“History” in Hinduism and Christianity

A long series of commentators on the Indic religious traditions, from the redoubtable HegelFootnote ⁵ to the highly influential John MillFootnote ⁶ to numerous contemporary writers, have discussed the question of the presence in them of a historical consciousness and often replied in the negative. As Arvind Sharma points out, the perception of India as an essentially spiritual land immersed in the contemplation of eternal verities remains one of the most contested issues, both inside and outside the academy, in discussions on the socio-religious culture of the country. He notes that “[t]he view that Hinduism as a religion, or the Hindus as a whole, lack a sense of history has been expressed so often as to have become a cliché. Even when scholars have tried to take a more sophisticated as opposed to a clichéd view, the effect has often been to reinforce it.”Footnote ⁷ Taking our cue from Sharma's reference to clichéd and sophisticated reasons for this supposed absence of history, we shall examine, in this section, those which are framed in terms of the geometrical representations of time as a straight line or a circle, and, in the next, those of a somewhat different kind which suggest that this lack is a consequence of certain factors relating to language and culture. More specifically, we shall first examine the “straight line versus eternal cycle” dichotomy that has often formed the backbone of such explanations concerning modes of temporal consciousness and then proceed to grapple with arguments that are based on linguistic considerations and civilizational contrasts.

A contrast is set up in some strands of Christian theology between the Hindu and the Christian experiences of temporality with the latter understood as imbued with goal-oriented purpose and the former as devoid of any such directionality. A clear statement of these putative equivalences comes from the Old Testament scholar Bernhard W. Anderson: “In Hinduism … the world of sense experience is regarded as maya, illusion…. [On the other hand], in the Bible, history is neither maya nor a circular process of nature; it is the arena of God's purposive activity.”Footnote ⁸ The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr too believed that the acosmic spirituality of Brahmanic mysticism, in which temporal events are shackled to recurring cycles, obscures the dialectic between past influences and present responsibility that makes human beings both the creatures and the creators of history.Footnote ⁹ That the postulation of such a disjunction between the Christian and the Hindu modes of perceiving time is not a mere historical curiosity but continues to be made is suggested by more recent remarks of Christian thinkers such as Lesslie Newbigin who spent a substantial part of his life in India and had a deeper acquaintance with its religious traditions than Anderson or Niebuhr. For instance, Newbigin states that “[t]he Eastern religions [such as Hinduism] do not understand the world in terms of purpose…. The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated by the idea of divine purpose.”Footnote ¹⁰ Such views are not uncommon outside the circle of Christian theologians: in a popular study of Indian culture, Richard Lannoy argues that it cannot accommodate the idea that the individual is the subject of “history” for the ultimate aim is “the merging of the collective … in the ecstasy of Oneness, or absorption of all in the All.”Footnote ¹¹ Even Joseph Needham, who has done much to dispel the notion that Chinese culture was a part of the “timeless Orient,” argues that the dimension of the “historically unique” was absent in Indian civilization.Footnote ¹² Now, roughly two patterns of response have been offered to such charges: a) the insistence that the notion of cyclical time in classical Indian civilization should not be equated with the reduplication of the same events, and b) the assertion that the categories of “cyclic” and “linear” time should not be conceived “monolithically” and thus placed in conflict, given that the former can include some crucial aspects of the latter.

a) It has been pointed out that the symbolism of time as a circle refers not to the “fatalistic” repetition of precisely the same temporal events but to general similarities in structures or patterns in the manner of the production and the absorption of the empirical world across the cycles. While the idea of cyclic time in classical India is often regarded as similar to that which was prevalent in ancient Greece, it is important to note that even in the latter it was not always associated with the recurrence of exactly the same events. Among the philosophers, Anaxagoras and Epicurus are on record as having rejected the cyclical notion of time, and Aristotle seems not to have attached any fundamental importance to the Stoic theory of the (cosmic) Great Years, whereas historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, in Arnaldo Momigliano's view, did not teach the eternal recurrence of identical events.Footnote ¹³ More generally, the idea of historical recurrence, which has included notions such as renovation, re-enactment, and restoration, seems only rarely to be associated with the exact repetition of events. In the course of a study of the writings of Polybius, Luke in the New Testament, and Machiavelli, G. W. Trompf writes that “the minimal expectation from a cyclical view is simply the recurrence of the same stages of development, together with the idea of a return to an original set of general conditions. The exact or detailed repetition of events or characteristics is not a necessary prerequisite.”Footnote ¹⁴ Trompf's observation finds further support from James Barr, who cautions us, regarding the vexed matter of “cyclical” time which is often straightforwardly attributed to Greek thinkers, poets, or writers, that we should not confuse the philosophical (Aristotelian) view concerning the perfection and the uniformity of circular motion with the claim that “the Greeks” believed in the identical repetition of events. Pointing out the intense disagreement among (Biblical) scholars over the precise extent to which cyclical views were prevalent among “the Greeks,” Barr believes that the very phrase “cyclical view of time” should be abandoned. Instead, one should provide careful descriptions in terms such as the periodic processes of earthly regeneration and degeneration, the circular motions of heavenly bodies, the single occurrence of a cosmic cycle which returns to the same point of origin, temporal cycles which are repeated infinitely, and the recurrence of events exactly as in the previous cycle—and also clearly specify which of these is applicable in the relevant context.Footnote ¹⁵

