Imagining Hinduism by Sugirtharajah Sharada

Author:Sugirtharajah, Sharada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

Ward’s text is replete with a series of negations in terms of which Hinduism is represented. Hinduism is made to signify nothing; its texts, beliefs, and practices are all stripped of their meanings. For Ward and his Baptist colleagues (Carey and Marshman), Hinduism is to be purged of what they see as its numerous evils such as idol worship, caste, satῑ, polygamy, child-marriage, infanticide, and so on. Hindu beliefs and practices belong to a different order of reality and the source of these practices is to be found in their texts. Hinduism needs to be exorcised of its demonic powers and this can only be done by introducing the Gospel to the heathens. Ward constructs the notion of an eternally “degraded India” which requires the moral and virtuous influence of Britain. As with orientalists and missionaries of the time, Ward, too, considers British rule as a sign of divine providence:

It must have been to accomplish some very important moral change in the Eastern world, that so vast an empire as is comprized in British India, containing nearly One Hundred Millions of people, should have been placed under the dominion of one of the smallest portions of the civilized world … This opinion, which is entertained unquestionably by every enlightened philanthropist, is greatly strengthened when we consider the long-degraded state of India … the moral enterprise of the age in which these countries have been given to us, and that Great Britain is the only country upon earth, from which the intellectual and moral improvement of India could have been expected. All these combined circumstances surely carry us to the persuasion, that Divine Providence has, at this period of the world, some great good to confer on the East.

(Ward 1820a: xvii–xviii)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.