SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, 2016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2016.1260353

MONOGRAPH ARTICLE

Idolatry: concept and metaphor in colonial representations

of India
Swagato Ganguly
Independent Researcher

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay argues that ‘idolatry’ and the discourse surrounding it played a Polytheism; imagination;
seminal role in thinking India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – ideas; colonial state;
similar to the role played by ‘fetishism’ in Enlightenment constructions of civilizing mission
African societies. Both concepts stress the inappropriateness of material
entities as loci of spiritual and devotional activity. Both concepts were linked
to the idea of superstition (superstitio), which in its traditional Latin sense
referred to the kind of religious subjectivity which produced exaggerated or
excessive, hence superfluous, cult practices. As repetitive, material practices,
the latter could be placed on the same continuum as material objects, hence
adjudged inappropriate media for spiritual activity. In exploring these con-
cepts and their deployment with reference to colonial India, this essay aims to
be a study of mentalities, of etymologies, of subconscious influences and
indeterminacies, of subterranean linguistic echoes that framed the colonial
outlook. In the context of colonial Indian society, the idolater’s lack of an
autonomous subjectivity made him unable to control and govern himself, as
he was liable to be held in thrall by manipulating the powers of his imagina-
tion. Just as the African fetishist’s belief in the power of things made him
seem thing-like himself, and rendered the trade in slaves permissible, the
idolater’s situation required the intervention of an external rational power to
govern him wisely and rescue him from his own idolatry. The social ‘civilizing
mission’ could be recast in terms of a battle against idolatry.

1. Introduction
Platonism must take pride of place over “fabulous” theology, with its titillation of impious minds by
rehearsing the scandals of the gods, and over civil theology, where, unclean demons posing as gods, have
seduced the crowds who are wedded to earthly joys
− St. Augustine/City of God 1.8.5

‘Of all them blackfaced crew

The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din!

‘Hi! Slippy hitherao

‘Water, get it! Panee lao,
‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’

Though I’ve belted you and flayed you

By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’
− Rudyard Kipling/Gunga Din

CONTACT Swagato Ganguly swagato.ganguly@gmail.com

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. GANGULY

In the popular and widely acclaimed 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, directed by
Steven Spielberg, the Hindu priest Mola Ram rips the heart out of his living victims, offered as
human sacrifices to a grotesque and decaying idol of Kali Ma (Kali the Mother). Curiously enough
the victim shown to be sacrificed to the goddess Kali is still alive without a heart, and appears
unharmed as he looks on with fascination at his beating heart held in the priest’s hand. The
underground Temple of Doom where a vampire-like worship flourishes is redolent of death and
decay; scattered among its antechambers are idols, or images of false gods.1
In dark mines attached to the temple young boys are held and forced to work, in conditions
that appear closer to American slavery than any Indian social practice. As Indiana Jones helps the
young slaves escape into the light of day from the subterranean chambers of the Temple of Doom,
their escape is aided by the arrival of colonial troops who, under the command of a British officer,
proceed to shoot down their native pursuers.
Where does Hollywood derive this repertoire of images from, and what is the structure of
signification that holds them up? What narratives of identity and subjectivity, self and other do they
rely on? What is the prehistory of the notion of idolatry in the context of colonial India? To what
extent are these images and narratives a commentary on the notion of the image itself, the role
played by it in representation, the fascination exercised by it? And is there a line that connects such
narratives to cataclysmic events a few years later, such as the dynamiting of giant Buddha figures by
the Taliban in Bamiyan, Afghanistan over several weeks in March 2001, or the demolition of the
Temple of Baalshamin by Islamic State forces in Palmyra, Syria in August 2015?2
An answer to these questions would need to unpack ‘idolatry’ as a concept-metaphor; one way
to do so is to explore its deployment in colonial representations of India, where the mythical
Temple of Doom of the Indiana Jones movie is located. While a history of the concept would trace
it to the Old and New Testaments as well as to the ‘origin of western metaphysics’ in Plato’s
splitting of eidos (form, idea) from eidolon (image, representation), this essay is an examination of
how it functioned in colonial Indian contexts, where it indicated a kind of delusional mentality
opposed to Enlightenment values, thought to be characteristic of Indian society and religion.
From the biblical conception of false gods, ‘idolatry’ came to designate in the Indian context a
flawed cognitive apparatus overdetermined by images, a weakness of reason which bedevilled the
subjects of colonial rule, thus legitimizing the latter’s ‘civilizing mission’ of upholding enlight-
enment and emancipatory values in a hostile environment.
Idolatry did not necessarily cover all that was irrational about Indian society. But it stood as a
figure for that irrationality, even as it took a stab at explaining how all that irrationality and false
cognition – the Other of calm Enlightenment ratiocination – came about. Idolatry was not so
much an outcome of Indian irrationality of which there could be many manifestations such as
caste or the immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre; rather, idolatry was the origin
and sufficient causal explanation of such irrationality.
William Pietz has described how a concept of the ‘fetish’ first arose out of cross-cultural
interactions on the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From
‘fetish’ came the theoretical term ‘fetishism’ which gained widespread currency among European
Enlightenment intellectuals in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. According to this
conception, ‘fetishism’ was a system of religious delusion which provided the central institutional
axis of African religion and society, and to which their perceived anomalies could be attributed.
The term designated a state of mind consisting of a perverse overvaluation of ‘things’, to which
could be accorded a ‘religious, aesthetic, sexual, or social value … (i.e., any value not expressing
the material object’s “real” instrumental and market values)’.3 Ruled by a principle of chance
conjunction between things, arbitrary fancy and a capricious imagination informed institutions
and mentalities in Africa, guaranteeing misguided, miscreating societies.
The state of superstitious delusion which resulted, while inhibiting natural reason and rational
market activity, added greatly to the power of ‘fetish priests’ who, while themselves enlightened,
were hypocritical and promoted falsehood in the rest of the populace. Africans’ attachment and
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 3