A fine-tuned analysis of this nature of the cycles in Hindu cosmology reveals that they were only quasi-recurrent and did not involve a return to exactly the same point of departure, as can be seen from the following two interrelated points. First, the idea of time as cyclical in foundational texts such as the Mahābhārata, the Manusmṛti, and the Purāṇas refers to the occurrences not of identical but of similar events within the framework of cosmological patterns that are repeated in every cycle. For example, while the god Brahmā is reborn at the beginning of each cycle, the specific details of his birth are different in each; moreover, the fourteen manvantara periods into which each cycle is subdivided are ruled by different Manus and deities.Footnote ¹⁶ Further, there always exists the possibility of novelty within each world-order, of events that had never taken place in any previous world-order, for the embodied selves which have attained liberation (mokṣa) in the present life-time will not return to any subsequent form of empirical existence. The Vedāntic theologian Śaṁkara (ninth century C.E.) specifically condemned the view that the liberated self would come back to the phenomenal world as the assumption of a “malicious man,”Footnote ¹⁷ and Rāmānuja, his arch-adversary a few centuries later, emphasized as well that once the self is delivered from its karmic bonds and begins to enjoy the blissful intuitive experience of the Lord it will not be sent back to saṁsāra, the round of rebirths.Footnote ¹⁸ A. T. Embree therefore is rather off the mark when he claims that in classical Indian thought time is regarded in terms of endlessly repeating cycles, such that “[e]verything has been and everything will be; there is no unique event, nothing that has been that will not be again.”Footnote ¹⁹

Second, the law of karma too, which shapes and guides these cycles, should be viewed not as the theoretical underpinning of the stance of a “fatalistic resignation”towards the world but as the declaration that through conscious and disciplined efforts human beings can be extricated from the empirical limitations of their earthly lives. As several commentators have pointed out, it is a misreading of classical Indian thought that it denies agential capacities to individuals, who are instead bound by the iron grip of the karmic cycle, which saps away all strength for engagement in the present. As the medieval text Yogāvasiṣṭha notes: “Without a doubt, the fault of the past is appeased by the attributes of the present. The aim of this is the destruction of yesterday's fault by today's attributes” (11.5.12).Footnote ²⁰ The world structured by karma can even be called minimally “historicist”—in one of the many senses of that term, “historicism” is the view that the key to understanding an individual or institution is to grasp its temporal development over a sequence in which actions and events move forward towards an end. Historicist explanations, in other words, take a narrative form in which an event e is genetically connected to a chain of previous events which is the temporal process of which it is the emergent product (a–b–c–d–e).Footnote ²¹ The embodied self (jīvātman) can be said to have a narrative structure in which its motives, actions, and beliefs since beginningless times (anādi) are causally related to their effects through the law of karma, which is the principle of moral causation operating both within and across the cosmological cycles.Footnote ²² To be sure, because the memories of previous births are supposed to be wiped out at birth, the jivātman is unable to trace the precise causal connections between its (past and present) actions and (present and future) happiness and misery; nevertheless, as a theory of causation, karma is believed to bind together past, present and future through dense meshes of causal relations. More specifically, the kārmic law is supposed to be an extension of the law of physical causation to the moral realm and can be called the law of conservation of moral values which states that an action never perishes without its doer coming to enjoy its fruits (kṛtapraṇāśa) and that the results of an action accrue only to its doer (akṛtābhyupagama).Footnote ²³ Consequently, philosophical traditions such as the Mīmāṁsā, the Vaiśeṣika, and the various schools of Buddhism had to grapple with the question of how kārmic residues were causally transmitted from past to future and tried to explain this passage in terms of an invisible moral potency (apârva), a disposition or tendency (sạṃskāra) that exists in an eternal self or is conditioned by prior states (dharmas) of the person, and so on.Footnote ²⁴ In short, while the kārmic law is at one level an expression of the principle that “one will invariably reap in the future what one has sown in the past,” it is, at another, the means through which one can gradually move towards liberation, in this as well as over several life-times, by progressively developing an attitude of nonattachment to the finite entities of phenomenal existence. In this connection, Anindita Niyogi Balslev has therefore pointed out that “the wheel of becoming, in the Indian context, does not involve a mechanical repetition of the particular/the individual, neither does it preclude salvation, nor by any means imply that a released soul can be pulled back to this death-bound existence again.”Footnote ²⁵

b) The second strand of response goes somewhat further and points out that the very categories of “cyclic” and “linear” time, when they are conceived as “binary opposites,” are spurious, for each incorporates, in fact, several pictures of time.Footnote ²⁶ In the contemporary west and many other parts of the world, where time is measured in a linear fashion in terms of seconds and hours, the division of the temporal flow into seasons and cycles is commonly accepted and used. For another example of this coincidence, Joseph Needham has argued that in Chinese civilization elements of both linear and cyclic conceptions of time are present and criticized European scholars for having bound China to the “myth of eternal recurrence” by failing to emphasize its linear time-consciousness. While cyclic time appears in the speculative philosophies of the Taoists and the beliefs of the Neo-Confucians, the Chinese who formed the bureaucracy, assisted the emperor in the rites of nature-worship, and worked in the bureau of astronomy possessed a linear temporal consciousness which is often not adequately emphasized.Footnote ²⁷ Returning to classical India, it has been pointed out likewise that the study of several early Indian texts such as the Mahābhārata and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa shows that the cyclical understanding of time in cosmological speculation coexisted with the categories of linear/sequential time in chronologies of kings and descriptions of the various ages within the cycles of cosmological time.Footnote ²⁸ The various rites of initiation (saṃskāras) in Hindu religious life too reveal a teleological experience of temporality: the arrow of time moves forward through the various successive stages of an individual's life.Footnote ²⁹ Though most of the classical traditions believed mokṣa to be the highest “goal of human existence” (puruṣārtha), one of the means to this end was dharma, which involved fulfilling the duties and obligations that were attached to one's caste and stage of life (varṇāśramadharma).Footnote ³⁰ This presence of a forward-oriented directionality within the extremely vast cycles (each world-cycle is said to last 4320 million years) weakens the association of cyclical time with “stagnation” by indicating that such a symbolism of the temporal process is capable of encompassing different modes of historical experience. Even the charge that Indians were indifferent to chronological computations can be countered to some extent by pointing out that ancient Indian rulers utilized a number of eras, such as the Era of Mahāvīra (528 B.C.E.), Vikrama Era (58 B.C.E.), Śaka Era (78 C.E.), Harṣa Era (606 C.E.), Lakṣmaṇa Era of Bengal (1119 C.E.), and so on.Footnote ³¹ Pursuing this line of argument, Arvind Sharma notes that a study of the epigraphic records left behind by Indian kings in north and south India reveals that they were not lacking in a sense of chronology; for instance, the Junagadh inscription of Rudradāman (ca. 150 C.E.) specifies that it was incised in the fifty-second year of the king.Footnote ³²

