Comparative Study of Hinduism

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The comparative study of Hinduism encompasses three broad forms of conceptual enquiry, cultural imagination, and political engagement. First, there are occasional attempts in premodern South Asia to outline correspondences or analogies between Islamic doctrines and Vedic worldviews, such as al-Biruni’s descriptions in the 11th century of scriptural texts, cosmology, astronomy, and so on, and Dara Shikoh’s attempt in the 7th century to highlight certain parallels between Sufi and Vedantic thought. However, the comparative enterprise of painstakingly detailing correspondences between European and Indic conceptual systems begins only with the gradual installation of the administrative-legal apparatus of the East India Company in Bengal. Starting from the late 18th century onward, various British scholars and administrators, and occasionally continental European figures, began to sketch immense comparative vistas on which they placed Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin cultures at varying points on an evolutionary continuum, which was said to have culminated in the ideals and the institutions of modernity. The orientalist projections of a Vedic Hindu antiquity of uncorrupted humanity and the currently degraded popular Hinduisms were sometimes adopted by British Christian missionaries who reconfigured these temporal contrasts into their own comparative spectra of fragmented Hindu truths culminating in the saving truth of Christ. Second, these orientalist-colonial imaginations of a pure Vedic Hindu antiquity were creatively appropriated by influential Hindu figures such as Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, and others who constructed distinctive patterns of comparative scales for positioning the essential spirit of the European and the Hindu civilizations. Third, the “comparative study of Hinduism” that we have outlined in this introduction has come under fierce criticism in various academic circles in the early 21st century such as postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, feminist theory, and so on. Roughly, these scholarly perspectives claim that the attempt to “compare” across cultural and religious boundaries involves the postulation of transhistorical universals that are said to inflict epistemic violence on distinct conceptual systems by encapsulating them under monolithic descriptions. The comparative study of Hinduism seems to presuppose some kind of common ground between a Hindu category and a non-Hindu category, and it is precisely this notion of commonality that is often charged as being politically suspect and culturally reductive. The comparative study of Hinduism in academic circles, then, is yet another essentially contested topic. As this introduction suggests, the bibliography on the “comparative study of Hinduism” can be placed in three categories. First, the perceptions of Hinduism recorded by “outsiders” such as Muslim travelers, Christian missionaries, and British colonial administrators. Second, the various forms of “critical insider” responses developed by Hindu figures who delineated comparative scales on which reconstructed forms of traditional Hinduism are placed vis-à-vis aspects of European modernity and Christian doctrine. Third, the current academic interrogations of the coherence of the “comparative” project, which charge that the very idea of the “comparative study of Hinduism” is deeply implicated in the nexus between the classifications of indigenous knowledges and the entrenchment of colonial asymmetries of power.