How to make an Enlightenment hero: the British Akbar

Johnson's and Hastings's reflections on Indian ‘religions’ need to be seen, first and foremost, within the broader context of the way in which other British East India Company personnel understood the exemplars of ‘toleration’ that they could cite when they looked back at the Mughal era in Indian history. One figure who attracted their immediate attention was the mighty emperor Akbar. Akbar became a cipher through which various writers disclosed the special emphases in their own pet models for British ‘religious toleration’ in the subcontinent. However, different impulses encompassed within the notion of ‘toleration’ could be emphasized to greater or lesser degrees, depending upon user and context, usually in accordance with one's instincts as to good models of colonial governance. The story told here lends support to Robert Travers's thesis that British endeavours to appropriate Mughal records and histories were more than mere window dressing for policies dreamed up in Europe. Travers contends that the worldview of Company officials in the eighteenth century was not so dichotomous as we tend to assume:

Of course, as Travers's allusion to the popular Montesquieuianism that guided such excavations suggests, British officials tended to find what fit best with their expectations of a ‘despotic’ Asian constitution.Footnote ³⁰ The layers of mediation were, in the last analysis, multiple and multivalent, and they engendered as much redefinition as recovery of Mughal tradition.Footnote ³¹

My alignment with this interactive framework for understanding the nature of British ‘religious toleration’ in India puts me somewhat at odds with a recent article on ‘the principle of toleration in early modern Europe and colonial India’ by Jakob de Roover and S. N. Balagangadhara. The authors enlist British toleration in India as an example of how tolerance of religious views and practices that Christians would have seen as affronts to God's law had become a moral duty, rather than simply a ‘prudential’ decision, for Protestant Northern Europeans by the end of the eighteenth century. Although they note that arguments from political expediency abounded in the private correspondence and internal memoranda of the Hastings era, these authors stress that, when East India Company personnel publicly espoused religious toleration, they appealed to an implicit prevailing wisdom that required toleration to be principled if it was going to be regarded as legitimate.Footnote ³² To my mind, this focus on (mostly nineteenth-century) public justifications homogenizes British toleration policies in colonial India too much across time. Moreover, a diffusionist argument of this kind can lead us to neglect a whole layer of mediation: namely the sub-continental traditions that Europeans read in light of their own sensibilities concerning ‘toleration’. It can also conceal the full variety of ends policy-shapers saw as accomplishable through the exercise of different tolerationist strategies.

From the 1770s onwards, the published works of East India Company scholar-administrators show that they were quick to find examples of ‘toleration’ in the Mughal-era history of South Asia. Company military officer Alexander Dow led the way with his History of Hindostan (published in London from 1768 to 1772). Dow called India ‘a country … where all religions are tolerated’.Footnote ³³ To get a sense of how he meant this, it helps to look at a passage in his third volume in which he celebrates the details of the ‘prudent administration’ of one of the Mughal emperor Jehangir's viziers:

Finally, ‘No distinctions were made in the administration of justice between the Mahommedan and Hindoo. Both were worshippers of God, each in his way; both members of the same community, and subjects of the same lord’.Footnote ³⁴

It is hard to know exactly how much of this vision of good governance to attribute to Dow and how much to his Persian sources. Historian J. S. Grewal noted many years ago that Dow's History reflected Dow's own objectives, even where he translated from the Persian Tarikh-i Firishta.Footnote ³⁵ If this was true of the whole project, it should have been doubly so in volume 3, in which Dow makes no claim to be translating, but rather to be assembling a history of the Mughal empire after Akbar from fragments of several Persian manuscripts. It is still possible, nonetheless, that the refrain about Hindus and Muslims each having their own ways of worshipping God was a quotation from one of his Persian sources.Footnote ³⁶ After all, wherever else he has someone uttering a formula like ‘every one may go to heaven his own way’, Dow has it issuing from a native voice—individual or collective.Footnote ³⁷ Where he recommends ‘an absolute toleration of all religions’ in the ‘Plan for Restoring the Kingdom of Bengal to its Former Prosperity’ prefixed to volume 3, he invokes no such rationale. His point there is rather that the British need to resist any conversionist urges they might have because, as the ‘prudent successors of Timur’ learned, ‘the Hindoo religion’ itself ‘prepares mankind for the government of foreign lords. It supplies, by its well-followed precepts, the place of penal laws; and it renders crimes almost unknown in the land’. For Dow, this was an inherited balance too precious to upset.Footnote ³⁸

Dow reiterated this object lesson in his treatment of Akbar, the most prudent of Timur's successors. Grewal argues that Dow initiated a durable British narrative tradition in which Akbar represented the apotheosis of ‘enlightened rule’ in Mughal history—and precisely because he could be regarded as a virtuoso of toleration. The back half of this narrative, in which the Mughal empire's decline was linked to later emperors’ departure from the Akbarian example, would be filled in by later writer-translators, such as Hastings's own Persian secretary, Jonathan Scott.Footnote ³⁹

Yet Akbar's undisputed status as a champion for toleration in these histories can obscure subtle differences in British interpretations of the genius of Akbar's tolerationism. For Dow, Akbar

In other words, Akbar's virtue lay in his resistance to the temptation to compel his subjects to his own beliefs. Robert Orme (a returned Madras council member and the Company's first official historiographer), on the other hand, suggested that Akbar's toleration stemmed from ‘compassion’ for his subjects. This required a more empathetic regard for the institutional form of their ‘religion’ than that implied in Dow's presentation of Akbar.