Now while a sharp antithesis between “Hindu cyclical” and “Christian linear” time often appears, as we have seen, in Christian literature, a closer look at the range of Christian views on the metaphysical status and significance of the temporal flow reveals that we should not glide too readily from “linear” conceptions of time to the notions of expansion and development. Though “linear” time, often regarded as one of Christianity's gifts to European civilization, is associated with such notions, an influential strand of “Christian pessimism” has, in fact, doubted the possibility of any lasting, meaningful progress in the secular realm. Saint Augustine, for instance, believed that though there is a linear progression through the ages from the creation to the final consummation, the possibilities of moral or political progress are bleak, for human beings dwell in the era of the world's “old age” (saeculum senescens), the zone of corruption that is being slowly reformed through divine grace.Footnote ³³ His City of God is a theological interpretation of history that reads the past not with a merely human perspective, seeing only the rise and the fall of kingdoms and civilizations, but in the light of the revelation of God's salvific purposes for human beings.Footnote ³⁴ From such a standpoint of faith, temporal events are seen to be the unfolding in time of a metahistorical narrative that, though intertwined with the historical narratives of the struggles of the predestined members of the “city of God” with those of the “earthly city,” exists beyond time as God's eternal plan for humankind. “Progress” in the secular domain is, however, inherently ambiguous, for God gives earthly power to both good and evil human beings in accordance with an order of events which is hidden from us but is perfectly known to God.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, from Saint Augustine down to the Medieval Ages, Christian historians, even when they took notice of historical events, rarely believed that these could be strung together on a continuously upward moving line.Footnote ³⁶ In short, Augustinian time is to be understood as “linear” in the sense not that it is an unbroken straight line leading towards inevitable progress but that it had a definite (pre-temporal) “beginning,” will have a definite “end,” and is therefore encapsulated within a trans-historical eternal destiny.Footnote ³⁷

A more accurate description of the Christian understanding of time would, therefore, be that it is subsumptively linear in the sense that the Christ-event looks both backwards, drawing into itself the history of the Jewish people, and forwards, gathering human beings into the Church that now awaits its eschatological consummation.Footnote ³⁸ To say that history moves in a straight line is not an expression of the view that the world is a self-sufficient entity that has the resources to improve its condition on its own such that the “passage of time” and “progress” can be equated in an unproblematic manner.Footnote ³⁹ Rather, there is a teleological movement within human history that is governed by divine providence, and events in time derive their ultimate meaning only by being set within the context of an unfolding drama of sin, salvation, and redemption. To return to our contrast between the circle and the line, the following observation by Frederick Charles Copleston, who reads the cosmological cycles as referring to broad recurrent patterns of development, is therefore highly relevant: “[T]his is not in any way incompatible with theistic belief in general or with Christian doctrine in particular. It is possible to believe that divine providence works in and through the cycles, and, if one wishes, that in spite of recurrent patterns there is overall progress.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In short, then, the depiction of time as a circle must be interpreted not literally in terms of a curve passing endlessly through the same set of events but as a type of theological symbol which expresses and ties together concepts relating to the self, its embodiment, and final liberation, and such representation should not obscure the presence of other categories of time that express the notions of purpose, sequence, or progression within the cycles.

Debating the Cyclicity of Indian Time

In other words, temporal consciousness and the belief that cosmological cycles constitute the backdrop of human existences are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, can coexist, and one cannot consequently infer from the presence of the latter the absence of the former. Nevertheless, there are certain ways of framing the contrast between “Indic” and “Christian” time that appeal primarily not to the cyclicity or the linearity of time but to linguistic structures and civilizational traits and that remain fairly untouched by the criticisms that we have discussed in the previous section. For instance, the alleged lack of dynamism in Indic cultures is sometimes traced to the primacy accorded to the noun over the verb in Sanskrit: it is suggested that the fact that modern Hindi uses the same word for the concepts yesterday, tomorrow, three days before, three days after, and so on indicates that the “essential point [is] the distance from the centre without giving priority to an orientation toward the past or the future.”Footnote ⁴¹ A second line of argument seeks to draw, from some of the basic metaphysical presuppositions of the Indic worldviews, the sweeping conclusion that the views on temporal existence implied by them were held by most or all its adherents, which would explain the absence in them of the sort of historical concerns that we see in western contexts. Explanations of this sort tend to work with civilizational blocs, such as the “Graeco-Roman,” the “Hebraic,” the “Chinese,” the “Oriental” and so on, and seek to isolate certain factors which will putatively account for the presence or absence of x, where x ranges from “science” to “democracy” to “freedom” to “secularism” to “philosophy.” In the case of Indic cultures, these factors are often believed to be rooted in the karma-saṁsāra-mokṣa complex, as is characteristically stated by Richard Lannoy: “Contrary to Islamic and Judaeo-Christian tradition, history has no metaphysical significance for … Hinduism…. The whole purpose of life is to pierce the veil of ignorance (avidyā) blinding [an individual] to the nature of ultimate reality.”Footnote ⁴² In short, while we have seen in the previous section that the charge of the absence of “history”—if it is taken to mean that the classical “cycle-bound” Indians were not conscious of the structuration of the temporal process by the three modes of past, present and future, is highly implausible—we now have to deal with the suggestion that certain linguistic and cultural features hampered the development of the kind of “historical” consciousness that we have come to associate with western civilizations.