devotion to things enabled a large measure of sensuality and promiscuity in African society.
Ultimately, it degraded them to the level of things rather than subjects, which made the taking of
African slaves permissible.4
This essay argues that ‘idolatry’ and the discourse surrounding it played a seminal role in
thinking India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – similar to the role played by
‘fetishism’ in Enlightenment constructions of African societies. While Pietz makes a conceptual
distinction between idolatry and fetishism, from my point of view it is the correspondence
between the two concepts, which sometimes causes them to be used interchangeably for each
other, that is striking.
According to Pietz, while the ‘idol’ is a freestanding statue of an anthropomorphic type, the
‘fetish’ is an object generally worn about the body, which embodies special powers resulting from
specific ritual combinations of materials. Pietz also notes, however, that in early Portuguese travel
accounts the distinct but paired terms idolatria and feiticaria are used to characterize the super-
stitious practices of black African societies.5
Both concepts stress the inappropriateness of material entities as loci of spiritual and devo-
tional activity. Both concepts were linked to the idea of superstition (superstitio), which in its
traditional Latin sense referred to the kind of religious subjectivity which produced exaggerated or
excessive, hence superfluous, cult practices.6 As repetitive, material practices, the latter could be
placed on the same continuum as material objects, hence adjudged inappropriate media for
spiritual activity. In exploring these concepts and their deployment with respect to colonial
India, this essay aims to be a study of mentalities, of etymologies, of subconscious influences
and indeterminacies, of subterranean linguistic echoes that framed the colonial outlook.
Both idolatry and fetishism were linked to the idea of spiritual fraud, exercised by ‘fetish
priests’ in Africa or by Brahmin priests, themselves enlightened about natural causality, in
India. Thus, the Reverend William Ward, an English missionary associated with the Serampore
Mission in Bengal, wrote that ‘idolatry is often … the exciting cause of the most abominable
frauds’; while according to the Abbé J.A. Dubois, a French missionary who proselytized in the
Madras Presidency and the Deccan, ‘there is no trick which the Brahmins will not employ in
order to excite the fervour of their worshippers, and thus to enrich themselves by their
offerings’.7
The word ‘idolatry’ is derived from a combination of the Greek words eidolon, signifying
‘image, phantom, idea, fancy, likeness, imitation, figure of a person or thing, especially a statue’
and latreia, meaning ‘service, worship’. Eidolon, in turn, is derived from eidos, meaning ‘form,
shape’.8 Although the senses of eidos and eidolon overlap significantly, Platonic philosophy leads
to a disjunction between them. The cognate words eidos and idea are used by Plato interchange-
ably to denote the Platonic Form or Idea.9 An eidolon becomes a corrupt, mutable, degraded copy,
inferior to the eternal world of ideas from which it is derived.10
While the Judeo-Christian God, like the Platonic Idea, is immaterial and immutable, ‘idol’
within Judeo-Christian theology comes to designate a false god that is a fabricated, material
entity.11 The idol’s materiality, its proneness to change, decay and disintegration, is a crucial
indicator of its falsity.12 Thus, paintings of the Christian Gothic period depicted idols in the very
process of material disintegration, and representations of idols during this period were suggestive
of the decay and putrefaction of the human body.13
India has been associated with the worship of idols since the days of Marco Polo.14 When
Indiana Jones – Marco Polo’s modern successor – visits India, he finds the gloomy idol-filled
chambers of the Temple of Doom, teeming with bats, insects, worms, skulls, and instruments of
human sacrifice, to be redolent of decay, corruption, and death. The priest Mola Ram, master of
idolatrous ceremonies, proclaims as his objective the overthrow of the Judeo-Christian God: ‘the
Hebrew God will fall. And then the Christian God will be cast down and forgotten. Soon Kali Ma
will rule the world’.
4 S. GANGULY

Thus, the opposition between true and false gods continues in contemporary times. Indiana
Jones’s release of the chained prisoners from the underground Temple of Doom into a world of
broad daylight cannot but suggest Plato’s parable of the philosopher’s ascent from the cave, whose
bound prisoners are trapped in a world of shadowy images, into the sunlight. The film may thus
be read as an allegory of enlightenment, with Indiana Jones delivering the prisoners of the Temple
of Doom from the visions of horror which hold them in thrall. Unlike the denizens of the cave,
the philosopher can apprehend ideas in the sense of mental entities that are eternal universals (Gk.
Eidos/idea), as opposed to mutable and unstable images (Gk. Eidolons).15
Words adopted in modern European languages from the Greek root idea reflected its devel-
oped Platonic signification of mental entities (albeit somewhat subjectivized). Alternative senses of
the word close to that of eidolon were available, however, in the English of the sixteenth century
and later, such as ‘figure, image, representation, likeness, “picture” (of something)’.16 Idea and
eidos are also cognate with the Greek and Latin words for ‘see’, thus linking them to the world of
mutable appearance rather than essence.17 Plato’s divorce between ‘idea’ and ‘image’ was, how-
ever, carried over by St. Augustine into Christianity as a distinction between the ‘intelligible’ and
the ‘sensible’, the former of which was to be preferred over the latter.18 The Christian opposition
between faith and idolatry stressed that the former had nothing to do with the sensible world,
giving rise to the dictum that ‘faith is the virtue by which we believe in that which we do not
see’.19
When the word ‘ideology’ was first used by Enlightenment ‘ideologues’, they reinscribed the
same opposition using ‘ideology’ in a sense that was opposed to the ‘idolatry’ of the superstitious
past, and that stressed the superiority of ‘ideas’ over ‘images’ as instruments of thought.20
Linguistic theory restated the split between idea and image as that between the ‘signified’ and
the ‘signifier’, which Jacques Derrida locates as the founding gesture of ‘western metaphysics’:
The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the
great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated
way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of
Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain the convenience of
the ‘scientific truth’ of the Stoic and later medieval opposition between signans and signatum without also
bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots. To these roots adheres the distinction between sensible
and intelligible – already a great deal – with all that it controls, namely metaphysics in its totality.21

Controlled by the protocols of ‘western metaphysics’, the discourses of revelation and of reason
both seek to bypass the signifier, and thus ‘somehow transcend all falsifications of image’.22 They
presuppose a transcendental subject whose sources of illumination are wholly ‘inside’. By contrast,
the idolater is subject to mediation and control by the external image.
In the figure of the idolater, the ideal of the autonomously determined self is transgressed. This
points to an area of convergence with fetishism: Pietz shows how the autonomously determined
self is also subverted in the instance of the fetishist, who treats the self as necessarily embodied.23
The distinction between idols and fetishes may be reformulated in terms of the semiotic theory of
C.S. Peirce as the difference between ‘iconic’ and ‘indexical’ signs.24 However, both idolatry and
fetishism retain a sense of the immanence of the signified in the signifier, thus subverting the
search for a ‘transcendental signified’ in monotheistic religions.25
According to Pietz, ‘the discourse of fetishism represents the emerging articulation of a
theoretical materialism quite incompatible and in conflict with the philosophical tradition’.26 A
similar claim could be made for idolatry, which was historically perceived as enjoying an affinity
with materialism. Thus, the Italian Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, in a seventeenth century Latin treatise
on Indian religion entitled Informatio de quibusdam maribus nationis indicae, included among
Indian idolaters not only Shaivas, Vaishnavas, and Shaktas (classed among ‘Hindu’ sects) but also
materialists (‘Logaides’ or lokayatikas, ‘who say that God is nothing but the elements’).27 After
30 years of missionary work in India, the Abbé Dubois concluded that the undermining of Indian
idolatry would lead not to Christianity, but to atheism and materialism.28
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 5

