Religion

Abstract

For most writers one of the most foreign aspects of India was its religions. While Islam was somewhat familiar, Hinduism was altogether alien. Here was a religion that was ‘primitive’ in that it was polytheistic and varied in form — yet sophisticated in certain aspects, as in its much commented-on tolerance. In an attempt to deal with this they searched and found parallels for it in the relatively familiar religions of ancient Greece and Rome. However, in the British mind, the religion of ancient Rome had failed because it was unequal to the challenge of the ‘true’ faith, Christianity. If they then accepted that Hinduism was similar to the ancient Roman religion it too should have crumbled before Christianity — but it had not. Christianity, whether the writers knew of the Indian Christian church or based their observations entirely on the assumption that it had been introduced by Europeans, had singularly failed to impact on the ‘native prejudice’, gathering only relatively few converts. Islam was more successful but even it had not overrun the subcontinent. This caused no little confusion, which was compounded by the fact that most commentators perceived Hinduism as monolithic, as existing in the same form throughout the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Another alien feature of the religion was the way in which Hinduism seemed to govern every facet of Indian life — its social organization, its legal system and government, even the dietary habits of the various social groups that composed it. Baffled, the writers first took to discussing the relative age of Hinduism.