Orme's impression of Akbar's tolerationism comes across in a couple of notes in his commonplace book. Sometime in the early 1770s, he jotted notes on a conversation between Akbar and Jehangir that he found in a manuscript translation of Jehangir's memoirs. Orme's notes have Jehangir asking Akbar ‘why he did not destroy the great temple of such immense wealth at Benaras (or Benarez) and extirpate the Indian religion’.Footnote ⁴¹ Notice, first, how short the step is from destruction of sites of worship to the destruction of Hindu ‘religion’. We can assume from Dow's ‘Dissertation Concerning the Religion and Philosophy of the Brahmins’, included in the first volume of his History of Hindostan, that he would not have agreed. He considered the core of Hindu ‘religion’ to consist of a deistic vedantin philosophy that he likened to pure, ‘primitive religion’—or ‘natural religion’.Footnote ⁴² Then there is also Orme's intriguing way of praising Akbar's reply: ‘The answer of Acbar is of a good man & a great King.’Footnote ⁴³ Unfortunately, the precise wording of Akbar's answer as it appeared in the manuscript on Orme's table cannot be traced. In 1829, the passage received this translation:

The ‘men’ to be left alone can refer equally to the five-sixths of mankind who are non-Muslims or to the men who build ‘haunts of idolatry’. In either case, the leaving-alone to be done is of a special, personal (man-to-men) kind: it must register as the gesture of ‘a good man’. In Orme's judgement, Akbar's virtue lay in the continuity between his private character as a man and his public character as a king, and his toleration marked this continuity. For Dow, on the other hand, Akbar's public toleration for his subjects’ ‘religious superstitions’ had to be discontinuous with his private inclinations.Footnote ⁴⁵

Why should such a subtle difference matter? Because it suggests that, for all of the paeans to the importance of ‘religious toleration’ that issued from East India Company pens in the 1770s, the nature of the Company's toleration was still up for debate. P. J. Marshall has argued that the writers who participated in the British Discovery of Hinduism in the last half of the eighteenth century ‘wrote with contemporary European controversies and their own religious preoccupations very much in mind’ and thus ‘created Hinduism in their own image’.Footnote ⁴⁶ One can make a similar observation about the British discovery of Mughal-era ‘toleration’. Dow's theological inclinations were deistic; little wonder that he should treat Akbar as a kindred spirit and delight in the emperor's refusal to define and enforce a single creed for his people. But a caveat is also in order: these writers did not take Europe to be the sphere of application for the lessons they drew from the record of their Mughal predecessors. They wrote to influence the direction of Company policy in Asia. Dow was no different from his successors in this respect.Footnote ⁴⁷ And this was why it was the distance between Akbar's private beliefs and his subjects’ ‘superstition and credulity’ that Dow carried over into his vision of an ‘absolute toleration’ to be enacted in Bengal.Footnote ⁴⁸ ‘Attention must be paid to the usages and very prejudices of the people,’ he maintained, ‘as well as a regard for their religion. Though many things of that kind may appear absurd and trivial among Europeans, they are of utmost importance among the Indians.’Footnote ⁴⁹

For a viewpoint more in line with Orme's feeling that toleration should spring from sympathy, however, we can compare Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's preface to the Code of Gentoo Laws that he published in 1776. Halhed expressly invoked a transactional language of toleration to characterize the policy (and political wisdom) of his employer, Hastings. ‘Nothing can so favourably conduce’ to ‘conciliate the affections of the Natives, or ensure stability to the acquisition,’ Halhed opined, ‘as a well-timed toleration in matters of religion, and an adoption of such original Institutes of the Country, as do not immediately clash with the Laws or interests of the Conquerors.’ For Halhed, the Romans (rather than the Mughals at this point) owed their success as an imperial power ‘to a steady pursuance of this maxim’. And, ‘by a policy still more flattering’, the Romans ‘even naturalized such Parts of the Mythology of the Conquered, as were in any respect compatible with their own System’.Footnote ⁵⁰ (Again, the notion of toleration as a form of flattery was one that Dow downplayed in his take on Akbar, and it figured minimally in his call for a ‘regard for [the people's] religion’ in Bengal.)

Halhed gave hints of what it might mean to ‘naturalize the mythology of the conquered’ in his own depictions of Akbar and his descendants. These can be found in his draft of a translator's preface to the Sirr-i Akbar, or The Great Mystery—a Persian rendering of Sanskrit Upanishads completed in 1657 by Dara Shukoh, heir apparent to the Mughal throne at the time.Footnote ⁵¹ Although his translation of the Sirr-i Akbar never saw the light of publication, Halhed can only have expected that it would—hence the draft preface. By the time Halhed set to work on it in the later 1780s, the narrative of Akbar's reign as a golden age in Mughal history was gospel among British interpreters of that history. Halhed reiterates: ‘In the first place it must be recollected that the Mogul Empire attained to the summit of its grandeur in the reign of Acber.’ Not coincidentally, ‘in Acber's time every possible attention was paid to the learning & religion of the antient Hindoos, & that wonderful display of sound wisdom & important research the Ayēnēh Acberee bears the strongest testimony of that attention’. In the second place, this was such a high priority for Halhed's Akbar that he put his best man on the job: Abul Fazl, the author of the Ain-i-Akbari, ‘who alone was ever worthy to be ranked with our great Bacon’ and who ‘joined an acquaintance with the Sanscrit language to a profound knowledge of every Science then known in the world. While his Brother Feizi employed many years upon [translating] the Mahabharatt [into Persian]’, Abul Fazl ‘amid all his laborious occupations found time to translate the Geeta’.Footnote ⁵² Halhed lamented that, having arrived in India a century and a half after Akbar's death, he personally had only come to ‘know the country & the indifference of the modern uninquisitive Mahometans’.Footnote ⁵³ In this way, he implied that Dara Shukoh had represented a last flourishing of the Akbarian mindset. Halhed thought he could tell from Dara Shukoh's biography and his texts that he was probably not quite ‘the free thinker that his enemies would have made him’, but ‘it is probable he seriously & bona fide thought it possible to reconcile the Mahommedan & Hindoo Religions’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As with Akbar, so with Dara: their efforts to naturalize Hindu mythology proceeded in full sincerity.