Idolatry was also seen as related to polytheism. From a monotheistic point of view, claims
about many gods would ipso facto imply their falsity. Apart from this, since idolatry harbours a
belief in a divinity embodied in nature rather than a wholly spiritual divinity transcending nature,
the multiplicity of nature suggests a multiplicity of gods.29 If idolatry stresses the image/signifier
without reference to an ultimate or transcendental signified, it also promotes a multiplicity of
meanings rather than reducing them to first causes or transcendent essences.
Idolatrous speech and belief thus bear a greater affinity to narrative and myth than to
metaphysics and philosophy. It is comparable to Plato’s notion of writing, which he designated
as the dead image or eidolon of speech. While speech is associated with the law, it is the difficulty
of referring writing to an ultimate signified that makes it transgress the law and causes it to be
rendered as an inferior counterpart of speech.30
Derrida stresses the affinity between myth and writing, created by their common opposition to
the logos of metaphysics.31 The multiplicity of embodied gods and goddesses associated with
idolatry engenders a multiplicity of profane tales and histories, an inexhaustible fund of material
for use in mythical narratives. William Ward associated Indian idolatry with the proliferation of
mythical narratives and modes of their representation, which he held to be injurious to public
manners (and morality): ‘There is another feature in this system of idolatry, which increases its
pernicious effects on the public manners: The history of these gods is a highly coloured repre-
sentation of their wars, quarrels and licentious intrigues; which are held up in the images,
recitations, songs, and dances at the public festivals’.32
In colonial discourse on India, idolatry became a totalizing figure for Indian society and for
its perceived strangeness, its excesses and anomalies. Thus, according to the Victorian art critic
George Birdwood, the ‘whole organization of social life in India’ was ‘theocratic’ in character,
with the ‘monstrous forms’ of Hindu idolatry at its centre.33 To Ward, the figure of idolatry
provided a sweeping explanation for the acute character of the perceived moral decay of Indian
society: ‘The manifest effect of idolatry in this country, as held up to thousands of Christian
spectators, is an immersion into the grossest moral darkness, and a universal corruption of
manners’.34
To East India Company official Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, whose father belonged to the
Clapham Sect of fervent Christian evangelicals who militantly campaigned against Indian idolatry,
‘Hinduism is the only remaining great system of idolatry; and, of all the religions which mankind
have invented for themselves, it has gone furthest in deifying human vice … Other religions have
had their abuses; but the essence of the religion of Kalee is pure, unmixed evil’.35
Moreover, idolatry’s gravitational field is so powerful that, like a malign black hole, it appears
to have sucked subcontinental varieties of Islam as well into its fold. Thus, Trevelyan is surprised
to find that Muslims as well as Hindus among Thugs – a league of robbers who strangled their
victims – worshipped Kali: ‘The perpetual exclusion of idolatry from their religious system has
always been their peculiar boast … we never heard before that the Mahommedans had fallen into
the idolatry of the Hindus’.36 Interestingly, the Temple of Doom in the Indiana Jones movie is also
portrayed as being devoted to the cult of the Thugs.
Elements of Hindu architectural design were thought to be ‘idolatrous’ and shunned by the
British in designing the buildings they constructed.37 While idolatry was not the only irrational
practice in Indian society, it served as an overarching figure for Indian irrationality, which
encompassed its perceived aesthetic shortcomings as well as moral flaws.
According to Enlightenment psychology believed by both rationalists and empiricists, the
faculty of imagination consisted of the power to form images, and this was a dangerously
misleading and deceptive faculty when exercised for the purposes of cognition. Thinking in
images precluded one from thinking in concepts. Idolatry’s proneness to images made it suscep-
tible to the misleading and irrational powers of the imagination. As the sources of imagination lie
in the material objects around us, the idolatrous subject was prone to a kind of material
determination from outside instead of exercising an autonomous subjectivity.38
6 S. GANGULY

In the context of colonial Indian society, the idolater’s lack of an autonomous subjectivity made
him unable to control and govern himself, as he was liable to be held in thrall by manipulating the
powers of his imagination. Just as the African fetishist’s belief in the power of things made him
seem thing-like himself, and rendered the trade in slaves permissible, the idolater’s situation
required the intervention of an external rational power to govern him wisely and rescue him from
his own idolatry. The social ‘civilizing mission’ could be recast in terms of a battle against idolatry.
Since idolatry was an overarching explanation for the lack of well-being of the vast majority of
colonial subjects, addressing their economic and political plight did not involve reversing the
unequal power relations of colonial society. It required, instead, the reform of idolatrous sub-
jectivities. This scenario is staged by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, at whose conclusion
colonial troops rescue native children kept in subjection by their own countrymen given to the
performance of cruel idolatrous rites.
Fetishism and polytheism (the concomitant of idolatry) were seen during the Enlightenment as
two ‘moments’ or stages in a progressive evolution of the human mind. According to this notion
of progress, all cultures moved through identical stages of religious consciousness with monothe-
ism as the highest stage. Auguste Comte formulated three ‘theological’ states of humanity, moving
through fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism, giving way to the era of metaphysics and
ultimately to positive science.39
Hegel’s philosophy of history stands as an ideological monument to the notion of progress.40 In
his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel enunciated his understanding of the moments of
fetishism and polytheism. According to Hegel, fetishism is a stage in the ‘religion of magic’,
widespread among ‘Negro tribes’.41 Fetishism consists of the belief that divinity is embodied in
‘things’; there is little notion of abstract universals.
There is consciousness of universals in Indian religion, the ‘religion of phantasy or fanciful
imagination’.42 At this stage, ‘divinity is objective with all its plenitude of content’.43 Indian
religion cannot satisfactorily mediate, however, between abstract universals and sensuous parti-
culars: ‘it is true, the different moments or aspects are developed, but in such a way that they
remain external to one another’.44
Its practice therefore oscillates between the poles of a cold and lifeless universal principle where
humanity and consciousness are comprehensively negated, and of a chaos of particulars where the
imagination runs riot. The release offered to the imagination enables good poetry but disables
reason:
Caprice and freedom are released in the imagination, and it is in the imagination that poetry has its field.
Among the Hindus we find the most beautiful poetry, but always with an underlying element of utter
irrationality: we are attracted by its grace and at the same time repelled by the sheer confusion and nonsense
of it.45

