NATIONALISM TAKES ON THE CHURCH

Questioning the Christian Dogma

The Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that shook Europe, stretches from the 1630s to the eve of the French revolution in the late eighteenth century. In those few years, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, and Pierre Bayle, the best-known modern philosophers, made their mark. Most of them were amateurs: none had much to do with universities. They explored the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to reject many traditional teachings and attitudes, and it left a spiritual vacuum in the realms of Christianity in Europe, questioning its dogma.

The seeds were sown in the seventeenth century when some people came to think that history was the wrong way around. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the first to crystallise this thought. Among the many that echoed Bacon, the French scientist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) put it best in his writings about the vacuum.

Pascal's vacuum was not the spiritual one-In 1646, Pascal learned that an Italian, Evangelista Torricelli, had inverted a long glass tube filled with mercury into a bowl also filled with mercury, and the result was some mercury left standing in the tube with a vacuum above it. Torricelli thought that the mercury in the tube was kept up by the weight of the atmosphere pressing down on the bowl. Both claims were highly contested--at this time, the air was believed to be natural light, and Nature was supposed to abhor a vacuum.

Pascal sided with Torricelli, and he reasoned that if the atmosphere had weight, then less atmosphere should have less weight, and the level of mercury in the barometer should be lower. Accordingly, on 19 September 1648, Pascal engaged his brother-in-law Perier to climb the Puy de Dôme, the tallest mountain in central France, carrying a Torricellian tube with its bowl of mercury all the way up. Sure enough, as Perier climbed higher, the level of the mercury fell. This experiment, which convincingly demonstrated that air has weight, is one of the most famous experiments performed during the period of the Scientific Revolution.

 

John Locke

Bacon was an effective propagandist for the new idea that all old ideas in Europe are suspect. To Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was briefly Bacon's assistant, the medieval European philosophy was part of "the Kingdom of Darkness". Superstition and intolerance were at work in this kingdom. (1)

John Locke was a late starter: It was not until he was 57 that he published his main works. the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government and the Letter Concerning Toleration, all of which came out in 1689. He was born in the same year as Spinoza and his first 45 years were far from idle. The Second Treatise of Government has been called an inspiration not only for the French revolution but for the American constitution, as well. His essay was heralded particularly in France, as the philosophical counterpart of Newton's Principia, which had been published in 1687. They were the twin prophets of Enlightenment. 

In questions of religion, Locke's idea was that theological doctrines must be answerable to the court of reason: "Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing." He said that some truths, such as the resurrection of the dead, are "Above Reason". (2) In a tract entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity, published in 1695, Locke argued that nothing in the scriptures was contrary to reason and that God had generously expressed himself in terms that can be understood even by "the poor of this World, and the bulk of Mankind." (3) 

Locke's rationalistic approach to religion did not go as far as that of his contemporary, 25-year-old John Toland, whose Christianity Not Mysterious was published the next year. Toland was condemned in parliament and threatened with arrest in Ireland for asserting that doctrines which were "above reason" were as suspicious as those which were contrary to reason and that Christianity is better off without them. (4) Locke was regularly accused by conservative churchmen of indirectly encouraging atheism in various ways, and of not having enough to say about the Trinity. On the question of religious tolerance, Locke argued for the same sort of freedom of belief that Spinoza had defended: "men cannot be forced to be saved", he wrote in his Letter Concerning Toleration, "they must be left to their own consciences." (5)

The Enlightenment dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global effects, including India. While it included a range of ideas centred on the value of human happiness, and the pursuit of knowledge obtained using reason and evidence, in politics, it stood for the separation of Church and State. (6)

Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the publication of French philosopher René Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians date its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.

The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. It took place in Europe starting towards the second half of the Renaissance period, with the 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus publication De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) often cited as its beginning. (7)

The era of the Scientific Renaissance focused on recovering the knowledge of the ancients and is considered to have culminated in the 1687 Isaac Newton publication Principia which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, thereby completing the synthesis of a new cosmology. The subsequent Enlightenment saw the concept of a scientific revolution emerge in the 18th-century work of Jean Sylvain Bailly, who described a two-stage process of sweeping away the old and establishing the new. (8)

Philosophers and scientists of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at various places. The Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements including liberalism, communism, and neoclassicism trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment. (9)

The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the dogmas of the Church. The Enlightenment was marked with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by Kant's essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment, where the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know) can be found. (10)

The "Radical Enlightenment" (11) promoted the concept of separating church and state, (12) an idea credited to John Locke. (13) According to his principle of the social contract, Locke said that the government lacked authority in the realm of individual conscience, as this was something rational people could not cede to the government for it or others to control. For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he said must therefore remain protected from any government authority.

These views on religious tolerance and the importance of individual conscience, along with the social contract, became particularly influential in the American colonies and the drafting of the United States Constitution. (14) In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson called for a "wall of separation between church and state" at the federal level. Jefferson's political ideals were influenced by the writings of Locke, Bacon, and Newton, (15) whom he considered the three greatest men that ever lived. (16)

Nationalism as religion

Hans Ulrich Wehler, a German historian, in his book, nationalismus (2001) has interpreted the collapse of Christianity resulting in a spiritual vacuum along the Enlightenment and secularization process as one of the conditions for the success of nationalism since the end of the Eighteenth Century in Europe. (17)

The criticism of religion during the Enlightenment (Lumières in French), the dissociation between the Church and the State as manifested in the civil constitution of the clergy during the French Revolution, and the loss of religious guidance by large strata of the population, created a “void” in which nationalism could be inserted. Religion as a system of faith and guidance lost its space in Europe. 

According to French historians, The Lumières originated in western Europe and spread throughout the rest of Europe. It was influenced by the scientific revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei. 

The replacement of religion with the nation became possible in Europe because religion and nationalism were going to share some common traits and functions: They would provide myths of origin, saints and martyrs, holy objects, places and ceremonies, a sense of the sacrifice and functions of legitimization and mobilization. The Jacobinical period in France and the anti-Napoleonic wars were the first manifestations of what the French historian Mona Ozouf (1976) has named as “transference of sacrality” from the strict religious domain to the nation. (18) That is how the sans-culottes (lower classes) used to talk about their “Sainte pique”, celebrated the Revolution before the “altars of the fatherland” and left to fight in holy wars. (19) 

Bacon

Elias Canetti (1992), originally from the national and ethnical “melting pot” of the Balkans, insists that the nations can be regarded as religions, and it is mainly during the wars that the national and religious feelings get mixed. Norbert Elias (1989), the historian of European civilization, points out that nation and nationalism are important systems of belief, and eventually regards nationalism as the most important faith of the Twentieth Century. (20) Georg Mosse (1976) emphasized in his book on the nationalization of masses, that nationalism is not only a political and social movement but also utilizes a religious language and religious symbols. In his view, nationalism-socialism is the expression of that osmosis between nation and religion within the political culture. (21) 

However, as early as the origin of the scientific investigation on nationalism, Carlton J. Hayes (1926) found out that nationalism is a religion since it possesses rituals and martyrs and develops a particular national mythology. (22) American historian Eugen Weber (1986) observed that a historian can be regarded as the priest of the nation, for helping to provide nationalism with a historical legitimation.

The works that focus on the nation’s symbolism inquire to what extent this symbolism was borrowed from the existing religions and creeds, or was developed in a confrontation with them. (23) The actors of this process also play a primordial role. The priests and their influence, the intellectuals and their audience, and the political men and their strategies are the factors intervening at the moments of contact between religion and nation. 

Thus, German Emperor Wilhelm II could invoke the divine right as the source of his dynasty and his government, in face of the German defeats: however, during World War I, its legitimacy, inexorably disintegrated.  (24) 

The national States did not act only as factors of communication but tried also to impose themselves as organizing principles of the societies, as sources of legitimacy and as references to civic morality. In this mission, the national States had to face oppositions, among which the strongest were those by the Catholic Church. It opposed the State’s intervention in the systems of education and in the internal operation of the Churches, as well as in the public organization of the consolidating ceremonies, the mythical heroes, and the integrating ideologies. The debates regarding the place of the Churches in national societies were always accompanied by a conflict on who was going to retain the monopoly of interpretation of the past and the present. 

Those fights in Europe were between the State and the Catholic Church, from Portugal to Italy, and from France to the Czech portion of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. There were conflicts between the newly created national States and the Catholic Church, as well as the place of a national movement in face of the Catholic Church in Europe, especially in France, Italy, the Czech portion, and Germany, during the decades that preceded World War I.

Martin Luther

In France, Italy and Czechoslovakia, the State or a laic stream stood, in the course of the Nineteenth Century, against the Catholic Church. (25) This opposition was older in France - during the French Revolution, the revolutionary State forced the clergy to make a civic oath, causing a schism within the Church between the priests that made the oath and those that refused to make it. The opposition between the two loyalties was the origin of the civil war unleashed in Vendee. (26) If under Napoleon, such opposition was attenuated particularly due to an agreement with the Holy See, it exploded again when, under the Restoration, the Monarchy leaned on the Church. But it was under the Third Republic that the conflict between the Church and the State found its most important expression.

