Bob van der Linden's Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab offers a historical study of three of the most important socioreligious reform movements of colonial Punjab: the Muslim Ahmadiyahs, the Hindu Arya Samaj, and the Sikh Singh Sabha. While each movement has been the subject of major studies, this is the first work to treat all three comparatively and to address larger questions of modernity and world history.
Van der Linden rejects descriptions of these movements and of modern India as dominated by “religion,” instead adopting the term “moral languages” to indicate “traditions embedded in the flux and continuity of history” (p. 231). In his view, this turn to the moral can help distinguish the Indian context from “the secular-religious binary opposition” (p. 10) of the post-Enlightenment West. Thus, the values of rationality, scientific authority, the liberal public sphere, and nationalism are presented as central to the processes by which “Indian elites secularized their traditions” (p. 10), sacred texts, and symbols.
Perhaps surprisingly, then, Van der Linden emphasizes the neglected but central role played by Christian missionaries. Missionary institutions, especially schools, and the Protestant morality of missionaries and colonial administrators helped the British penetrate to the “roots of rural society” (p. 41), creating the new liberal public sphere in which Indian movements flourished. Together with Christian missions and the “Anglo-Indian colonial state” (p. 19), reformist movements shared “one and the same” culture in which Indian elites “to a great extent shared the terminology of the civilizing mission” (p. 29).
Chapters 1 and 2 describe the region's “social process” (p. 37) in terms of the operations of the colonial state, Punjabi popular traditions, and the emergence of a new class of urban “public men.” Van der Linden describes the ironies of a conservative, evangelical, and increasingly racist state (pp. 21–22) dedicated to a liberal, tolerant, and progressive “civilizing mission” that ultimately created a class of “traditional” authorities such as landowners, agricultural castes, and Sufi pirs (pp. 42, 45–46). At the same time, many colonizers, especially missionaries, unleashed the technologies crucial to the radical subculture of urban elites who shaped the liberal public sphere according to “assumptions in favor of improvement, education, law and individual rational beings leading a self-conscious life” (p. 21). Modern institutions such as voluntary associations and Anglo-vernacular education offered sites in which printing presses, debate, and the “rational” questioning of traditions could be deployed by new leaders (pp. 91–93).
While giving due attention to the conflict that marked these movements, chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on the “vested ideas” (p. 28) that tied all three together (p. 101). Each group sharply critiqued their existing Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh traditions, insisted on the right of the individual to approach sacred texts independent of priestly hierarchies, and drew on scientific authority. The new lay elite appealed to their reconfigured “scriptures” and founded movements that stressed individual moral will, progressive education, and conformity to clearly delineated beliefs and identities. Comparisons with the Reformation and historical claims about the impact of Protestant ideas, missionaries, and Orientalist scholarship appear throughout this discussion.
In chapter 4, Van der Linden examines the transformation of Indian vernaculars into the central “moral” language of colonial culture and symbols of new religious identities. The stories written in these languages and scripts inscribed those present identities back into the past—that is, Punjabis “started to historicize their traditions” in reaction to British historiography (p. 151). A historiography of an intensely personal, biographical nature (p. 153) resulted in which Christian and popular Punjabi models of martyrdom supplied the “moral inspiration” for public activism (p. 157) and informed the masculinist ethos of male reformers' respectability (izzat) (pp. 165–70). The final chapter in this section describes how moral languages, distinct identities, and martyr mentalities could be deployed and propagated to the public. While building on previous scholarship on colonial Punjabi polemics, Van der Linden's approach is distinguished by its focus on the “social consciousness through which debates became increasingly rational, comparative and competitive” (p. 189).
Overall, this study offers a compelling comparative analysis of three Punjabi movements and the modernizing culture they shared with the British. Its major achievement is to challenge recent scholarship's emphasis on “communal” conflict and religious difference in colonial Punjab by focusing on equally important unities. However, Van der Linden's concluding claims—that Reformation parallels illumine “only in contrast” (p. 215) and that nineteenth-century Punjabi reformers were not significantly affected by Orientalist and missionary Protestant historiography (pp. 226–28)—seem strange reversals of the narrative thrust of the study. While apparently motivated by the author's arguments that the colonial encounter was a “polyphonic intellectual dialogue” (p. 171) and that modernization is a “more or less universal processes” (p. 21), this shift remains unconvincing. More attention to precolonial Punjabi religious traditions, akin to the interesting treatment of martyr traditions, or to specific forms of precolonial rationality or dissent would help unify the overall project.
It also remains unclear whether turning away from “religion” as a category actually undermines the religion-secular binary or, rather, suggests that the modern Indian world is modern insofar as it is post-traditional, even post-transcendent (p. 215). If this world remains religious, then it seems so in an instrumentalist sense, through which elites “stir the public mind” (p. 231). In leading us to ask such questions, however, this study certainly “open[s] up [the] debate” (p. 11) that Van der Linden aims to provoke.
