THE SECULARIST CRITIQUE OF PROSELYTIZING

Antipathy toward proselytizing in India has given rise to legislation in several Indian states that severely restricts religious conversion. The so-called Freedom of Religion Acts are ostensibly designed to prevent conversion by force, fraud, or inducement.Footnote ⁴ But as many have remarked, the Acts are effectively if not openly discriminatory, imposing disproportionate hardships on non-Hindus and low castes.Footnote ⁵ Although proponents argue that the Acts safeguard religious freedom by prohibiting coercive means of proselytizing, the legislation's vague definitions of force and fraud make it impossible to ascertain when conversion will be legitimate in the eyes of the state.Footnote ⁶ In short, this anti-conversion legislation has clear majoritarian tendencies that render its claims to protect religious diversity deeply contestable. Its loudest supporters have been Hindu Nationalists, whose organized violence has increasingly threatened Muslim and Christian minorities in India since the 1990s.Footnote ⁷ Inasmuch as the Acts appear to sanction rumors that religious minorities use violent or coercive methods in their pursuit of converts, there is good reason to fear that the legislation might justify retributive violence by Hindu Nationalists.Footnote ⁸

Yet it is not only Hindu Nationalists who look upon proselytizing as socially disruptive. Many Indians consider proselytizing to conflict with secularist objectives in India.Footnote ⁹ In 1971, one former Chief Justice suggested that “deliberate attempts at conversion are inappropriate in a truly secular society.”Footnote ¹⁰ And in 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the Indian Constitution's guarantee of “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion” does not extend to proselytizing. Claiming that “to insist on the right to convert is to impinge on the freedom of conscience . . . guaranteed by the Constitution,” the ruling dispensed with any appeal to conventional understandings of religious freedom.Footnote ¹¹ Whether or not they interpret the Indian Constitution faithfully, such arguments derive from a long tradition of Indian secularist thought. Since the early twentieth century, the Gandhian political ideal known as Tolerance has defined Indian secularism by contrast with proselytizing religiosity, which it has portrayed as both intolerant and politically destabilizing. If today Hindu Nationalists twist these secularist arguments to serve clearly majoritarian ends, it might still be argued that the Tolerance critique of proselytizing in unadulterated form—or in the right hands—preserves and protects religious diversity and interreligious harmony in India. Mahatma Gandhi's first deployment of the Tolerance ideal during the 1920s would seem to provide historical confirmation of this view. Historical accounts often portray Gandhi's condemnation of proselytizing in this decade as a clear victory for Indian secularism over both sectarian violence and majoritarian intolerance toward religious minorities.Footnote ¹²

Gandhi advanced the Tolerance ideal at a time of escalating Hindu-Muslim conflict amidst active competition for converts pursued in the name of religious freedom. Unlike today's Freedom of Religion Acts, which target minorities, Gandhi aimed his critique of religious proselytizing at Hindus: specifically Hindus of the reform organization, the Arya Samaj, and the Shuddhi Movement they initiated in 1923. Shuddhi, literally “purification,” was a rite used to admit people to Vedic ceremonial and to intercourse with their Hindu caste fellows after perceived breaches of social or ritual etiquette. The Shuddhi Movement of the 1920s is infamous for targeting the Muslim Malkanas, and shuddhi is generally described as a rite of conversion. In conventional understanding, by condemning shuddhi together with all religious proselytizing the secularist ideal of Tolerance answered the two needs of the hour: to subdue interreligious violence and to reaffirm the inclusive nature of nationalist politics.Footnote ¹³ It lay the foundation for a secularism that would be truly suited to Indian society.

Gandhi's critique of proselytizing has been extolled for rising above and providing a resolution of the 1920s' combative appeals to religious rights.Footnote ¹⁴ I will show that to the contrary, the Tolerance ideal reasserted the politics of religious freedom. The making of a Hindu majority in India depended on the successful incorporation of Untouchables.Footnote ¹⁵ The Tolerance critique turned a spotlight on religion and suppressed the problem of caste. In so doing, it deflected attention from Untouchables' uncertain religious identity, anticipating the Pune Pact of 1932 that settled Untouchables' status as Hindu. Although it appeared to defend the religious rights of Muslims from Hindu aggression, the Tolerance critique of religious proselytizing in the Shuddhi Movement helped establish a Hindu constitutional majority, ensuring that Muslims would be a political minority.