What Halhed left out of his account of Akbar also seems significant. Halhed owned two copies of Faizi's Persian Mahabharata, which included a preface by Abul Fazl. We know that Halhed studied these manuscripts closely enough to make an English abstract of the Mahabharata, which survives along with draft translations of the Bhāgavata Purāna and the Purānārtha Prakāsa in a manuscript volume at the British Library.Footnote ⁵⁵ It seems unlikely that he would have skipped over Abul Fazl's preface. There, Akbar's first minister explained that the emperor patronized this kind of work to ease tensions between Muslims and Hindus. He said that Akbar was troubled by the antipathy with which his Hindu and Muslim subjects regarded one another, and he was convinced that it ‘arose only from their mutual ignorance’. So far, so unsurprising. But then there was another rationale that would have sat less comfortably with Halhed and more comfortably with Dow. Abul Fazl says that Akbar wanted to prove to Hindus that some of their ‘errors and superstitions had no foundation in their ancient books’. So much for flattery. At least this Akbar was an equal opportunity demystifier: he also wanted to show his Muslim subjects that the world had to have been older than the 6,000 years allowed in their creation myth.Footnote ⁵⁶

If the Akbar who appeared in Abul Fazl's preface would have rung truer to Dow's ears, there were nevertheless other elements of Akbar lore that Dow needed to suppress. In another place, Dow almost conceded Halhed and Orme's point, noting that Akbar ‘greatly favoured the Hindoo faith, and gave much offence to zealous Mahommedans, by practising some Indian customs which they thought savoured of idolatry. But,’ he hastened to add, ‘the dispassionate part of mankind have always allowed that Akbar was equally divested of all the follies of both the religious superstitions, which prevailed among his subjects.’Footnote ⁵⁷

Interestingly, Dow's assertion of Akbar's religious independence was somewhat at odds with the text he was translating. The Akbar who ‘broke those chains of superstition and credulity, with which his tutors had, in his early youth, fettered his mind’ and sought ‘his own religion’ forms no part of Firishta's portrayal.Footnote ⁵⁸ Firishta's Akbar makes regular pilgrimages to the shrine of Khaja Muinuddin in Ajmer, visits living Sufi pirs, and, to Dow's manifest annoyance, credits their prayers with having brought about the birth of his two sons.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his parting assessment of Akbar's character, Firishta has nothing at all to say about the emperor as a ‘religious’ seeker. There, we learn only that Akbar loved glory, that he was a daring warrior but not a great commander, and that

If there was a veiled reference to Akbar's treatment of his Hindu subjects intended in these lines regarding his mercifulness, one would have to have had more knowledge of Akbar than what Firishta provided to catch it.Footnote ⁶¹

To sum up, the Company historians’ appropriations of the Akbar tradition reveal a constellation of sometimes complementary/potentially contradictory impulses associated with ‘religious toleration’. Halhed and Orme placed a premium on what might also have been called comprehension or ‘latitude’ had they wished to invoke another English tradition that was sometimes conflated with ‘toleration’.Footnote ⁶² But Halhed wrote to defend Hastings's patronage for institutions and people engaged in scholarship that would reconcile Asian subjects with European conquerors.Footnote ⁶³ The opportunity to present Hastings as a latter-day Akbar was grist to his mill.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hastings's own claim that he owed his success in India to the impression he was able to give native Indians of his ‘character’ probably informed Halhed's emphasis on Akbar's sincerity, as well.Footnote ⁶⁵ As the projector of a plan for the future of Bengal, Dow wrote at a greater theoretical remove from any established routine or regime of toleration in India. He insisted that the British could hardly be beholden to the patterns of their Mughal predecessors. ‘The British nation have become the conquerors of Bengal,’ he argued, ‘and they ought to extend some part of their own fundamental jurisdiction to secure their conquests. To call the possessions of the Company by any other name is to leave them undefined. … It is an absolute conquest, and it is so considered by the world.’ By rights of conquest, the British might impose any form of ‘religious toleration’ they liked in Bengal. Dow offered a Lockean recipe: ‘All religions must be tolerated in Bengal, except in the practice of some inhuman customs, which the Mahommedans have already, in a great measure, destroyed.’Footnote ⁶⁶ This he premised on a projected official indifference as to the efficacy of any particular ‘religious’ practice, indigenous or otherwise. As he put it: ‘We may use the Indians for our benefit in this world, but let them serve themselves in the next.’Footnote ⁶⁷ But the nonchalance with which he rattled off these formulas, imbued with the assumption that such universals as ‘humanity’ and ‘public interest’ could be trusted to guide the boundaries of British toleration, surely reflected his greater distance from any running public controversy on the tolerationist front at the time of writing. In fact, the specific customs Dow considered impermissible were sati and the live burial of dying persons in the mud along the Ganges. It would have vexed those who came to share Halhed or Orme's perspective that Dow did not feel compelled to explain how, precisely, the Mughals had reduced these practices—just as the issue of whether it was rather the permission or the prohibition of sati that truly constituted ‘toleration’ would vex British officialdom for much of the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸

One can surmise, in the spirit of Jon E. Wilson's work, that the distinct emphases in Halhed and Dow's programmatic statements on ‘toleration’ reflected different feels for the game of governing. Dow's drive to enunciate rules of operation by which British bureaucratic rule itself might be governed in Bengal would appear to anticipate colonial utilitarianism. Utilitarians liked to liken the state to a machine, the operating instructions for which were thought to lie in the common sense of abstract categories like ‘inhuman[e] customs’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Halhed's (and Hastings's) sense that public opinion was something that needed to be courted and managed through personal care was more typical in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ At the same time, we ought not to exaggerate the gap between these authors’ governmental predispositions. Both Halhed and Dow represented the stakes of their proposals as the consolidation of British sovereignty over a conquered people. In this sense, they confirm David Scott's claim that governmental praxis in the British colonies continued to aim first and foremost at securing subject peoples’ loyalties until sometime in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷¹ However, the shift in analytical language—from something like ‘visions of empire’ to something more like subsurface sensibilities—on offer in Wilson and Scott's work is salubrious. It not only helps capture what happened with British ideas of ‘toleration’ in India from about 1772 to 1793. It also suggests that there may have been oral elements in the political culture of eighteenth-century Calcutta that simply cannot be tracked by reading the most polished published sources from the period.

