In Religion, Science, and Empire, Peter Gottschalk makes a solid contribution to the study of the ways in which Indian society was described, catalogued, and classified during the rule of the East India Company and the British imperial regime. Gottschalk discusses an impressive range of texts written mostly by employees, both British and Indian, of the company and the imperial state or by British missionaries and travelers. The discussion is centered on the town of Chainpur in the Shahabad District of southwestern Bihar, where Gottschalk did much fieldwork. The book is about classification schemes, however, and is not a monograph about Chainpur. Gottschalk highlights Chainpur mainly in order to limit the variables in his discussions.
The period that Gottschalk covers stretches from the latter half of the eighteenth century to Independence in 1947, with an added chapter on “Chainpur Today.” An initial chapter on theory offers a moderately postmodern perspective on “Religion, Science, and Scientism.” Gottschalk then offers chapters on different genres of texts used to describe and classify the society of Chainpur and beyond. These genres include cartography, Christocentric and humanistic travel writing, gazetteers, the census, folklore, ethnology, and archaeology. In each case, Gottschalk is concerned to expose the ways in which the texts reveal the inherent stereotypes and ideological biases of their authors about Indian society, particularly the central place accorded to religion and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to caste.
In his opening chapter, Gottschalk sets out a key distinction between “scientific” and “scientistic,” which he uses in subsequent chapters to characterize the interplay between ideology and objectivity in the texts analyzed. For Gottschalk, “scientism … refers to the ascent of Western-originated science as an ideology and as a hegemonic discourse in, first, Western and, then under imperialist impetus, non-Western cultures” (p. 35). He notes that in the West “nonnormative forms of knowledge” such as astrology are usually degraded to the status of “‘pseudo’ or ‘voodoo’ science,” and hence “the need for a term like scientism to differentiate the operations of sciences from the normative hegemonic position those sciences attain in certain cultures” (pp. 41–42). Gottschalk then employs this idea against the preoccupation with religion and caste in colonial texts, labeling this as scientistic and due to “Romantic and scientistic impulses.” For us today, it is easy to regard the obsession of early British physical anthropologists with nasal indexes and skull types as examples of scientistic classification, of something close to pseudo-science. But should we regard the British interest in classifying religion and caste in the same way, however colored this interest was by stereotype and Christian prejudice?
The key chapter of Gottschalk's book is devoted to the censuses of British India. What he shows quite clearly is both the continuing central concern and difficulties of the census organizers with elaborating appropriate categories to classify the Indian population by religion and by caste. The efforts to rank castes, for instance, had a whole series of unfortunate consequences that are described in detail. Gottschalk avoids the simplistic arguments of some recent scholars that the census categories somehow reflected an irrational British fascination with measuring, classifying and cataloging, but he does not, in my view, give sufficient attention to the ways in which the organizers' motives were pragmatic, based on the need to tax, regulate, control, and avoid conflict.
The census organizers' concern with religion, for instance, can be seen as implicitly responding to the potential for political troubles along the fault lines of the Hindu and Muslim communities. Syncretic practices among ordinary Hindus and Muslims may suggest harmonious relations, but they do not cancel out the potential for conflict. Also, the colonial government may have aggravated community conflict by divide-and-rule tactics, but they could not have done this without a preexisting fault line. Religious conflicts in India, including violent conflict, date back well before the presence of Muslims, and there is also a “pre-history” of Hindu-Muslim conflict. By the late 1800s, when the censuses began, the conflicts had gotten worse, and they obviously continued to worsen up until Independence. However much the British may have been at fault, it is not surprising that the census takers were preoccupied with measuring and analyzing the Hindu and Muslim communities. One way to help clarify such issues would be to make a detailed comparison of the criteria used in British censuses in India with those employed in the censuses of Mughal India, of Britain itself, of other British colonies, and especially of post-Independence India. To his credit, Gottschalk does include some discussion of these topics, but much more is needed.
Gottschalk's discussion of the term dharma in modern Hindi merits a brief comment. He claims that dharma's “early meanings of ‘duty,’ ‘morality,’ and ‘virtue’” were supplemented from the nineteenth century on “to also connote ‘religion’ in its Western formulation of a reified system of beliefs, practices, and ethics” (p. 301). This is undoubtedly partly true, but Gottschalk may be putting too much reliance on the idea of religion as an arbitrary concept. Against this, I would claim that many early modern and even ancient texts often use dharma in a sense not far from a modern sense of religion. Contrarily, Christian texts written before about 1900 give the word “religion” connotations that are not usual today. We need to be aware of how the senses of words change, but this should not blind us to their continuities.
However all this may be, Gottschalk's detailed and wide-ranging work deserves a central place in discussions about how Indian society was classified by colonial authors, about the different genres of texts in which they did the classifying, about why religion and caste were made so salient, and about how Christian and imperial ideologies molded the way all this was done.