During the 1920s debates over religious freedom, Tolerance cast shuddhi unequivocally as a practice of conversion. Scholars have generally followed suit, treating shuddhi as a self-evidently religious practice. Only by attending to what the framing perspective of religious freedom discourse excludes can we understand its political repercussions.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DEBATES OF THE 1920S

When Arya Samajists launched the Shuddhi Movement in 1923, the nationalist unity of the preceding years was giving way to political infighting, bitterness, and a rapid escalation in Hindu-Muslim violence.Footnote ¹⁶ Anti-Muslim rhetoric was on the rise, and Hindu Nationalist politics was taking definite shape both ideologically and institutionally.Footnote ¹⁷ Against this background, the Arya Samaj announcement of a shuddhi initiative among the Malkana Rajputs of Punjab and U.P.Footnote ¹⁸ raised considerable alarm, for it suggested an organized campaign to convert Indian Muslims into Hindus. Muslim leaders condemned the initiative as a campaign for apostasy and launched their own campaigns of tabligh (“propagation”).Footnote ¹⁹ Muslim counteraction helped to funnel orthodox Hindu support for shuddhi activities that had hitherto been largely confined to the reformist Hindus of the Arya Samaj, resulting in an expanded Shuddhi Movement and reinforcing the impression of a united Hindu attack on Muslim religious loyalties. Both at the time and since, Arya Samaj shuddhi was among the major contributing causes cited for deteriorating Hindu-Muslim relations during the 1920s.Footnote ²⁰

Mahatma Gandhi advanced his critique of shuddhi while reflecting on “Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Cause and Cure” in the pages of Young India on May 29, 1924. In so doing, he articulated the secularist ideal of Tolerance through a contrast with proselytizing religion: “In my opinion there is no such thing as proselytism in Hinduism as it is understood in Christianity or to a lesser extent in Islam. The Arya Samaj has I think copied the Christians in planning its propaganda. . . . The real Shuddhi movement should consist in each one trying to arrive at perfection in his or her own faith.”Footnote ²¹ Gandhi identified shuddhi as religious proselytizing, a movement to convert Muslims to Hinduism. He addressed the damage shuddhi caused to interreligious relations. And he described shuddhi as a problem with specifically religious origins, derived from false understandings of Hindu religious teachings. Gandhi's critique framed shuddhi decisively as a religious problem.

The Tolerance critique of shuddhi was an intervention into debates over religious freedom. When the effects of the Shuddhi Movement on Hindu-Muslim unity became the focus of nationalist censure in the press, Arya Samaj papers defended shuddhi as a religious right. Arya papers insisted that “right thinking people among Muslims” recognized that “[l]iberty to reclaim and even to proselytize is the golden right of every religious [sic]. This is the main part of religious liberty which the movement for Swarajya [Self-Rule] to be real should safeguard.”Footnote ²² Rejecting the criticisms of concerned nationalists, Arya Samajists protested that it was unfair to urge that the movement be stopped in the interest of Hindu-Muslim unity.Footnote ²³ Arya Samajists either defended shuddhi as a religious pursuit that was irrelevant to nationalist politics or made the stronger argument that shuddhi was precisely the kind of religious right that nationalists ought to defend. While Arya Samajists appealed to religious freedom, critics labored to show that shuddhi could not legitimately be claimed as a religious right. Gandhi's critique denied legitimacy to the entire approach to religiosity—proselytizing religiosity—that Arya Samajists sought to defend.

It is true that in these debates Arya Samajists themselves described shuddhi as a religious practice of proselytizing and invoked religious freedom in its defense. Yet the possibility of an alternative representation of shuddhi hints at the complexity of the practice and suggests that the translation of shuddhi into the language of religion was far from inevitable. At the same time that Arya Samajists invoked their right to proselytize, they also made a contradictory claim: that shuddhi was not a form of proselytizing.Footnote ²⁴ “What some of our Muslim brothers are pleased to call re-conversion is nothing more than the removal of untouchability in a particular form.”Footnote ²⁵ With such statements, Arya Samaj elites portrayed the aim of shuddhi to be the eradication from Hindu society of the exclusive practices of caste. Arya Samajists' suggestions that the aim of shuddhi was to eliminate forms of untouchability are not easily dismissed as disingenuous. For although scholars' analyses of the Shuddhi Movement have foregrounded the Hindu campaign for shuddhi among the Muslim Malkanas, the 1920s also saw an aggressive pursuit of shuddhi by Untouchable castes.