a) In responding to the first type of arguments, we may refer to the scholarly debate, from around the middle of the previous century, over the “Greek” understanding of time and use for our purposes some of the criticisms that were leveled against the endeavor to isolate “the” Biblical versus “the” Greek mental concepts of time. James Barr's fundamental criticism against such attempts was that they were based on the assumption that the vocabulary stock in a certain language forms orderly patterns that are isomorphic with the cognitive structures of its speakers.Footnote ⁴³ For instance, Barr pointed out that theologians sometimes started with the conviction that because for the early Christians time had a “decisive quality” and because the word kairos (denoting times imbued with immediacy and urgency) was in some contexts distinguished from the word chronos (denoting chronological succession), it must therefore be possible to isolate lexical structures, even if by drawing words out of their syntactical contexts, that would systematically and comprehensively correspond to the Biblical versus the Greek mental concepts of time. Along a similar line, Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out that one of the arguments sometimes put forward in defense of the view that the Hebrew and the Grecian notions of time were insulated from each other was that the Jewish people, lacking a specific word for time (such as the Greek chronos), were not able to develop the “abstract” understanding of chronological succession. He replies that the Bible does indeed speak about human beings in concrete historical contexts and avoids “abstractions” concerning time, but this is simply because it is not interested in meditations on the nature of time which we find in Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. It would be mistaken, however, to infer that the Bible's terminology would be alien to the Greek citizens who went about their everyday business in the marketplace or that the Hebrew words stood for a completely different conception of time.Footnote ⁴⁴ The same point is made by John van Seters, if a bit more vigorously: “[N]o cyclical view of time is evident in the Greek histories, whatever the philosophers might say, and there is no eschatology in the Israelite histories, whatever prophet or apocalyptic might propose.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The criticisms discussed above of the attempt to construct smoothly-polished entities such as “the” Grecian attitude and “the” Judaeo-Christian attitude to history should be treated as important caveats against propounding similar contrasts between “the” Indic and “the” Judaeo-Christian outlooks on the same. Broadly speaking, it should be clear that the lack of a specific word for a referent, say x, in a language does not definitely establish that its speakers could not have possessed the concept x (and vice versa, that the presence of a specific word for y is not definitive proof that the language-speakers operated with a distinct concept y not available in other languages). For instance, John Robinson once used the following line of argument to suggest the absence of a historical sense in classical Sanskritic civilization: “Indeed one may interject that while the term prakṛti more or less corresponds to ‘nature,’ no distinctive word for ‘history’ ever appears in Sanskrit glossaries.”Footnote ⁴⁶ One may of course counter that the Sanskrit itihāsa has some conceptual overlaps with the English “history,” but, what is more pertinent, we have seen that it is somewhat hazardous to seek to establish conclusive equivalences between the presence or absence of a concept with that of a word in a certain language. Indeed, while the Hindu traditions are often characterised as suffused with “myth,” it is noteworthy that “India, extraordinarily rich in myth, has no special word for it.”Footnote ⁴⁷ A particularly clear warning against the pitfalls of making such inferences is provided by the noted Old Testament scholar Klaus Koch while referring to the argument that prophets such as Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah were not able to develop a sense of history because they did not use a word which we would translate (in an English dictionary) as “history.” Koch responds to this claim as follows: “But there is no word in the Old Testament for marriage, for agriculture, or religion either. Is this supposed to mean that these areas of life were unknown in Israel?”Footnote ⁴⁸

b) The second pattern of explanations, as we have noted, treads a different line and seeks to connect the absence of a historical sense with specific characteristics of Sanskritic culture, which are held to have obliterated it or at least impeded its growth. In such accounts, the internal divergences over views regarding temporality and historical existence are usually glossed over in order to put forward a certain conception as “the” representative one for a civilizational outlook. Amaury de Reincourt, for instance, believes that the “key to an understanding of Indian Culture” is to be found in the “total indifference toward history … Aryan India had no memory because she focused her attention on eternity not on time.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This association of “Indian Culture” with ahistoricality is commonly made by writers who base this correspondence on the assumption that Śaṃkara's school of Advaita Vedānta, which holds that the phenomenal-temporal world is an insubstantial appearance (māyā) of the non-dual eternal Brahman, is the quintessence of Vedāntic theology, if not actually of “Hinduism” itself. However, scholars in increasing numbers have recently pointed out that this correlation is a form of “cultural summarizing” because it ignores the significance of other Vedāntic figures such as Rāmānuja, Mādhva, Vallabha, and others who were often strongly opposed to Śaṃkara's doctrine that the empirical-temporal world is dream-like and has only provisional reality. In his criticism of what he considers to be certain misconceptions of Indian thought, Daya Krishna argues that if it is contended that the Indian tradition holds the spiritual dimension alone to be real, this perspective is a caricature, for not only the Jainas, the Nyāyas, the Vaiśeṣikas, and the Sāṁkhyas but also the followers of the Rāmānuja and the Mādhva school of Vedānta clearly affirm the ontological reality of the material world.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some of these Indian schools, opposed to the Advatic theory of ‘illusionism’ (māyāvāda), vigorously debated the nature of time: for instance, the realist and pluralist Nyāya–Vaiśeṣika school regarded time as one of the categories of existence (padārtha); in the Sāṁkhya tradition, again realist, time was regarded as an aspect of the world of becoming which emerged from the dynamic interplay between the principles of puruṣa and prakṛti; and the Buddhist schools were involved in controversies over notions such as momentariness (kṣaṇikavāda).Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, there are a number of strands of traditional Indian culture which are not specifically “spiritual”; here one may mention the contributions of the classical Indians to mathematics and medicine, the presence of practical concerns in epics such as the Mahābhārata, and the atheism of the classical schools of the Cārvākas and the Lokāyatas.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, “Indian traditions are often taken to be intimately associated with religion … and yet Sanskrit and Pali have larger literatures on systematic atheism and agnosticism than perhaps any other classical language—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, or Arabic.”Footnote ⁵³

