Far from the jungle of Hinduism being seen as feminine, Eliot in the passage cited
by Inden explicitly says that “men and women of all classes... and all stages of
civilization have contributed to it.”
A page later Inden again says that for Western writers, “If Hinduism has a
positive essence, it consists of its feminine imaginativeness, its ability to absorb
and include, to move from one extreme to the other, and to tolerate inconsis-
tencies” (1992: 88). Again, the femininity is entirely his own addition. It is also
interesting that in the final part of his book, an account of what he calls “the
imperial formation” in medieval India, Inden happily refers to the traditional
idiom wherein the conquered peoples of the universal emperor, the king of
kings, are referred to as his wives (1992: 234).
In Inden’s next section on Hinduism, “Psychic Origins,” we get a long dis-
cussion of Mill’s History of British India(1858), followed by Hegel’s India as the
sleeper dreaming before he awakes. “What were more or less disconnected exam-
ples of Hindu irrationality and superstition for Mill, the empiricist, were, for the
German idealists, including Hegel, instances of the core metaphysics of that
religion, of its double displacement of the ideal and material, the subjective and
objective and of the predominance in it of creative imagination or fantasy over
true thought or reason. That becomes the positive inner essence of the female
India that a masculine Europe with its inner essence of reason was coming
to dominate.”...“We would not have those later British depictions of India
as a feminine sponge or jungle animated by a feminine imagination had the
Romantics and Hegel not done their work” (1992: 96).
“When we turn to the historical narratives of this religion, we behold a degen-
erative psychohistory masterminded by Hegel,” says Inden. “Instead of witness-
ing the triumph of man, reason, and spirit, however, we see the triumph of the
effeminate, the sensuous and the parochial.. .” (1992: 129). But no one says
this; certainly no one whom Inden cites. Hinduism is indeed a sponge, is a forest,
precisely because like Topsy it just growed. There was no overall authority, no
Inquisition, no Synod to rule and regulate what men thought; practice was
regulated, behavior was governed by caste councils. Social life was, relatively
speaking, orderly and stable; intellectual life was a free for all. Inden refers,
without any further reference, to the “schizophrenic religion of Shiva and
Vishnu” (1992: 129), implying that that attribution of schizophrenia was the
view of some or all Indologists. It need hardly be added that a résumé of the
history of religion in Europe, careful to note all schisms and sects, would be no
less confused and probably more schizophrenic than that of India.
Inden proceeds to expose the Orientalist as claiming a “shift of essences,
from a masculine Aryan mentality that had been tropicalized, to a feminine
Dravidian or aboriginal mind that had been Aryanized,... The change from
depicting an Indian mind that was the same in its racial origin as that of the Self
to one that was fundamentally different was significant.... the imperial jungle
officers that took charge after the Mutiny...came to imagine themselves as
presiding over an India comprised of Dravidian plants that could only be
managed” (1992: 120).
58 david smith