THE CASTE POLITICS OF SHUDDHI

Reports by the Criminal Intelligence Department in U.P. indicate that Arya Samaj shuddhi initiatives were very active among Untouchables, particularly among the castes designated “Chamar,” from the very start of the Shuddhi Movement in 1923.Footnote ²⁶ Chamars of Punjab and U.P. had been connected with the Arya Samaj for some time; the 1921 Census for U.P. reported a significant increase in Chamar members of the Samaj since 1911—from 1,500 to 6,000—and this was supposed to be a low estimate.Footnote ²⁷ A substantial leap in Arya Samaj numbers in Punjab at the same time was attributed to shuddhi work among Chamars.Footnote ²⁸ Although scholars have emphasized the role of upper-caste Hindu “proselytizers,” Chamars and other Untouchables often pursued shuddhi actively.

Scholars have treated shuddhi as religious conversion. But what did it mean for a person deemed “untouchable” to undergo the shuddhi rite? Certainly one effect was to admit such persons to membership in the Arya Samaj. But is shuddhi best understood, regardless of historical circumstances, as a technique for making people Hindu? Attention to how Untouchables and other non-elites used shuddhi in the decades before 1930 indicates the analytical limitations of efforts to describe this Arya Samaj practice as religious proselytizing or conversion. And once the characterization of shuddhi as proselytizing is no longer regarded as self-evident, it is possible to examine the political consequences that followed when the Tolerance critique framed shuddhi in exclusively religious terms.

In Arya Samaj usage, shuddhi referred to a reformed variation on the orthodox Hindu ritual of prāyashcit, which was a form of purification or expiation for deviations from prescribed practice. In Dharmashastra literature, shuddhi was defined as “the state of being fit or capable of performing the rites that are understood from the Veda,”Footnote ²⁹ Literally, shuddhi referred both to a state of purification associated with the individual who was free from error because observing dharma and to the pure state that was required for performing dharma. But because the Vedas were restricted to upper-caste Hindus, in the Shastras, shuddhi was a “state of purity” that only the upper castes could achieve. The Shastras prescribed prāyashcit rituals for individuals who deviated from correct practice: for example, for the student of the Vedas who broke his vows or otherwise failed to perform his daily duties and obligations (to perform the Vedic sandhyā prayer daily, to wear the yajñopavīt or sacred thread of the Vedic initiate) or who indulged in things forbidden to him (gambling, sexual intercourse).Footnote ³⁰ In a major departure from the interpretation of the Shastras then predominant, after 1900 many Arya SamajistsFootnote ³¹ began to use shuddhi to prepare those who were not upper caste Hindus—including Muslims, Christians, and Untouchables—for Vedic practice.

The Arya Samaj was one of the most influential reformist Hindu organizations of north India, established in the provinces of Punjab and U.P. in 1877 and 1878. The organization's first objective was to reinstate the knowledge and practice of the Vedas. Arya Samajists held that all humanity had once been united in Vedic practice; if Hindus alone still revered the Vedas, in the Arya Samaj understanding they no longer understood or followed them correctly. The Arya Samaj's second objective was caste reform: the Arya Samaj rejected the teaching that the Vedas should be restricted to the Hindu upper castes. Whereas orthodox teachings enjoined that any Untouchable who heard the sound of the Vedas should be punished, Arya Samajists enjoined Vedic observance upon everyone, including Untouchables and other non-Hindus. At first, adherents of the Arya Samaj derived almost exclusively from the Hindu upper castes, who would continue to comprise the leadership of the organization. But owing in part to the universalist message of the Arya Samaj and in part to the Arya Samaj use of shuddhi, membership expanded after 1900 as non-elites began to appropriate the reformed practice of the Arya Samaj into their own campaigns against the discriminations of caste.

Because social hierarchy in colonial India was structured in part by forms of Vedic performance, many of the practices that scholars are accustomed to treating as religious signified within a politics of caste.Footnote ³² The reformed Vedic practice promulgated by Arya Samajists worked to challenge or resignify the everyday practices that constituted relations of power and subordination between castes in north India. Boundaries between low and high were marked not only by distinctions in ceremonial, but also by the practices of social discrimination known as chūt or untouchability.Footnote ³³Chūt included restrictions on commensality, marriage, and social proximity, and it organized everyday displays of superiority and deference. Lowly groups were prevented from adopting the sartorial style or ceremonial of locally superior castes, were required to show prescribed forms of deference in their posture and forms of greeting, and were often excluded from equal access to common spaces. Both Hindu and Muslim elites marked their distinction by discriminating against the “laboring classes,” as well as against groups they judged to be “low,” “common,” or “Untouchable,” whatever their religious affiliation was understood to be.