The acts of supporting the Republic and standing for political and social progress were equivalent to anticlericalism; the acts of defending the Monarchy and opposing the Republican and, a fortiori, socialist movement were the same as defending the Christian faith and the Catholic Church. Following one of the third French Republic's founders, Leon Gambetta’s word of command: “The clericalism, here’s the enemy!”, the victorious Republicans passed laws to restrict the Institutional power of the Catholic Church (27). With the establishment of the laic, free and mandatory school using educational legislation, the privileged field of activity of the Catholic Church was reduced. In 1880, the hospitals, previously managed by the Church, were nationalized; in 1884, divorce was legalized, and, in 1889, a law decreed that priests should obligatorily render military service, like any other citizen. The practical application of the law of 1905 on the separation between Church and State caused a sometimes violent confrontation between the churchgoers and the police force. (28) The confrontation between the “two Frances” reached its summit.  

In Italy, differently from France, an agreement between the Holy See and the national movement seemed to be possible within the period that preceded the revolution of 1848. However, because the Pope stood on the counter-revolutionary forces’ side, the Church took quarters in its hostility toward the national unity, and the priests who participated in the national unification had to face problems with the ecclesiastic hierarchy. (29) This hostility was expressed on both sides after the national unity. The State responded to the questioning of the government by confiscating the Church’s properties, imposing military service on the seminarians and priests, and refusing to acknowledge the religious marriage ceremony unless accompanied by a civil marriage. The State exercised its right to inspect and consent to the ordination of the archbishops- in 1864, half of the dioceses possessed no archbishops. The Pope’s position hardened when, in 1864, he condemned in his “Syllabus” the “eighty mistakes”, and, in 1870, the Pope’s infallibility was affirmed when he speaks ex-cathedra. 

The issue of the pontifical State’s survival was the major obstacle between the two actors. The representatives of the Risorgimento proclaimed the march over Rome and elevated Rome to a symbol of the recovered national unity. After the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the people should be constructed against the Pope. With those discourses, they provoked and intensified the suspicion of the Pope, who feared that this expansionist rhetoric would lead to the abolition of the pontifical State. That occurred on 20 September 1870. (30) The subsequent decades regarded the papacy, pathetically as a “prisoner inside the Vatican.”  

In the Czech portions of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, only in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, a conflict between the Catholic Church and the national movement occurred. The Catholic Church was divided into a Bohemian and a Moravian Church, which was dedicated to the cult of their regional saints: Saint Wenceslas in Bohemia, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in Moravia (31). But it was with the revolution of 1848 that the Czech started to refer, more and more, to Jan Hus, the heretic who was burned during the Council of Konstanz. Hus was regarded as an important character within a European general movement towards progress and an individual religion that was based on ethics. Hus was interpreted as a factor of sacralization of the nation that, with its sacrifice, had permitted the rebirth of the Czech nation. The more the Catholic Church attacked Hus’ doctrines, the more his image gained popularity. Within a period in which the Catholic Church was losing importance, a national interpretation of Jan Hus became relevant. (32) This cult was supported by 250 important intellectuals who, in 1868, left in a peregrination to Constance, where Hus had been burned at the stake as a heretic. 

Jan Hus

The German situation was fundamentally different, for the German empire had been the stage not of an opposition between the national State and Catholicism, but of a struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism; the Hebrew community did not have the same numeric weight. The identification of the German nation with the history of Protestantism, which had already begun before 1871, was reinforced with the victory of Prussia against Austria in 1866, and with the outcome of the Franco-German war. Protestantism could claim to be the Emperor’s faith, which had been defined as Protestant. He stood against the Catholic faith, whose loyalty to the Pope was construed as antinational, and whose connivance with the enemies – often Catholic – of Protestant Prussia was suspected. During the period of the Kulturkampf – the cultural struggle- after 1871, the difference between the Protestant Empire and the Catholic Church exploded. (33)

In December, the clergy was forbidden to criticize the Empire and its constitution ex-cathedra. One year later, Prussia decided to exclude from the School inspection all the Catholics. In the same year, the Jesuits’ houses were closed and their foreign members were expelled from Germany. From that time on, the Catholic priests had to be German citizens and should have studied in the State schools of Theology. The State reserved the right to appoint the archbishops and threatened with financial penalties those who preferred to leave their positions vacant. In this confrontation, the Catholics were perceived as the internal enemies, and it was even affirmed that there was a new confession of faith in the public and private life: struggles occurred between students of different creeds, the inter-creed marriages became more difficult, and consumers chose stores that were managed by merchants of their own creed. (34)  

The Catholic Church refused to comply with the laws, organized movements of protest and refused to participate in the holidays of national celebration. In the organization of the “political circles”, as defined by German sociologist Rainer M. Lepsius, the Catholic environment would eventually organize the majority of the Catholic voters, regardless of their social origin (35). Catholicism found itself in a difficult situation, for it should try to find its place in a national culture defined by the Protestants. Considering that, for a long time, Catholicism had defended a Germany that lived under the domination of Catholic Austria, and it found itself in an uneasy position in face of the victory of Protestant Prussia. Moreover, its social professional composition was damaging to it, for Protestantism was supported by the great majority of the members of the "enlightened bourgeoisie", whose importance was smaller within the Catholic sphere. Because the members of the bourgeoisie had a prominent position within the German national movement, the Catholics had limited space to make their voices heard.

Another trend would constitute the nation as a community of believers, by using Christian symbols to ascribe it to a sacred nature, resorting to the religious liturgy to celebrate it, and developing a history of national redemption. (36) The was a re-interpretation of the national figures and the establishment of civil religion, as developed by Rousseau in 1772 in his “Considerations on the government of Poland”; then there was the national application of the biblical figures, of the saints or of the characters of the Churches’ history.

In the history of the nationalization of religion, the cult of Martin Luther in Germany is important. The reformer was celebrated as a national hero, for having defended Germany against the Pope and Catholicism. The Reformation was celebrated as a pre-history of German national unity. During the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of his birth, on 10 November 1883, forty thousand speeches were allegedly made in Germany about the Reformer’s merits; a Luther Foundation was created to sponsor the higher education of the pastors’ and teachers’ children, and a multitude of monuments was built and inaugurated in Luther’s honour. The reference to Luther and to a Protestant national tradition also helped to differentiate, in history and in the present time, those who favoured the uprising of the nation and those who opposed it. The Middle Ages were regarded as gloomy and ineffective, and the Catholic Church was ultramontane and vassal to Rome. The European countries that were regarded as enemies of the new German nation, such as France, in their majority Catholic, were perceived as “rotten” due to the ultramontanism that prevailed there. With many initiatives and resources, Protestantism succeeded, under the Empire, to promote a “religionization” of the nation and a nationalization of the religion.

The German Catholics responded with the same enthusiasm and with similar arguments. Even in 1848, Ignaz von Döllinger contended that the “only true national Church is... the Catholic Church” (37). Against Luther, the Catholics mobilized, especially after 1848, Boniface, the “apostle of the Germans”, to emphasize that the German nation had been associated, by the time of its birth, with the introduction of Christianity. Boniface, whose name derives from the Latin bonum facio, was celebrated as the one who, during the AD Eighth Century, was assigned by Pope Gregory II with the mission of Christianizing the German provinces. In this missionary action, he was murdered – as the legend has it – by pagans from Northern Germany. The missionary and civilizing action and the martyrdom were, in Boniface’s Catholic perspective, good examples of the longevity of the Catholic struggle for the unity of Germany. 

In France, a similar effort to nationalize a character of the ecclesiastic history occurred when the Republicans tried to nationalize the cult of Joan of Arc, which had great importance within the Catholic Church. As demonstrated by Krumeich (1989), Joan of Arc achieved great popularity among Catholic believers and in popular culture (38).  To the “maid of Orleans”, who had saved the king, the Republicans opposed a Joan of Arc that had been betrayed by the king, by the noblemen and by the Catholic Church, and who had to die to save France. The Republicans placed among the adversaries of Joan of Arc all those that they combated during the Third Republic. The Republicans were successful in ascribing a sacred nature to the national heroes by transferring them to the Church of Saint Genevieve. Such a decision, made during the Revolution of 1789, was abolished during the Second Empire, but renewed under the Third Republic. The entombment of the national heroes inside an ancient church raised a strong reaction from the Catholics, who regarded it as a profanation and a sacrilege. However, in 1855, Victor Hugo - the national poet – was transferred to the Pantheon. (39)

It is surprising to see how the policies of memories and symbols are similar in the four Christian societies. They were based on characters of the past, both to celebrate the longevity of the national unity that had been created by the Christianization of the country – such as Saint Wenceslas, in Czechoslovakia; Boniface, in Germany; Joan of Arc or Saint Louis, in France – Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Giordano Bruno, and a Republican Joan of Arc could serve as an example. In this opposition, the characters of the ecclesiastic history were nationalized and inserted into a historical construction, into an “invention of tradition.” (40) The nation itself was made sacred with those discourses and lost the character of a contingent and historical construction. The nation was not defined in a pluralist, open way, but as a closed, unique and holistic entity. 