Indeed, an additional hint that the oral political culture in British Calcutta in the last quarter of the eighteenth century must have been more copious than meets the eye is that subsequent generations of British Indian officials read very specific meanings of ‘toleration’ back into edicts and policy statements that had never actually used the term. Typifying the pattern are the multitude of nineteenth-century glosses on Cornwallis's Regulation 3 of 1793 that represent its language of ‘preserving and protecting’ Indian natives’ ‘religions’ as the incarnation of a ‘compact’ between the East India Company and its South Asian subjects.Footnote ⁷² For instance, Lord William Bentinck, during his stint as governor of Madras from 1805 to 1807, touted ‘the universal toleration of all religions allowed by the British Government, or, to use a more proud expression … the universal protection and support which has been given to all religions’ under East India Company governance.Footnote ⁷³ Bentinck had not been privy to the Fort William council-house deliberations of the 1790s, but Court of Directors member and one-time private secretary to Sir William Jones in Calcutta Henry St. George Tucker had been on hand, and he confirmed Bentick's appraisal of the drift of the Company's ‘toleration’ policy.Footnote ⁷⁴ He explicitly recalled the opening text of the Cornwallis regulations as the statement of the Company's contract with the people of India. In his words:

Tucker's institutional memory was very good, perhaps even conspicuously accurate in this case.Footnote ⁷⁶ But it is at least also suggestive of a more robust, late eighteenth-century discourse of ‘toleration’ (whatever its precise meaning) as an active stance than the official Company pronouncements pledging simply ‘not to interfere’ in natives’ devotional activities might let on. The evidence of actions taken by Governors General Hastings and Cornwallis while in office, then, would only have lent credence to an interpretation of the core meaning of Company injunctions to ‘leave [Indian natives] undisturbed’ in the exercise of ‘religious’ practices that placed the accent upon such an expression's undertones of active promotion.Footnote ⁷⁷

Confessions of an Enlightenment (anti-)hero? Richard Johnson's ‘general toleration’

If one's instincts for governing tended to govern one's approach to ‘toleration’ in India, then no one better typifies the pattern than Richard Johnson, Bengal civil servant and, in Calcutta, mentor to the more famous Orientalist Sir William Jones.Footnote ⁷⁸ And were it not for relatively ephemeral sources like Richard Johnson's journals and commonplace books, one might be led to believe that the utilitarian impulses animating Dow's portrayal of Akbar gave way to sympathy-derived ‘tolerance’ during Warren Hastings's Administration. But Johnson offers a counterpoint to the standard narrative of what Orientalist credentials actually meant in terms of one's ‘tolerance’ or toleration for Indian ‘religions’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It would be hard to imagine how an Englishman might engage more deeply with Indian cultures than Richard Johnson did, but what does this really reveal about his political agenda? Was it a high opinion of things Asian—literature, leisure pursuits, art, women—that truly led Orientalist scholars of Johnson's calibre to advocate ‘indirect rule’ and religious toleration in India?Footnote ⁸⁰ Not necessarily: Johnson's quasi-utilitarian priorities were products of the particular way in which he processed his colonial experiences.

Johnson worked for the East India Company from 1770 to 1790. He is probably best known to historians as a collector of art and manuscripts.Footnote ⁸¹ He prided himself on his competency in the local languages and customs in North India.Footnote ⁸² Although he fell out of favour with Warren Hastings on a couple of occasions for exceeding his brief, Hastings did select Johnson for a couple of important diplomatic posts: first, the lucrative position of Assistant Resident in Lucknow at the court of the nawab wazir of Oudh, which he held from October 1780 to August 1782, and, second, Resident at the court of the nizam of Hyderabad from 1784 to early 1785. (He did the bulk of his collecting while at Lucknow and Hyderabad.)

Not only was Johnson an able linguist; he was also a voracious reader. According to Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, the French governor of Pondicherry Jean Law observed of Johnson that ‘he was “familiar with the Arabic, Persian, Turki and Hindustani languages. He loves reading and never passes a day without employing some hours on it”’.Footnote ⁸³ When Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta in 1783, he immediately consulted Johnson's expertise in Hindu mythology. The two agreed to meet for dinner every Monday and Thursday if other obligations did not prevent them.Footnote ⁸⁴ Jones said that he anticipated ‘great things’ from Johnson. ‘First,’ he wrote, ‘I expect from you an Hindū Pantheon, and next a complete tract on Hindū musick: no man has better materials than yourself for those works; none have made more original observations on the subject; few have more discernment or taste.’Footnote ⁸⁵ When Johnson left India in 1790, Jones wrote to his boyhood friend, Sir Joseph Banks, to recommend Johnson for membership in the Royal Society, calling him ‘one of the most distinguished of the Company's servants in India for ability as a public man, & for knowledge of various kinds’.Footnote ⁸⁶

We can tell from Johnson's journals and commonplace books—housed in the manuscripts collection at the Ames Library of South Asia at the University of Minnesota—that he possessed ‘enlightened’ tastes as a reader. The reading list includes the major Scottish Enlightenment figures Hume, Ferguson, Robertson, and Smith, their English aficionado Gibbon, and several of the philosophe-ic French: Voltaire, Helvétius, d'Holbach, Raynal, Diderot, and, from earlier generations, Pascal, Gassendi, and Bernier. The question, in the wake of the last 30 years or so of Enlightenment scholarship, is: what kind of Enlightenment interested Johnson? It becomes evident over the course of his commonplace books that he read these authors in search of insights into good social regulation.

Johnson saw India as a testing ground for the most up-to-date Enlightenment ‘science’ of society.Footnote ⁸⁷ For example, while he read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in March–April 1789, he sketched out ideas on the ‘Cultivation of the Sea Coast Sunderbunds [Sundarbans]’. He quoted the famous passages from Book I on the advantages for development conferred by ‘water-carriage’ in support of a wish—‘Had I the power’—to ‘immed. order a most accurate survey and report upon these southern Islands and call for the best plans to inhabit and cultivate them’.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Anna Clark and Aaron Windel observe: ‘Johnson looked to emulate Smith not only for his insights but for his method of collecting statistics and composing arguments that used these in concert with an historical account of the stages of civilizational development and man's possible futures.’Footnote ⁸⁹ An undated draft of a statement in Johnson's hand on ‘the subject of the management of the Revenues’ of Bengal and Bihar resides in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It is likely that Johnson prepared this plan in advance of a meeting with the new governor general, Charles Cornwallis, soon after Cornwallis's arrival in Calcutta in September 1786. Throughout his statement, Johnson stresses that the problem with the way in which the Company government has managed Bengal ‘after thirty years possession’ is still an absence of detailed knowledge. ‘We do not know the extent and division of our lands,’ he writes, ‘nor their quality. We are unacquainted with the objects of cultivation, the cultivators, their language, manners, nature and rights. As little informed of the rates & values of the crops nor have our Kistbundees [i.e. collection schedules] yet proved that we even know the periods.’Footnote ⁹⁰ Johnson's Adam Smith was not the Smith of the invisible hand so much as the Smith who continued the work of his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763) in his magnum opus of 1776.Footnote ⁹¹