In low castes' protest movements, distinctions in the performance of rite and ceremony and the everyday practices of chūt “untouchability” were loci of resistance. Other sites of resistance included restriction from use of common wells and vessels; exclusion from common schools or access to education; debarment from owning land; forced obligations to perform polluting or otherwise demeaning menial tasks; and unpaid labor (begār). In the course of the nineteenth century, many groups on the receiving end of discrimination initiated movements for purification and self-fashioning in which they asserted their right to respectability by revising or refusing the practices of chūt; some pursued this end through the Arya Samaj. These movements—like the experience of caste subordination itself—were not the special preserve of “Hindus.”Footnote ³⁴ Muslims, Christians, and persons of indeterminate religious affiliation also fought caste discrimination.

When non-elites appropriated the reformed practice of the Arya Samaj in the decades between 1890 and 1930, they did so as part of their efforts to transform, reorient, and refuse the complex of practices that rendered them subordinate to Hindu and Muslim (or Sikh) elites. Arya Samaj practices of reform, inasmuch as they were directed to bringing about universal access to the Vedas, were available to the politics of low-caste assertion. Shuddhi was one such practice. But only when we acknowledge the forms of low-caste assertion with which shuddhi was conjoined can we appreciate how transgressive it could be. Upon undergoing shuddhi, low castes donned the sacred thread and adopted Vedic ceremonies that were restricted to the Hindu upper castes, signaling their refusal to accept consignment to low-caste status. They combined this provocation with others: abandoning deferential forms of address for the upper classes, refusing to perform unpaid labor on their behalf, claiming access to wells reserved for Hindu and Muslim elites, and insisting on the right to education. These efforts to usurp the prerogatives of upper castes were regularly met with suppressive violence. They constituted significant transformations of power relations in their own right.

To characterize the use of shuddhi by Untouchables and other non-elites prior to 1930 as religious conversion is inadequate for several reasons. It is often suggested that lower castes who were influenced by the Arya Samaj were distracted from real material concerns by a pursuit of “spiritual, otherworldly equality,” evidenced by a preoccupation with “Sanskritized” caste names and Vedic ceremonial.Footnote ³⁵ Yet to describe Vedic ceremonial as an “otherworldly” concern hardly does justice to the relations of status and power, humiliation, and subordination that it organized in the first decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the forms of protest and assertion with which shuddhi was conjoined by Untouchables and other non-elites cannot readily be described in terms of a distinction between “religious” and “secular” practices. The struggles of these non-elites defy any analytical distinction between “symbolic” and “material” practices; they cannot adequately be described as merely “religious” in this sense.Footnote ³⁶ Finally, to describe shuddhi as conversion suggests that it involved a clear change in religious identity. Use of shuddhi among Untouchables complicates this view. Moreover, the religious identity of Untouchables was extremely uncertain in the decades before 1930.

HINDU UNITY AND THE PROBLEM OF UNTOUCHABLES

Today, UntouchablesFootnote ³⁷ are considered Hindu in most common-sense understandings. Far from natural or self-evident, however, this understanding is a relatively recent outcome of deliberations over constitutional politics. These deliberations began several decades before independence, as the British slowly meted out real power to Indians beyond the merely “symbolic” appearance of representative politics that characterized colonial rule.Footnote ³⁸ They began in 1871 when the British tried to conduct the first all-India census. Having set themselves the task of classifying the diverse population of the subcontinent according to what they considered to be its two major religious groupings, Hindu and Muslim, British census officials in India struggled with the impracticable task of establishing definitively who was and who was not a “Hindu.”Footnote ³⁹ No idle question, the making of a Hindu majority in India hinged on how the boundaries of this community of “Hindus” would be drawn. Until the question of the religious status of Untouchables was settled in 1932, the religious identity of the castes deemed “untouchable” was ambiguous, and the question of how this ambiguity should be resolved was the focus of highly contentious debate.