Joan of Arc

During the years preceding World War I, in Italy, the Right-wing had tried to attain a commitment to the Catholic Church and avoid manifestations and publications that could be regarded as anti-clerical. The attitude of the Catholic Church was changing as well. With the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Pope signalized a relative openness toward the modern world and allowed the national Churches to set out for a policy of commitment with the laic National States (41). This did not produce deep effects in France, where the Catholics had eventually adopted the national symbols such as the tricolour flag and the commemoration of July 14, but where the separation between the Church and the State of 1905 unleashed new conflicts and increased the rupture between the laic Republicans and the Catholic believers. Only World War I allowed the Catholic Church to participate in the defence of national unity and the “sacred” cause of the nation, without eliminating the fundamental differences between the “two Frances”. (42)

Tipu ties up with the French

While Europe was in conflict with the Church, in 1794, surprisingly, the despot Muslim king of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, allegedly founded the (French) Jacobin Club in Seringapatam, had planted a Liberty tree, and asked to be addressed as 'Tipu Citoyen,'" which means Citizen Tipu. (43) Helped by French republican officers, he founded the club for ''framing laws comfortable with the laws of the French Republic."

One of the motivations for French Emperor Napoleon's invasion of Egypt was to establish a junction with India against the British. Bonaparte wished to establish a French presence in the Middle East, with the ultimate dream of linking with Tippoo Sahib. (44) Napoleon assured the French Directory that "as soon as he had conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their possessions." (45) According to a 13 February 1798 report by Napoleon's chief diplomat and cleric Charles Maurice Talleyrand: "Having occupied and fortified Egypt, we shall send a force of 15,000 men from Suez to India, to join the forces of Tipu-Sahib and drive away the English." (46) Napoleon was unsuccessful in this strategy, losing the Siege of Acre in 1799 and at the Battle of Abukir in 1801.

But, In a 2005 paper, historian Jean Boutier argued that the club's existence, and Tipu's involvement in it, were fabricated by the East India Company in order to justify British military intervention against Tipu. (47)

Ignorance in England

The majority of textbooks on British history make little or no mention of the English Enlightenment, although they do include coverage of major intellectuals such as Joseph Addison, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, Joshua Reynolds, and Jonathan Swift. (48) Freethinking, a term describing those who stood in opposition to the institution of the Church, and the literal belief in the Bible, can be said to have begun in England no later than 1713 when Anthony Collins wrote his "Discourse of Free-thinking", which gained substantial popularity. This essay attacked the clergy of all churches and was a plea for deism.

The reasons for this neglect were the assumptions that the movement was primarily French-inspired, that it was largely a-religious or anti-clerical, and that it stood in outspoken defiance of the established order. (49) After the 1720s, England could claim thinkers to equal Diderot, Voltaire, or Rousseau. However, its leading intellectuals such as Gibbon, (50) Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson were all quite conservative and supportive of the standing order. The reason given was that Enlightenment had come early to England and had succeeded such that the culture had accepted political liberalism, philosophical empiricism, and religious toleration, positions which intellectuals on the continent had to fight against powerful odds. Furthermore, England rejected the collectivism of the continent and emphasized the improvement of individuals as the main goal of enlightenment. (51)

In England, during the last decade of the Eighteenth century,  the pattern of English thought got altered profoundly. Responding to the dual impulses of the French revolution and the evangelical revival, educated Englishmen changed their attitudes toward both political and religious questions. In politics, a Trory emphasis on traditional institutions superseded the Whig insistence on traditional rights as the framework for debate on public issues. In religion, emotional Evangelicalism began to compete with rational Christianity of the late Eighteenth century for the allegiance of the educated population. These changes in the political and religious views in turn modified the hitherto dominant ideas in other spheres of thought and thus set a cultural pattern which persisted well into the nineteenth century. (52)

In the period of transition in England, the least studied development was the growth of public concern about the relation of science to religion. This most perplexing nineteenth-century problem had caused Englishmen little anxiety in the years before 1790. The orthodox opinion then assumed that science and religion were complementary, not contradictory, and that scientific investigations would confirm the literal truth of the religious writings. English scientists for the most part acknowledged this religious mission and carefully organized their findings to accord with the scriptural account of the origin of the earth and its inhabitants. According to Charles C Gillispie, Eighteenth-century English scientists were influenced by rationalist ideas and began to express the religious applications of their work in "the language of convention rather than of ardent conviction." (53) 

Scientists and theologians were united in that "peculiarly English phenomenon, the holy alliance between science and religion". (54) 

It is in this world of contradictions that the East India Company Writers in India tried to place Indian scriptures.

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1. Gottlieb, Antony, The Dream of Enlightenment, Allen Lane, 2016, p xi
2. ibid, p 116
3. ibid, p 117
4. ibid
5. ibid
6. Zafirovski, Milan (2010), The Enlightenment and Its Effects on Modern Society, p. 144
7. Juan Valdez, The Snow Cone Diaries: A Philosopher's Guide to the Information Age, p 36
8. Cohen, I. Bernard (1976). The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution. Journal of the History of Ideas. 37 (2): 257–88.
9. Eugen Weber, Movements, Currents, Trends: Aspects of European Thought in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1992).
10. Gay, Peter (1996), The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, W.W. Norton & Company
11. Israel, Jonathan I. (2011). Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790. Oxford University Press. p 10-11
12. ibid, pp. vii-viii
13. Feldman, Noah (2005). Divided by God. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, p. 29: "It took John Locke to translate the demand for the liberty of conscience into a systematic argument for distinguishing the realm of government from the realm of religion."
14. ibid, p 29
15. Sorkin, David. Hayes-Robinson Lecture: Enlightenment and Faith: Debates among Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 2008, p. 10
16. Susan Manning, Francis D Cogliano, ed., The Atlantic enlightenment, 2008, Routledge p. 14
17. Heinz-Gernhard Haupt, Religion and Nation in Europe in the 19th Century: Some Comparative Notes, Estudos Avancados, 22 (62), 2008
18. Ozouf, M. The Revolutionary Party: 1789-1799. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haupt, Religion and Nation in Europe in the 19th Century: Some Comparative Notes, Estudos Avancados, 22 (62), 2008, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
19. Martin, J. C. Violence and Revolution: Essay on the Birth of National Myth, Paris: Seuil, 1996
20. Elias, N. Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and Culture Development in 19th and 20th Centuries. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup

21. Mosse, G. L., The Nationalization of the Masses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic War to the Third Reich, Frankfurt: Campus, 1976. quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
22. Hayes, C. J. H. Essays on Nationalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1926
23. Temps Modernes, v.550, May 1992, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
24. Haupt H G & Langewiesche, D ed. (2001, 2004), ) Nation und Religion in Deutschland. p.293-332.
25. Burleigh, M. Earthly Powers. The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French revolution to the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (2005),
26. Martin, 1996, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
27. McManners, John (1972), Church and State in France-1870-1914, Oxford, p.2327-58
28. Mayeur, Separation of Church and State (1966), quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
29. Papenheim, Margot, 2003, p.202-36, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
30. Verocci, G, 1997, Places of memory, Characters and dates of United Italy, p.89, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
31. Hroch, The Europe of Nations, 2005, p.55, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
32. Schulze-Wessel, 2004, p.135-50, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
33. Burleigh, M. Earthly Powers. The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French revolution to the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (2005), p.311 ss
34. Kuhlemann (2004), p.27-63, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
35. Laube, 2001, p.293-332, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
36. ibid, p.302ss
37. ibid
38. Winock M, 1997, p.4427-73, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup
39. Ben Amos, 2002, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789-1996. Oxford University Press, 2002
40. Burleigh, 2005, p.365
41. Hobsbawm & Ranger, ed, (1992), Invention of Tradition, Cambridge
42. Mollenhauer D, 2004, p.228, quoted in Heinz-Gernhard Haup

43. Conrad, Sebastian (2012). Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique. The American Historical Review. 117 (4): 999–1027
44. Watson, William E. (2003). Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World (2003), Praeger Publishers
45. Amini, Iradj (1999). Napoleon and Persia, Mage Publishers

46. ibid

47. Boutier, Jean (2005). "Les "lettres de créances" du corsaire Ripaud. Un "club jacobin" à Srirangapatnam (Inde), mai-juin 1797". ( The "credentials" of the corsair Ripaud. A "Jacobin club" in Srirangapatnam (India), May-June 1797". The Learned Indies, Les Indes Savantes.

48. Peter Gay, ed. The Enlightenment: A comprehensive anthology (1973) p. 14

49. Roy Porter, "England" in Alan Charles Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (2003) 1:409–15
50. Karen O'Brien, English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815 in José Rabasa, ed. (2012). The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 3: 1400–1800. Oxford, England: OUP. pp. 518–535
51. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (2000), pp. 1–12, 482–484.
52. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology, Cambridge, 1951, p 10, quoted in Norton Garfinkle, Science and Religion in England 1790-1800: The Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin, Journal of the History of Ideas, (June 1955) vol 16, no 13p 376-388
53. Morris Quinlan, Victorian Prelude, New York, 1951, W L Mathieson, England in Transition,1789-1832, London, 1920
54. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, (New York, 1941, p 136)

© Ramachandran 

CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL VACCUM AND HINDU RENAISSANCE

Four Company Writers Invent Hinduism

The British presence in India began as a commercial and evangelical enterprise. The royal charter of 1600 gave the English East India Company a monopoly on trade with India. It operated through the fragmented Mughal Empire, the disintegration of which was aided and exploited by the Company. The conversion of the Company to political power was because of the actions of Robert Clive, who expanded the Company's territory, during 1748-1763. (1) From his arrival in India in 1756 to his departure five years later, he led the Company from a position of defeat at the hands of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, who had recaptured Calcutta and the Company's Fort, to dominance in the sub-continent.

