minate. Kanhayalal Gauba’s 1930 study of native princes refers to Bismarck’s
distinction of male and female European nations. For Bismarck, the Germans
and various other peoples including the English and the Turks were essentially
male; all Slavonic and Celtic peoples were “female races”. Female races were
charming but inefficient. Bismarck’s view is relevant here in that it shows that
the sweeping attribution of femininity to males is not necessarily tied in with
prejudices of conquest and colonization. Gauba, not resenting the Raj, credited
British India with the “virility of youth,” and saw in the India ruled by princes
“all the attractiveness of fine clothes, fine living, love and the extravagance asso-
ciated with the elegant and sensuous female” (Gauba 1930: 13). If one accepted
Gauba’s analysis, one could well argue that the India of the Princes as he
describes it represents a higher level of civilization. Of course, all such talk is
really about style and presentation rather than substance.
The British after the Mutiny/War of Independence revised their view of what
they saw as the regional differentions between Indians, and General Roberts pro-
mulgated a doctrine of martial races. In this doctrine the general problem of the
possible unmanning of conquered peoples took on for many Indians, especially
Bengalis, a particularly insulting tone. The hypermasculine colonialist claimed
to find Indians relatively effeminate. There are many complex issues here, includ-
ing a degree of homoeroticism in the English public school and in the relation-
ship between British officers and Indian troops, but my concern is to show that
this attribution of effeminacy to Hinduism was absent from the work of Orien-
talists. By and large the British had remarkably little understanding of Hindus
and Hinduism. What is at issue is the attitude of those Britons and Europeans
who were deeply interested in India and Hinduism, Orientalists in the pre-
Saidian sense.
In his chapter on Hinduism in Imagining India, Inden tries to show that the
west’s understanding of Hinduism opposed its own claimed masculine reason to
the imputed feminine imagination of India. Inden begins by quoting Spear’s
likening of Hinduism to a sponge because it absorbs all that enters it. Implicit
here, says Inden, is the idea that Hinduism is “a female presence who is able,
through her very amorphousness and absorptive powers, to baffle and perhaps
even threaten Western rationality.” He then quotes Sir Charles Eliot – “Hinduism
has often and justly been compared to a jungle” (Inden 1992: 86). Inden quotes
several other sentences from Eliot expanding on this, ending, “The average
Hindu who cannot live permanently in the altitudes of pantheistic thought,
regards his gods as great natural forces akin to mighty rivers which he also wor-
ships, irresistible and often beneficent but also capricious and destructive.” Inden
immediately comments, “There is thus little doubt here that this jungle with its
soul, is, like Spear’s sponge, also a female, one that can be managed by its male
masters and known so long as they don’t become entwined in its embraces”
(1992: 87). Neither Spear nor Eliot said a word about femininity, nor about man-
aging the forest, though Eliot spoke of Brahmans as “not gardeners but forest
officers”. Inden unfairly finds a colonial implication in the Brahmans being seen
as this way, but Eliot’s point is that Hinduism cannot be controlled like a garden.
orientalism and hinduism 57