In 1881 the British had settled on the makeshift solution of listing all persons who did not clearly identify as members of a different religion—Islam, Christianity, Judaism—under an inclusive category of “Hindu.” This included a large number of persons who were excluded from free social intercourse with (full-caste) Hindus: the so-called Untouchables. As representative politics in colonial India became linked to the social categories enumerated in the census, this solution was challenged. In 1906 a Muslim deputation to the Viceroy of India raised the possibility of adjusting this evidently flawed practice and increasing the political parity between Muslims and Hindus by enumerating Untouchables separately. In 1910, it became evident that officials were giving this proposal serious consideration when the “Gait Circular”—a memo sent by the census commissioner to the provinces—was leaked to the press. By 1911 the Gait Circular proposal had been dropped, but the possibility that the Hindu political constituency might be reduced by a stroke of the pen brought forcibly home to many upper caste Hindus the importance of creating the appearance of a united Hindu community that unequivocally encompassed the lowest castes.

Use of shuddhi among Untouchables was of uncertain advantage in Hindu elites' efforts to gain recognition for a Hindu majority prior to 1932. The politics of Hindu unity continued to gain importance in upper-caste Hindu circles into the 1920s and 1930s, but it was far from uniform. To some, Hindu unity made it imperative to downplay the social distance of Untouchables from caste-Hindu society. Reformist Hindus of the Arya Samaj adopted a different approach to Hindu unity when they advocated use of shuddhi among the lowest castes: they sought to secure the active loyalties of the lowest castes by transforming the lived relations between Hindu elites and the castes they judged “untouchable.” Not only did this approach fly in the face of entrenched prejudice, but after the Gait Circular its efficacy for Hindu unity was ambivalent at best. As John Zavos has remarked, use of shuddhi to alleviate the most obvious forms of caste discrimination dramatized the boundary between Untouchables and caste Hindu society. It risked alienating non-reformist Hindus, and it provoked Hindu violence against low castes. Use of shuddhi among Untouchables threatened to bring into relief the very fault line that symbolic representation required should be papered over. It provided a ready argument for those who advocated counting Untouchables separately from Hindus, for as Zavos remarks, “[h]ow could such low-caste groups be converted or reclaimed, if they were already a feature of Hindu society?”Footnote ⁴⁰ Especially, but not only, when appropriated for low caste protest, shuddhi highlighted Untouchables' indeterminate religious identity.

The protest movements of Untouchables in north India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not primarily addressed to the state, and they were not concerned with the politics of Hindu unity. This began to change as Untouchables entered the contest to shape how the British distributed political representation. In 1906 the Muslim deputation to the Viceroy had requested—and in 1909 was granted—political representation for Muslims separate from the general electorate dominated by Hindus, to allow Muslims' voices to be heard. By 1930 many Untouchable politicians in north India rallied behind B. R. Ambedkar to demand that Untouchables also be granted a separate electorate. But Gandhi and the Indian National Congress vigorously opposed what they described to be a division of the Indian body politic and the Hindu community. In 1932 Ambedkar was obliged to agree to the Pune Pact and to concede the winning hand to Gandhi. After the Pune Pact of 1932, the political category of Hindus encompassed Untouchables to form a clear majority, relegating Indian Muslims to the position of a minority.Footnote ⁴¹

SHUDDHI ACTIVITIES IN THE 1920S

Scholars' analyses of the Shuddhi Movement of the 1920s have facilitated secularist criticisms of religious proselytizing as a sure provocation for interreligious conflict by foregrounding Hindus' campaign among the Muslim Malkanas. Historical scholarship would seem to suggest that the focus of shuddhi efforts by Arya Samaj elites shifted in the 1920s from Untouchables to Muslims. But Untouchable castes in U.P. aggressively pursued shuddhi into the 1920s. Notwithstanding greater support for the Shuddhi Movement from non-reformist Hindus, Untouchables' pursuit of shuddhi continued to provoke violent opposition from Hindu as well as Muslim elites.