In light of this intra-traditional diversity of life-worlds and conceptions of time, we may refer to Sheldon Pollock's argument that the emergence of a historical sense in Hinduism was hindered by the belief in the eternality of the Vedas and of the Sanskrit language. The Mīmāṁsaka argument that the Vedas are transcendent because they have no beginning in time and no (historical) author influenced, according to Pollock, later forms of Brahminical learning in classical and medieval India, which accepted this model of knowledge in which historical referentiality is eliminated from truth-claims. The Mīmāṁsā believed that the Vedas, comprising an eternal book, should not be taken as a repository of empirical knowledge, and consequently references to individuals and nations are to be read allegorically as teaching maxims on themes such as the impermanence of worldly goods. As Pollock notes: “The transcendent character of the Vedas … is confirmed by their contents: the Vedas show no dimension whatever of historical referentiality. Allusions to historical persons or to historical sequentiality are only apparently so.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Consequently, Pollock concludes that it is more correct to say that history was denied than that it was unknown in Sanskritic India, this denial being repeated in sāstras which accepted the putative ahistoricality and timelessness of the Vedas. However, one may wonder if this is not to confuse the levels of what have been called, in a somewhat related context, “philosophical” and “historical” time: Chester Starr notes that it is sometimes mistakenly believed that the theoretical speculations concerning the nature of time in philosophers such as Parmenides and Plato were accepted and internalized by the wider circle of Greek historians, poets, artists, and dramatists.Footnote ⁵⁵ Likewise, we must be on the guard against the assumption that the theoretical views propounded by the Mīmāṁsā were accepted universally by members of the other philosophical schools (for instance, the Buddhists and the Jainas clearly denied the authority of the Vedas) or by individuals who were not directly involved in philosophical argumentation.Footnote ⁵⁶ Pollock himself points out the existence of another tradition of Vedic exegesis—that of the aitihāsikas who sought to explain the Vedic texts on the basis of what “actually happened” (itihāsa)—and notes that “it is significant in reexamining the question of Indian historical consciousness to know that such interpretation existed.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Further, even though Mīmāṁsaka and Vedāntic exegesis revolve around the Vedas, a close examination of the argumentative patterns of the Yoga, the Nyāya, the Vaiśeṣika, and the Sāṁkhya schools reveals that they are not primarily exercises in Vedic hermeneutics. Therefore, while Pollock's carefully qualified conclusion points to the centrality of the Vedas in classical and medieval Sanskritic culture, he overemphasizes the status of the Mīmāṁsaka hermeneutic strategy in scriptural exegesis as well as the constraints that it is said to have laid down for subsequent discourse.

Investigating the Linearity of European Time

We have examined a number of putative explanations for the absence of “history” in classical India and noted that they are based on debatable correlations between depictions of the temporal flow and temporal consciousness or on questionable assumptions about linguistic structures and the prevalence of certain philosophical perspectives across the traditions. In this and succeeding sections, we shall follow a different tack: since the historicality of Christendom is often contrasted with the mythic structure of Hinduism, we shall reexamine certain aspects of the supposed connections between the foundational elements of Christian faith and historical awareness. Just as we noted earlier that the reasons that have been offered for the lack of a historical sensitivity in traditional India do not quite hit their mark, we shall seek to highlight, in the following two ways, the point that the correlations between those features of Christianity and the “intense history-consciousness”Footnote ⁵⁸ that they are said to have fostered are much weaker than they are sometimes claimed to be. First, given that the questions of when “history” can be said to have emerged in Europe and who among the pre-Rankean European individuals (whether Greeks such as Herodotus and Polybius or Christian figures such as Eusebius of Caesarea) can be properly regarded as “historians” remain matters of intense dispute, the contrast between a historically-minded Christian Europe and a classical ahistorical India is considerably softened. Second, while Christianity is indeed rooted in some historical events in the life of Israel, the precise link between Christian faith and historical consciousness is considerably more complicated than a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship. The extent to which the faith that saves must be informed by knowledge of the life of Jesus Christ and the sense in which such a quest can be regarded as “historical” remain extremely contested matters.

