ally superior Hinduism. In turn, nationalist adaptations of Orientalist scholar-
ship formed the basis for contemporary (New Age?) representations of India as
the eternal land of spirituality. The important point is that Orientalism remains
the point of reference for Hinduism’s current identification with mysticism and
spirituality. Indeed, the work of King among others suggests that it is often
impossible to distinguish western understandings of Hinduism from those of
Indian nationalists, since “through the colonially established apparatus of the
political, economic, and educational institutions of India, contemporary Indian
self-awareness remains deeply influenced by Western presuppositions about
the nature of Indian culture” (King 1999: 117). In this view, all notions of
Hinduism deployed by Indian nationalists to create an overarching cultural
unity have little reference to the lived religious experience of the people but,
rather, derive from Western readings of a textualized Hinduism reconfigured to
correspond to the compulsions of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
To be sure, British colonialism’s relation with Hinduism has long been a
fraught one, ranging from antagonism to admiration, with a good measure of
sheer indifference thrown in between. Some scholars argue there was no such
thing as Hinduism in precolonial India, only a set of traditions and practices
reorganized by western scholars to constitute a system then arbitrarily named
“Hinduism” (Frykenberg 1989). The most radical position states that Hinduism
is not a single religion but rather a group of amorphous Indian religions. Hein-
rich von Stietencron writes that “Hinduism... does not meet the fundamental
requirements of a historical religion of being a coherent system; but its distinct
religious entities do. They are indeed religions, while Hinduism is not” (von
Stietencron 1989: 20). In denying Hinduism the status of a religion because it
does not constitute a coherent system, this view considers modern Hinduism to
be the product of a sociohistorical process distinct from the evolution of a doc-
trinal system based on successive accretions of philosophical thought. The for-
mation of modern Hinduism involves Christian missionaries and Hindu
revivalist organizations alike, which both contribute to the systematization of
disparate traditions for their own purposes.
However, the “construction of Hinduism” theory has several limitations. In
an effort to recover a more heterogeneous and diachronically diverse religion,
some scholars present modern Hinduism as more unified than it actually is.
Richard G. Fox’s critique of Ronald Inden’s anti-Orientalist approach is relevant
in this context. Fox’s argument that anti-Orientalism preserves the stereotypes
it seeks to demolish can be extended to the field of Hinduism studies (Fox 1993:
144–5). The tendency to interpret modern Hinduism as the unification of a loose
conglomeration of different belief systems remains trapped within a monothe-
istic conception of religion, which constitutes the final reference point for
judging whether religions are coherent or not. Nineteenth-century Hindu
reformers, seeking to rid religion of the features most attacked by Christian mis-
sionaries, are believed to have been driven by a similar will to monotheism in
their attempts to make the Hindu religion correspond more rigorously to the
Judeo-Christian conceptions of a single, all-powerful deity. Only to the extent
colonialism and the construction of hinduism 27