Arya Samajists who promoted shuddhi among the Chamars of U.P. included both Hindu caste elites (such as Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand) and leaders of Chamar background.Footnote ⁴² Large meetings of Chamars were reported in the 1920s in which resolutions were adopted to seek recognition for status equal with that of other caste elites, to refuse demeaning and coercive forms of unremunerated begār labor for caste elites, and to gain access to schools.Footnote ⁴³ In Rohtak district, Punjab, Untouchable castes in the Arya Samaj were also claiming the right to landownership: Prem Chowdhry reports that from the mid-1920s “Arya Samaj conferences all over Punjab were passing resolutions in favour of the abolition of the 1900 [Land Alienation] Act” and the concession to Untouchables of the right to buy land.Footnote ⁴⁴ In consequence, undergoing shuddhi and donning the sacred thread of the upper-caste Vedic initiate continued to be strong sources of provocation. In Rohtak Jat landowners boycotted members of the Arya Samaj from Untouchable castes who donned the sacred thread, together with any members of the Jat caste who helped them.Footnote ⁴⁵ At Moradabad in U.P., orthodox Hindus were said to “resent” leading Arya Samajists' taking food from Chamars, while in Bareilly Chamars were beaten by Sanatanist Hindus after undergoing shuddhi.Footnote ⁴⁶ There were also frequent reports of violence by Hindu and Muslim elites in connection with aggressive efforts by Arya Samaj Chamars to secure access to common wells.Footnote ⁴⁷

THE TOLERANCE CRITIQUE AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

The deployment of Tolerance as a critique of shuddhi during the 1920s is often portrayed as a just and fitting solution to the problem of Hindu-Muslim violence. In fact the Tolerance critique paved the way for the political developments of the 1930s—including the integration of Untouchables into a general electorate dominated by Hindus after the Pune Pact.

Most historical assessments of the 1920s shuddhi movement accept certain core assumptions of the Tolerance critique: framing shuddhi as a religion problem, they have approached it as an assault on the religious loyalties of Muslims and focused their inquiries on the motivations of Hindu elites in the Shuddhi Movement. But shuddhi practice also encompassed low caste struggles against discrimination that were not in the first instance organized through the language of religion. Indeed the first deployment of the Indian secularist ideal of Tolerance importantly functioned to confine and delimit national debate over shuddhi to questions of interreligious harmony, tolerant religiosity, and religious freedom.

Addressing the “cause and cure” of Hindu-Muslim tension in 1924, Gandhi condemned the pursuit of shuddhi among the Malkana Rajputs in no uncertain terms. Inasmuch as he denounced all religious proselytizing as intolerant, Gandhi's comments on shuddhi might be said to have defied the intransigent politics of conflicting Hindu and Muslim religious rights that afflicted public life in this troubled decade by providing an antidote to Arya Samajists' appeals to religious freedom. But the Tolerance formulation also framed shuddhi decisively and exclusively as a religious matter. In so doing, Tolerance maintained a remarkable silence on caste. This silence had important political implications for the politics of majority and minority in India.

Gandhi addressed the two uses of shuddhi, among Muslims and among Untouchables, separately. When discussing Hindu-Muslim relations, he focused exclusively on the former. But in a second essay on the Arya Samaj published later in 1924, Gandhi hinted that he had more to say on the subject when he suggested that “Hinduism has a way all its own of Shuddhi.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The fact that Gandhi elaborated on what this truly Hindu shuddhi might look like only later points to the sensitivity of the subject for Hindu-Muslim politics.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fact that he did so when discussing untouchability and caste reform bears testimony to the importance of shuddhi in Untouchables' politics.

Gandhi proposed his alternative to Arya Samaj shuddhi in an address to the Untouchability Conference in 1925, advocating the moral “self-purification” of upper-caste Hindus rather than the ritual purification of the so-called Untouchable castes:

By rejecting what he saw as the assumption behind shuddhi that Untouchables were impure, Gandhi portrayed the shuddhi of the Arya Samaj as an aggressive and condescending effort on the part of upper-caste Hindu reformers. Gandhi also criticized Hindus' motives in pursuing shuddhi, implying that their intent was to win Untouchables' political allegiance. Gandhi presented his alternative as more sympathetic reform that truly acknowledged the equality of the lowest castes and pursued Untouchables' advancement rather than Hindus' political self-interest.

But Gandhi's condemnation of shuddhi entailed criticism not only of the motivations of Hindu caste elites, but also of low-castes' provocation. Gandhi ostensibly focused his criticism on the motivations and attitudes of upper-caste Hindu reformers, but it was low castes who frequently took the initiative by combining shuddhi with assertive gestures of defiance against caste inequality. Gandhi's focus on the moral “purification” of upper-caste Hindus was situated within arguments for patience on the part of Untouchables, and the moderation of their demands:

Gandhi had made the abolition of untouchability a necessary step towards swaraj or self-government in 1921, side by side with Hindu-Muslim unity and subsistence for the poor. But as many have remarked, his conciliatory approach to meeting this objective meant a decidedly conservative approach.Footnote ⁵² The Tolerance ideal rested on an implied critique of shuddhi as a tool of low-caste politics and provocation.