a) The claim that Christianity brought “history” into Europe received one of its clearest expressions in R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History, where he argued that the Judaeo-Christian conception of a creator God who was present in the world, even becoming incarnate in it, enabled human beings to view it as the locus of divine activity and, on the basis of the motif of time as a forward-directed straight line, to develop a historical attitude towards past and contemporary events.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is an argument that appears in different forms in numerous other writers: for Christianity the whole world is a redemptive stage on which the divine drama, which revolves around the unique temporal mid-point of the Christ-event, is being enacted through individuals who have to live their parts through each irreversible moment.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, in recent decades several scholars have examined more closely the role of Christianity in altering the time-consciousness of Europe and offered instead more sociological readings of this transformation in terms of changes in technology, industry, and so on.Footnote ⁶¹ While Karl Löwith argued around the middle of the last century that western historical consciousness was a “secularized” derivation from Christianity (through demythologizing crucial Christian beliefs such as the eschatological consummation of the world), other intellectual historians have developed different “materialist” explanations for the emergence of our contemporary modes of historical explanation.Footnote ⁶² For instance, Hans Blumenberg, in his criticism of Löwith's “secularization” thesis, tries to establish the legitimacy of a modest un-secularized idea of progress by freeing it from theological preoccupations and directing us instead to developments in Copernican astronomy (which was a cumulative enterprise based on the collection of data over several centuries) and to the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns (in which the participants came to emphasize individual creativity over classical perfection). Gradually at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a relatively circumscribed idea of empirically-based progress which was driven by an irreligious “self-assertion,” and only around two hundred years later was it extrapolated and over-extended, in Hegel, Comte, and Marx, into the key to understanding the totality of history.Footnote ⁶³ Equally significant is the appearance of the mechanical clock sometime in the fourteenth century in Italy, after which people began to measure time not in terms of the natural periods of sunlight but according to the sequential regularity of the clock. Clock time now became detached from variable seasonal time, and since it was uniform, public, and calculable, it provided scientists, historians, and makers of calendars with an objective measure of time, now considered as a series of repeatable identical units.Footnote ⁶⁴ In short, while the Christian understanding of divine providence stretching from creation to consummation is based on linear temporality, an assortment of material, social, and cultural changes between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries also played a crucial role in the establishment and greater diffusion of linear understandings of time.

Further, when we trace the different senses of the term “history,” we are confronted by an intriguing paradox: while Christian theologians often comment on the prophetic-historical vitality of the Jewish and the Christian faiths and the alleged negation of the historical dimension in the Greek worldviews, it is, after all, Greeks such as Herodotus and Thucydides who are usually regarded as the fathers of “history.” Matters become a bit more convoluted when we note that, through the Middle Ages until sometime in the eighteenth century, the Bible, according to Alan Richardson, was read not so much as a collection of historical events, localizable in specific times and places, as the text where the parabola of “salvation history” touched the world at the lowest point in its descent before rising heavenwards again. Consequently, the reading of the Bible during these centuries was not informed by what later generations could come to regard as a “historical sense”; for example, in the absence of the notion of a “progressive revelation” it was often believed that the same revelation could be extracted, through the allegorical method, out of the Old Testament and Saint Paul.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is such a religious explanation of past events that we can observe in Saint Augustine, the doyen of Christian historians: of the twenty-two books of the City of God only one, Book 18, deals in fact with history as we usually understand it today, that is, the “empirical” account of kingdoms such as those of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks.Footnote ⁶⁶ This point is further reinforced by Osmund Lewry who notes that the Old Testament books such as Genesis, Kings, Chronicles, Tobit, and Esther present narration of events in the history of Israel, connecting these directly or indirectly to the action of God, such that these narratives are clearly produced from the perspectives and concerns of writers of later generations and specific contexts. He writes that this “is not history-writing in the modern sense; there is none of the studious attention to documentary records we have come to expect … and in consequence there are no historical events in the modern sense.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The question of the “when” of the emergence in Europe of “history” becomes yet more acute when we observe that Hindu India has often been charged with lacking a tradition of historical writing, supposed to have arrived on Indian shores only with modernity, which brought in its train the bureaucratic apparatus of the colonial state. If by “history” we mean the contemporary (post-Rankean) academic discipline with its distinct (empiricist) methodology that emphasizes matters such as chronology, original documents, primary sources, causal laws, and so on, then “history” (as the observations of Richardson and Lewry indicate) is quite a recent arrival even on the European intellectual landscape. For even Thucydides has been charged with lacking a clear concept of historical causation,Footnote ⁶⁸ and the Greeks have been accused in more sweeping terms of not having a sense of historicity by Alasdair MacIntyre who writes about “the absence of any sense of the specifically historical—in our sense—in Aristotle, as in other Greek thinkers.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Gerald A. Press has likewise noted that the “idea of history” was largely marginalized in late antiquity, being neither a philosophical problem for the Greeks nor a theological one for the Christians, and that the Latin historia, as reflected in both Christian and non-Christian literature of the Roman Empire (31 B.C.E.–450 C.E.), fluctuates between an accurate informational account and a literary genre in which the requirement of factuality was relaxed.Footnote ⁷⁰ For instance, Christian historiography, right from Eusebius of Caesarea, while dependent on documentary evidence, was intermingled with polemical and rhetorical elements and was primarily directed to demonstrating the power of God over the world and particularly in human affairs.Footnote ⁷¹ In other words, the question of whether (and to what extent) there was “scientific” historical literature among the Greeks and the early and medieval Christians remains a highly contested matter, and consequently the statement that classical India was deficient in historiography (by mixing up legend with history) does not present a genuine contrast with (Christian) Europe. The category of texts to which classical authors such as Kautilya (third century B.C.E.) refer as itihāsa correspond not quite to critical history in our contemporary sense but to a complex interweaving of the narration of past events, legends, stories, and moral instructions.Footnote ⁷² Now the Rājatarangiṇī of Kalhaṇa (twelfth century C.E.), which is often put forward as an example of critical history-writing in ancient India, states, promisingly enough, the importance of consulting, in an “objective” manner, inscriptions, ordinances, and grants: “That virtuous poet alone is worthy of praise who … ever restricts his language to the exposition of facts.”Footnote ⁷³ Elsewhere, however, Kalhaṇa violates the canons of “scientific” history-writing (such as the narration of empirical events without appeal to the supernatural), for instance, when he attributes the conquest of Ceylon by the army of Kashmir to the god Varuna who turned the sea to land to allow the troops to pass.Footnote ⁷⁴