Clive retaliated at the battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, and Siraj-ud-Daulah was defeated and replaced with the puppet Nawab, Mir Jafar. The Company had usurped imperial authority over the region. (2) Clive's victories were controversial and the following decade confirmed his critics' misgivings when widespread extortion resulted in a decline in trade, as well as local famines. (3) Clive acted like a despot. (4) It was the astonishing amounts of private wealth accumulated by Clive and his faction that brought the conditions in India to public attention. Men associated with it acquired their own label of 'nabob'. (5) Even those whose agenda was to downplay the events, agreed that Clive was a real English Nabob. (6) 

The legitimacy of the British presence in India became a matter for parliamentary debate, as well as public opinion. (7) Apart from whether the Company was constitutionally capable of holding and governing territory, the questions raised included whether it was possible for the Company to establish a system of laws in an ancient and civilized polity like India, and, how a British government in India would increase or decrease the despotism it had experienced under Clive. The Company agreed to pay the British Government an annual subsidy of £400,000 and promised to correct the abuses of which it had been accused. 

Holwell

But the British Parliament made no specific recommendations. (8) In the following years, in addition to corruption, increased military expenditure meant that the resulting reduction in the Company's revenues added an economic imperative to resolving questions of legitimacy. The Regulating Act of 1773 resolved that both the British government and the Company's Board of Directors would together appoint a Governor-General, and a council of Bengal, which had exclusive authority over British territory in India. It was incumbent on this post to ensure that the Company‟s operations were to the benefit of Britain, and the Company‟s stakeholders. It was into this role that Warren Hastings stepped, with a commitment to ending the abuses that had drained the Company's profits, and ruined its public image. (9) But, Hastings too plunged into abuse of power.   

British philosopher and MP Edmund Burke summarised East India Company as "A State in the disguise of a Merchant', at the time of the Impeachment trial of Warren Hastings during 1788- 1795. (10) The Company had developed from a network of trading outposts to a territorial power, during the course of the 18th century. In 1765 the Company was officially granted the right to Diwani, that is, the right to collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. With this came public criticism and concern for the rights of native subjects. 

Religion had an important role throughout this transformation, sometimes justifying Company policy and sometimes providing the foundation for criticism of it. Since its inception, some had assumed that it was the Company's moral duty to utilise its trade mission for the purpose of evangelism. The period from 1770 onwards saw mounting pressure from Evangelicals for the Company to pursue a missionary policy. (11) For some, religious tolerance was an important principle of enlightened government, (12) and they held on to the belief that non-interference in native religions and institutions was the best means of achieving stability. (13)

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the works of four Company Writers, John Zephaniah Holwell (1711-1798), Alexander Dow (1735/36-1779), Nathaniel Halhed (1751-1830) and Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) were instrumental in constructing the ideological milieu for the justification, as well as criticism, of Company policy and rule. They were at the forefront of European research into the region's history, culture and religion. Their interpretation of what they termed the "Hindoo" or "Gentoo" religion was based on their own preoccupations with European Christian religious debates, in the backdrop of the Enlightenment. They never used the terms Hindu or Hinduism.

Holwell: He was a surgeon, and a temporary Governor of Bengal (1760). He was one of the first Europeans to study Indian antiquities and was an early advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism. Holwell was a survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, June 1756, the incident in which British subjects and others were crammed into a small poorly ventilated chamber overnight, with many deaths. Holwell's account of this incident (1757) had wide circulation in England and this gained support for the Company's conquest of India. His account was not publicly questioned during his lifetime nor for more than a century after his death. However, in recent years, his version of the event has been called into question by many historians. (14)

Holwell was one of the first British Company servants to study Hinduism. (15) He came to believe that the Hindu scriptures completed and unlocked a secret meaning of the Bible. He wrote about this in the second and third volumes of his work Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan (1765–1771)

Holwell was a believer in metempsychosis (transmigration of souls). He came to the conclusion that the fundamental doctrine of the Brahmins was that God had created angelic beings but they rebelled and so were condemned to be punished, with the possibility of a return to grace by passing through a series of rebirths to regain paradise. He held the view that all animals and humans were fallen angels. According to him, metempsychosis accounted for the problem of Original sin as the Fall of Man had occurred in heaven long before the creation of Adam and Eve who were fallen angels.

He suggested that the Greeks and Egyptians took their belief in metempsychosis from the Brahmins. 

He stated that all religions have much in common but only the Hindu scriptures have all the truths fully articulated. He wrote that Moses's version of the creation and Fall of Man is "clogged with too many incomprehensible difficulties to gain our belief", and is only made intelligible with the Hindu doctrine that humankind is fallen angels.

As a vegetarian, he opposed the Cartesian view that animals are machines without souls. He argued that animals were not created for domination or use by man. He stated that meat and the killing of animals is a violation of man's original nature and is the cause of moral and physical evil.

In regard to Christianity, Holwell identified as a Christian deist, which was consistent with his belief in the transmigration of souls and his enthusiasm for Hinduism.

Dow: He was a Scottish Orientalist, writer, playwright and army officer. Dow was in the process of being educated for a mercantile career in Eyemouth when he abruptly left aboard the King of Prussia as a midshipman. One reason posited for this was that he was involved in a fatal duel. (16) In Bencoolen, 300 miles along the southwestern coast of Sumatra, he became secretary to the Governor and was recommended to the officials of the Company at Calcutta. He joined as an ensign in the Bengal infantry in 1760 and was rapidly promoted to lieutenant in 1763, and captain in 1764.

He returned to Britain on leave in 1768 and published in that year two translations, Tales translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi and the History of Hindostan, translated from the Persian book, Tarikh -i-Firishtah, of Firishta. Both works had great success, and in the following year, Dow had a five-act tragedy on Genghis Khan, Zingis, which was a limited success at Drury Lane.

Dow

He then returned to India, and was promoted lieutenant-colonel on 25 February 1769, and in 1772 published the continuation of his History of Hindostan to the death of Aurungzeb, with two dissertations, On the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan, and An Enquiry into the State of Bengal. In 1774 he again returned to England, and David Garrick produced his second tragedy in verse at Drury Lane, entitled 'Sethona', set in a mythic ancient Egypt. It was acted only for nine nights and David Erskine Baker in his Biographia Dramatica alleged to be not really by Dow at all.

Dow returned once more to India and died at Bhágalpur on 31 July 1779.

Halhed: While at Oxford he undertook oriental studies under the influence of William Jones. Accepting a writership in the service of the Company, he went out to India, and there, at the suggestion of Warren Hastings, translated the Hindu legal code from a Persian version of the original Sanskrit. This translation was published in 1776 as A Code of Gentoo Laws, the first translation of Manusmriti. In 1778 he published A Grammar of the Bengal Language, a Bengali grammar, to print and he set up the first Bengali press in India.

Wilkins: An English typographer and Orientalist, he is notable as the first translator of the Bhagavad Gita into English, and he supervised Panchanan Karmakar to create one of the first Bengali typefaces. He trained as a printer. In 1770, he went to India as a printer and writer in the Company's service. His facility with language allowed him to quickly learn Persian and Bengali. He created the first type for printing Bengali and Persian. In 1781, he was appointed as the translator of Persian and Bengali to the Commissioner of Revenue and as superintendent of the Company's press. He successfully translated a Royal inscription in Kutila characters, which were thitherto indecipherable. In 1784, Wilkins helped William Jones establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

The paradigm shift

The interpretations of these four Company writers instigated a paradigm shift in the way that Hinduism was understood in eighteenth-century Europe. This new paradigm moved away from characterisations of the religion according to eyewitness accounts, towards the construction of Indian religion based on the claim of British researchers that they were penetrating the "original philosophical sources" of a much maligned and ancient system of thought. This interpretation shaped European Enlightenment intellectual culture, and by the turn of the century, it firmly cemented its place in the thoughts of prominent figures such as Voltaire and Raynal and influenced the emergent German Romanticism and discourses of German idealism. (17)

Clearly, the "invention" of the sources of Hindu religion by the Calcutta-based British servants occurred as part of an imperialist project. These authors were the unscholarly precursors to the work of the first British Indologist, Sir William  Jones (1746-1794), who was also part of the project.

The Company writers who turned to Hindu scriptures, had a spiritual vacuum in their backyard, after the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason shaped philosophical, political and scientific discourse from the late 17th to the early 19th century. Matthew White traces the Enlightenment back to its roots in the aftermath of the Civil War, and forward to its effects on the present day.

The Enlightenment – the ‘Age of Reason’ – is defined as the period of rigorous scientific, political and philosophical discourse that characterised European society during the ‘long’ 18th century: from the late 17th century to the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. This was a period of huge change in thought and reason, which was ‘decisive in the making of modernity’. Centuries of Christian custom and tradition were brushed aside in favour of exploration, individualism, tolerance and scientific endeavour, which, in tandem with developments in industry and politics, witnessed the emergence of the ‘modern world'. Christendom lost its depth and faced a spiritual vacuum.

