Abstract
The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of England in particular, and the broader European tendency of naturalising religions in general. It contends that the rise of historicised life writing genres in Europe was organically related to the demythologised, verifiable god-lives writing project. Bankimchandra’s Krishnacarita is embedded within a dense matrix of nineteenth century Indian secular life writing projects and its projection of Krishna as a cultural icon within an incipient nationalist imagining. The essay while exploring such fraught writing projects in Victorian England and nineteenth century colonial Bengal, concludes that ‘secularism’ arrives as not as religion’s Other but as its camouflaging in ethico-cultural guise. Secularism rides on the backs of such demystified god life narratives to rationalise ethico-culturally informed global empires.
Highlights
Ecce Homo: Behold the Human is an ideological configuration that provides an interventionist point; it enables rereading Bankimchandra Cha opadhyay’s Krishnacaritra (Cha opadhyay 1886) as the ‘life-narrative’ of a humanised, historicised god, Śri Krishna
John Robert Seeley’s highly controversial biography of Jesus Christ published in 1866, in Victorian England, demystifies the Christ figure, and celebrates him instead as a man who created a religious order. This conceptual paradox of a man who is regarded as god is embraced in the name of Seeley’s book, Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ
Partha Cha erjee (Cha erjee 1993) and Tanika Sarkar (Sarkar 2014) are among some of the historians who seriously explore the emergence of life narrative genres in colonial Bengal
Summary
Ecce Homo: Behold the Human is an ideological configuration that provides an interventionist point; it enables rereading Bankimchandra Cha opadhyay’s Krishnacaritra (Cha opadhyay 1886) as the ‘life-narrative’ of a humanised, historicised god, Śri Krishna. John Robert Seeley’s highly controversial biography of Jesus Christ published in 1866, in Victorian England, demystifies the Christ figure, and celebrates him instead as a man who created a religious order This conceptual paradox of a man who is regarded as god (or should it be the other way round?) is embraced in the name of Seeley’s book, Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. 1886 (Seeley 1886)—even though its contents would radically influence his Krishnacaritra and his last novel, Sītārām
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