In truth, however, when we historicize our understanding of “history” itself, so that we do not confuse a historical sensibility with one particular historiographical style—namely, the positivist understanding of historical reasoning—we can avoid the conclusion that wherever the latter is absent (whether in the Bible or in Indic civilization) the former is lacking too.Footnote ⁷⁵ The positivist conception, according to which the study of the past involves the uncovering of general laws which can subsume temporal events, overlooks the diverse ways in which historical memory has been preserved and handed down through representations of the pasts such as stories, legends and ballads. For instance, Chris Bayly points out that an Indo-Muslim tradition of historical writing flourished through the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries where members of the scribal classes, who were often Hindus in Mogul service, produced large numbers of histories of Persian kings, religious figures, and small towns. It is true that such histories were based on “theological” motifs such as the impermanence of human existence in the face of divine majesty; nevertheless, they also exhibit a concern with “secular” themes such as the decline of civic virtue in the Mogul administration. As Bayly points out: “Such writers were by no means innocent of historical explanation; it is simply that their explanations differed from twentieth-century predilections, though not necessarily from eighteenth-century European ones.”Footnote ⁷⁶ As a matter of fact, however, these “predilections” have in recent decades become rather heterogeneous, with a number of post-empiricist writers moving to the opposite end of the spectrum from positivism and casting doubt on the possibility of attaining objective historical truth. They have argued instead that the past is a construct of the historian guided, for instance, by the choice of emplotment of the “facts,” which themselves are a product of poetic tropes such as metaphor and metonymy.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the light of these intense scholarly debates over the nature of historical explanation, it is clear, then, on the one hand, that the connections between Christianity and “historical” discourse are not as straightforward as it may be supposed, and, on the other, that the presence of elements of historical sensitivity in traditional Indian texts should not be overlooked.

b) Such historiographical debates over the nature of evidence and interpretation notwithstanding, it might be argued that there is an irreducibly “historical” core to Christianity in that it is associated with certain dateable events in the life of an individual named Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified under the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate sometime around 29 C.E. in Jerusalem. These facts constitute the “given” and are fairly uncontested, in the sense that there is almost universal consensus, at the event-level, that such individuals lived and moved in such places, under such institutions and at such times. They provided the basis for several reconstructions, through the methods of the critical historian, of the human life of Jesus. Of these instances of the quest for the historical Jesus, the most famous was perhaps that of Ernest Renan. However, as Albert Schweitzer demonstrated, such lives reflected, in fact, the presuppositions of their authors, and this demonstration sparked a still-ongoing controversy regarding the precise relationship between the events that a historian can “dispassionately” study as objects of research and the faith of a believer who sees them as actions of the suprahistorical Word. An influential Kierkegaardian position in this matter, in effect, divorces faith from history: it holds that Christian faith springs not from a study of the historical pictures of Christ presented by chroniclers but from the witness of Scripture and likewise that the object of this faith is not a “fact of history.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For instance, Rudolf Bultmann makes a sharp distinction between a historical (historisch) event, which is one that is precisely identifiable with a spatio-temporal juncture and is accessible to historical scholarship, and a historic (geschichtlich) event, which is the present moment when a past event becomes existentially significant. Therefore, though the cross of Christ is a historical event, which happened once and is limited to its temporal duration, it becomes a historic saving event for the individual when it is proclaimed as the cross that judges the world and challenges or questions the individual's present existence.Footnote ⁷⁹ Likewise, it remains a contentious matter whether certain crucial events such as the resurrection, which cannot be located in the spatio-temporal continuum, are to be construed as “historical,” that is, as events within history.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is usually pointed out that to the Christian believer the resurrection is a historical event, for the risen Christ is present within the Christian community, and becomes a historical reality for those who have undergone a (moral and religious) transformation through his Spirit.Footnote ⁸¹ In other words, it is only in the light of faith that the knowledge of the resurrection and the true significance of the incarnation is possible, so that, as Emil Brunner notes, whereas the “scientific historian” can know Christ only after the flesh—that is, the specific details of his life and death—the believer also knows Christ in the flesh—that is, as the incarnate Word who became present in historical reality.Footnote ⁸²