The lack of a principle of reason that could satisfactorily mediate between abstract universals
and concrete particulars inhibits the development of a free, autonomous subject in India:
Where consciousness of the universal in general, of what is essential, shines through into the particular, is
active in it and delimits it, there freedom of spirit comes into being in some form; and the legal and ethical
realms depend upon the particular being delimited [in this way] by the universal. … To the extent that this
[delimitation] is not posited, consciousness of the universal is essentially cut off, ineffective, unfree, devoid
of spirit.46

Hegel thus articulates in a systematic manner the categories within which the colonial subject
could be thought. The free spirit could not develop in India, as it faced a stark choice. It could
either immerse itself in a chaos of sensuous particulars, and thus become subject to their random,
material determination. Or it could escape this condition by severing its contact with life and
contemplating the abstract and universal Brahman, a vocation open to a very small minority.
Hegel also positions this subject within a global field of civilizations, arranged in a graded
hierarchy, with Christian, European civilization at its apex. Hegel’s portrayal of the unfree spirit
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 7

subject to random, material determinations could be compared with the colonial portrayal of the
idolatrous subject whose predilection for images inhibited the growth of a rational faculty. Just as
African fetishism justified the taking of slaves, the corruption of the East India Company could be
justified by pointing to corruption as an endemic state of affairs, connected to the state of morals
and religion in India.
While idolatry in the colonial context functions as a reminder of what Nigel Wood has called
‘the “staged” conceptual power of imperialism’, and provides a powerful justificatory idiom for
colonial rule, it also denotes the threat posed to prevailing categories of colonial representation
and the autonomously determined European subject by an encounter with India.47 Not only was
the native subject influenced by material determination and prone to disorderly and incoherent
representations, this was also a prospect that faced the European subject coming into contact with
India.
In this sense, idolatry was seen as contagious, communicable through contact with India.
Instead of reforming Indians’ idolatry, Europeans might themselves succumb to Indian idolatry
through a counter-revolutionary process. This is the sense in which when Mola Ram holds in his
hand the beating hearts of his human victims ripped from their bodies, they appear physically
unharmed: they have merely switched over to an alternative mode of interpellation and subject
constitution, after succumbing to idolatry.48
At one point in the film, Indiana Jones appears as a Hindu priest and cooperates with Mola
Ram in performing ceremonies preceding human sacrifice. Susceptibility to idolatry and the
power of the image not only plagued Indians, but could transfer to European observers of
India, which presented the prospect of breaching European rationalities through the deployment
of image, spectacle and sensuality: a prospect that was linked to decay, danger, and death, and yet
could produce a sense of exaltation.
The trope of idolatry, therefore, may also be read to discover the fragility of the European self.
India’s effect on the senses and on European rationality was a reason advanced by James Mill, who
wrote extensively on and made a career out of India, for never actually setting foot in India or
learning any Indian languages. The same could be said in a qualified way for the Indologist
Friedrich Max Mueller, who focused exclusively on Sanskrit texts. Texts by Alice Perrin and E.M.
Forster links India to the power of the image; in these texts, India induces uncertainty and
provides a setting for the potential unravelling and stripping out of European selves, a prospect
both daunting and strangely exciting, even sexually arousing.
My focus in this essay is on influential scholarly and literary representations of India which
draw out the manifold conjunctions between a theological discourse on idolatry and colonial
discourse on India, and allow us to examine how far a trope of theological provenance informed
‘secular’ post-Enlightenment views of India.

2. William Jones and James Mill: the duplicity of the colonial image

“For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth”. I.e., when that which is said figuratively is taken as though
it were literal, it is understood carnally. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul
than when that thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the
flesh in pursuit of the letter … There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for
things
− St. Augustine/On Christian Doctrine

The very idea of the idol tends, at its most urgent, to be bound up with the mythology of the iconoclast,
rather than with that of the one accused of idolatry
− Kenneth Gross/Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Magic
8 S. GANGULY

2.1. The idol in ideology

An idol deceptively resembles a god, without being God, an appearance which beguiles but belies
reality, thus leading to metaphysical disappointment. It is related to artifice, and through artifice
to art and literature. Kenneth Gross calls the idol ‘the mocking ghost, the fantastic and recalcitrant
limit of what we call representation; it is the blank interior of our myths of revelation, the place
where our questions about divine authority receive their most severe test’.49
Idolatry’s penchant for dwelling on the sensual surface of metaphors is held to lead to serious
cognitive error; idolaters are thus held to be victims of the play of language. According to the
Abbé Dubois:
This decided taste for allegory, which is characteristic of the founders of the Hindu religion and polity, has
proved the source of many errors in the case of a people who are invariably guided simply by the
impressions of their senses, and who, accustomed to judge things only by their outward appearance, have
taken literally that which was represented to them under symbols, and have thus come to adore the actual
image itself instead of reality.50

The taste for allegory and penchant for outward appearance leads Indians, particularly Hindus, to
dwell on the outward forms of nature itself, instead of positing a radical separation between
nature and its Creator. Nature, being corporeal and multiple, is inimical to the notion of God as a
unitary and perfect being.
Polytheism evokes a multicausal world, from whose perspective monotheism’s search for a
final cause may itself be seen to proceed from a fallacious premise: because every effect has a
cause, there must be one cause that is the cause of all the effects.51 The monotheistic God as
absolute, all-knowing subject is mirrored in the notion of man as autonomous subject and
possessor of logos. But idolatry and polytheism, by invoking the body, materiality, mutability,
and multiplicity, disrupt both Semitic-religious and Cartesian-rationalist conceptualizations of
God and man.52
For colonial observers, not only was India seen as a haven for idolatry, but Indian idolatry
could be perceived as contagious. In James Mill’s History of British India, the problem of idolatry
crops up in relation to perceptions of India by external observers. India is apprehended as the
bodily, the material, and the sensory, an excess of random, unassimilable signifiers, not amenable
to framing or control by ideas, mind or spirit but liable to overwhelm reason. Echoing Dubois’s
concern with the mind being misled by outward appearance, Mill thought that the true business of
the historian was ‘not merely to display the obvious outside of things’ but to ‘convey just ideas of
all those objects’ of his interest.53 In doing so, sense stimuli could prove a distraction:
Nobody needs to be informed, how much more vivid, in general, is the conception of an object which has
been presented to our senses, than that of an object which we have only heard another man describe.
Nobody, therefore, will deny … there is great danger, lest the impression received from the senses should
exert an immoderate influence, hang a bias on the mind, and render the conception of the whole
erroneous.54

