Sovereignty,Religion and Law in the British Empire: Raja Rammohan Roy’s Public Hermeneutics in His Times

The King of Britain: First Sign of the Indistinguishability of ‘Religion’ and ‘Politics’

Ernst Kantorowicz begins his fascinating and learned study of the King’s two bodies by citing Blackstone’s constitutional maxim that the King is not only incapable of doing wrong but is also incapable of even thinking wrong. ¹¹ While he traces it historically to medieval theology and jurisprudence, this very maxim in fact continues well into the future. The precise place of the King or the institutional position of Kingship in Britain, during the period of our study, has been a surprisingly understudied theme, and the relationship between Kingship in Britain and the subcontinent has almost received no attention. ¹² From the perspective of the British Isles, it appears that parliamentary authority is gaining, but if one considers the importance of the Kingship or its relation to British ‘possessions’ in India, this claim becomes much more problematic. In fact, even the first proposition regarding the gain in parliamentary authority is questionable, considering that the King was very much and inextricably bound with parliament; hence, the King-in-Parliament was the source and locus of legislative authority. Rammohan Roy’s insistence that he was a subject of the King reminds us of the fact that subjecthood in the period was a subjection to authority and sovereignty, a statement of allegiance, and was not defined by a specific ethnic or cultural identity. This characterization of subjecthood has been recently well established in the extant literature and serves as a warning not to anachronistically project notions of national citizenship of the twentieth century into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ¹³

An examination of sovereignty in this regard would clearly alert us to the differentiations in subjecthood in this period. It would also alert us to the impossibility of distinguishing religion and ‘politics’, since the latter was itself formulated through the very specific lens of what we would understand today as religion. Considering the King’s role in external affairs and matters of conquest in the eighteenth century, one must remember that Ireland was regarded as ‘conquered territory’ and Roman Catholics—technically called papists, papist recusants, popish priests—were not ‘fully’ British subjects, in that they suffered from legal (i.e., political/state based) discrimination. Debates around ‘Catholic emancipation’ alternated between the religious and the political at every instance of its enunciation; which is to say there is no real distinction between the two but a distinction to be found within the self-definition of each of the terms ‘religious’ and ‘political’.

Those supporting discrimination might use arguments citing the King’s coronation oath which promised the security and protection of ‘Protestant Reformed religion’, ‘established by the law and customs of the realm’ ¹⁴ defining doctrinal content in terms of politics and law. In this sense, ‘popery’ posed a threat to the security of the land. The counterargument pointed to the importance of context, and it was argued that if indeed once Catholics and dissenters could be seen as threatening, this was not so now; after all, the initial right of Catholics were later abrogated by William and Mary, and there was a protracted alleviation of the legal disabilities which earlier fell on dissenters. ¹⁵ In turn, it was argued that the security of the realm could not be established if members of the realm in fact owed allegiance to foreign powers, that is, the papacy. It should be noted that even after the Catholic Emancipation Act, Catholics had to swear absolute allegiance to the King. It is the measure of the importance of ‘religion’ that in a constitution, which still held on to the maxim that the ‘King could do no wrong’ (or even think no wrong), the only legal manner in which he could cease being a King was if he disassociated with the established Church. ¹⁶ There simply was no other legal means to divest the King of his sovereignty.

Such a fracturing of the body politic is shown by the fact that while Catholicism was referred to as a religion, over the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, penalties were slowly being detached from the practices of Catholicism; an attention to this history re-opens the debate about the use of categories such as private and public. ¹⁷ Catholics could practice their religion, they had the sanction to ‘freedom of conscience’, although they did not either have the right to the ‘public’, that is, practice publically (without taking the consent of the state/registration), or have a right to represent the public, that is, become members of the House of Commons or hold official position. Catholic priests did not even have a right to such a civil existence. An act could alternatively be cognized as innocuous ritual or political threat disguised as ritual and therefore be liable to criminal prosecution (‘public’ law). It is also to be noted that even after 1829 and the Catholic Emancipation Bill, Catholics could not aspire to the Throne or a range of the highest offices. Catholic practice could be perceived as political allegiance and this was indeed the fear; a fear that the opponents of Catholic Emancipation well expressed by arguing that such legal disabilities had nothing to do with religion. ¹⁸ Such practice was simultaneously nominated as ritual which Reformed religion accused of being a denial of (the freedom of) conscience. Ritual was here a superstition or an action whose meaning was snatched from the actor revealing him to be but an agent for someone else, that is, a hostile political power. Superstition was not necessarily a false belief in an afterlife (‘religion’) but rather the false belief in a temporal power that claimed to be a representative of the sacred (eternal) and therefore infallible. ¹⁹ Ritual was open to being constructed as a legal threat or a threat to a legal existence.

Freedom of conscience could thus at any point be turned into superstition and threat. Therefore, being political was at once, paradoxically, being free to choose allegiance, and choosing allegiance to the Protestant King. Being a member of a body politic was a matter of making clear an allegiance, and not merely a cultural or linguistic marker. It is in this specific matter of an allegiance that one must understand the fundamental importance of Kingship, for which we turn to Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State.

Understanding the nature of the British constitution in the period will require a deep understanding of Christianity and its self-conception and history. Coleridge wrote that the King represented the nation. ²⁰ Representation is used here in the strongest, most active sense: through representing, the King makes what was otherwise the multitude and without identity, one. ²¹ In Coleridge, the very understanding of law itself was to be unravelled by a self-conception of the Christian world and goes back to its own history and the Jewish religion. ²² For, in fact, the Christian constitution of the visible and invisible church was itself posited in contrast to the Jewish world which was conceived as being, and having been, unable to distinguish between religion and law, ritual and legality; this world in which Jesus died and the world-to-come when Christ would reign as King. According to this Christian conception, for Jews all action was ritual—for God was their King—and there was no distinction between religion and law, unlike religion when used in the Gospel sense wherein the distinction between the sacred and the secular (this and the hereafter) was operated. ²³ Of course this distinction was not a rigid binary but the very topos in which Christianity could find both its singularity and universality.

