To historians familiar with the “new imperial history” or South-Asian studies, the answer to the question posed in the title of Brian K. Pennington's book may seem obvious: of course it was. From the appearance of Ronald Inden's Imagining India (Oxford, 1990) and reinforced by a number of studies that appeared in the following decade—including perhaps the most widely read contribution, Bernard Cohn's Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ, 1996)—the processes by which British colonial authorities and scholars (often one and the same) defined Indian communities from the late eighteenth century onward, with the end result of improved bureaucratic means of rule, have become increasingly clear. More than simply extending this scholarship, however, Pennington's book has a more important agenda: bringing both the Christian missionaries who were essential to forming British opinion and the Hindu traditionalists who shaped Indian identity, nationalist and otherwise, into critical focus not as mere ciphers in a larger story of hardening colonial hegemony but as complex agents with independent, autonomous agendas. Thus a more apt, though certainly less catchy, title for Pennington's book might be “Who Else Constructed Hinduism, and Why?” In emphasizing the “who else” and, more important, the often conflicting “whys,” Pennington has written an important book that redirects attention to historical agents that mainstream postcolonial scholarship has largely either oversimplified or passed over.
The theoretical formulation that equates colonialism with a simple unitary process of oppression of the colonized, Pennington demonstrates, misses much that untidily resists fitting into such a simple box. He does this by examining periodical and other print sources produced in the critical period between 1790 and 1840 by evangelicals, Orientalists, and Hindu traditionalists on the nature of that complex, astonishingly diverse, overlapping local set of practices that subsequently came to be called “Hinduism.” His primary sources are limited but put to good use: a range of missionary literature particularly focusing on the Missionary Papers, published by the Anglican Church Missionary Society; the Orientalist journal Asiatick Researches; and one of the earliest of the vernacular Indian newspapers, the Bengali biweekly Samācār Candrikā (Moonlight of the news), published from 1822 through the 1840s in Calcutta, of which only fragments, but also an unbroken run from April 1830 to April 1831, survive.
This book demonstrates that when fully contextualized, influential print sources provide insight into the interwoven religious debates that dynamically shaped and constructed religion in the colonial context. In Britain, rapidly changing Protestant theology and a rapidly changing, revolutionary European world both reinforced the sudden growth of foreign missions as evangelicals (particularly those in the church of England in this case) responded in a variety of ways to both the growing class of industrial poor at home and growing awareness of “pagan” colonial subjects abroad. Attempting to understand religious belief on its own terms leads Pennington to explore denominational diversity within the emerging evangelical culture, domestic strategies to enliven home churches with competitive foreign projects, and the simple power of belief in the transforming power of rational individual response to the gospel message. Rather than a hypocritical religious movement cynically twisting stories to wring pence from the poor and pounds from their betters, Pennington demonstrates that the missionary obsession with what was constructed as Hindu idolatry, priest craft, and immoral materialism operated directly within preexisting anti-Catholic tropes of popular Protestantism. Seeing Protestant missions as more than mere reflections of empire leads to more nuanced understandings of missionaries, for example, in Pennington's analysis of the Baptist missionary William Ward's early writings on Hinduism as both sympathetic protoethnology and bigoted, essentializing commentary on Indian religion that served the missionary cause in England. For those who saw the world primarily in religious categories, religious transformation provided a simple prescription for social improvement, but, as Pennington shows, evangelicalism itself was far from monolithic.
Pennington pays attention to shifting Orientalist attitudes in a separate chapter, arguing that previous readings have underestimated the defining power of an early whimsical romantic wonder at what was seen as organically interlinked “polymorphic nature” and “polytheistic culture” (101) in India. Only later, by the 1820s, was there a clear shift to a hard-edged emphasis on statistics as a means to master Indian knowledge. But he quickly moves on from this subject to the central project in the book.
From analysis of the pages of the Samācār Candrikā, the biweekly religious newspaper edited by Bhabanicaran Bandyopadhyaya (the influential associate-turned-antagonist of Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy), Pennington argues for creative Indian agency in the formation of “Hinduism,” making it part of a larger encounter, rather than a simple colonial imposition. The emerging colonial system of print technology empowered traditionalist Hindus (as well as Britons and reforming Hindus) who sought to define a more homogeneous Hinduism able to respond to the manifold demands of modernity, including not only (or primarily) degrading challenges from western critics but more important the transformations of Indian society under colonialism. Traditionalist societies such as the Dharma Sabhā (Society for religion), for which the Samācār Candrikā was a mouthpiece, were far more widely influential than those of reforming Hindus, and their legacy was the creation of a Hindu protonationalism operating in the messy crossing of influences the colonial setting created. When the colonial state interfered in 1829 in Indian religious practice, abolishing satī (the ritual self-immolation of virtuous wives), Samācār Candrikā responded by engaging with western critics of Indian religion, defending but also redefining and standardizing Hindu ritual practice, caste definitions, and the unique authority of Hindu practitioners to define Indian religious practice.
Was Hinduism Invented? provides an important argument but also could have been strengthened in some significant ways. The first few chapters rest on a relatively narrow body of historical scholarship on British religion and missions. Integrating the work of scholars like Boyd Hilton, Elizabeth Elbourne, Brian Stanley, or Jeffrey Cox, for example, would have produced a richer understanding of the relationship of evangelical theology to social thought, of Anglican to dissenting evangelical missions, of Enlightenment ideology to missionary theology, and of missionary theory to practice. Like others, Pennington perhaps too easily associates the programs of diverse evangelical groups to a generic nationalism or imperialism. Nevertheless, in taking seriously the dynamics of religion to independently motivate change in metropole and colony he helps to advance a new wave of scholarship that rejects the essentialism of stereotypical, unitary visions not only of “the East” but also of “the West.”