Raw empirical stimuli need to be processed into a series of textual signifieds before they could be
of any use to the observer of India. The truth of Mill’s predecessors’ accounts may have been
affected by too much proximity to India: ‘We received indeed the accounts of the Hindu
chronology … from men who had seen the people; whose imagination had been powerfully
affected by the spectacle of a new system of manners, arts, institutions, and ideas’. The veracity of
these accounts needs to be distrusted, as their proponents may have been carried away by
‘astonishment, admiration, and enthusiasm’.55 The use of one’s senses can beguile and mislead:
But the mental habits which are acquired in mere observing, and in the acquisition of languages, are almost
as different as any mental habits can be, from the powers of combination, discrimination, classification,
judgment, comparison, weighing, inferring, inducting, philosophizing in short; which are the powers of most
importance for extracting the precious ore from a great mine of historical materials.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 9

Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India, can be expressed in writing. As soon as everything of
importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in
one year, in his closet in England, then he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his
eyes and ears in India.56

The oppositions expressed in this passage run through Mill’s text and frame the utilitarian
imaginary. Philosophizing is privileged over observing, the processing of ideas over images and
impressions, the intelligible over the sensible. This correlates with the classic oppositions of
‘western metaphysics’ which may be traced to Plato.
These oppositions are linked to another dichotomy: that between England and India. Only in
England are there opportunities to process ideas and philosophize, hard to come by in India
where they are precluded by the overwhelming pressures/pleasures of seeing and observing. Mill is
an exemplar here of the articulation of ‘western metaphysics’ with the historicism and ethnocentr-
ism that Derrida identifies:
What then, are the pertinent traits of someone who is trying to reconstitute the structural resemblance
between the Platonic and the other mythological figures of the origin of writing? The bringing out of these
themes … must open on to the general problematic of the relations between the mythemes and the
philosophemes that lie at the origin of western logos. That is to say, of a history − or rather, of History −
which has been produced in its entirety in the philosophical difference between mythos and logos, blindly
sinking down into that difference as the natural obviousness of its own element.57

logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing … which was fundamentally … nothing but the most
original and powerful ethnocentrism.58

Mill is not writing a history of India but History, offering a ‘knowledge of India, approaching to
completeness’ and written according to the protocols of ‘western metaphysics’.59 His History is
produced in the space of the difference between mythos and logos, which translates into the
difference between India and Europe.

2.2. A question of judgment

A philosopher can see reality more clearly precisely because he withdraws from the changing
world of images and sensations. According to Plato’s Republic, this is what equips him to rule, to
judge, to discriminate.60 The ideal republic may be realized only if power is placed in the hands of
those with the capacity and training to philosophize. These constitute a small minority, as
‘philosophy is impossible among the common people’.61
In his preface, Mill calls his history of British India ‘a judging history’ (author’s italics).62 Mill’s
absence from the scene of action qualifies him better to speak his history from the position of
philosopher/judge: ‘Is it not understood, that in such a case as this, where the sum of the
testimony is abundant, the judge, who has seen no part of the transaction, has yet, by his
investigation, obtained a more perfect conception of it, than is almost ever possessed by any of
the individuals from whom he has derived his information?’63
If spoken from the position of philosopher/judge, the question arises: what does Mill’s history
set out to judge – ‘if a judging history, what does it judge?’64 Mill’s history is concerned to judge
India’s place within an evolutionary scale of civilizations, following a comparative method whose
assumptions had been stated by Baron Turgot as follows: ‘By … infinitely varied inequality the
actual state of the universe, in presenting at the same time all the shades of barbarism and of
civilization, shows us in some sort under one view the monuments and vestiges, and all the steps
of the human mind, the reflection of all the degrees through which it has passed – in short, the
history of all the ages’.65
For Mill, ranking within this caste system of civilizations is to be determined by a philosophical
criterion, that of Utility:
10 S. GANGULY

In looking at the pursuits of any nation, with a view to draw from them indications of the state of
civilization, no mark is so important, as the nature of the End to which they are directed.

Exactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit, may we regard a nation as civilized. Exactly in
proportion as its ingenuity is wasted on contemptible or mischievous objects, though it may be, in itself, an
ingenuity of no ordinary kind, the nation may safely be denominated barbarous.66

Such a criterion requires an implicit normative standard, since one’s judgment of the utility of an
action would depend on one’s valuation of the end towards which it is directed. It thus defers
rather than resolves the problem of value: how is an end itself to be assessed? Mill considered ‘the
greatest number of miscarriages in life … to be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures’.67 But
this begs the question of what the true value of pleasure (if pleasure be the end of activity)
might be.
India fell short in terms of this implicit normative standard. Not only did India rank low
among civilizations according to this criterion, despotism was justified on the same grounds: as
liberty would not be compatible with the maximization of utility in the Indian instance. On
Platonic lines, Mill proposed the government of India by a single legislative council composed
entirely of a few experts, and argued strenuously against any representative institutions for India.
On grounds of the Benthamite criterion of the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’, natives
could not be admitted to a significant role in the governance of India.68
While Mill speaks his history of India from the position of philosopher/judge, the Indological
researches of William Jones were conducted during his tenure as Judge at the Supreme Court in
Calcutta. Post-Saidian critics such as S.N. Mukherjee and Jenny Sharpe have shown how Jones’s
researches were tied up with his duties as judge: he wished to compile a digest of indigenous laws
with which to govern British territories in India.69 Apart from indigenous laws, however, knowl-
edge of local mythologies was also considered necessary for the task of sound governance:
We may be inclined perhaps to think, that the wild fables of idolaters are not worth knowing … but we must
consider, that the allegories contained in the hymn to LACSHMI constitute at this moment the prevailing
religion of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believed by many millions, whose
industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whose manners, which are interwoven with their religious
opinions, nearly affect all Europeans, who reside among them.70