While the Jews were perceived as exemplary among the ancient tribes for forming a state (with God as King), the very constitution of a multitude as nation, Coleridge argues, reveals the presence of a God (or Demon). ²⁴ As opposed to the Jews who had God as their King, among Christians, the King unified the people as a people. This is once again the sense in which the authority of Kingship had to be religiously founded for no population was unified qua itself; the tacit counter point of which is the Jews. From this unification, Coleridge argues for the (heuristic) distinction between nation and property. While property was held by the master/head of the family/lineage, there was also common property; and even these two were not distinct but rather formed the ‘two poles’ of the same homogenous medium, that is, the (Kingly) nation-state. It is within such a framework that Coleridge speaks of the Clerisy or a specific ‘cadre’ that would be responsible for developing the culture of the nation, but at the same time link the specific nation to the universal (the hereafter).

The importance of property as a constituent of nationhood allows us to return to the distinction between the public and private even if in an ultimate sense the latter is included in the former as an essential element. This was the logic of property, for unless one had property (the means to be oneself and independent) one could not aspire to represent or be represented; hence, the property qualification for franchise. In the eighteenth century, until 1776, property right too was denied to Roman Catholics restraining them from that other route to politics and power. It was only in 1829 that some modicum of political rights was therefore given to Catholics; Jews, atheists and the colonized ‘subjects’ would have to wait longer. It is only in such a context that we can understand the interrelation between law and religion in the conquered subcontinent. Hastings’s Judicial Plan of 1772, broadly followed henceforth into the nineteenth century, gave civil laws to natives based on their religion, even if the ultimate determinant of the content of such religion was the Company and finally the King in Council. ²⁵ The banning of Sati ultimately was justified in terms of natives of the subcontinent being the ‘innocent subjects of His majesty’. ²⁶

That the King, to repeat, was no mere powerless and an abstract symbol, in the period, is established by fact as much as argument. All laws required the assent of the King, and, for instance, George III felt that the precise issue of Catholic Emancipation went against his coronation oath to protect established religion, and thereby had parliament dissolved. To examine the nature of laws in the period, we now turn to examine a crucial jurisprudential text of the time, that is, Austin’s Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Austin writes that Divine commands (or natural law) were the ‘ultimate measure or test’ and utility was the ‘index to the measure’, the ‘proximate measure’ ²⁷ when one was not directly guided by Revelation. Laws, understood to be a species of command from sovereign to subject, were themselves divided into Divine laws, positive laws and positive morality. Disputing the distinction between free and despotic governments, Austin further argued that all governments were despotic in that they were absolute, ²⁸ and since sovereigns could not have rights against their subjects (since rights can only be given by a third party) and insofar as subjects were bound by a ‘law of God to obey their temporal sovereign’, a government did have a ‘divine’ or ‘moral’ right against their subjects. ²⁹ Even though utility—or general good—is admitted as the ‘test’ to determine the ‘will of God’, it is not at all established how such a metric makes Divine law any more legible; nothing definite is detailed or justified. ‘Despotism’ in the juridico-political architecture is underlined by the fact that customs were construed as laws through the state (via judge or legislature), and positive morality (the opinion of the many) was not considered legally binding. Interestingly, in the distinction between Divine law, positive law and positive morality, the first and third category shares a commonality in the appellation of moral. ³⁰

Having provisionally outlined laws as understood by a canonical work on jurisprudence in 1832, we might now speak of the King and his role in the ‘public’ and governmental apparatus of the day. Blackstone had identified the King with the executive; the analytic merit of distinctions such as those between executive, judicial and legislative was later questioned by Austin. This questioning is not surprising given Austin’s argument for a ‘despotic constitution’, but here one might remind oneself that Blackstone too had argued for such a constitution. The Glorious Revolution had ensured that the King exchanged his ‘military tenures’ for revenues from excise and custom. ³¹ The latter two, along with traditional sources of revenue from various crown lands, financed the Civil List which paid the salaries of offices, both administrative and judicial, as well as, offices related to the royal household. There was no clear distinction between the King as public representative and the King as a private person. Only after 1780 was the Civil List even open to parliamentary scrutiny. ³² However, even as various regulations succeeded in opening the Kings’ finances to such oversight, thereby attempting to distinguish between private and public expenditure, the King continued to have direct influence through his ability to create (and control) offices (including sinecures) as well as his power to confer baronetcies and peerages. Offices such as the Chancellor and Secretary (technically servants of the King) remained closely associated with the King and the traditions of royal sovereignty; they had access to the royal signet and other bearers of the sovereignty. ³³ Often such higher officers did not sit in Parliament, and while Privy Councillors were chosen at the King’s pleasure, offices such as the Chancellor and Secretary were filled with consent from the Houses. He was in the fortunate position of being integral to sovereignty and therefore beyond legal redress, but at the same time he could sue and exercise his rights in relation to others. ³⁴ His powers through the media of Privy Councillors (for governors), offices (such as the Secretaries and the Chancellor) and the House of Lords (where peerages could be created) ensured that no election before 1831 was won without his support. Even in the early nineteenth century, statute-making power lay with the King in Council in Britain, but especially in territories beyond the seas ³⁵ ; it is the King in Council that we could identify as locus of legal authority, for there neither existed a Benthamite code ³⁶ nor a formal party system. The House of Commons, on the other hand, could not claim to be representative (because of property as well as ‘religious’ qualifications) before the Great Reform Bill (1832). Even the idea of representation assumes a priori a ‘people’ existing to be represented, an assumption that one cannot make in the period under study.