During the late Enlightenment period in Europe, and the vacuum in that Christianity found itself in Europe, India played an important role in filling the spiritual vacuum. Hinduism in particular came to occupy the space that Chinese Confucianism had once held for thinkers like German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), as an intellectual counterpart to declining European civilization. (18) With privileged access to Indian languages and advisors, British East India Company servants became instrumental in delivering information about "Hinduism" to European audiences. In 1767, J.Z. Holwell described the central tenets of the "Gentoo" religion as short, pure, simple and uniform", arguing that the multiple gods associated with it were merely figurative. (19) A year later, Alexander Dow, declared that the "Hindoo religion" was orientated towards a belief in a singular "Supreme Being". (20)

Halhed

Further, in two separate works commissioned by the Governor General of Bengal, Hastings, N.B. Halhed suggested that the "Gentoo" scriptures were of greater antiquity than the Bible, and Charles Wilkins described the ancient Brahmins as "Unitarians". (21) These Company writers suggested that "Hinduism" was an unjustly maligned and essentially reasonable religion, the main tenets of which were compatible with Christian moral teaching.

A decade before Howell's remarks, Company Servant John Henry Grose had offered a different account of the "Gentoos". In A Voyage to the EastIndies, with Observations on Various Parts There, Grose described his experiences in Bombay and Surat, as well as offering a recent history of the Mughal empire, the Catholic missions, and a miscellany of social practices. In terms of the "Gentoo religion," Grose thought that there was "little or nothing to add" to the impressions of earlier travel writers and missionaries and so confined his discussion to "those particulars of it that struck [him] the most." (22) These "particulars" were namely "their religious toleration, their treatment of cows, and the practice of voluntary burning among widows." (23) Grose speculated about the origins of the religion in the second edition of A Voyage to the East Indies (1766), which described the ancient Gentoos as "descended from Shem". (24) This was a reference to the biblical notion, made popular in the early modern period, that after the flood Noah's sons, Japheth, Shem and Ham had repopulated the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. (25) After this, claimed Gross, they were "instructed by the Greeks in the worship of the heroes of fabulous antiquity", eventually consecrating an elephant as an idol. (26) To authors like Grose, the "Gentoo religion" served as the idolatrous counter-point to revealed Christianity.

The difference between Grose and the four Company authors illustrates the emergence of a new approach to the interpretation of "Hinduism" according to the newfound concerns of the Enlightenment religious culture, as opposed to the conventional biblical historical narrative. In the mid to late eighteenth century, Company servants began to produce what they claimed most "systematical accounts of the doctrines of the Gentoos". (27) Their work advanced a uniquely "philosophic" interpretation of "Hinduism"; and this was a result of their engagement with heterodox religious thought. While not deviating from the evangelical approaches of missionaries and travel writers like Grose, the interpretations of "Hinduism" advanced by these authors focused on its theological content, not on contemporary practices, (28) in an attempt to appropriate to the masses.

The emergence of these interpretations was in conformity with the development of the Company policy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of the British in India meant that the opportunities for greater knowledge of Indian religion and culture were mostly exploited by Company men. Holwell and Dow were pioneers, independently researching and publishing their discoveries of what they believed to be the original religion native to India. The Company's transformation into a sovereign entity pressed the question of how it would accommodate its non-Christian polity and prompted a deepening official engagement with the religious history, tenets and practices of India. These were the conditions in which the works of Halhed and Wilkins were commissioned by Hastings. Ideas about Indian religion became accommodated within the more obvious political project of British colonialism. Halhed and Wilkins built on the conceptual framework already established by the independent projects of Holwell and Dow. The basis of the framework was contemporary European religious heterodoxy, with all four writers approaching the interpretation of "Hinduism" from a "liberal" perspective. This philosophic interpretation of "Hinduism" was to have a lasting impact on colonialism, the work of the philosophes, and German Idealism. (29)

These protégés of Hastings were in fact the inheritors of a discourse already established by Holwell and Dow and William Jones, and his founding of an Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. (30) So, the Marxist scholar Edward Said described Jones as the "undisputed founder" of Orientalism, (31) and those tending towards a more apologetic agenda invoking Jones as the embodiment of what some have termed the "new Orientalism". (32)  All of them agreed that Holwell, Dow, Halhed and Wilkins each claimed to have delved into the mysteries of the "Gentoo" religion to an unprecedented degree. Holwell was hailed by Moses Mendelssohn, a thinker for both the German and Jewish Enlightenments, as the first author "to see through the eyes of a native Brahmin". (33) Dow was highly regarded by Voltaire, who cited him as an authority in a number of works. (34)  Dow's History of Hindostan shows, that the work of Company writers was considered at the time to be a significant contribution to European knowledge. The work of Halhed and Wilkins followed in the two decades after were hailed as the first authentic translations of Brahminical scriptures into English. (35)

Holwell was the first of the four to publish, his Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan appearing in three volumes during the years 1765-71. (36) His position was that Hinduism, in its ancient form, contained all of the essential truths of monotheistic belief. Dow also described the Hindoo religion as monotheistic. His work, The History of Hindostan was published in two volumes (1768-1772) and contained several appended essays featuring a discussion of the country's culture and religious traditions. (37) In contrast, the projects of Halhed and Wilkins fell under the direct patronage of Warren Hastings. At the request of Hastings, Halhed produced A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), which was a digest of religious ordinances compiled from various sources, rendered into Persian by a panel of pandit scholars, and subsequently by Halhed into English. (38) Ensuring the British publication of Charles Wilkins's The Bhăgvăt-Gēētā, or Dialogues of Krĕĕshnă and Ărjŏŏn (1785) was also the design of Hastings. (39) The prefaces that Halhed and Wilkins prepared for these literary contributions expressed a number of personal convictions which placed the "Hindoo" religion in the context of European religious dissent and heterodoxy.   

These authors also had their critics. Their approach to "Hinduism" was one with which Charles Grant, three terms Director of the East India Company‟s Board of Governors (1794, 1805 and 1816), did not agree. In response to Dow‟s claim that they worshipped the same "Supreme Being" he wrote:

"It is doubtless very pleasing to discover the recognition of this grand principle, the foundation of all true religion, even under an immense mass of falsehood and superstition; but some persons seem to have thought, that in ascertaining the existence of this principle in the writings of the Hindoos, or in the opinions of their learned men, they had substantially vindicated and established the religious character of that people; making little account of their idolatry, which as practised by the Brahmins, they represent to be no more than symbolical worship of the divine attributes…" (40)

Wilkins

Grant and his circle were anxious to make the opposite case to Dow, Holwell, Halhed and Wilkins. While the British were extending their influence in India, there had been no serious attempt to institute a missionary campaign, which people like Grant wanted. With the revival of Evangelical Christianity towards the latter half of the century there were more calls for what one sermon titled, The Duty of attempting the Propagation of the Gospel among our Mahometan and Gentoo Subjects. (41) In 1792, in order to convince the Company that a Christian mission in India was an immediate necessity, Grant published a lengthy document designed to prove the moral depravity of the "Hindoos". He chastised what he termed "European apologists" for presenting a skewed picture of the "Hindoo" religion(42)

An advocate of the evangelical movement, belonging both to the Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christianity in the Highlands and Islands and the "Clapham Sect" of evangelical reformers and abolitionists, Grant saw the Hindoos as practising nothing short of "gross idolatry". (43) In contrast, the observations of writers like Holwell, Dow, Halhed and Wilkins were only made possible, according to Grant, because their proponents leaned to "so latitudinarian an opinion, an opinion which falls below even the creed of deism" that such "falsities" were consistent with their generally heterodox account of religious truth. (44)

Their religious heterodoxy became conflated with the sympathetic reading of Indian religion advanced by William Jones, whose work was so supportive of Christian primacy that it was welcomed by several Christian apologists. (45) The Enlightenment had identifiable religious origins in both Protestant heterodoxy and Catholic counter-reformation movements, particularly in the formation of theories about the social role of religion and tolerance. (46) 

This view of a "religious Enlightenment" points to how many of those figures associated with the Enlightenment retained and argued for particular forms of faith and religious belief. French philosopher Denis Diderot's (173-1784) contribution to the 1774 edition of Histoire des deux Indes, argued that the creation story of the "Gentoux" (Gentoos) was no less fantastical than the biblical one, allowing the philosophes to launch an attack on revealed religion in general. Diderot's source for this was Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws. (47) Comparative critiques like his helped to foster an attitude whereby all religions were subject to similar historical processes, and the primacy of Christian teaching was increasingly put into question. All four writers, Holwell, Dow, Halhed and Wilkins invoked this trend which often led them to draw out the similarities, both sublime and vulgar, between the Christian and "Gentoo" traditions.

Among the four, there was an attempt to differentiate between the original religion of India and its "corrupt" modern manifestations, which were a product of priest-sponsored superstition. Halhed lamented the "priest-rid mis'ry of the blinded throng", and longed for a return to the "intellectual fire" of Bhagavad Gītā, recently translated by Wilkins, which he saw as "containing the most ancient and pure religious principles of the Hindoos." (48)  While some of these Protestant concepts were present in the works previous to theirs, what set these authors apart were their claims to have "discovered" the original religion of the Gentoos in the texts of the ancient Brahmins. While Holwell was deeply concerned with theodicy, Halhed forwarded a sceptical account of religion as a historically contingent phenomenon.