Thus, mythology contains the key to understanding a subject population, and affects in
quotidian matters Europeans living among or ruling it. It has a bearing on the successful discharge
of Jones’s duties as Judge. Apart from the literal discharge of his duties as Judge, however, there is
the question Mill raises regarding what it takes to pass epistemological judgment on Indian
matters. On this question, Mill’s claim regarding who can judge best the Indian situation is
anticipated and contested by Jones, in a letter written from India to the second Earl Spencer:
You judge rightly … that we are the best judges here of all that relates to ourselves. In Europe you see India
through a glass darkly: here, we are in a strong light; and a thousand little nuances are perceptible to us,
which are not visible through your best telescopes, and which could not be explained without writing
volumes.71

Jones’s position here is opposed to Mill’s: it is through proximity to India’s light and through
the inscriptions of the visible that India might be read, making over Jones’s own location (as
physically present in India) into one of epistemological advantage.
It is possible, however, to read even into this passage a moment of equivocation, present in
Jones’s use of the phrase ‘through a glass darkly’. The phrase occurs in St. Paul’s First Epistle to
the Corinthians, and is an allusion to the (forthcoming) day of Last Judgment and revelation,
when things will at last be revealed in their true colours: ‘For now we see through a glass darkly,
but then face to face’.72 Following through the logic of this allusion would imply (somewhat
blasphemously) that India stands revealed in its true colours, as on the day of Last Judgment, to
those in Jones’s position. As a classics scholar, moreover, Jones must also have been aware of the
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 11

occurrence of the phrase in Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates fears the blinding of his soul if he tries
to apprehend things directly with his senses instead of having recourse to conceptions. Socrates
observes that people may injure their eyes by gazing directly at the sun during an eclipse.73
Elsewhere, Jones complained of the damage caused to his poor vision by the ‘glaring Indian
sun’.74 Jones had a serious attack of sunstroke in India in 1784, which reduced him to a skeleton
and from which he never quite recovered. Warren Hastings advised Jones to avoid the Indian sun,
which he followed since his illness.75 Given this history, Jones cannot have lacked ambivalence
about India’s ‘strong light’, setting up a subtext in the passage that runs against its grain. This
subtext echoes Mill’s fear of losing his judgment if he were to encounter India from up close,
through his senses instead of ideas.

2.3. ‘Seeing Them in Their Own Books’: the absent origin

Idolatry signifies cognitive error or delusion, which may arise out of stupidity and ignorance, or
the deliberate malignity of a priestly class. It is often seen as a combination of both, in which
crafty priests deliberately mislead the rest of the populace, which is ignorant and credulous
enough to swallow the fables invented by them. Both senses appear in Jones’s ‘A Hymn to
Lacshmi’ which also links the meme to a rationale for imperial rule:

Oh! bid the patient Hindu rise and live.

His erring mind, that wizard lore beguiles
Clouded by priestly wiles,
To senseless nature bows for nature’s GOD.
Now, stretch’d o’er ocean’s vast from happier isles,
He sees the wand of empire, not the rod …76

In this verse, the average Hindu is patient but slow on the uptake, held in thrall by wily priests. It
also follows that priests are rational manipulators, who are themselves aware of the untruths they
perpetrate, and guilty of imposing a false consciousness on the rest of society.
The verse amplifies one of the principal meanings of idolatry: bowing to ‘senseless nature’
instead of ‘nature’s God’. One must not look at but look through nature, reading it as signifier
pointing to God as the transcendental signified; any other reading confuses Creation with its
Creator, signifier with signified. Empire will liberate Hindus from the thralldom of their priests,
consequently Hindus will not perceive empire as a coercive apparatus (the rod) but as a magical
‘wand’.
One of the subtle deconstructive effects set off by this passage, however, is that the Hindu
still perceives the empire as a magicians’ enterprise, managed by the wielders of a wand that
stretches across the oceans. The Hindu still remains an idolater, but he has shifted his
allegiance from myths of his own religion to myths of empire. The persistence of idolatry,
rather than a desire for profits, provides a rationale to the British for maintaining and
extending their empire.
Another subtle effect of the verse is that Jones positions himself through it as the true guardian
and repository of tradition. The poem is in the form of an invocation to the goddess Lakshmi, to
whom Jones prays to deliver the Hindu. Jones thus puts himself in the position of a priest of the
community; one, however, who preserves its true interests.
The poem thus inscribes the ‘Orientalist’ rather than ‘Anglicist’ view of the imperial civilizing
mission.77 Although pagans err, the poem is still addressed to a pagan deity. It is as if Hindu
scriptures themselves were a kind of inferior revelation, and it was part of Jones’s brief to preserve
it from corruption and misuse by priests and idolaters. India was to be governed by indigenous
laws, but Englishmen were the most effective interpreters and arbiters of these laws.78
12 S. GANGULY

This ideology was reflected in the constitution of the Asiatic Society founded by Jones, the
principal body conducting research on Indological subjects in British India. Although set up in
1784, soon after Jones’s arrival in India, non-Europeans were ineligible to participate in its
meetings till 1892.79
According to standard Christian doctrine in the eighteenth century, all peoples had received
the same primeval revelation, but pagans lost it during the dispersion and scattering of peoples
following the Tower of Babel. It is at this point of time that idolatry had its inception among
them; traces of monotheism among contemporary pagans were to be attributed to distant
recollections of a remote past.80 This may explain Jones’s privileging of antiquity; since Hindu
scriptures were closer to the remote past, they were liable to be a less corrupted copy of revelation
than the assertions of present day Hindu priests. Jones’s project therefore is couched as one of
‘restoration’ and ‘recovery’ of the text of Hindu scripture, rather than one of ‘reform’.
This ‘protestant’ position vis-a-vis Hindu scriptures, together with Jones taking up the position
of trustee for Hindu tradition, made it incumbent upon him to learn Sanskrit. He suspected the
duplicity of the Brahmins the British had employed to give legal advice and compile digests of
laws. The heterogeneity of the texts they produced led him to doubt their veracity.81
He spelt out his motives for learning Sanskrit in a letter of 1785: ‘The villainy of the Brahmen
lawyers makes it necessary for me to learn Sanscrit, which is as difficult as Greek’.82 Neither were
Muslim lawgivers spared from suspicion: ‘Pure integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits
and Maulavis, few of whom give opinions without a culpable bias … I therefore always make them
produce original texts, and see them in their own Books’.83
The British assumed that Hindu law was vested in dharmashastra texts. According to Rosane
Rocher: ‘What dharmashastra offered … was a multiplicity of authoritative texts and a variety of
commentaries that, in Indian fashion, sought to interrogate and reconcile conflicting statements
by the application of interpretatory rules of mimamsa and the entire array of panditic learning
and skill’.84 This heterogeneity of texts is connected to one of the root senses of idolatry: an
endless proliferation of images and meanings, without reference to an ultimate signified. Plato
designates writing as the dead image or eidolon of speech; while speech is associated with the law,
it is the difficulty of referring writing to an ultimate signified that makes it transgress the law and
causes it to be rendered as an inferior counterpart of speech.85
Jones refers to the ‘mad introduction of idolatry at Babel’, identifying the formation of
heterogeneous languages and splitting of the logos at Babel with idolatry and the disintegration
of subjectivity.86 The moments of idolatry and heteroglossia are one, implying the fracturing of
subjectivity and truth. The ideas of textual and moral corruption may be linked; as Kate Teltscher
observes, ‘For Jones, textual corruption seems inevitably to imply moral corruption’.87
The idol as duplicitous double and the identification of idolatry with textual and moral
corruption leads, in the case of Jones’s legal thought, to a fixation on the problem of appropriate
forms of oath taking and the prevention of forgery. Forgery and its oral equivalent, perjury, are
seen as the forms of social production appropriate to an idolatrous society. Jones finds Hindu law
unaccountably lax in dealing with these matters. In his preface to Institutes of Hindu Law, he
observes that ‘the very morals [exemplified in the law], though rigid enough on the whole, are in
one or two instances (as in the case of light oaths and pious perjury) unaccountably relaxed’.88
A large number of the deviations from standard Hindu legal opinion that J.D.M. Derrett found
in the Digest of Indian Laws compiled by Jones, concern laws on fraud.89 The practice of
dissimulation spreads beyond its initial referent, Brahmin pandits, to pervade all of society and
pose a barrier to the administration of justice:

but such, after all, is the corrupt state even of their erroneous religion, that, if the most binding form on the
consciences of good men could be known and established, there would be few consciences to be bound by it;
and, without exemplary punishments of actual perjury, subornation of it, and attempts to suborn, we shall
never be able to administer justice among them with complete satisfaction.90
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 13

In order to stem the rot Jones, generally a mild-mannered man, prescribes severe corporal
punishments for forgery or perjury. In 1783, soon after his arrival from England, Jones addressed
the Grand Jury at the Calcutta Supreme Court as follows:

It gives me, in the first place, inexpressible pain, to see no fewer than four persons charged with so
abominable an object as corrupt perjury, or the subornation of it; and one of them, I observe with horror,
is an Armenian by birth, and, in name, at least, a Christian: now, if all laws, human and divine, if all
religions, the many false and the one true, be thus openly defied, we must abandon all hope of administering
justice perfectly; and, as much as I blame severe corporal punishments, especially those which mutilate the
offender’s body, I must recommend a degree of severity, if the wickedness of man cannot otherwise be
restrained.91

Jones thus links perjury with issues of truth and falsehood in religion; he finds it shocking that a
practitioner of the ‘one true religion’ should be guilty of it. ‘The wickedness of man’ carries
theological overtones, and in the case of this particular mode of its manifestation (together with its
twin, forgery) Jones even considered capital punishment.92
When Nandakumar, the Raja of Hoogly, complained that Jones’s friend and mentor Hastings
accepted bribes in exchange for government appointments, Hastings used his powers as
Governor-General to have Nandakumar hanged on a charge of forgery.93 The meme of forgery,
linked to the concept of idolatry as spiritual fraud, thus emerges as a crucial site for the exercise of
colonial power.
The meme of forgery as well as issues of idolatry and Enlightenment are highlighted in the
controversy over the Ezourvedam, variously described as a ‘lost Veda’ and a ‘pious fraud’.94 This
French text purported to be a translation from a lost fragment of the Vedas by a wise Brahmin. It
turned out that, as Ludo Rocher puts it, ‘this Veda contained a real surprise; its precepts were very
close to the basic precepts of Christianity. Voltaire was happy to conclude that many so-called
Christian concepts were, therefore, not exclusively Christian; they existed elsewhere in the world
long before the birth of Christ.’95
Ezourvedam was, in fact, the work of French Jesuit missionaries in India, who wanted to use
it as a tool for proselytizing Hindus.96 It consists of a conversation between two sages:
‘Chumantou’ (i.e. Sumantu) upholds an ‘enlightened’ philosophical monotheism, refuting the
idolatrous outlook of ‘Biach’ (i.e. Vyasa). Chumantou’s arguments are meant to hold out for an
original monotheism, a light of reason since obscured by the growth of idolatry. Significantly,
his opponent is identified as Biach or Vyasa, to whom authorship of the Mahabharata as well
as Pauranic narratives is attributed by Hindu tradition. Idolatry is thus related to narrative and
myth.
If idolatry signifies the production of images, narrative is the generation of a surplus of images
and meanings without closure. The concept of ‘idolatry’ thus reconfigures the fabulous as the
false. Moral and metaphysical maxims, by contrast, reduce meaning to first causes and transcen-
dent essences, thus exemplifying the outlook peculiar to nonidolatrous monotheism.97
The strategy of conversion deployed in Ezourvedam, however, is a risky one, since it permits a
multiplicity of reversible readings. Thus, Julius Richter, a Protestant and historian of Protestant
missions, remarks on the Ezourvedam: ‘The fundamental dishonesty of the Jesuitical system is
perhaps revealed in the most striking way of all by the remarkable literary forgeries which the
Jesuits committed, probably about the middle of the seventeenth century’.98 The Jesuits are here
tarred with the same brush as the Hindus; like Brahmin priests, they are forgers and agents of
dissimulation. Wilhelm Halbfass has pointed out that it was a common Protestant strategy to
discredit Catholicism by association with Hinduism.99
Although Ezourvedam targets idolatry, it takes the form of myth and dissimulates itself as a
Vedic text. In other readings, the Ezourvedam may be used to argue the chronological priority of
Hinduism over Christianity itself. This was precisely Voltaire’s reading of it, when he used it as
evidence that Christian concepts preexisted the birth of Christ. Texts like Ezourvedam, by
14 S. GANGULY

appropriating the signifiers of Hinduism, may help legitimize Hinduism itself, which is the fear
expressed in the following critique of the work by William Hodge Mill, a missionary:

But when, as if to defeat the success of the design [of proselytisation] with all Heathens of knowledge and
integrity, we see the names of Narada, Jaimini, and other teachers of Brahmanic theology, introduced as
refuting and denouncing [polytheism and pantheism], and the name of the most ancient and sacred of all
Hindu writings, prefixed as the real title of the composition … no skill in the execution can screen from
censure the authors and abettors of a forgery equally disingenuous and imprudent.100