The East India Company was established by Royal Charter, which it renewed by payment. The nature of its conquests came in for intense scrutiny in the middle of the eighteenth century; and through the East India Act (1784), the King in consultation with Parliament was to establish a Board of Commissioners which would consist of a Secretary of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and no more than three Privy Councillors. Matters relating to civil military and revenue matters were to be ‘superintended’ and ‘controlled’ by the Board whose members were appointed by the King in Council, the latter having the right to dismiss them at will. The Act understood the ‘territorial acquisitions’ of the East India Company to be the ‘possessions’ of the ‘British Kingdom’. ³⁷ The Board could directly through a Secret Committee send directions regarding war and peace to the Governor General in India. All dispatches from the Court of Directors had to be approved by the Board, who even had the powers to change the same, although it was the Court rather than the Board that had control over who were appointed to the various offices in the East India Company. The Board members were given the status of ‘justices of peace’ with sovereignty lying with King-in-Parliament. Privy Councillors—which were not offices in the way we understand the term but forms of property given and taken—were the highest Court for laws and acts being formulated in the subcontinent, and this is where for instance the debate over Sati found its denouement.

In this midst, how is one to understand Rammohan Roy’s self-perception as a subject of his ‘Britannic Majesty’? While famously speaking of British rule as ‘providential’, he at the same time thought it very much his right to criticize the policies of the East India Company, all the while recognizing and when necessary appealing to his sovereign, the English King in Council or King-in-Parliament. In his time in England, he also witnessed the counter-petition on the legitimacy of Sati, an appeal against the legal prohibition of Sati, and the subsequent case, as heard in the Privy Council, the highest court constituted by the King. This in itself should be a caution against characterizing his position—or that of the age—as ‘liberal’ or ‘anti-absolutist’ unless and until the term is defined and discussed as a category. Since political participation, whether through franchise or the holding of high officers, is denied to natives in the subcontinent, he pushes for a greater integration of this land to the United Kingdom ³⁸ through arguments for the greater settlement of people and investment of Capital. Politics in the conquered terrain of the subcontinent while retaining a legal structure—from an appellate system that went all the way up to the King in Council to civil laws being referenced to religious communities—was articulated as the construal of a public space where reasoned debate could at once educate the colonial state as much as the subject populace. ³⁹ The hallmark of which would be to engage both so as to allow for mutual recognition and communication.

Elaborating the Sign: Ritual as Veil for Societal Interest in the Sati Debates

The above context that establishes the indistinguishablity of religion and law in Britain would hopefully sensitize us to the context and discourse of Roy in his critique of the practice of Sati. The emphasis of the normative architecture of law and religion in Britain and British India through the importance of the King thereby hopes to add to the rich extant work that has focused on the making of colonial laws in India with reference to Sati, ⁴⁰ rather than its normative self-understanding. In the course of such an inquiry into the nature or religion and law, and the understanding of the Rammohan Roy’s writings on the subject, it would be anachronistic to oppose reason and religion; rather the effort was to distinguish true (reasonable) religion and (false) religion which was exposed as an operation of power and/or vested interest. In fact, it was Roy’s argument that true reason and religion are not incompatible, and outright crimes which take the form of religion can only be exposed and corrected through the use of reason as much as (true) religion.

In this section, we wish to both interpret Roy’s debates within the philosophical traditions of the subcontinent as well as underline his re-orientation of the tradition to values such as a public criticism that they might scarcely even recognize; this has not been sufficiently attended to in the important extant literature. His public hermeneutics in arguing about Sati was an attempt to align the legal and the social through reason, thereby undercutting the absolutist claims made on both, whether by the Brahmins or the British. Such public hermeneutics, as is evident from his writings, is an interpretation that is simultaneously constructive. While this section focuses on his writings on Sati, the following section underlines the deployment of his philosophical strategy in his critique of the missionaries, while the last section returns to his earliest published work, the Tuhafat, to examine some of the theoretical presuppositions of his method.

To persuade and convince the other—in this case the Hindu advocate of Sati—is to make a claim about the ignorance of the Hindu of his own Hinduness, disallowing the ‘false’ Hindu from (falsely) representing the religion to colonial authorities. Correction is the supplementing of the old and not the mere introduction of the new. It is on such terms that the interpreter-expositor makes his case ⁴¹ echoing strategies found in the classical philosophical traditions. In Roy’s tract, it is the ‘opponent-advocate’ who begins expressing surprise at ‘the endeavor to oppose the practice of Concremation and Postcremation of widows, long observed in the country’ (Nag and Burman, The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy, part III, 89). In response, Roy as the ‘opponent’ says that such a custom was simply a sign of sadistic delight and had no sanction in the shastras, which forces the opponent-advocate to try to establish his case with reference to tradition.

