We have today the privilege of sharing with you a special mail, containing the main issues of a lecture(Swami Vivekananda Chair Inaugural Lecture) on the subject by Sir Christopher A Bayly of the Cambridge University, delivered at a two-day long Conference at the International House of the University of Chicago on April 18,2014.
Friends, this is how the Conference details were summarised:
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Sir Christopher A. Bayly of Cambridge University delivered a lecture titled “MakingHinduism a ‘World Religion’: Before and After Swami Vivekananda” on April 8 at the International House of the University of Chicago (UC). Prof. Bayly is inaugural Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professor, and will be part of the UC faculty for Spring Quarter 2014 and 2015. Thelecture was attended by Consul General of India in Chicago Ausaf Sayeed and members of the local Ramakrishna Mission led by Swami Ishatmananda.
Prof. Ulrike Stark presented UC South Asian Languages and Civilization (SALC) Department that she heads. Historian Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty then Muzintroduced Bayly’s scholarly achievements, emphasizing hisbooks “Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars” (1983) that revealed the creativity of native enterprise across North India in a colonial epoch of presumed decline, and “Birth of the Modern World” (2004) acclaimed for finally decentering Europe from our larger global history.
“I’m working on a follow on book in which India will be more central than in most Europe- and America-centered world histories. I continue to develop my history of Indian political thought into the postcolonial period,” Bayly told Desi Talk. “I’ve contacted faculty and capable students at UC, including on law, political economy and issues of identity, who have opened up lines of investigation on contemporary India.” He will teach “India and world history” (2014) and “India and the challenge of the twentieth century” (2015). Bayly invited members of the Indian community to attend his lecture-series every Monday at 5pm at Foster Hall for six weeks.
The inaugural lecture was a historical account of the divergent responses of various Hindu public intellectuals to the challenge of (re-) inventing the previously polymorphic and decentered ‘Hinduism’ into a ‘world-religion’ simultaneously in native self-perception and the skeptical gaze of Western critics. These “prewar idealist” tendencies would have crystallized inSwami Vivekananda’s self-imposed mission to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
Bayly distinguished “Hindu populism,” as an outlook and movement, from both liberal secularism and the politicized Hindutva of today, by reviewing the social initiatives, personal choices and career of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, culminating in his establishment of the Banaras Hindu University in 1916. His understanding of ‘Hinduism’ was based on sacred geography with its pilgrimage circuits at a time when “sanātana dharmi” meant rather a “conservative inclusivism.” He upheld the cooperative ethos of Indian society as opposed to the competitiveness of Western democracy. Bayly underlined the petty bourgeois character of the populist movement adopted by (what are now called) “other backward castes” (OBC).Unlike Vivekananda, Malaviya never engaged with Islam. Though not essentially directed against Muslims, the slogan of “Hindu, Hindi, and Hindustan” has led to contemporary Hindu majoritarianism. For moderate Congress politicians too were swayed by such Hindu populism that could facilitate the sort of “slippages” into exclusivist tendencies that resulted in Partition.However, even ideologues such as Sarvakar and Golwakar could not be assimilated to “fascists” for their discourse resembled more closely the earlier Germanism or Gallicism of the West.
The term ‘world religion’ derives from sociologist Max Weber and from the philosopher Hegel, but both these thinkers denied this status to Hinduism itself, seeing it respectively as a ‘dream religion’ and as otherworldly. Among the Hindu reformers of the early colonial period onward that Bayly invoked as working to counter this (self-) image through education, missionizing and social work were Rammohan Roy and Keshub Chandra Sen (19th C). He concluded with S. Radhakrishnan, second President of the Republic of India, andGandhi’s unintentional role in promoting Hinduism through his sheer example, by assuming the guise of the classic sannyasin and affirming the non-sectarian embrace of the Bhagavad Gita.Bayly went on to survey some of the otherwise ‘secular’ politicians clustered around Nehru who reveal the same Hindu mindset. Whereas Stark, in her introduction, had highlighted the dominance of Bengal at UC-SALC, Bayly observed that its role has been overrated in the development of public Hinduism
Underlining the departure of the modern notion of a generalized orthodoxy from the earlier guru-ledmovements, Bayly also pointed out that Vivekananda’s public recognition by his compatriots had been contingent upon his acclaim in the West, suggesting thereby that ‘Hinduism’ had in a sense been “made in USA to be projected back onto India.” Declaring ours the “Age of the Shudra” (laboring classes), the Swami advocated an Advaita-based socialism. The status of women and their emancipation, central to the reform movements, became linked to the (divine) Mother in the Ramakrishna movement. The modern insistence on social welfare has transformed post-WW2 Hindu self-perception as belonging to a coherent world religion.
In contrast to his bland hard-to-pin-down public speeches couched in Western idiom, Malaviya’s practical choices, Bayly claimed, amount to“speech-acts” that reflected a coherent agenda and worldview. Implied, perhaps, was a similar consistency underlying Vivekananda’s historic “itinerary” as an unfinished project despite his often contradictory pronouncements. A comment from the audience pointed out that Hindu public intellectuals are today questioning whether their inheritance amounts to a “religion” and whether the coherence of seemingly “polymorphous” Hinduism should be sought at a level deeper than that of doctrines and ideas.
Anyone who paid close attention to the carefully selected and complementary themes of Chicago Calling through the mouths of SV’s spiritual heirs would have come away with a very well rounded appreciation of his life, teachings, mission, and its contemporary relevance.
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