Considering their work as the product of European religious discourses necessarily leads us to consider the existing debate as to whether "Hinduism" is a construct, the foundations of which were laid out in the work of European orientalists. (49) The term "Hinduism", although adopted and adapted by "Hindus", was nevertheless rooted in a Western concept of "religion". (50) All the authors mentioned here have been recognised by some as having a degree of influence on the development of the term "Hinduism", as a signifier of a unified religion that is native to India. (51) But, as Lorenzen has pointed out, the Hindu religion as expressed in the theological and devotional practices surrounding the Bhagavad Gītā and other texts acquired a sharper self-conscious identity much earlier. (52)  The eighteenth-century terms were, "Hindoo‟ and "Gentoo", rather than "Hindu" and "Hinduism".

Along with the argument that the image of "the religion of the Gentoos" painted by these authors was the product of idiosyncratic intellectual mythologies, there was also the claim that these and other European Orientalists "invented" the modern concept of "Hinduism." The actual degree of "invention" in their work, ranges from misreading to deliberate forgery. Holwell's claim to have been translating original manuscripts was dubious. Dow's supposed translation of original manuscripts is built on similarly suspect claims. Although Halhed and Wilkins worked more closely with a few pundits, the stages of reinterpretation that these went through also betray a certain degree of invention. If we assess them on the basis of Indology, the fabrications contained in their work would have a devastating impact. (53) Yet, all four authors intentionally presented a version of  Indian religion that spoke to European intellectual culture and debate, after the spiritual vacuum in Christianity, brought about by Scientism in Europe.

The change in British policy 

In the two decades that the work of these writers appeared (1760-1790), the East India Company underwent a transformation from a commercial enterprise to an administrative government. The period contains two broad epochs in the evolution of the British presence in India. The first is the conflict and resolution surrounding the 1757 battle of Plassey. The decisive encounter had been waged and won in response to the resistance of the Mughal governor of Bengal, Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah, who had attacked and captured the Company's base in Calcutta. Having asserted itself militarily, the Company colluded with and installed as the new nawab, the demoted army leader, Mir Jafar. Robert Clive, the Colonel credited with the victory at Plassey, went on to institute the system described as "dual government" whereby the Company secured fiscal dominance but was able to abandon administrative responsibilities to the Nawab. (54) The following decade was a time of crisis in British Bengal. Extorting revenues resulted in a general decline in trade, as well as a devastating set of local famines. (55) It is against this backdrop that the work of Holwell and Dow was produced. They were both critical of these developments but from different perspectives.

Both Halhed and Wilkins were directly engaged in the business of legitimising the new administration. It was on a tide of hostile public opinion that the question of the British presence in India became a matter for parliamentary debate. (56) The resulting Regulating Act of 1773 resolved that both the British government and the Company's Board of Directors would together appoint a governor-general, and a Council of Bengal, which had exclusive authority over all British territory in India. It was incumbent on this post to ensure that the Company's operations were to the benefit of Britain, and the Company‟s stakeholders. It was into this role that Warren Hastings stepped, keen to affirm his commitment to ending the abuses that had both drained the Company‟s profits, and ruined its public image. How he chose to legitimise this project involved Halhed and Wilkins, whose work was commissioned by Hastings.

The obscure and ad hoc productions of Holwell and Dow served in shaping contemporary attitudes towards Indian religion, in the eyes of Europe. As well as belonging to  Hastings‟s administrative project, the personal conjectures expressed within the work of Halhed and Wilkins were much more closely related to the ideas expressed in Holwell and Dow's work than has previously been recognised. As East India Company employees they placed their discussion directly in the context of the Enlightenment grappling with empire. Hence, they were grouped together, with extracts of their work appearing in an anthology introduced by P.J Marshall in The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (1970). (57)  Marshall, in his introduction, rightly pointed out that Holwell, Dow, Halhed and Wilkins were united in protecting colonialism. 

Hasting's misrule found him facing impeachment before the British Parliament. As Burke‟s assertion that the Company was "a State in disguise as a Merchant" suggested, it was not just Hastings but the Company itself that was under scrutiny at the time of his trial. The proceedings became a sensation and newspaper columns were crowded with transcripts of the various speeches, as well as with letters submitted by a scandalised public. (58) At the heart of the affair was the question of legitimacy. The gradual conquest of Bengal produced a set of circumstances beyond the Company's original capacity and remit. As the anonymous author of the pamphlet Reflections on the Present State of our Indian Affairs (1764) pointed out to the public: the East India Company had "been changed contrary to the intention of its institution". Rather than "living like merchants under the protection of the prince in whose dominions they resided" they had become "sovereigns of those very princes" to the extent that "they hold in more absolute vassalage, than ever did the monarch of France the meanest of his feudatories." (59) While for some, these conquests were a positive affirmation of Britain‟s global significance, (60)  for others it raised important moral and ethical questions about the role of the Company in India and the impact of its returning wealthy plunders on the political culture of Britain. (61)

Holwell and Dow both had a complex relationship with these developments, much of which was aired through the pages of various publications, reviews and replies. They were intimately involved in the political aspirations of the Company, but they were also its critics. In contrast, Halhed and Wilkins were Hastings‟s protégés. The production of their work on Indian religion was the defining condition of their involvement in the politics of the Company. 

Holwell's political involvement in the Company was particularly fraught. Despite his position as chief surgeon of the Company‟s hospital in Calcutta he actively sought an appointment in the administration of the Company, by persuading the Board of Directors that his plans for reform would raise funds. He was eventually appointed zamindar in 1752 (a revenue-collecting role that had existed in the company since 1698) and was placed twelfth in the Fort William council, with the stipulation that he rises no higher. Holwell duly raised revenues and the restriction on his promotion was removed. (62) Disaster would soon follow, however, when in June 1756 the Nawab Sirajud-Daulah, attacked Fort William. Senior officials abandoned the Fort, leaving Holwell in charge. What followed was to be the subject of Holwell's literary debut, A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and Others, who were suffocated in the BLACK-HOLE (1758). (63) This highly fraudulent narrative described the imprisonment and death of those who were taken captive once the Fort finally fell. The fake narrative helped make the Black Hole an important symbol of the barbarity of the Muslim Mughal regime against the British and remained so until it was finally eclipsed by the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny”. (64) 

After Clive recaptured Calcutta in January 1757, a small faction gathered around Holwell, which included the Chairman of the Company, and he was appointed to fourth place in the council and governor by fourfold rotation. (65) The election of directors in April 1758 meant that his supporters lost power and Holwell was reduced to ninth place in the council. When Clive resigned the governorship in January 1760 Holwell succeeded him for just six months, during which time he was involved in an intrigue that aimed to persuade the new and unpopular Nawab, Mir Jafar, to surrender power to his son-in-law, Mir Kasim, while retaining his title. The scheme was implemented by Holwell's successor, Henry Vansittart, in October 1760 with the result that Mir Jafar resigned completely and Mir Kasim became Nawab. (66) Many regarded Holwell's role in this coup to be financially motivated, to the extent that he felt it necessary to publish a defence of his conduct in India, titled An address to the proprietors of East India Stock. This was published alongside friends' letters and his account of the Black Hole, in a collection titled India Tracts (1764). (67) In fact, throughout the account of Black Hole, Holwell invoked the same principles of contemplation and detachment that he later praises in the Gentoo religion, as a superior moral status. (68)

Dow's career was in the Company's military, though he too had political ambitions. In 1766, at the rank of Captain, he participated in the officers' association to protest against Clive's measure to abolish the double field allowance. Probably as a consequence of his involvement in this affair, Dow found himself relieved of duty and back in Britain in 1768. In March 1772 the Directors, after cleaning the slates of many other officers involved in the officers' protest, decided to restore Dow to the rank he would have held in Bengal (Lieutenant-Colonel), had he never participated. In 1775 he was appointed Commissary-General, an administrative post taking care of the military stores of all the factories and stations of the Company's Bengal establishment. His subsequent ambitions for promotion were short-lived as his health deteriorated and on 31 July 1779, Dow died at Bhagalpur, aged forty-three. (69)

Dow's History of Hindostan was widely seen as a direct attack on Clive (70), especially when, in the third volume of 1772, it included the additional dissertation, An enquiry into the state of Bengal; With a Plan for restoring that Kingdom to its former Prosperity and Splendor. (71) Yet, the crime of the Company under Clive was not, according to Dow, to presume dominion, but rather to have pursued it in such a way that "in the space of six years, half the great cities of an opulent kingdom were rendered desolate". (72) Dow was an open advocate of the conquest of India, suggesting even that British control could be won "by right of arms" and by just "a handful of regular troops". (73) Dow was explicit in distancing himself from "some of [his] countrymen", claiming himself to be among those "roused into attention, with regard to a subject that concerns the welfare of the state" and therefore was addressing his suggestions for the restoration of Bengal to those who "shew an inclination to be informed, as well as a willingness to correct mistakes and redress grievances". (74) Part of the answer he supplied to these grievances was a policy of religious tolerance, which emulated the Golden Age of the Mughal government under Akbar, whom he described as an enlightened ruler owing to his dual system of laws for Muslim and Hindoo subjects. (75)