For argument to exist, the meaning of the traditional scriptures would have to be put at stake; the alleged self-evidence of practice or inhumanness as declaration of self-evidence cannot be included in the ambit of debate. And hence the citation of authorities is the staging; the confrontation has begun, initiated by the advocate. Since the textual corpus of scriptural literature is vast, here too one would have to argue out ones case, and discover the intent of the sacred texts; again something recognized across various schools of Indian philosophy. ⁴² Not dismissing the arguments of the advocate, Roy confines them within a lower order set of duties or works. Sati is in this case defined as a ‘rite’—as also articulated by the advocate—which would bear enjoyment as its fruit in time. That is to say its results would not be immediately perceptible; the pain that accompanies the action is for all to see. While Roy does not deny that it would indeed bring joys in the future, and as an act it is not in itself improper, he contrasts this act to the superior acts as enjoined by the sacred texts that demand a complete absorption in God. This could only be expressed by actions that of themselves do not contain the slightest trace of a desire for gain or joy. ⁴³ It is in this way that the practice of Sati is critiqued as a merely inferior act, in itself impregnated by (worldly/other-worldly) desire. What Roy is attempting here is to distinguish between the traditions sanction for Sati and its stronger recommendation or injunction to a superior form of action which is ‘complete devotion to God’.

Here we need to look a little more closely at the lexicon being deployed and the possible historic-philosophical sources of the argument. The notion of action (karman) has historically enjoyed close intimacy with ritual. ⁴⁴ The philosophical problematic is the fact that the results of our actions are not immediately apparent. This would require a theory of ‘morality’ because not all actions which are considered moral provide for immediate pleasure or satisfaction. The most orthodox school of Vedic interpretation—the Mimamsa—believed such specifically human ‘morality’ (dharma) to be grounded in the Vedic corpus to be (interpreted as) injunctive to actions/rituals. The right interpretation of words and sentences were those that led to action (ritual) so that desirable purposes could be accomplished. ⁴⁵ The advaitin critique of Mimamsa—although accepting the Vedic corpus to be eternal and authorless—took reality/truth to be (already) accomplished and not something that could be pursued through right action/ritual based on right interpretation. ⁴⁶ According to this critique, no specific action could be undertaken so as to establish truth or achieve reality/truth, even though specific kinds of action might well result in specific forms of (conventional) pleasures such as heaven. ⁴⁷ Action with a purpose distinguishes between here-and-now and hereafter; actions produce results that are not immediately apparent, but rightly conducted actions would in time produce pleasures in the future. The counter arguments of many advaitins regarding action and result rest on misidentifying the self (‘I’) as subject/object which remains tied to actions and its results.

Interpretation of scripture, such as is seen in Roy’s writing, has to therefore be viewed as already inserted within philosophical argumentation on soteriological, ontological and epistemological issues. ⁴⁸ This is certainly one context in which to understand Roy, who often asserted his fidelity to the Advaita of Sankara and this particular advaitic mode of argumentation. For the Vedanta tradition, karma was construed as ‘three kinds: nitya or “obligatory”, naimittik or “occasional”, and “kamya” or “desiderative”’. ⁴⁹ As a kamya act, it is voluntary and so its fruits are of a secondary value if at all, and ultimately of no value. The characterization of action and results is what is germane to, and integrates, ritual and law; which is after all about treating the relationship between actions and results. Ritual and law have to assume an underlying unity that is the experience/subject of action and result. This is achieved through the idea of the ‘soul’ that underpins the unity of experience—for experience to be experience and not mere event—and the body. Without it, one could not have a theory of morality (results of actions are not immediately apparent) or moral rules that become the prototype of legality. Time experienced as sequence needs a subject to link action and result. ⁵⁰ It is the positing of intentionality at the level of soul that requires and is replicated by the demand for interpretation of a text as rule.

Such justification of the soul in such ‘reasonable’ terms as expressing a theory of law allows Roy to speak of pseudo-laws which cannot be similarly therein be justified. That is, mere practice and custom—inculcated by habit rather than reason—become a possible placeholder for erroneous and unthought-out action, habit, the darkness of being merely body-like (tamasic). This emerges at certain points in the course of debate as when the advocate after a while retreats to the initial argument about practice and custom. Here, Roy points out to the inherent incoherence of such a position since something cannot be justified by pointing to its mere existence. Murder, theft and plunder are not condoned simply because they happen; they have to be justified. ⁵¹

Examining the arguments of the Sati advocate, Roy counters that even while the shastras allow such a practice, it is allowed only if done voluntarily. It is not obligatory but a kamya act and only if one accepts it as voluntary and optional can one speak of its desirable fruits in terms of joys and sorrows. ⁵² The lack of its voluntariness can be ascertained by the practice of tying women down with bamboo and ropes which indicated coercion. Such coercion could certainly not be condoned as it would undermine the very essence of the kamya act as voluntary. The presence of force revealed this ‘rite’ to be wilful murder, an act that is and was unequivocally condemned in the strongest possible terms by the shastras, as well as every race of men. ⁵³ Thus, the nature of the subject or intentionality in law was crucial in determining the nature and import of the act; what appeared as sacred rite was in fact proved to be wilful murder. This problematic is at the heart of jurisprudence even today. ⁵⁴ However, Roy’s exposure of wilful murder as sacred rite is simultaneously a diagnosis and critique of the mindless habituation of rules and norms.

In the final exchange, the advocate shifts the debate from the nature of the shastra to the nature of women. ⁵⁵ He argues that since they were by nature given to passions, it was more than evident that with the death of their husbands they would sin thereby bringing shame on both themselves as well as the family of the husband. To pre-empt such a state of affairs, the Sati advocate says that they are taught from childhood that the virtues of Sati brought happiness and beatitude not only on themselves but also on their husbands, as well as their families. Thus, rather than being a sacred voluntary act in itself, Sati is to be construed as an anticipatory punitive measure set out in advance to correct the wayward passion of the female species. It is this patriarchal construal of female nature which finally grounds the norms and practice of the Sati. In undermining the specifically human intentionality on which the relationship between acts and results is based, the woman is denied any humanity.