In other words, Johnson kept abreast of the latest developments in ‘police’ science. As Foucault and several of his followers into the field of governmentality studies have explained, the science of police—which bore a closer resemblance in meaning to what today would be called ‘policy’ than to ‘law enforcement’—emerged out of the ‘advice to princes’ literature that was common in seventeenth-century Continental Europe and that concerned itself with maximizing people's reasons to find themselves satisfied with those who legislated for them.Footnote ⁹² Eighteenth-century interventions in police science included the Anti-Machiavel book that Voltaire ghostwrote with Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740) and Smith's Edinburgh Lectures on Jurisprudence—that is, on ‘Justice’, ‘Police’, ‘Revenue’, and ‘Arms’—as well as the Wealth of Nations.Footnote ⁹³ Smith considered political economy a branch of ‘police’.Footnote ⁹⁴ One could say, in short, that Johnson made himself particularly conversant with the Cameralist strand of Enlightenment, which descended from Machiavelli and those who critiqued Machiavellian political thought.Footnote ⁹⁵

Johnson's reading of the pre-utilitarian Helvétius is typical of his overall practice. He found more to challenge among the quotations that he picked out from Helvétius's Treatise on Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education than he did in Smith's Wealth of Nations, but he jotted down no fewer than 13 remarks—against the five passages he quoted from Smith. Johnson makes three of these relate in some way to the relationship between civil and ‘religious’ authority, six to the hidden springs of human action, two to the markers of accomplishment for a state, and four to the origins of ‘religious’ doctrines. His interest in Helvétius clearly had something to do with the way in which all of these problems came across to Johnson as interlinked ones. This, I think, is why Johnson can be seen pressing quotations into the service of somewhat different points than they advance in the original. For instance, he paraphrases a section in which Helvétius accounts for the origins of what he calls ‘religious tales’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Johnson glosses the passage as: ‘“Hope of immortality & fear [(Johnson's emphasis)] of annihilation made up the doctrine of the Soul”.’ He adds ‘Hope & fear are certy. our two most powerful motors’—Helvétius would simply have said pleasure and pain—before rejoining Helvétius's line of analysis to confirm that ‘with their united strength [they] may establish anything’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Here, as was often the case, the problem on Johnson's mind was the question of social management. Helvétius's reduction of human motivation to the pleasure/pain principle offered an entrée toward a solution. But Johnson's assessment of hope and fear as ‘our most powerful motors’ fell in line with his reaction to Helvétius's statement that ‘corporeal pains & pleasures are the unknown principles of all human actions’.Footnote ⁹⁸ He wrote: ‘This is true when the imagination does not overpower the man. As [for example] by religious conceits[.] … We are ever ready to be insensible to present pain or pleasure for future hope.’Footnote ⁹⁹ So, although he resisted Helvétius's system insofar as it failed to appreciate the role of imagination, he also sought to ground his faith in the malleability of men on a similarly universal basis. Writing some notes on ‘government: what shall be its principles?’ he reflected, ‘As man is the object to be regulated His passions aim & end should form the basis. To form & guide him as well as check and control him should clearly be the object of good government.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He asserted elsewhere that

And he never wavered from a Helvétius-like belief that, if Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, could ‘be aided by a printers devil and the Hindoos receive a free Govt. & the Education we do, and improve their astronomy by navigation, they would vary from their present state’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Clearly, Johnson shared Helvétius's urge to treat the human passions as embodied forces. In fact, nothing anchored his style of social analysis so much as what A. O. Hirschmann once termed ‘the theory of the countervailing passion’. In the works of authors from Bacon down through Hume, Helvétius, d'Holbach, and Alexander Hamilton, Hirschmann found the idea developed that some passions, for example avarice, could act benignly if they blinded individuals to the sensation of more sordid ones, such as lust or vengefulness. Hirschmann argued that faith in this idea of the utile passions enabled gentlemanly elites, whose status did not derive from moveable property, to champion commerce: for reasons of political and social control.Footnote ¹⁰³ Johnson read these authors’ works attentively, and it is apparent that he imbibed their rhetoric; some form of the verb ‘to check’ is a ubiquitous presence for Johnson. It makes one wonder whether he spoke this way all the time and to everyone: ‘Magistracy alone must check mankind’; ‘I cannot check noting an Idea’; ‘Nay could I check this vagrant spirit’; ‘I have been called to these reflections by the jarrings of two parties of Hindoo Durgah poojans & Mahomedan morning ashoorahs and the agent of our Christian govt. checking the two.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And, completing the circle: ‘To form & guide him as well as check and control him should clearly be the object of good government.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵

This reliance on universally experienced ‘passions’ as the key to managing individual humans suggests that Johnson was not one of those Company servants, so astutely analysed by Jon E. Wilson, who suffered from epistemic anxiety during their time in India. Wilson tracks Johnson's contemporaries John Shore and George Barlow, both of whom were instrumental in drafting the Permanent Settlement of Bengal and the accompanying judicial regulations that formed the ‘Cornwallis Code’ of 1793, especially thoroughly. He concludes that their anxieties about whether native norms were knowable at all led them to advocate a modern, impersonal style of bureaucratic government. Rule carried out through inflexible procedures and adapted to the management of whole categories of the population rather than individual persons alleviated the burden of blind spots in British knowledge and, at the same time, perpetuated Britons’ habits of governing the Bengali populace as strangers to the governed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But Johnson should stand as a counterexample. As he put it in his commonplace book entry on government: ‘In short I would extend to the aggregate of man that Government which I would propose for the single man and assuredly that would turn upon his education & the subsequent control of his passions at a more advanced period.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He seems, in other words, to have envisaged a type of governance tailored around the Indian iterations of human universals.