Unlike 'Holwell and Dow, whose works were composed at times when their position in the Company was out of favour, both Halhed's Code and Wilkins‟s Gěětă were products of the direct patronage of Hastings and were composed in support of his governorship. (76) This relationship with their patron was loyal and long-lasting. Wilkins left India and the Company directly because of the departure of Hastings, only returning in 1800 as a librarian, an office established for the care of its collection of manuscripts. (77) The relationship between the Company and the works produced by these writers cannot, therefore, be explained without exploring the role of Hastings as Governor-General and his self-consciously "orientalist" policies. (78)

The 1698 charter that was granted to the new East India Company contained a clause that the ministers of each garrison "were to learn the Portuguese and Hindoo languages, to enable them to instruct the Gentoos &c in the Christian religion". (79) Roughly a century later (1793) William Wilberforce attempted to introduce a "pious clause" into the Company's Charter, a measure that he regarded as essential to promoting "the Interests and Happiness of the Inhabitants of the British domains in India". (80) Despite this continuity of intention from one faction, more influential members of the Company pursued an opposite policy. For many, it was imperative that the Company should avoid both the trouble and the costs that Christianization would incur. Despite the 1698 Clause, the Court of Directors did not write despatches to India regarding the Christian terms of the charter until 1712. They had also successfully altered its wording to better suit their interests by replacing the demand that all Gentoos be instructed in Christianity with one that called for the instruction of only those Gentoos that were "servants or slaves of the Company's". (81) The Company also utilised its power to refuse licenses to reside in its territories to effectively disbar missionaries. (82) When the Company reached a position whereby it had effectively seized control of the region, these differences in approach required much more explicit justification.  

Wilberforce‟s presentation of the matter as a question of public "happiness" was not unique. (83) In this period the concept of public happiness became central to debates over who best represented the welfare of Britain's colonial subjects. (84) The 1781 Select Committee, set up to enquire into the affairs of the Company, included in its remit a consideration of "how the British Possessions in The East Indies may be held and governed with the greatest Security and Advantage to this Country, and by what Means the Happiness of the Native Inhabitants may best be promoted". (85)  Evangelicals like Wilberforce regarded the eternal happiness of the immortal soul as a priority over material happiness. For others, though, happiness meant leaving Indian institutions intact as far as possible. (86) Holwell represented an early formulation of this thinking. In the dedication to the second volume of his Interesting Historical Events, Holwell states his intention in writing about the customs of the Gentoos was to "rescue the originally untainted manners and religious worship of a very ancient people from gross misrepresentation." (87) That this misrepresentation resulted in practical miscarriages of justice is expressed later in the volume (1767), when Holwell describes the rescuing of women from the controversial practice of what he terms "voluntary sacrifice" (the self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands-Sati) as an "outrage" and recounts how the Gentoos considered it "an atrocious, and wicked violation of their sacred rights and privileges." (88) Roughly a decade later, Edmund Burke echoed a similar sentiment when he and William Jones drafted a bill which included the stipulation that the British Government ensure for the inhabitants of India, "enjoyment of all their ancient laws, usages, rights and privileges". (89)

Wikins' translation of Gita

The Company's military power was heavily dependent on sepoy troops for the majority of the eighteenth century. Fearing disaffection, a consideration that would foreshadow the events of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, administrators were not prepared to interfere with Indian religions. Hastings's predecessor, Lord Cornwallis, in a letter to the President of the Board of Control, stressed the need for good officers, "perfect" in the appropriate Indian language, who would give "a minute attention to the customs and religious prejudices of the sepoys", because "you need not be told how dangerous a disaffection in our native troops would be to our existence in this country". (90)

This approach was a moment in the Company‟s history, at the height of which was the "Orientalist" policies of Hastings. Hastings' administrative ideology was essentially underpinned by the French philosopher Montesquieu's legal geography, dictating that only where the demands of natural justice were at odds with custom should indigenous practice (including religious law) be overruled. (91) This principle was most clearly articulated in Clause XXIII of Hastings's new 1772 regulations, which stipulated that "the Laws of the Koran with respect to the Mahometans, and those of the Shaster with respect to the Gentoos shall be invariably adhered to". (92)

The Hindu-Muslim divide

The historical separation between the Islam of the Mughals and Hinduism of India's majority people was thus the central feature of a British administrative system which regarded all non-Muslims as Hindoo. (93) There were various unforeseen outcomes of this policy. It alienated and extracted Indian Christians from the system of native laws. There was criticism that subsuming all other religions under the non-Muslim category also made the "Gentoo" majority larger. (94) The most significant and intended impact of the Judicial Plan was to discontinue the official monopoly that Muslim law had in the civil courts. (95) The reason for eighteenth-century British sympathies aligning on the side of "Hindoos", as a category apart from Muslims, was in part political: the great villain in the Company‟s recent history was the Muslim ruler Siraj-udDaulah, who had attacked and captured Fort William. (96) Although there were alternative depictions of the Muslims in the Enlightenment, the Ottoman Turk often stood as the archetypical Mohammedan, and the Ottoman Empire was the seat of tyranny and barbarism. (97)

The anti-muslim sentiment was based on a certain set of assumptions about Islam that pervaded the intellectual and political culture of the period. On the one hand were critiques of the religion itself: both its doctrines and its historical manifestations. (98) On the other, was the theoretical alignment of Islamic polities with the concept of Asian despotism. (99) Though none of the four writers discusses this sentiment overtly, Dow elaborated his view of Islam more, when in his 1772 Dissertation Considering the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan, he considers those elements of the Quran that encouraged "voluptuousness". (100) This was more a consideration of the Quran as a legal document, the assumptions behind which formed the basis of the theory that Muslim polities are necessarily despotic. In the first direct translation of the Quran into English (1734), the description that its translator, George Sale, attributes to Muhammad most frequently is that of "legislator". (101) Dow similarly refers to Muhammad as "the legislator". (102)

Both Holwell and Dow question this relationship between Islam and despotism in relation to the Mughal empire, both emphasising the degree to which Gentoo laws were left intact under their government. (103) Halhed and Wilkins enlist these tropes of Asian despotism in support of Hastings, so as to make a claim for the comparative enlightened quality of the British government in the region. A striking example of this appears in Halhed's 1773 poem, The Bramin and the Ganges, in which the river goddess urges a melancholy Brahmin, suffering under Muslim tyranny, to embrace the enlightened rule of the British. (104) Halhead, who had learnt Persian at Oxford had even sought the help of a Muslim to translate Manusmriti, from Persian.

Accurate information about Islam had percolated into Europe via translations of the Quran into European languages. After Latin, the first translation was into French in 1647, which was then translated into English in 1649. The Quran was then directly translated into English from Arabic, by George Sale, in 1734. (105) 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most common approaches to Islam revolved around the idea that the prophet Mohammed was an imposter. (106) This is most clearly expressed in Voltaire's play, Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète (1742), which was later translated into English as Mahomet, The Imposter (1744). In it, Voltaire cast the religious leader as a charlatan, who incited his town into revolt and subjugated it by the sword, on a ruthless quest for dominion. (107) Voltaire's engagement with Islam was in unison with his criticism of religious dogmatism and intolerance. In a dedicatory letter to Frederick the Great, Voltaire acknowledged that the play Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète was not an accurate historical representation of the prophet's life, but an artistic invention which allowed him to represent the most awful actions of fanaticism on the stage. (108)

This equation of Islam with religious fanaticism served to support the idea that Islam was a historical mechanism by which despotism came to be the dominant political model in the Middle East. Though it has much older roots, (109) in the eighteenth century, Montesquieu's thesis, that despotism was the essential characteristic of all Asian governments, had set the paradigm for the debate, which both Hegel and Marx reflected in their essays. (110)  In Britain, Gibbon painted a portrait of Islam that was intolerant and conducive to despotism. He emphasised the perceived luxury and sensuality of its Eastern kingdoms. (111)

These foundations would form the starting points for the discussions advanced by Holwell, Dow, Halhed and Wilkins. The principle of enlightened toleration was the basic assumption that underlined their approach to "the religion of the Gentoos". Similarly, the conceptual separation between the native "Hindoos" and their Muslim rulers in terms of religion would provide the framework for their understanding of ancient versus contemporary "Hinduism‟. Dow greatly admired the Mughal government and saw within it a blueprint for enlightened treatment of the "Hindoo religion", which in fact was a platitude. In contrast, Halhed depicted a true narrative of it in which the morally virtuous "Gentoos" had suffered under their Mohammedan oppressors.

___________________________________

1. Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History, (Longman Publishing, 1993), pp.86-87

2. Bruce Lenman & Philip Lawson, “Robert Clive, the Black Jagir‟ and British Politics”, in The Historical Journal, Volume 26, Issue 04 (December 1983), pp. 801-829.

3. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, C.1750-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.247

4. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of British Constitution, Princeton University Press, p.86.

5. Joseph Price, The saddle put on the right horse; or, An enquiry into the reason why certain persons have been denominated nabobs; With an arrangement of those gentlemen into their proper classes, of real, spurious, reputed, or mushroom, nabob (London, 1783), p.1.

6. ibid, pp.21-22

7. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire; India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p.15

8. Jack. P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Enlightenment Britain, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.128-129.
9. Jessica Patterson, Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India ‘Company Men’, 1760-1790, University of Manchester (2017) p 36

10. Edmund Burke, Trial of Warren Hastings Esq: Third Day, 15th February 1788, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol.13, (London: F.C & J. Rivington, 1822), pp.1-87.

11. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), p.20-22.

12. Dow, “Plan for Restoring Bengal” in The History of Hindostan, (London, 1779), p.cxxviii.

13. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, p.4, p.15.

14. Bayon, H. P. (November 1944). "John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798) and the Black Hole of Calcutta". Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 38 (1): 15–18. Adamson, Kohleun (2005).  Replacing Emotional Biases: A Critical Look at the Accounts of John Zephaniah Holwell. Dalley, Jan (2006), The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire. London: Penguin Books

15.Trautmann, Thomas R. (1997). Aryans and British India. University of California Press. pp. 68–72. All subsequent quotes on his views of Hinduism are from this book

16. "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004.

17. Jessica Patterson, Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India ‘Company Men’, 1760-1790, University of Manchester (2017)

18. P.J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p.2

19. John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting Historical Event Relative to the Province of Bengal, vol. ii (London,1767), p.1, p.111

20. Alexander Dow, “A Dissertation Concerning the Customs, Manners, Language, Religion and Philosophy of the Hindoos”, in The History of Hindostan, vol.1, (London, 1768), pp. xxi-lxix, p.lv

21. N.B. Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits: from a Persian Translation, (London, 1776), pxliv; Charles Wilkins, The Bhăgvăt-Gēētā, or Dialogues of Krĕĕshnă and Ărjŏŏn, (London, 1785), p.24.

22. John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East-Indies, with Observations on Various Parts there (London, 1757), p.291.

23. ibid, Grose, pp.291, 293, 309.

24. ibid, p.327

25. Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods”, William and Mary Quarterly, vol.54, no.1, (January 1997), pp.103-142, pp.106-108.

26. Grose, A Voyage, p.328.

27. William Julius Mickle, The Lusiad: or Discovery of India, An epic poem. Translated from the original Portuguese of Luis de Camoëns. 3rd ed., vol.2 of 2, (London 1798), p.179.

28.  Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250-1650, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that changed Europe: Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)

29.  Jessica Patterson, Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India ‘Company Men’, 1760-1790, University of Manchester (2017), p 11

30. M.J Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sire William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

31. Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 2003, [1978]), p.78

32. M.J Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sire William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). p 19

33. Mendelssohn, quoted in M.J. Franklin, Representing India: India Culture and Imperial control, vol.1 of 9, (Abingdon: Routledge 2000), p.xii

34. Kate Marsh, India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754-1815 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), p.69-74.

35. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its forms of Knowledge, The British in India, (Princeton University Press, 1996), p.21.

36. John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, vol. I, (London, 1764), vol. ii, (London 1766/1767), vol. iii, (London, 1771)

37. Alexander Dow, A History of Hindostan, translated from the Persian, vol. I, (London, 1768), vol. ii, (London, 1772).

38. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws; or Ordinations of the Pundits, (London, 1776)

39. Charles Wilkins, The Bhăgvăt-Gēētā, or Dialogues of Krĕĕshnă and Ărjŏŏn, (London, 1785).

40. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, (London, 1792), p.139.

41. Joseph White, The Duty of attempting the Propagation of the Gospel among our Mahometan and Gentoo Subjects, (London, 1785)

42. Grant, Observations, p.123

43. Penelope Carson, ''Grant, Charles (1746–1823)'', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11248, accessed 26 Jan 2017]. Grant, Observations, p.140.

44. Grant, Observations,p.139

45. In 1788 Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, republished some of Jones's work on Hinduism, adding a note that Jones had proven (contra Halhed) that Hindu traditions confirmed the Biblical Flood: Sermons on Public Occasions, and Tracts on Religious Subjects, (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon Printer to the University, 1788), p.221.

46. John Robertson, The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680Ŕ1760, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.15.

47. Peter Jimack, “Diderot and India”, in The Enterprise of Enlightenment: A Tribute to David Williams from His Friends, eds., David MacCallum & Terry Pratt, (Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004), pp.141-158, p.153.

48. Halhed's response to Charles Wilkins's translation of the Bhagavadgita, see Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry and the Millennium, p.124.

49. Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the study of Indian religions 1600-1776, (Halle: Franckesche Stifungen zu Halle, 2003).

50. Catherine A. Robinson, Interpretations of the Bhagavad-Gītā and Images of the Hindu Tradition: The Song of the Lord, (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p.5.

51. Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism, p.56-57

52. David N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, No.4, (Oct 1999), pp.630-659.

53. Jessica Patterson, Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India ‘Company Men’, 1760-1790, University of Manchester (2017)

54. Abbas Hoveyda, Ranjay Kumar, Mohammed Aftab Alam, Indian Government and Politics, (Pearson, 2011), p.50.

55. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, C.1750-1783, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.247.

56. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp.84-85

57. P.J Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

58. Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp.84-85.

59. “A Gentleman Long Resident in India”, Reflections on the Present State of our East India Affairs, (London, 1764).

60. Adam Anderson, An historical and chronological deduction of the origin of commerce, from the earliest accounts to the present time. Containing a history of the great commercial interests of the British Empire, (London, 1764).

61. Jennifer M. Welsh, “Edmund Burke and intervention: empire and neighbourhood”, in Stefano Recchia, & Jennifer M. Welsh (eds.), Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.219-236.

62. D. L. Prior, Holwell, John Zephaniah (1711–1798)‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13622, accessed 25 July 2016]

63. A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and Others, who were suffocated in the BLACK-HOLE in FORT-WILLIAM, at CALCUTTA in the Kingdom of BENGAL; on the Night succeeding the 20th Day of June 1756 (1758)

64. Nicholas B Dirks, The Scandal of Empire (2008), p.1, Harvard University Press, Belknap

65. D. L. Prior, Holwell, John Zephaniah (1711–1798), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

66. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, pp.49-50

67. John Zephaniah Holwell, Esq. F.R.S. and friends, India Tracts, (London, 1764).

68. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, (Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press,, 2012), p.25

69. Willem G. J. Kuiters, "Dow, Alexander (1735/6–1779)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7957, accessed 25 July 2016].

70. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, p.54.

71. Alexander Dow, “An enquiry into the state of Bengal; With a Plan for restoring that Kingdom to its former Prosperity and Splendor”, in The History of Hindostan, (London: printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt in the Strand, 1772), pp. xxxix–cliv.

72. Dow, The History of Hindostan, (1772), p.lxx

73. ibid,  p.94

74. ibid, p.xl

75. ibid, p. cxxix

76. P.J. Marshall, “Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron”, in Anne Whiteman, J.S. Bromley & P.G.M. Dickson, (eds,), Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp.246-8

77. Thomas R. Trautmann, "Wilkins, Sir Charles (bap. 1749, d. 1836)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29416, accessed 7 April 2016].

78. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1969), p.22

79. Document 30, in P. J. Marshall. ed., Problems of Empire: Britain and India 1757 -1813 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), pp. 194–6

80. Journals of the House of Commons 48, (14 May 1793), p.778

81. Extract of General letter to Bengal, 1712/13, para. 195, BL, IOR, H. Misc. 59, pp.195–7

82. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, p.23

83. Part V, The Promotion of Public Happiness”, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, eds. Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.497-600

84. John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774-1839, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp.123-127

85. Journals of the House of Commons, 38 (31 October 1780–10 October 1782), 600

86. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, p.126 

87. Holwell, “Dedication”, Interesting Historical Events, vol. ii (1767)

88. Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, vol. ii, (1767), p.100

89. 21 Geo.III, c.70 sec. 1, as quoted in, P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, (eds), The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment, (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1982), p. 161

90. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, p.23.

91. Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.105

92. "Plan for the Administration of Justice‟, RCHC, 4, p.350

93. Rosane Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialects of Knowledge and Government” in Carol. A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, ed., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp.215-249, p.215, p.222

94. Duncan M Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India, (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p.542-545

95. Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century”, p.222

96. Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.29-30

97. Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment: 1670-1840, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp.2-3

98. David A. Palin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp.81-104

99. Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, Cambridge University Press (2012) pp.35-36 

100. Dow, The History of Hindostan, (1772), pp.xv-xvi

101. ibid, p.xiii

102. ibid, p.xiii

103. Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, vol.ii, (1767), p.100; Dow, The History of Hindostan, (1772), p.xxii

104. Rosane Rocher, Alien and Empathetic: The Indian Poems of N.B, Halhed in B.B Kling and M.N. Pearson (Eds.), The Age of Partnership (Honolulu, 1979), pp.215-35

105. Olive Classe, ed., Encyclopaedia of Literary Translation Into English: A-L, (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), p.63

106. Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others, pp.18-19

107. Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam, p.35

108. Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others, p.72

109. Aristotle discussed despotic kingships as particularly prominent in Asia: The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Peter L. Phillips Simpson, (USA: University of California Press, 1997), 128a16, p.106

110. Sharon Krause, "Despotism in the Spirit of the Laws”, in Montesquieu's Science of Politics: essays on the Spirit of the Laws, eds. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher & Paul Rahe, (Maryland, U.S: Rowmman & Littlefield publishers Inc, 2001), pp.231-272

111.  J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Barbarian, Savages and Empires, vol.4., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.24-26

© Ramachandran