CHAPTER 1
Colonialism and the Construction
of Hinduism
Gauri Viswanathan
InThe Hill of Devi, a lyrical collection of essays and letters recounting his travels
in India, E. M. Forster describes his visit to a Hindu temple as a tourist’s pil-
grimage driven by a mixture of curiosity, disinterestedness, loathing, and even
fear. Like the Hindu festival scene he paints in A Passage to India, the Gokul
Ashtami festival he witnesses is characterized as an excess of color, noise, ritual,
and devotional fervor. Forcing himself to refrain from passing judgment, Forster
finds it impossible to retain his objectivity the closer he approaches the shrine,
the cavern encasing the Hindu stone images (“a mess of little objects”) which
are the object of such frenzied devotion. Encircled by the press of ardent devo-
tees, Forster is increasingly discomfited by their almost unbearable delirium.
Surveying the rapt faces around him, he places the raucous scene against the
more reassuring memory of the sober, stately, and measured tones of Anglican
worship. His revulsion and disgust reach a peak as he advances toward the altar
and finds there only mute, gaudy, and grotesque stone where others see tran-
scendent power (Forster 1953: 64).
And then, just as Forster is about to move along in the ritual pilgrims’ for-
mation, he turns back and sees the faces of the worshippers, desperate in their
faith, hopelessly trusting in a power great enough to raise them from illness,
poverty, trouble, and oppression. Transfixed by the scene, Forster sees reflected
in their eyes the altered image of the deity before them. As he wends his way
through the crowd, he is overwhelmed by the confusion of multiple images of
the Hinduism he has just witnessed: of garlanded, ash-smeared, bejeweled stone
on one hand, and of the inexpressible power of deepest personal yearnings,
desires, and needs on the other. If he is disgusted by the noisy displays of Hindu
worship, he is moved beyond words by the eloquent silence of the pain and tribu-
lation from which believers seek deliverance. In their taut, compressed faces he