What was the shape of interfaith encounters between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries in South Asia?
In this online seminar, convenors Dr Ankur Barua & Dr Anindya Purakayastha bring together doctoral students and established academics working on different aspects of the religious history of South Asia to explore the writings of thinkers who operated “in between” Indic and European idioms between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Use the menu below to view abstracts for each paper. This event is free and open to all. Registration essential.
To register, please complete the web form (via Microsoft Forms).
This seminar is free to attend and will take place wholly online.
Published times are in British Summer Time (BST; UTC+1).
There will be a break from 12:35 to 13:30 BST. A detailed schedule is given at the end of this page.
Brahmabandhab Upadhyay’s faith and the making of Indian nationalism
Amid the gathering momentum of nationalist mass movements in the first decade of the twentieth century, the necessity of maintaining a public and inalienable Hindu identity in politics—as opposed to Christian faith in salvation—resulted in a crisis of the soul. This crisis played out in the context of the radical nationalist politics of the swadeshi movement in the life of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–1907).
Brahmabandhab had converted to Catholicism but maintained a public identity as a Hindu nationalist. In his varied careers as social reformer, political radical, heretic theologian denounced by the Catholic Church, and revolutionary against the British government, he embodied the tensions wrought by religious identity within the context of developing political discourses of Indian nationalism. His life was riven in half—he publicly performed the role of a Hindu ascetic, wrote rousing apologetic editorials and articles espousing armed extremism against the British administration, and inspired the Bengali revolutionary violence of the Swadeshi era, but he was also a deeply private and devout Catholic Christian.
Upadhyay’s intellect, apologetic political ideology, and enigmatic life fascinated his contemporaries, including the polymath and future Nobel Prize recipient Rabindranath Tagore and the veteran Indian Congress politician Bipin Chandra Pal. Yet, the erasure of his memory from the narrative of nationalist historiography—and the many attempts to appropriate the legacy of this elusive man—point to a collective failure to resolve the ways in which an individual’s privately held religious beliefs affected their political, legal, and social belonging within the imagined community of the Indian nation.
Orientalist texts in Urdu’s print economy
The rise of the Urdu commercial press in the late nineteenth century opened new avenues for framing authority in everyday print. A pressman’s ability to translate and report multilingual sources on a single page helped establish his “expertise” over global flows of news and information, especially European views on Islam and Muslim governance.
Urdu markets were soon flush with translations of Orientalist scholars like Henry Stubbe, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Armin Vambéry, and EF Knight. These translations were often accompanied by paratext—prefaces, footnotes, and appendices—through which Urdu writers could validate, recalibrate or critique Orientalist narratives on their own terms.
This presentation focuses on the prolific translation activities of journalist and entrepreneur Maulvi Inshaullah, who both competed and collaborated with Orientalist scholarship to familiarize Urdu readers with the norms of what Ulrike Stark calls “modern informational culture.” Inshaullah frequently disrupted East–West binaries and often relied on favourable Orientalist voices to counter Arab interlocutors on politically contentious issues, such as the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
I argue that the translation of Orientalist writings into Urdu was a process that simultaneously secularized Islamic knowledge and globalized South Asian Muslim publics.
The Hindu lives of Sister Nivedita and CF Andrews
Looking back at Britons, Europeans, and Americans who wrote about India and inhabited the land’s socioreligious milieus during the timeframe of 1800 and 1950, how should we envision them today?
According to a ruling idea, we should summarily dismiss all of them as a group of Orientalists who, from their normatively white and West-centered standpoints, viewed India as the perennial heart of darkness. I agree with this scholarly estimate to some extent—but not entirely.
Margaret Elizabeth Noble (Sister Nivedita) (1867–1911) and Charles Freer Andrews (1871–1940) were able to develop experientially sensitive and conceptually sophisticated understandings of Hindu sociocultural streams (even) against the backdrop of empire. From their interstitial locations, these pioneers can speak to us in our own engagements across interfaith boundaries: they lived elsewhere even as they remained rooted to their distinctive origins.
The Medicus Malabaricus of 1712
The missionary Johann Ernst Gründler (1677–1720), who was active in Tharangambadi in South India as part of the Danish-Halle Mission, collected, translated, selected and compiled medical and pharmaceutical knowledge from various sources in close collaboration with an Indian scribe as well as a Brahmin. The result is a manuscript entitled Medicus Malabaricus (1712), which is preserved in the archives of the Francke Foundations in Halle.
For the understanding of the text and its placement in a culture of knowledge circulation in colonial contexts, the analysis and understanding of the procedures of knowledge generation is central. In particular, this raises the question of the contribution of the Indian actors to the manuscript.