After a long discussion over the shastras in the second discourse, Roy ends triumphantly by pulling the religious mask off the real interest and prejudices of his opponent-advocate. ⁵⁶ He argues that the Sati-advocate denies knowledge to the woman and then accuses her of ignorance. This is used as a lever to reveal the duplicity and oppressiveness of a society which accuses women of being given to passions, but allows and condones the same with regard to men. Once again, returning to history we are told of many women who had acquired merit, wisdom and knowledge. Thus, the problem lay not with the nature of women, but their victimization in present society even as they showed evidence of the greatest will and resolution, virtues in which they far outshine their male counterparts.

Roy thereby succeeds in bringing the woman into the centre of analysis from and through which a critique of present practice is undertaken. Not the constitution of tradition but an argument for the reasonableness necessary for its constitution. The true intentions of the advocate lay very much within the worldly ambit for which other-worldly means were co-opted. Reasoning distinguishes itself from mere condemnation by accounting for erroneous and unjust practices. This recognizably and restricted philosophical discussion on the nature of desire and embodiment is re-directed and levered in a way that would have perhaps been scarcely imaginable to this very tradition; beginning from its ‘public’ nature and its extremely specific target (a particular law). ⁵⁷

It is significant that Roy is attempting to convince the reading public as much as the colonial state that ultimately the advocate had in fact—through habit or interest—‘used’ religious doctrine as a means by which a particular social end could be pursued. Not only is such a use questioned in its very nature but this becomes a way to exhibit the fact that what passes off as religion is in fact a veil to mystify and legitimate worldly and condemnable action; condemnable even by ‘worldly standards’, deception, since action as social is subject to critique from one who desires release. It is also shown that the advocate’s advocacy of such cruel action is not simply traceable to the nature of either the advocate or the society in which he comes from. It is crucial to Roy’s enterprise to critique the present society from a vantage point that allowed the criticism to be but a temporary affliction of the particular society, not native or natural to it, for such was not always the case; and hence, the insistent referencing to the past which is a convincing way of conceiving the present otherwise. The future as non-existent cannot be a model. The past as corrective ensures that a correction has taken place. ⁵⁸ The cruelty exhibited by those who condoned the practice of Sati was one that was inculcated into them from their very childhood. ⁵⁹ It was this prejudice that had to be removed via the parameters and modes of justification recognized by the one who is prejudiced; otherwise what is taught is done so by force or through superstition.

Herein lays the function of the long and substantial discussion on scripture which is part of the ‘correction’ as pedagogic. ⁶⁰ Yet Roy innovatively and unprecedentedly uses a specific advaitin critique of desire-action that was hitherto restricted to philosophical discourse to apply it on a specific social terrain. Unprecedented was the genuinely public articulation of such a philosophical position beyond the confines of caste at the levels of institution and intellectual vocabulary. The same might be said of the concluding critique of patriarchy enabled by the advocate’s own assertions. Transformation can take place only by showing, and convincing, him and the reading public of his own contradictions expressed as hypocrisy. The discussion of scripture ineluctably moves to the critique of the rite of Sati as worldly greed and patriarchal politics.

Vested interest may result in unthinking practice and this is the sign of the loss of the reflective function within practice. ⁶¹ It is the universality of reason that also allows one to discern the universality of unthinking practice, and the destruction of the latter can only be accomplished by the employment of the former. When asked why there were few converts to Christianity, Roy answers,

The chief causes which prevent the natives of India from changing their religion are the same as are found in the numerous class of Christians who are unable to give an answer to any man that asketh the reason of the hope they possess, viz., their reliance on the sanctity of the books revealed among them as received authorities, and the variety of prejudices planted in their minds in the early part of life. ⁶²

Expressed in exemplary fashion, here is a theory of habit as inertia which is characterized irrespective of particular content and specific nature.

Religion, Native and Foreign: Rammohan Roy’s Christian Polemics ⁶³

Just as Roy in his writings on Sati, as well as other such writings pertaining to the Hindu religion, made use of reason as the medium with which to construct tradition—an operation that seemed well recognized—it is noteworthy that he performed exactly the same manoeuvre in relation to the ‘Christian Public’. It should not be left unnoticed that the controversy with the Seerampore missionaries was triggered by his ‘Appeal to a Christian Public’. Here, just as in his editions of various Hindu scriptural texts, Roy decided to perform a similar operation on Christianity. He brought out what he thought to be the essence and most important sections of the Bible, through his ‘Precepts of Jesus’. In this new edition, Roy concentrated on morality which he defined as the relations between oneself and God, as well as oneself and one’s neighbours. In his ‘public hermeneutics’ with the missionaries, Roy was undercutting one of the primary claims being made during his time. The claim that colonial rule as Christian rule was meant to educate was one of the strongest ideological justifications of rule in the early nineteenth century which was both cause and effect of the Charter Act of 1813 allowing for missionary activities and proselytization.

What perturbed the missionaries the most was the fact that Roy seemed to imply that without his editing out the dogmas, mysteries and histories, Christianity would be but a prosaic, less than marvellous, Hinduism. It is in this spirit that Roy writes,

I feel persuaded that by separating them from the other matters contained in the New Testament, the moral precepts found in that book these will be more likely to produce the desirable effect of improving the hearts and minds of men different persuations and degrees of understanding. For, historical and anti-christians, especially miraculous relations, which are much less wonderful that the fabricated tales handed down to the native of Asia* [*Agasti is famed for having swallowed the ocean when it had given him offence and having restored it by urinary evacuation: at his command, also, the Vindhia range of mountains prostrated itself and so remains], and consequently would be apt, at best, to carry little weigh with them. ⁶⁴

Here too, as in the case with Sati, reason is held to be the only means by which tradition can be recollected and established. Reason is not as mere technical operation, but the human exhibiting her humanity. The continual disputes with the missionaries seem to lie in the fact that Roy insists—to the horror of the missionaries—on the parallels between both. That is to say the misconstrued versions of both religions, as well, as the reasonableness to be found in both. The radical nature of Roy’s argument can only be measured by the stringent colonial and missionary indictment of Hindu religious practice in the subcontinent. Alleged polytheism, idol worship and fantastical mythological systems are all arraigned for repeated assault. Roy takes these very arguments and turns them back on Christianity, implicitly proclaiming that but for his own interpretation of Christianity the missionaries would be unable to distinguish themselves from their reviled targets.

