-ad us from D-e-ath into E-e-ternal Li-f-fe!” This mantra is often included in published editions of the Bṙhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, as the Pavamana Mantra. How did mantras like this become associated with Brāhmo Samaj members and austere religious rituals? From the late 1830s after the death of Rammohan Roy, the Brāhmo Samaj continued to deepen its emphasis on Upaniṣads like the Bṙhadāraṇyaka, buil

What is the best way to assess the role of religion in nineteenth-century India? Should it be defined by texts? Rituals and religious practice? Reform movements? Distinctive histories of each religious community? Given how multi-faceted religious experience has been and continues to be in India, the question compels no easy answer. Also, given the numerous nationalist uses of nominally religious symbols and references, the importance of defining its historical contours and boundaries has become only more prominent in recent years. Outside simplistic models of nationalism, communalism, or political ideologies that use religion as a rallying cry, how do we begin to understand the role of religion in modern Indian history? If we start with Shashi Tharoor, a prominent public intellectual, one answer would be an affirmative celebration of being Hindu, based on a notion of Hinduism as a transcendental philosophy.1 If one looks elsewhere, such as to the rich world of Dalit and anti-caste activism, what sorts of answers would we find to that question? Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, another public intellectual, would answer that religion in India cannot be imagined outside of caste, hierarchy, and violence.2

These works both generated a fair amount of press in the various public spheres of India and raised questions for any student of religion in India. Is Hinduism, as Tharoor claims, a “tolerant” religion? When viewed from the history of religions, how shall Hinduism be distinguished from the various appropriations of it in the guise of Hindu nationalism?

For many generations, Indian historians have grappled with the importance of Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) (Figure 1.1) within the histories of print journalism, prose literature, and religious reform in early-nineteenth-century Bengal. For some, he is the “father of modern India,” the progenitor of reforms and progress in these areas, a “Universal Man,” a father of “new learning,” given his emphasis on English-language and Western-style debate, discourse, and thought. For other historians of India, he was a tool of imperial power, who constantly sang the praises of the English Company. World historians have seen him as an Indian-style French revolutionary and, in recent parlance, as a constitutional liberal.

When religion enters the picture, many assess his work according to the success or failure of his various ideas and critiques regarding religion. Rather than approach his writings and intellectual labors through a measure of failure or success from the perspective of post-1830s India, this chapter explores the precise nature of those ideas about religion and the institutions nurtured in the wake of those ideas, with a view toward understanding the significance of his work in the history of religions. Building on the recent work of Brian Hatcher, who emphasizes Rammohan's relationship to polity building and political life, I place him in a history of religion as opposed to a history of nationalism, liberalism, or empire. Questions about universal religion, true religion, and revealed religion, as well as demarcating lines between what constitutes religion and what constitutes a space outside of religion, have animated historical actors within a variety of traditions since at least the seventeenth century.

In 1796, as Britain fought endless wars within Europe and overseas, one of the three leading theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, contemplated the ideal relationship between landscapes and visual arts:

Living through the French Revolution and its aftermath, Price here suggests that the only semblance of stability could be found in the vindication of the established order. This is evident in his advocacy of the preservation and heightening of the features of a given landscape. The result is a blend of politics and aesthetic choices that necessitates framing one correctly in order to truly appreciate the other.

Thirty-two years after Debendranath dictated and wrote out Brāhmo Dharma, the reformer, writer, and public intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen (Figure 3.1) created a unique institution titled “Pilgrimages to Saints.” From 1880, and lasting only a few years, this featured historical pageants to great figures in the history of religion, from the Prophet Muhammad, to Caitanya, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other wise men drawn from across time and space. Drawing from the spirit of comparative religion embodied most clearly by Max Müller, this pilgrimages project transcended mere appreciation of texts or ideas. Drawing from the European intellectual traditions he admired, it rather featured a synthesis of a diversity of texts and appreciation for non-textual sources. This approach, defined by him as “subjective” and which “endeavors to convert outward facts and characters into facts of consciousness,”1 included the facts and character traits of Jesus Christ, as well as a host of other individuals in religious history. Included in this line of saints were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, prominent North Americans central to the mid-nineteenth-century history of religion, as analyzed in chapter 2.

Alive from 1838 to 1884, living through the 1857–1858 rebellions, which shook India, the British Empire, and the world, Keshab emerged as a figure who would pioneer new definitions of religion, building upon the comparative religious scholarship of Rammohan and Debendranath.

During the 1730s, the nawab of Bengal, Shuja Khan, warned the Mughal court in Delhi against the renewal of the EIC's commercial rights, the most important of these being the duty-free trade farman granted by Emperor Farukhsiyar in 1717. According to him, although it had previously been possible for the Mughals to maintain control over them, the EIC had now become exceedingly entrenched in Bengal and could undermine the very imperial framework that had allowed and facilitated their presence in the first instance. The nawab made a rather stark assessment of the Company's affairs, stating:

As subsequent events were to prove, Shuja Khan was not wrong. While conventional narratives of Britain's imperial art usually commence with the late eighteenth century, imaginative visions of India had begun to permeate English visual arts earlier on. However, colonial overtures until that point take on a layer of meaning that remains to be fully explored.

Nearly a thousand years before the life and times of Rammohan Roy, another writer and polymath of Bengali origin wrote a play about the various disputes between members of different religions in the kingdom of Kashmir, under the sovereign of King Shankar Varman (r. 883–902 CE). Little is known about the author, Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, besides his Brahmin lineage as well as surviving commentaries on grammar and scriptures. Of his many writings about religion, his play Much Ado about Religion, likely written in the late ninth century CE, serves as a reminder of the deeply embedded nature of political thought on questions of religious pluralism and the various ways of assessing truths, potentials, and values inherent in different positions on religion.

The play features the leading man in the name of Sankarshana, a young graduate (snatak) of the orthodox Mimamsa school of philosophy and an ardent believer in the Vedas. He seeks out constant battles against those who oppose his viewpoints. In the first act, he debates a Buddhist monk, arguing against “universal momentariness” and “consciousness as the only reality.” He declares that Buddhists must stop deceiving themselves in the belief of a better afterlife, as the actions of Buddhists threaten the social order in India at the time. In the second act, he faces and argues against the positions of a Jain mendicant, though he does not consider them a threat to the social order.