Johnson's tolerationism stemmed from a sensibility that brought Helvétius and Edward Gibbon—and, by extension, Hume and Ferguson—into neat alignment. Describing Rome's empire at its apogee in volume 1 of the Decline and Fall (1776), Gibbon had said ‘of the magistrates … in the provinces’ that ‘they were convinced that the various modes of worship contributed alike to the same salutary purposes; and that, in every country, the form of superstition, which had received the sanction of time and experience, was best adapted to the climate, and to its inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This account of the ancient religions as so many forms of superstition seems to have appealed to Johnson. While journeying from Bengal to England in 1790, he cited page 205 of volume 5 of the Decline and Fall and wrote:

Volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the Decline and Fall were published in May 1788.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Copies may have reached Calcutta by the end of that year. Clearly, for Johnson to have had volume 5 in his possession before he departed India in February 1790, he would have to have snapped up his copy within the first year that it was available in Bengal. This timing, coupled with the fact that Johnson wanted to consult Gibbon of all thinkers on the question of whether some religion was needed for a well-regulated society, suggests that he was something of a Gibbon fan.

Indeed, Johnson's approach as a historian of Asian ‘religions’ smacks of affinities with Gibbon's—and therefore also Hume's—analysis of religious history. As J. G. A. Pocock has argued, Gibbon and Hume found ‘enthusiasm’—the mind's overconfidence that it is in direct communication with the divine, that it is ‘God's immediate vehicle’Footnote ¹¹¹—to be the more dangerous element in the dynamic of ‘superstition and enthusiasm’ that animated world religious history.Footnote ¹¹² This was why neither supported disestablishing the English Church.Footnote ¹¹³ Hume wrote: ‘Whatever ridicule, to a philosophic mind, may be thrown on pious ceremonies, it must be confessed that, during a very religious age, no institutions can be more advantageous to the rude multitude, and tend to mollify that fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion, to which they are subject.’ Such superstition, arising from the ‘affrighted and astonished mind’, was probably ineradicable, but it was also manageable.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As Hume half-joked:

Hume and Gibbon's treatment of superstition accorded well with Johnson's psychology of the passions. And Johnson's desire to accommodate superstitious passions became all the stronger when he thought about them from the perspective of government. At one point, he brooded: ‘A man who can buy off a crime as the Roman Catholic can is no more checkd by religion than if there were none and probably a state which had no religion would go on as well as one where religion has no check.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ This amounted to the suggestion that, ‘if we may argue that a bad religion is worse than none[,] we shall readily infer that a religion is not indispensably necessary for the well regulating a society’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ However, he later recanted: ‘The possession of a Religion to a people is certainly a very beneficial object. It Elevates the mind & forms a wonderfully fine counterpoise to the selfishness of man otherwise restricted to the groveling objects here below.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ When he read Chastellux's Travels in North America (published in 1787), he extracted just one quote from the author: ‘Nothing proves to me that it is not good to know the truth, & what has error hitherto produced? The misery of the world.’ Then he rebutted it: ‘This is said upon ye subject of religion. … But it is a question to be discussed whether there is no objection to the attainment of truth & whether error has & must entail misery.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ Whether error has and must entail misery—it is this formulation of the problem that sends the clearest signals of Johnson's affinities with Gibbon and Hume.

Little wonder, then, that Johnson should ultimately suggest that all ‘religions’ were forms of superstition, adapted to a particular time and place—or, as Adam Ferguson might put it, a particular state of civil society. In contrast to the more renowned Orientalists of his day, Johnson's study of Hindu and Avestan mythology led him to what could be called a perverse perennialism. The perennialist argument, according to Richard King, is the ‘thesis that all religions, at a fundamental level, express the same basic truth’.Footnote ¹²⁰ King cites Anquetil Duperron, the French Jesuit who translated the Zend Avesta into Latin in 1771, as a leading example of Orientalist perennialism. In 1801, in his preface to the first version of the Hindu Upanishads that appeared in a European language (Latin), Anquetil argued:

Sir William Jones favoured perennialist arguments, with a heavy accent on interreligious comprehension, throughout his lifetime. Not long after the Gordon Riots in 1780, which he experienced first-hand as he joined with other barristers in forming an emergency defence force for the Inns of Court, he wrote a poem called Kneel to the Goddess Whom All Men Adore. The poem's first three lines carried Jones's main message:

In 1789, he recorded plans to write four books of hymns that were ‘Indian, European, Persian, Asiatick, Arabian, African, Hyperborean, [and] American’ in origin. His ‘object: to recommend universal toleration by showing that all nations, even those esteemed the most idolatrous, agree in the essentials of religion, a belief in one God, Creator and preserver, and in a future state of rewards and punishments’.Footnote ¹²³

Johnson agreed that ‘religions’ should, universally, be tolerated—but not because they were universally truthful. In an extended reflection on the ‘Various religions’, Johnson asked himself, ‘What shall argue from the various religions that exist and have existed throughout the world? … Shall the variety be a proof that all are imaginative? Shall the variety prove that many cannot judge between the true and false?’ To be sure, the sacred texts of the world's known religions exhibited remarkable similarities. But, of

In the end, the shared features amongst all of these faiths tallied in the particular favour of none: ‘In short, the circumstances advanced by each are so similar the proofs so alike & the avouchers of such equal number & the objects of each so equally discordant with right reason, that is my right reason, for other[s’] I cannot judge of, that I must reject the whole.’Footnote ¹²⁵

But, for Johnson, this reduction of the springs of all religions, including the one ‘authoritatively pressd upon me … with my first Ideas’, to superstition was not the end of the story. After all, it did not negate the utility of that particular passion. Thus, no sooner had he determined ‘I see no remedy … but to reject them all & appeal to reason’ than he began to panic:

Ultimately, he decided that the social benefits outweighed the ‘evils’ involved in accommodating the superstitious impulse. He determined, pace Hume, that ‘[Thomas] Reid's book [on The Active Powers of Man], which tends to confirm the doctrines of religion, is more usefull than Hume's’ because