In this manner, through a series of writings, he argues that the Trinitarian doctrine is but an expression of the very polytheism, allegedly characteristic of Hinduism. The worship of Christ as a God is no different from commonly critiqued Hindu idolatry, and the dogma, histories and miracles are nothing but less imaginative versions of their Hindu counterparts. In his words, the bird as the Holy Ghost impregnating the Virgin Mary would pale in comparison with the multifarious dalliances between princesses and Hindu deities, and it is the superstitious elements in both traditions that are productive of violence. In an address to polytheists, East and West each of the missionaries’ criticism of Hindu religion is shown to but reflect—and distil—their own religious practices and prejudices. Roy’s treatment is detailed, intricate and careful, and merits time and attention in equal measure.

Polytheism was a favoured term of rebuke which missionaries had throughout their history used against Hindu practices. In this context, Roy goes beyond the familiar critique of the Trinitarian doctrine as itself a sign of polytheism, which was well honed by the Islamic tradition in their interactions with Christianity. Through a close attention to the Bible and using Greek and Latin, he argues that the term ‘God’ or Lord was often used in the plural in the text. And in this case, there was no need to preserve the singularity of Christ, since Moses too was called a God, and others including Daniel were worshipped. While lord was simply a name used to mark superiority, worship was simply a mark or external sign of reverence ⁶⁵ : well in the horizon of the advaitic critique of a deity yet all the same a distinct echo of a certain form of Biblical criticism that could be traced to Hobbes and Spinoza. Referring to the desire of the person, it was not an adequate predicate of a really existing being. ⁶⁶ Explicating the philosophical problematic, Roy therefore argues that the error of polytheism was not necessarily evident if the term god was used in the plural, but rather consisted in confusing—or conflating—the determinate being of the Son (Christ) as the Father (universal Supreme Being).

The very term son indicated Jesus’s created nature and in this sense expressed his inferiority and limitation; it could not adequately signify the supreme being. ⁶⁷ The confusion of the Trinitarian doctrine lay in the assertion of one god in three persons: in the proposition and not in the use of the plural as part of conventional language use. The unusual and arbitrary conflation of conceptualization (unity as an act of unifying presupposing itself in the latter) and existing-determinacy (things that are [unitarily] conceptualized as distinct and plural) is unreasonable since the determined (the number three as standing for three distinct things) does not reveal—and cannot subtract from itself—the principle of determination (unity as the operation through which any number identifies itself). ⁶⁸ The unity of God could in fact be expressed as any number whether three or three million, but if its expressibility were to be confined to number (three and not three million), it would itself be indistinguishable from the determined (three), loosing its conceptually determining nature and ending up as an idol. Here, we have the erasure of the distinction between Christian and Hindu forms of worship where the vulgar believed in God as being numbered (whether three or three million), and the true believer believed in the unity of God, making the difference between Christian and Hindu indiscernible. If the Christian argument insisted on particularizing, designating, or sequestering the principle of unity to a determinate being (Christ), then it could no longer be distinguished from the Hindu worship of its own deities—whether they be Ram or Thakurta. ⁶⁹ Such reification could only be the sedimentation of habit and tradition and/or the symptom-site valorized in the course of a pursuit of worldly interest. The historical record was replete with resultant violence.

Roy ups the ante by arguing that Western Christians did not understand their own originally ‘Asiatic’ traditions since they were at a loss to understand the ‘proper sense of metaphor’. Thus, they took literally what was in fact allegorical. It was indeed the pagan infiltration into and refashioning of Christianity that attenuated the polytheistic tendency as this conformed to European sensibilities. In contrast, one sees a complete absence of this in Islam, which had no such inheritance. The introduction of dogma and the mysteries however were not simply innocent expressions of a conceptual nature but rather themselves both the causes as well as the results of worldly interests and political power. On these issues were staked the ‘wars and bloodshed’ that Europe had witnessed and inflicted on herself time and again. And it is in this context that Roy’s of ‘edition’ of Christianity performs the excision of what are taken to be the roots of conflict and error: the dogmas, mysteries and histories. What refuses to submit to the reflective principle—the essence that is human reason—and at the same time enjoins particular action can be surely in turn explained by analysis. Thus, to understand Christ as someone special who could take on the sins of the world—militating against avowed principles of equity and equality—is merely the mark of a fetish which authenticates a dogmatism that can find itself in the mere assertion of identity as superior. This finds clear substantiation in Roy’s own Christian interlocutors who merely assert their Christianity in terms of a bio-genetic and historical heritage (‘the faith of my ancestors’ ⁷⁰ ) rather than reason. There is also a sharp echo with the argument for the Sati who too was meant to save not only herself but also her husband and family. The analysis, real basis, of this argument regarding rite as (social) interest/habit has already been alluded to.