Moreover, Gandhi treated untouchability as a problem facing the community of Hindus, not as a problem affecting the nation as a whole: “Untouchability . . . . is an essentially Hindu question and Hindus cannot claim or take Swaraj till they have restored the liberty of the suppressed classes . . . . The sooner we remove the blot, the better it is for us, Hindus.”Footnote ⁵³ Gandhi spoke of Untouchables unequivocally as Hindus: “I want to uplift Hinduism. I regard the Untouchables as an integral part of the Hindu community. I am pained when I see a single Bhangi [“sweeper,” Untouchable] driven out of the fold of Hinduism.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet untouchability could not be “an essentially Hindu question,” because the “absorption” of Untouchables into Hindu society had definite implications for Hindu-Muslim politics. The question of how Untouchables ought to be classified—whether they should be counted as part of the Hindu religious community, or as separate from it—had been a matter of open contention and debate since the Gait Circular of 1910. If Untouchables were counted as separate from Hindus, there would be immediate implications for the presumed Hindu majority, and Muslims and Hindus would find themselves on a more equal footing. Combined with the assumption that Untouchables were already Hindu, Gandhi's proposal that the “real Shuddhi movement should consist in each one trying to arrive at perfection of his or her own faith” had definite political implications.Footnote ⁵⁵

Many would agree that by decrying Arya Samajists' proselytizing as an assault on the religious loyalties of Muslims, Tolerance condemned Hindu intolerance and advanced a secular “principle . . . capable of holding together people who subscribed to different faiths.”Footnote ⁵⁶ But the Tolerance critique of shuddhi during the 1920s also paved the way for an end to the struggle between Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar over a separate electorate for Untouchables. When Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death” to prevent it, Ambedkar was forced to agree to the Pune Pact, which instituted a system of reserved seats but prevented the electoral separation of Untouchables. In the Pune Pact, Gandhi and the Congress won the battle for the symbolic representation of a unified community of Hindus that included Untouchables “on paper.” By encompassing Untouchables within the general electorate, the Pune Pact secured a Hindu majority and confirmed Muslims' status as a democratic minority.

The Tolerance critique of the Shuddhi Movement paved the way for a politics of Hindu majoritarianism. By decrying use of shuddhi for “religious proselytizing” while remaining silent about use of shuddhi among Untouchables, Tolerance implied that Untouchables were not “converted” by shuddhi and thus were already Hindus. At the same time, Gandhi discouraged low-caste protest that dramatized the Hindu practices of chūt that excluded Untouchables. We find that even as Tolerance apparently defended the religious rights of the Muslim minority by decrying proselytizing as an act of disrespect toward Muslims' religious loyalties, it helped to establish Hindus as a constitutional majority by deflecting attention from the uncertain religious identity of Untouchables. The deployment of the secularist ideal of Tolerance in the face of low-caste political initiatives during the 1920s can therefore be said to have prefigured Gandhi's role in the Pune Pact of 1932.

CONCLUSION

What can this historical account of early debates over religious proselytizing teach us about the politics of religious freedom in contemporary India? Critics generally raise three objections regarding the restrictions on proselytizing and conversion imposed in several Indian states by the Freedom of Religion Acts. First, it is argued that the Acts are based on a majoritarian view of conversion. In upholding the legality of this legislation, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional guarantee of a right to “propagate” religion does not extend to seeking converts. Critics argue that this reflects the view of the Hindu majority in India. The notion that religious rights can be satisfied by a narrow interpretation of propagation as mere “edification,” critics argue, reflects a Hindu perspective and willfully disregards the fact that active pursuit of converts is essential to some religions. Although this critique builds upon the logic of international human rights discourse, it should be noted that in the Indian context it has the problematic effect of reinforcing Hindu Nationalists' portrait of a fundamental conflict between “indigenous” (Hindu) religions and “foreign,” “proselytizing,” “Semitic” (Christian and Islamic) religions. At worst, such arguments support a Hindu Nationalist perspective on national belonging and a Hindu Nationalist political agenda that undermines the citizenship rights of religious minorities in India. In a gentler form, these arguments lend support to the view that the established understanding of religious freedom has been shaped by Western bias and is unsuited to the subcontinent. Even when advanced by secularists, this line of critique easily yields to the claim that religious proselytizing and conversion tend to produce interreligious violence in a pluralistic society like India, and are therefore at odds with the spirit of secularism. So long as the first deployment of Tolerance as a critique of the Shuddhi Movement of the 1920s remains above critical reproach, established understandings of Tolerance as a solution to interreligious violence remain intact. Meanwhile, caste violence is not discussed.Footnote ⁵⁷ In either form, this critique makes it possible to discuss the politics of conversion in India today without mentioning caste.Footnote ⁵⁸