In short, the patterns of divine action in history cannot be traced by the “external” historian but are perceptible, although only through a glass darkly, to the believer, and this “Jesus of history” versus “Christ of faith” dialectic has certain interesting parallels in some influential Hindu conceptualizations of the person of Christ. In figures of “neo-Hinduism” such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Swami Vivekananda, we find a contrast being elaborated between what we might call the “historical/individual Jesus” who lived in Judah two millennia ago and the “eternal/paradigmatic Christ” who is an ever-present reality in the innermost core of our being. The key difference between the ways in which this dialectic emerges in the writings of Christian theologians and the above-mentioned Hindu figures is that it is embedded, in the latter case, in different variations on the metaphysics of Advaita Vedānta. The “historical Jesus” is to be regarded as the primus inter pares in whom the consciousness of one's own divine nature received the fullest expression, but this manifestation of the “eternal Christ” is not a once-and-for-all event, for it can be replicated in all human beings. According to Radhakrishnan, for instance, the particular individual Jesus of Nazareth is the savior of humanity not in the sense that he enjoyed a unique ontological status of consubstantiality with the divine but in that he awakens human beings to the “eternal Christ” that is within all of them. That is, Radhakrishnan rejects the notion that there is no “continuity of revelation” between the Christ-event and other divine operations in human history and appeals to the Logos-doctrine of the Johannine Prologue in support of his view that all human beings can be reborn into the Christ who is the eternal reality in all of them. Therefore, Radhakrishnan asserts that “[t]he Incarnation is not an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago. It is an event which is renewed in the life of everyone who is on the way to the fulfillment of his destiny.”Footnote ⁸³ The Advaitic vocabulary in which this “historical Jesus”/“eternal Christ” dialectic is couched is especially clear in the case of Swami Vivekananda who similarly argues that what separates Jesus Christ from us is not that he is God and we are not (for all are essentially divine) but that he has realized his inner divinity to the highest level of perfection. All individuals have the potentiality of becoming perfect manifestations of the “eternal Christ,” and the historic individual called Jesus of Nazareth was only one instance of such an expression. This is how Vivekananda puts it: “The Atman is pure intelligence…. But the intelligence we see around us is always imperfect. When intelligence is perfect, we get the Incarnation—the Christ.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Through this survey of two patterns of Hindu responses to Christ we return to one of the central questions that Christian theologians down the ages have grappled with, which is that of the “particularity” of the Christ-event: how do we make sense of the claim that a series of occurrences in Israel two millennia ago is the fulcrum around which world-history turns and is constitutive of the salvation of all humanity in all times? In emphasizing that the Christ-event has a universal significance which is not restricted to those specific events but reaches out both backwards and forwards in time, Christian theologians have elaborated some forms of the faith–history dialectic. Our exploration of some Advaitic “christologies” shows a distinctive way of negotiating this dialectic: the “eternal Christ” is the inmost reality in all, of which the “historical Jesus” was the most perfect (but not unique) manifestation. Though the dilution of the “uniqueness” of Christ in the views of the Advaitic thinkers we have discussed would not be acceptable to Lutheran-Reformed theologians such as Bultmann and Brunner, the latter's interpretations of the historical particularity of Jesus Christ do have some interesting parallels with the views of the former. While the Christian faith revolves around certain events connected with the historical individual called Jesus of Nazareth, it is ultimately rooted in the acceptance of this Jesus as the Christ, the trans-historical center and savior of all humanity.Footnote ⁸⁵ To explain this universal salvific role, extending outwards from Golgotha to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, the historical aspect has been elevated to the mythical plane and is ritually celebrated through the symbolisms of the birth-narratives, the divine victory over demoniac powers on the cross, and so on. For their part, scholars of the Hindu worlds have for long been familiar with the role of the mythical imagination in the construction of the eternal realm of the gods and goddesses, the depiction of the avatāras, and the help extended by them to human beings and the elaboration of theologies based on the former. Therefore, in place of the oft-repeated contrast between Hinduism as steeped in “myth” and Christianity as based in “history,” we need instead to highlight a parallel between these worldviews that states that it is not “mere history” that saves and on the basis of this congruence also to investigate for what ends and in what ways mythical thinking is used in them in their own distinctive ways. In particular, myths embody metaphysical views about the nature of reality, and the study of Christian and Hindu mythography can highlight some of the characteristic ways in which these two traditions have interpreted the relations between self, world, and the divine.Footnote ⁸⁶

Time Regained

The points that have emerged from our comparative analysis of some facets of Christianity and Hinduism can be used to illustrate a wider point: the question of the presence or the absence of “history” in Indian thought will revolve around one's understanding of the “nature of history,” which, in turn, is related to a number of time-honored philosophical debates, such as the possibility of attaining “truth” as a historiographical ideal, the plausibility of viewing history as a “scientific” discipline with a specific “critical method,” and the question of whether the student of history can attempt to recover the past objectively, “as it really was.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Such epistemological issues have been brought into sharp focus by various strands of postmodernist thought and, more particularly in the Indian context, by a generation of postcolonial theorists, feminist critics, Marxist historiographers, and Subaltern historians who have sought to recover once-marginalized voices by focusing on those forms of subjectivity that had been subsumed into European metanarratives. The challenge for such writers, according to Gyan Prakash, is therefore to articulate critical “third-world” perspectives that will not simply be inserted into some world-historical framework characterized by the great post-Enlightenment shibboleths of reason and progress.Footnote ⁸⁸ For instance, it has been pointed out that from around the time of David Hume, various historians, (Scottish) philosophers, and economists began to conceptualize the peoples of humankind through an evolutionary framework, such that newly-encountered civilizations could be placed at different grades on a single ascending ladder of civilization, whose summit was represented, of course, by Europe itself. One consequence of this conversion of the “savage” to “primitive man” was that these primitive peoples became the “children” who had to be educated by supplying them with knowledge of world-history which, however, only asserted their own backwardness. Josep Fontana argues that we must now dismantle this linear view of history that interprets every change as progress and “replace it by another better suited to analyzing the complicated structure of the various trajectories which link up, separate, and cross over each other, forks in the road at which it was possible to choose between several possible paths.”Footnote ⁸⁹

An attempt somewhat of this kind has recently been made by Ranajit Guha. He charges that traditional Indian modes of story-telling (itihāsa) were inserted into the Hegelian narratives of world-history, so that indigenous histories were expropriated by the colonial state which through its official historiography eclipsed the voices of the people who were charged as lacking all history. It is such a historiography, according to Guha, that was criticized by the poet Rabindranath Tagore as being obsessively concerned with the conflicts of political history and thereby bleaching out the richness, the vitality, and the concreteness of lived experience. Tagore writes: “I have it in my mind to say, ‘off with your history’ [dur hok go tomar itihas]…. Try and highlight only the history which is piloted by man [sic]–as–creator towards the Magnum that lies beyond history…. This was known to our Upanishads.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In writing these lines, shortly before his death, Tagore, the poet of “modern” India, was not of course advocating a rejection of the historicality of everyday life; rather, he was expressing in his own creative fashion a central motif of classical Vedāntic reflection on the nature of the historical process, namely, that it is a locus of the divine and hence is charged with a reality, beauty, and value of its own.