The missionary’s goal was to publish the text in Halle. This plan was not realized. The manuscript remained relatively obscure for a long time. During the past two decades it has been mentioned or used in a couple of articles by different authors. However, no in-depth research on the manuscript has been carried out so far.
The presentation will illustrate a project with the goal of developing a research application for a contextualized digital edition at the Francke Foundations’ Research Centre.
The philosophy and science of transcendence and limits in JC Bose’s instrumentality
An often-asserted dimension of JC Bose’s (1858–1937) phenomenally innovative work is the seamless mixing of demonstrative science with Indian philosophical deductions. I shall analyze a specific aspect of such organicity of indigenous ideas and contemporary science, by arguing that Bose was imagining a science and philosophy of universality—connecting organic and inorganic life—despite and also enabled by bodily and national limits.
Bose engaged in the highly original minute manual construction of apparatuses for his electromagnetic radiowave and plant research, in the smallest possible available space, and with the aid of an illiterate tinsmith. These instruments were subsequently deemed by scientists all over the world as possessing remarkable sensitivity and precision. They achieved immense demonstrative magnitudes: reducing Hertzian electromagnetic waves to an unprecedented miniscule level of 50,000 million vibrations per second, and calculating moment-to-moment imperceptible plant movements to 10 million times in less than a second.
Bose posited these achievements in perfect extremes as transcending the limited bodies of both the handmade small instruments with which to anticipate the smallest and the largest ether wave potentials, and the sensory body whose frontiers were extended to extrasensory wave-fields; and also the colonized situation which derived hope towards political and spiritual autonomy through the use of ‘Indian hands’ and their deft craftsmanship. Modern appropriations of Vedantic discourses on instrumentality and the hands, much like Kantian understandings of manuality, help to analyze the ways in which Bose’s equipment stretched immanent limits towards scientific, philosophical and political transcendence.
The Purāṇas in seventeenth-century England
By far the earliest substantial translation of a Sanskrit text into English is a version of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa made by an East India Company factor, John Marshall (1642–1677), and a Bengali Brahmin, Madhusūdhana. Although they worked from a written Sanskrit text, Marshall’s English rendering of the Purāṇa was produced from an oral Hindustani translation by Madhusūdhana.
Their text deviates substantially from the received Sanskrit text of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. It includes, for instance, a much longer rendering of the story of the Rāmāyaṇa—occupying more than a tenth of the manuscript—and reflects elements found in Bengali retellings of the epics and Purāṇas, including those which delight in grāmyatā, “villageness” or vulgarity. Nevertheless, the bulk of Marshall and Madhusūdhana’s text consists of an extended account of the first sixty-eight chapters, in order, of the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
Although left unfinished at Marshall’s sudden death, in accordance with his will his manuscripts were sent to his former teachers in Cambridge, Henry More and John Covel. Covel declined John Locke’s invitation to arrange publication of the Purāṇa, but Marshall’s works appear to have provoked some engagement with Hindu texts in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Thomas Hyde saw another manuscript of the Purāṇa in London and it may also have been seen by John Toland.
It seems likely that Marshall’s works inspired efforts by scholars connected with the Royal Society to obtain Indian manuscripts. As a result, a series of works, mostly versions of material from the Indian epics, in Telugu, were sent to Oxford where they remain in the Bodleian Library.
This paper will examine the translation and the circumstances of its production, and explore the extent of its influence among the latitude men and freethinkers of late seventeenth-century England.
11:00 Opening remarks
Dr Anindya Purkayastha
Invited lectures (30 minutes each, including discussion)
11:05 The Purāṇas in seventeenth-century England
Will Sweetman, University of Otago
11:35 The philosophy and science of transcendence and limits in JC Bose’s instrumentality
Sukanya Sarbadhikary, Presidency University
12:05 The Medicus Malabaricus of 1712
Holger Zaunstöck, Franckesche Stiftungen and Martin Luther University, Halle Wittenberg
12:35 Breaktime — lectures will resume at 13:30
13:30 The other face of Orientalism: the Hindu lives of Sister Nivedita and CF Andrews
Ankur Barua, University of Cambridge
14:00 An elusive patriot: Brahmabandhab Upadhyay’s faith and the making of Indian nationalism
Mou Banerjee, University of Wisconsin-Madison
14:30 Relocating authority: Orientalist texts in Urdu’s print economy
Sumaira Nawaz, McGill University
15:00 Concluding remarks
A PDF flyer including the schedule can be downloaded below.
