women, or Advaita Veda ̄nta, for instance, which were frequent in the nineteenth
century, were taken as attacks on Hinduism itself, which had to be defended
against them either by justifying the beliefs and practices in question, or by repu-
diating them as aberrations from the true Hinduism, or as misrepresentations on
the part of its opponents. Moreover, the dominance of Enlightenment ideas in
the arena of public debate, together with widely held assumptions of Christian
and British superiority, meant that the resulting body of Hindu apologetic was
presented in terms of Western ideas of reason and morality which were assumed
to be common to all civilized people.
Eighteenth-century Western writers – for whom, it should be remembered,
there was no such word as “Hinduism” – had often believed that the Hindus pos-
sessed an ancient wisdom of immense value, even if its contemporary heirs did
not fully understand it. Brahmins were idealized as wise law-givers who gave up
all claim to political power: an ancient embodiment of the separation of the leg-
islative and judicial departments of government from the executive. Hindu reli-
gious beliefs were upheld as supremely rational and moral; Sir William Jones, for
instance, wrote in a letter of 1787:
I am no Hindu but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning the future state
to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from
vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without
end. (Mukherjee 1968: 119)This liberal view was opposed by an evangelical view which is expressed in an
extreme form by the pioneer Scots Presbyterian missionary in India, Alexander
Duff (1806–78):
Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen
man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous. (Majumdar 1965: 155)Missionaries were banned from the East India Company’s territories until 1813,
when evangelical pressure in Parliament forced a change. However, the Baptist
Missionary Society, founded in 1792, had a base in the Danish colony of
Serampore, near Calcutta, from 1800, and other missionary societies soon
followed. A view of Hinduism as evil helped to raise funds for the societies in
Britain; it also followed from an extreme Protestant interpretation of the doc-
trine of the Fall, in which all religion outside the Christian revelation is a product
of human endeavor, and therefore inherently sinful.
The evangelical view of Hindu degeneracy was partly matched by the
utilitarian one. This found an influential advocate in one of the foremost
Utilitarians, James Mill, whose History of British India, first published in 1817,
included a condemnation of Hindu culture. But whereas evangelicals consid-
ered that Hindu society could only be reformed through conversion to
Christianity, Utilitarians believed that it was the duty of governments to reform
society through education and legislation. In practice the two groups, both of
modernity, reform, and revival 513