Certainly, the politics of caste and conversion has changed a good deal since the 1920s. But critics have noted that the contemporary Freedom of Religion Acts betray a preoccupation with low castes, both imposing stricter penalties on those who proselytize among them and policing the conversions of low castes with extra rigor.Footnote ⁵⁹ The legislation shows concern only for low castes' conversions away from Hinduism, however.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus a second critical objection to the Acts is that in imposing unequal restrictions on conversions to Islam and Christianity, they extend special rights to the Hindu majority. In India today, the castes formerly known as Untouchable are held to be Hindu by religion. First put in place by the Pune Pact, the default Hindu identity of the lowest castes is now enshrined in the Constitution of India and in much common-sense understanding. The lowest castes often fight discrimination by rejecting this Hindu identity, sometimes through conversion. Although caste inequality exists among Indian Muslims and Christians—low castes can't be said to “escape” discrimination by leaving Hinduism—it is not unusual for low caste critics to equate caste with Hinduism and vice versa. There is ample evidence of low castes pursuing conversion from Hinduism as part of their quest for dignity, respectability, and equal treatment: mass conversions to Buddhism following the example set by Ambedkar in 1956 are one famous example. When the lowest castes reject Hinduism, Hindu Nationalists exert themselves to bring converts back into the fold. They call their practice by many names—“reconversion” and ghar vāpasi (“homecoming”) among them. But they unequivocally deny that it is a form of conversion or proselytizing. Thus they ensure that the restrictions of the Freedom of Religion Acts apply only to conversions away from Hinduism.Footnote ⁶¹ These two objections against India's anti-conversion legislation fit easily into international critiques of religious freedom. They suggest that the secularist promise of religious freedom has been compromised in India by legislation that favors the Hindu majority over religious minorities. They overlap with wider discussions about theological biases in interpretations of religious freedom and about how best to achieve the secularist imperative of non-discrimination or equal treatment for all religious groups.

The third major objection against the legislation—that it demonstrates paternalism toward low castes—seems to part ways with wider discussions of secularism and religious freedom. Critics observe that, in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of mass conversions by low caste groups, the legislation “skirts the question of judging individual volition on a case-by-case basis by condoning the assumption that certain groups are more easily tricked into conversion.”Footnote ⁶² Thus in combination with their broad definition of force or fraud, the laws' preoccupation with the lowest castes implies that these groups are particularly incapable of deciding for themselves in religious matters.Footnote ⁶³ In addition to a Hindu majoritarian bias, therefore, the Freedom of Religion Acts are faulted for their paternalism and for reinforcing social hierarchies. While this criticism can make visible the complicity of political elites in the continued subjection of disempowered groups in Indian society, it seems to have little to offer to comparative reflections on the politics of religious freedom in national or international law. As the Indian debates are positioned in a global frame, the problems of caste are liable to be reduced to mere footnotes.

But historical perspective from the vantage point of the debates of the 1920s makes it clear that the paternalism of the contemporary legislation is not accidental to the politics of religious freedom in India. Nor is the Hindu majoritarianism of the contemporary take on religious freedom separable from the politics of caste. Historically, criticism of proselytizing religiosity helped to secure the practical reality of a Hindu majority that forms the political backdrop to disputes over religious conversion today, just as it helped to delegitimize and defuse low-caste self-assertion decades ago.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like the shuddhi debates of the 1920s, contemporary debates over religious freedom in India frame the conflict as a religious problem, deflecting attention from the politics of caste. Assessments of the politics of religious freedom need to be attentive to what the framing perspective of religious freedom excludes.