Lenses used through the years
Seeing clearly is especially important when one reflects on the various lenses
that have been worn throughout the years by those purporting to interpret
the religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. All of us stand in a long
line of “viewers” whose lenses have colored, shaped (often mis-shaped) that
landscape. Those lenses have affected the kinds of books that have been
written on India, for every book about India, even every translation, reflects
the viewpoint of the writer or the translator.
It may be useful as we begin this journey toward understanding to
make self-conscious a few of the lenses that have been employed in the
interpretation of India. Five such points of view will illustrate the dynamic.
Pejorative putdown
One of the least desirable perspectives that have been used in the inter-
pretation of India is that which has described her in such terms as “heathen,”
or “benighted.” One of the early expressions of this point of view occurs in
a book by William Ward, written around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Ward was a member of the “Serampore Trio,” the first English-speaking
missionaries in India; Ward was seeking to gain England’s support for the
missionary enterprise. His strategy was to record all the negative things he
could observe about the India of his time, taking little care to put things in
perspective or engage in objective historical scholarship. His conclusions are
expressed baldly in the preface of his book:
There is scarcely anything in Hindooism, when truly known, in which
a learned man can delight, or of which a benevolent man can approve;
and I am fully persuaded, that there will soon be but one opinion on
the subject, and that this opinion will be, that the Hindoo system is...the
most PUERILE, IMPURE, AND BLOODY OF ANY SYSTEM OF
IDOLATRY THAT WAS EVER ESTABLISHED ON EARTH. [sic]^1Ward’s relentlessly dark descriptions of infanticide, widow burning, and
other excesses, accompanied by letters and reports from some other
missionaries, informed the mind-set of some Christians in England and
North America for generations. This perception was expressed by a verse in
a nineteenth-century children’s book, entitled “The Heathen Mother”:
See that heathen mother stand
Where the sacred current flows;2 On Wearing Good Lenses