Johnson adhered to this belief in the utility of all sorts of ‘religious’ traditions, even when they appeared to render their practitioners least governable. We have seen how, in his assessment of the Koran, he moved from an initial revulsion at the numbers of people killed in the name of Islam and in the name of Christianity to an accommodation with ‘this variety and opposition’ that ‘is the source of life & existence In man’. It is significant that he reached this resolution within months of witnessing that especially violent clash in the streets of Calcutta in September of 1789. The outbreak itself had occasioned an exceptionally long meditation on the ‘Various religions’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Johnson had no solution for the problem of ‘religious’ violence; nor did he ever advocate a damping-down of the passions animating devotional behaviour. This was because the possibility of inter-‘religious’ conflict was always a lower-order concern for him than that of giving due encouragement to ‘superstitious’ practices. Where he could play a role in shoring up the case for superstition, he would do so. When he saw ‘the agent of our Christian govt. checking’ the Hindu and Muslim faction fighters in 1789, he opted to historicize rather than moralize: ‘The Christian reviles both & both arraign the Christians. The three are equally earnest & impressed with their respective creeds. They each belong to three of the great Govts that now divide the world at the same moment. Each have men of equal natural but not equal acquired parts.’Footnote ¹²⁹ There is no indication that he wished for a diminution in zeal on the part of any party. He simply brushes on to account for their antipathy by referring to their intimate complementarity with the respective governments that vie for supremacy in the world. In this way—allowing that some strife might always accompany his and his government's efforts to permit each religion to ‘thrive as it might’—Johnson projected the limitations of his own (and Hume's and Gibbon's) tolerationist formula.

When Johnson read the text of the Virginia Assembly's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom while on a tour of eastern Bengal in 1789, he gave it a spin that could only have reflected his long engagement with Indian ‘religious’ pluralism and a corresponding sense that ‘religious toleration’ involved, above all, the promotion of variety in worship.Footnote ¹³⁰ The foundation for Jefferson's text is the legislators’

In all likelihood, all Jefferson was doing at this point was reiterating the well-worn argument from Locke and others that it was futile to try to compel beliefs—compulsion could produce hypocrisy, not conviction. But, for Johnson, these lines

Now at no point do idolater, Muslim, and Jew enter Jefferson's text, and at no point does Jefferson actually say that Almighty God appreciates various styles of worship—he is conspicuously silent on what worship may or may not accomplish.Footnote ¹³³ Furthermore, Johnson seems to have been on the cusp of mentioning striving as something that the deity's general toleration permits religious groups to do—as part of the complex of thriving, spreading, and prevailing. The precise kind of laissez-faire that Johnson envisioned for ‘religions’ would, in this way, always have a slightly sobering edge embedded within it.

Coda

The facilitative preference exhibited in Richard Johnson's notion of toleration proved durable in British India. By the end of the 1830s, several British governors had affirmed commitments to ‘impartiality, toleration and protection, to all religions’ in their Indian empire.Footnote ¹³⁴ As Lord William Bentinck put it in 1831:

But it was also the case in the 1830s that British and Indian observers were alert to the tension between protection and impartiality that inhered in the East India Company's ‘system of toleration’.Footnote ¹³⁶ As Lord John Elphinstone, governor of the Madras presidency, declared in 1837:

His correspondent—Sir John Cam Hobhouse at the Board of Control—agreed. Hobhouse cited the role of troops at ‘religious’ processions as an example of

Thus, according to Hobhouse: ‘If we discontinue this practice, we, in fact, cease to tolerate the religion of our Indian subjects.’Footnote ¹³⁹ But these tensions over the finer points of such shibboleths as ‘free exercise’ and ‘protection and aid’ were barely in embryo when the Cornwallis Code regulations of 1793 most definitively guaranteed that the East India Company's officials would ‘protect [Hindus and Muslims] in the free exercise of their religion’.

Back in the 1770s and 1780s, as we have seen, the British in Bengal were attempting to graft their notions of ‘religious toleration’ onto long-standing (and far from monolithic) South Asian understandings of pluralist interrelationships. The outcome of this engagement was not pre-destined to take any particular form. For one thing, European ideas of ‘toleration’ only became more polyvalent as the European Enlightenment unfolded, even as a greater degree of consensus on toleration's moral and political value emerged from a variety of angles of political and religious thought. For another, the history of the Mughal emperors’ actions after Akbar provided fertile ground for competing retrospective accounts of Akbar's own ‘constitution’ to develop. Richard Johnson's secret Indian notebooks reflect a particularly clear convergence of these contextual trends. To indicate that Johnson's response to these patterns was indeed quite typical for his time and place and background, it is helpful to return to the question of how Johnson's countrymen in Calcutta approached the possibility of violence when the Durga Puja and Muharram observations overlapped in the later years of the 1780s.

Recall that the British found themselves bracing for nearly annual skirmishes in Calcutta between Hindus and Muslims when the Hindu Durga Puja festival coincided with the Muslim holy days of Muharram (ten days of solemnity at the start of the Muslim year culminating in the holiday ashura) in 1787, 1788, and 1789. Such an overlap of devotional activities could only come about for a stretch of a few years out of every 30 or so because of the differences between the lunar calendar observed by Muslims and the luni-solar calendar kept by Hindus. In October 1787, when the India Gazette reported on ‘the tumults and disorderly proceedings of the Natives during the holidays’, its editor announced that ‘this has invariably happened when the religious festivals, of these different Sects, interfered with each other’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It is not clear what body of knowledge of Indian history the India Gazette’s editor was drawing upon to conclude that this sort of struggle over what C. A. Bayly calls ‘local ceremonial precedence’ was endemic to pre-colonial India.Footnote ¹⁴¹

But the editor of the rival Calcutta Gazette was able to supply at least a form of evidence for past iterations of these clashes. In his account of the 1787 ‘dispute [that] took place between two of the different religious casts, whose ceremonies happened to interfere’, he determined that ‘the contest, as is general in such cases, was extremely violent’. He then imparted what may seem like an incongruous object lesson in light of this tragic outcome. He had learned that ‘during the Government of the Nabob Allyverdi Khan [namely the nawab of Bengal whose reign ended in 1756], the Hindoos were publickly prohibited from celebrating their Festival whenever it happened to interfere with the Mussulman holidays’. Reasoning in reverse from this detail, he regarded Khan's injunction as a particularly glaring example of ‘the bigotry and intolerant spirit of the Mussulmans’, to which he contrasted ‘the equitable and enlarged Government of Great Britain’.Footnote ¹⁴² Ruled out in this account of Alivardi Khan's motives was the possibility that any prohibitions he ordered might have had public safety as their justification.Footnote ¹⁴³