History and number are remainders of the same mis-construal. Being numbered and being designated as past masks the activity of numbering and recollecting. Quantity is a primary qualifier of the object since what exists can be counted just as what is proposed to exist is best defended by a qualifying history putatively its very own. Yet existence itself requires identification—the individualizing specification of a universal—a requirement that all the same distinguishes the existent-object and God. For God is not an object, un-predicable and therefore incomprehensible, ⁷¹ and as such it cannot direct a particular course of action. This is paradoxically a characteristic of reason itself—as distinct from fact or object; its indefinite border is what allows operation through what already is presumed existent (faith). Roy can argue that the divine has no attributes and what is attributed to him is but what we take to be good, and therefore a sign of our own reverence and good faith. To insist on the un-objective yet really existing nature of God as that from which reason and nature begin also means that the real nature of any entity—as it appears, whether a leaf or an animal—has as its penumbra the unknown and the unknowable. Such a state of affairs allows for reason and debate. The unity of God is the unity of man—his ‘humanism’—whose characteristic feature is reasoning. ⁷² Such a unity is to be believed as universal (in all places and times) yet differentiated in expression across history and geography and breaking up into culture(s). From the belief in the unity of God, the next insistent need is justice, or the idea of a subject and experience, action and result. Its particular organization shapes a particular body politic or society. Rewards and punishments, their rationale and their means of achievement are the distinguishing marks of culture (laws and customs). The source—and justification—as universal is the nexus between reason and God which allows for the possibility of interpreting specific differences as but variations of the same problematic.

All Are False, All Are True: The Theoretical Grounding in the Tuhfat al-muwahhiddin

In this penultimate section, we study Rammohan Roy’s first published work in Persian (with an introduction in Arabic) to make the argument that his detailed exegetical-cum-hermeneutic strategies in dealing the religious texts of Hinduism and Christianity followed from here. ⁷³ Roy spoke of both the falsity and truth that is germane to all religions. Finding that everywhere one went ⁷⁴ one noticed the belief in one God yet, at the same time, attributions and the rules regarding the right path differed from region to region and people to people. A universal human nature (the agreement and unity on there being but one God), thereby took very specific forms in different conditions (the specific commands and prohibitions as well as their legitimating apparatus that included God’s attributes as well as the ‘impossibles’ found in fabulous stores attached to religion). Belief in one god and human nature—called absolute belief ⁷⁵ —is itself reasonable since it is universal.

This universal belief simultaneously accounts for the experience of the world whose beauty and order speak to and of its design. The fact that it is designed does not necessarily tell us what precisely its design consists of, but that there is a design that should be accepted as a belief. This is because disbelieving in the world’s design would mean the dismemberment of experience which assumes a cognizable consistency. The arguments above including the one about reason and design do not need to be related to contemporaneous arguments in the West and may well be found, among other places, in Sankara’s critique of the Sankhya notion of pradhana where it is argued that the world cannot emerge without a cognizing principle of regulation. ⁷⁶

From this fundamental belief in design and human nature, a second order reasoning emerges which will necessarily be conflictual (diverse), changing from condition to condition. To (reasonably) be established, they will have to give up their existing emplaced identity and return to the principle that establishes them. Difference will remain different if they abandoned their reasoned principle of establishment resulting in custom or a second-order unreflexive faith; to be opposed to the fundamental faith in the world and reason that allows for the engagement across differences. As custom and habit, groups and collectivities are inculcated to accept certain kinds of actions and laws which derive their identity from their mere existence rather than reason.

The fact that there are divergences—different nations and customs and laws—is not merely so but itself the result of humans in their natural sociality; men are indisputably social beings, says Roy. This ineluctably unfolds into the need for marking the distinctions between persons, their property and rights: in a world wherein they are secured. Man and sociality is that from which is inferred the doctrine of the soul; actions and their results (as rewards and punishments) which maintain their consistency in the positing of a hereafter. ⁷⁷ Reward and punishment, and the necessity for such a peculiarly human ordering endow such teachings with an added force. The bare necessities, in their turn, unfold into a plethora of commands that compose the everyday life of the believer. Originating from reasoned belief (or believed reason) action becomes habit, a distinction that has lost its purpose. Now believing in a fabulous story, religious dogmas and divine commands can turn into violence against whom one no longer identifies; humanity thus dismembered amounts to the loss of reason.

The very fact that there are different religions, that is customary practices and laws, reveal themselves to be mere facts and not the (universal) truths of reason. As there exists no criteria apart from the different religions to evaluate each other, the fact that they exist as specific to time and place—for how else to preserve their identity in distinction—only speaks to their falsity. These differences are traceable to the founders of different religions. Roy argues that if in fact these religious founders had direct access to the divine, it cannot be reasonably maintained that only they were privileged in such a fashion because human nature is such that each and everyone has and can in reason discover God. On the other hand, if the founders were enlightened and taught through an intermediary, one cannot reasonably ascertain where the chain of intermediaries start or end, leading to an uncertainty as to what constitutes true religion.

A belief in God has to in turn speak to his reasonableness which requires current illumination and not reference detached and free from the present establishment. To justify specific action in terms of such reference to divinity—as his essential unknowableness—would eradicate the distinction between the possible and the impossible. Thus, each and every doctrine would have to be ratified and grounded at each and every instance and cannot get away by a reference to God: this will be witnessed in the debates regarding Sati as grounded in the shastras. While it would be reasonable to accept the limitation of our understanding of an occurrence (or a thing), this is different from the argument of the latter in that it does not initiate any action. Indexing action to God, on the other hand, has led to violence and can lead to the same. At the same time, such referencing but succeeds in erasing the distinction between the possible and the impossible because they are conjoined in their incomprehensibility and the ascertaining of anything would no longer be possible (or impossible). What are perceived as miracles may simply be understood to be signs of human limitation, and cannot be attributed to God, since if the attribution underlines its incomprehensibility there can be no ratio to the attributing; allowing it to attach to anything in any event.