Ruled in was the idea that prohibitions of this kind actually stoked violence. The next October (1788), the Calcutta Gazette made this point explicit: ‘The Mosulman Mohurrum, and Hindoo Dussaira, or Doorga Pooja, have again occurred this year at the same time. This, formerly, when the bigotry of the Mohummedans had full support from their uncontrolled authority, was frequently attended with fatal consequences.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It would have been easy for any Calcutta newspaper reader of the 1780s to draw a conventional moral from the Calcutta Gazette’s cautionary tale of Alivardi Khan and the Hindu holidays: government only courts trouble if it fails to encourage its Hindu subjects’ religious observances. A subtle Calcutta newspaper reader (or a close follower of Alexander Dow's logic) might have drawn what would then have been a much less familiar message: government has to act the part of the impartial or it risks exciting the zeal of an empowered party. The indications to be taken from the story would probably depend on the reader's deeper intuitions as to the requirements of good government. Either way, the policy applied would represent (one form or another of) non-interference.

By the late 1780s, the possible English-language sources for the tale that later Mughal governments like that of Alivardi Khan had departed, to their detriment, from Akbar's model of ‘toleration’ were legion, but one among those possible sources deserves special mention: Warren Hastings. Nowhere did Hastings expressly impute persecutory motives to figures like Alivardi Khan (at the province-of-Bengal level) or Aurangzeb (at the Mughal-empire-as-a-whole level) in the way that some of his near contemporaries did. Nonetheless, he may very well have had these late Mughal reference points in mind when he invoked the trope of ‘Muslim intolerance’ as a thing not to replicate.

Hastings's most startling application of this type of fault-finding to the East India Company's Mughal predecessors occurred in one of his most celebrated justifications for supporting Orientalist scholarship. In his foreword for the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Charles Wilkins in 1785, Hastings explained that part of the utility of studies of this kind lay in cultivating ‘a generosity of sentiment’ in the men who carry them out.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ He added, in often-quoted terms,

At another point, Hastings gives a nod to interfaith comprehension, suggesting that the theological outlook of the Bhagavad Gita is essentially in line with Christian doctrine. He calls the work ‘a single exception, among all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian dispensation, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ All of these are the kinds of statements that make one wonder why such a resounding defence of Orientalist scholarship would suddenly raise the spectre of ‘Mughal intolerance’.

Nonetheless, Hastings's castigation of Islamic rulers was shockingly unequivocal. On why Hindus had tended not to want to teach Sanskrit to Englishmen, Hastings ventured:

On account of most of the existing historiography, this characterization of Mughal governments as ‘strangers’ who bore ‘intolerant principles’ seems out of place in a letter written by Hastings. But, as Travers has noted, the reforms in judicial administration that Hastings supported were reflective of a tendency to emphasize the ruined condition of Akbar's constitution at the time the British obtained sovereignty over Bengal.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ His erasure of Akbarian toleration may have been an additional marker of a general retreat from what Travers calls the ‘political idiom’ in which Britain's Indian empire figured as ‘a form of constitutional inheritance’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In any case, Hastings was clearly willing to portray the Mughals as intolerant in order to assert a claim to the moral high ground for British rule. His portrayal of Islam as an inherently intolerant religion (in spite of the cases that he could personally have enumerated that would have undermined such a claim) operates as a negative for the ‘different treatment’ the Hindus have experienced ‘from our nation’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Since the manifold ways in which Muslims in India act intolerantly would appear, in Hastings's argument, to stem from ‘the intolerant principles of their own religion’, we have to imagine what the adherents of a religion with ‘tolerant’ principles would do differently. Luckily Hastings has already answered this question at an earlier point in the text: he has already noted that, upon careful examination, the Gita illustrates the essential doctrines of Christianity. In addition, the moment where the Mughals’ intolerance has led them into a series of pitfalls closely parallels this moment of Hastings's becoming persuaded of theological concurrences. The final form of intolerance of which Hastings accuses his Mughal forbears is, after all, nothing other than inquiring into Hindu texts ‘in order to deduce from them arguments to support the intolerant principles of their own [religion]’. What does Hastings have for assurance that his own procedure, though parallel, has been different? Above all, it is the compassion involved in the quest for comprehension. This can be demonstrated without being named. Hastings's three-fold depiction of Mughal intolerance works as a guarantee of the difference of the ‘different treatment’ under the British. Hastings has quite apparently not been incurious, nor undertaken study for the sole purpose of ‘derision’, even if he has arrived at a moment where a Hindu text has confirmed doctrines he would be presumed to uphold. His allusion to a search that has surveyed ‘all of the known religions of mankind’ makes this self-evident. It also transforms the Mughal procedure into a comparatively narrow one: the pillage of a rival tradition solely for ‘arguments’. And, by allusive contrast, Hastings has managed to suggest that theology is but one dimension of each of the known ‘religions’. The suggestion insinuates, further, that the comprehension associated with ‘tolerance’ goes beyond recognition of doctrinal concordance to an ostensible sympathy with the motivations of worship. This is why it should form part of Hastings's governmental praxis that Company servants cultivate ‘generosity of sentiment’ in their hearts and buttress their subjects’ devotion at every possible turn.

In short, the despair in the face of violence expressed by the India Gazette and the self-congratulation implied in the Calcutta Gazette’s assurances that a British government would at least not hamper either side's zeal when Durga Puja and Muharram coincided in the late 1780s were two sides of a die originally cast by government functionaries such as Hastings and Richard Johnson. In Johnson's private oeuvre, the managerial rationale and the transactional rationale behind both approaches appeared so unmistakably complementary as to all but force Johnson to presuppose a predisposition to violence among sects. In order to account for British indecision over how to meet the challenge of ‘religious’ violence in the Indian empire, then, we could do much worse than to uncover the way in which ‘growth thro’ powerful opposition’ became sedimented among the defining characteristics that made any one ‘religion’ one of the ‘various religions’.Footnote ¹⁵² As this article suggests, such a placement of antagonism against outsiders near the heart of what counted as ‘religious’ behaviour was not solely the result of imposing a European Christian template for religiosity upon lifeways in the world beyond Europe. But it was also a highly likely result if one applied a European grid for determining which practices to ‘tolerate’ as ‘religious’ ones for maximum political profit.