In fact, miracles only help the founder of a particular religion to instil the second order beliefs—the first order absolute belief being a belief in God—in relation to the particular religion. Their purposes are thus in fact worldly and related to the (particular) power politics of (particular) historical affairs. It is the expressivity of religion that Roy sketches out quite forcefully, using the first order belief as the vacant negative standpoint from which to test unreasonable, unreflexive practices, that is, customs and mores. There is an interesting critique of one version of the Pascal’s wager argument, already one might add, to be found in Kumarilla Bhatta. ⁷⁸ That one acts to achieve heaven—one calculates that one has nothing to lose in acting so because if there was indeed no heaven one still does not loose—does not give us any insight into the nature of action or the nature of right action. The (pseudo-) argument of the wager is unconvincing because as belief, religion is not simply an abstract affirmation but also has real consequences in the world; violence and oppression is not only possible but also highly probable given the historical record of the so-called religion. ⁷⁹ What religion says about itself when it says it has its object in the other world cannot be merely believed. When tested, it might be found to be but a mask for that which is very much part of this world. On the other hand, the fact that different religions—holding contradictory doctrines—can employ the same wager argument speaks to its essential meaninglessness. Later in life Roy, as detailed above in the polemics with Hindus and Christians, will persist in exposing this worldly secular nature of what masks itself as religion while retaining the truth that religion may well indeed, if interpreted correctly, reveal.

Public Hermeneutics: Reason as Constituting the Universal Scope of the Social ⁸⁰

Even though British rule in India never ceased using the argument of conquest as a source of their rule, the nineteenth century often witnessed arguments basing rule on the need for moral improvement; itself closely linked to proselytization. A close historical—as opposed to anachronistic look at Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries belie claims to—individual rights or equality, values which were not institutionally recognized even in the British Isles let alone the imperial setting. ⁸¹ To look at the period historically is also to recognize the relationship between religion and reason. One needs to trace and track their entwinement not merely at the level of argument and discourse but also to see such entwinement as constitutive of law in Europe as much as in India in differentiated ways. While Roy considered himself a British subject, he also considered himself free to critique East India Company policies, the missionaries as well as Brahmins and their collusion with colonial legal institutions. In doing so, there is a radical edge not only to the substantive content of his writings but also in their form. In substantive terms, it exposes the fact that contemporary controversies in jurisprudence continue to exhibit the philosophical conundrums that were articulated in religious traditions. Such as the relationship between action and their results and the contrast between the contemporary juridical individualization of the criminal in the face of the fact that human actions cannot but be interpreted as social. Also, it is in line with human nature to correct through the use of reason rather than through command or law. In terms of form, one must emphasize that Roy’s public hermeneutics was a deliberate exercise so as to constitute the tradition as a self-reflexive praxis as much as to constitute a site from which to rationally critique Company governance.

Roy’s contribution has been obfuscated by anachronism of various kinds. Notwithstanding the term Enlightenment, few if any, Christian or ‘Deist’ thinkers were able to simultaneously critique their own tradition alongside a critique and recuperation of the ‘truth’ of another tradition as Roy did with ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Christianity’. Voltaire believed that only the Christian could be truly tolerant, and what Hegel thought of religions other than Christianity is too well known to be told. ⁸² Roy, in contrast, directly engaged with different traditions and rather than merely assert an abstract universality over and above particulars, he attempted to establish such a universality through showing that the critical investigation of each and every particular yielded the universal in the form of the ability to subject existing law and custom to reason. Thus, the identity of a society could be formulated in terms of its public identity which was the site where reason had to establish, defend and re-articulate norms and law; without the touchstone of the social, reason could very well lose its value. ⁸³ This would be a recognition of the fact that laws as they exist are implicitly a species of command, but can ultimately find their value only through the touchstone of reason. By assuming a priori that humans in modern societies directly acquiesce to laws’ contemporary jurisprudence gives less importance to the thorny issues of how societies are themselves formed or how such acquiesce might itself be an ideological effect. ⁸⁴

For and in his times, there is no more spectacular evidence of his use of reason to challenge social presuppositions across the British Empire than the process of ‘editing’ scripture, whether Christian or Hindu. There can be no other rationale for his fundamental departure from traditional Hindu scriptures (for instance in adhikarabheda and caste ⁸⁵ ) as well as his ability to recognize what he saw as the benefits of modern education from Europe, ⁸⁶ most unlike those figures who were to follow him, beginning from Dayanand Saraswati. ⁸⁷ His overt critique of tradition and his aligning of interpretation with a form of ‘constructive constituting’ allowed him to escape from the burden of any kind of apologetics that became so pronounced in a later time. Simultaneously, his deep engagement with the tradition also allowed for radical critique. One witnesses a hermeneutics that has given way neither to historicist evolutionism nor Romanticist nostalgia and thus can truly recognize and correct the other within oneself (‘tradition’) as much as the other that can be realized as oneself (‘Christian’). ⁸⁸ In this powerful articulation of the scope of universality through rigorous engagement, Roy sheds light on his times that has all too often been obscured by a priori definitions of religion, law and the state. In ignoring their inextricably tangled existence, and reasoned employment in Roy, we risk draining the historical and conceptual complexity that marks the making of these categories; allowing easy narratives about the ‘rise of the West’, the capture of emptied concepts whether of law or secularism and the strained imitations of non-Western nationalistic apologetics. In reading Roy, we have a glimpse of a universalist horizon at the emergence of the crushing logic of the imperial nation-state.