This was by and large also the strategy Hindu reformists and Indian nationalists adopted to
vindicate Hinduism against charges of idolatry.
A weakness of such a vindication, however, is that it makes over Hinduism in the image of
Christianity; if Hinduism was Christianity before the fact, such a coup could be achieved only by
obliterating Hinduism’s difference. This was the strategy adopted by Voltaire, who wrote to
Prussia’s Frederick, the Great that ‘our holy Christian religion is solely based upon the ancient
religion of Brahma’.101
As a consequence, Voltaire retained the category of idolatry, subsuming difference as deviance
or corruption: ‘This manuscript [Ezourvedam] undoubtedly belongs to the time when the ancient
religion of the gymnosophists had begun to be corrupted … Chumontou combats all kinds of
idolatry with which the Indians began to be affected at that time’.102 Voltaire, thus, is one of the
first to proffer the myth of a Hindu golden age, contrasted to a fallen present in which idolatry is
dominant.
Though Voltaire was an Enlightenment ideologue, this construct is still elaborated within a
theological horizon and does not escape Christian logocentrism. Dorothy Figueira shows how for
Voltaire India mirrors the human condition in its fall from Grace.103 As we will soon see, the
Hindu golden age also figures importantly in William Jones, in a similar fashion.
If the Ezourvedam was a forgery, the question has to be: who fell for this particular confidence
trick? Since there is little evidence that it converted many Hindus in its time, the answer would be:
European Enlightenment thinkers, and Hindu reformists and Indian nationalists who followed in
their trail.

2.4. Jones and the Ezourvedam

Jones’s presentation of classical Indian texts follows some of the same strategies as the ‘forged’
Ezourvedam. As the founder of modern Indology, Jones is generally credited with having revealed
Indian civilization not just to the West, but to Indians as well. According to Suniti Kumar
Chatterji, noted linguist of Indian languages: ‘To my mind, as … an Indian who considers the
personality and the achievement of Sir William Jones … the greatest benefit that we in India have
received from England and Europe is to be able to know ourselves’.104 S.N. Mukherjee asserts that
Jones’s ‘real contribution to Indology lies in the foundation of the Asiatic Society which eventually
unveiled India to the intellectual world’, and observes that ‘the origins of modern scholarship on
Indian studies have to be traced back to Jones and his friends’.105 Ronald Inden describes Jones as
‘the “knowing subject” of the East India Company within the rising Anglo-French imperial
formation’.106
By contrast, the Ezourvedam is generally characterized in terms of a vocabulary of fraudulence,
such as ‘spurious’ (Paulinus), ‘literary forgery’ (Ellis), ‘pious fraud’ (Schlegel), ‘notorious hoax’
(Schwab).107 Halbfass describes it as ‘scandalous’, not a product of ‘sober research’.108
There are, however, significant crossovers and overlaps between the project of the Asiatic
Society as formulated by Jones, and that of the Ezourvedam. Jones believed in the myth of a past
golden age and of a degenerate present: ‘nor can we reasonably doubt, how degenerate and abased
soever the Hindus may now appear, that in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms,
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 15

happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge’.109 Idolatry is held to
be the source of this decline.
In Jones’s poem ‘The Enchanted Fruit; or, the Hindu Wife: an Antediluvian Tale’ this is the
identification underlying Jones’s pun on kali-yug, the name for the fallen present in traditional
Hindu chronology, as the age of Kali, the goddess who, as we have already seen, was among the
most reviled in colonial representation of Hindu idols and who will appear again in Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom.110 The narrator of the poem describes kali-yug as ‘bound by vile
unnatural laws/which curse this age from Caley nam’d’; a footnote gloss adds: ‘this verse alludes
to Caley, the Hecate of the Indians’.111
While a parallel is sought to be established between colonial and Hindu visions of decline, the
latter expressed in Hindu chronology as the slow step-by-step transition from satya-yug (Age of
Truth) to the contemporary kali-yug, in the traditional Hindu version this decline has nothing to
do with the growth of idolatry. A conceit like Jones’s, in which the onset of kali-yug is linked to
the dominance of goddess Kali, would be incomprehensible to Hindus lacking a Western
education.112
Elizabeth Eisenstein has suggested that print cultures are conditioned to think in terms of
historical progress, due to the continuous accumulation of fixed records. By contrast, a notion of
time as decay is built into the perspectives of traditional oral and manuscript cultures, since
knowledge recorded in memory or manuscripts is subject to corruption and decay.113 This could
explain the traditional perception of time as decline from satya-yug to kali-yug recorded in
preprint Hindu culture.
By contrast, colonial perceptions of Indian decay fitted it into an overall context of European
progress. Such a narrative provides a rationale for India’s colonization and resonates with the
colonial civilizing mission: colonization is a means of drawing India into the larger movement for
progress. While for Jones, the six philosophical schools of India ‘comprise all the metaphysics of
the old [Athenian] academy, the Stoa, the Lyceum’, he also passed the stricture that ‘the Gentoos
should not be ruled according to the maxims of the Athenians’.114 The interregnum of Indian
decline ruled out the possibility of self-government and democracy in India.
Jones returns to Voltaire’s conceit of the ‘gymnosophists’. Gymnosophists were Indian sages
reputed in ancient Greece for their capacity to philosophize and their stoical self-control.
Pythagoras, who believed in the doctrine of transmigration, was thought to have travelled to
India and transmitted to Greece the wisdom of the gymnosophists. The French Jesuit J.F. Pons, in
a letter written from India in 1740, made repeated mentions of the wisdom of gymnosophists and
of Pythagoras picking up Brahminic instruction in India. Upholding physis against nomos, the
ways of nature against social and artificial conventions, the gymnosophists could be thought of as
early Christians countering idolatry; their viewpoint would thus be close to that upheld by
Chumantou in the Ezourvedam.115
After claiming that the six schools of Indian philosophy comprise the metaphysics of the Greek
Academy, Stoa and Lyceum, Jones goes on to assert that ‘Pythagoras and Plato derived their
sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India’.116 Thus, Jones annexes Indian to
Greek philosophy, just as the Ezourvedam annexed Hinduism to Christianity.
The desire governing Jones’s hermeneutic of translation is disclosed by comparing his transla-
tion of the gayatri-mantra, the invocation to the sun which is the key verse in the Rig-Veda (verse
3.62.10) recited by Brahmins every morning, with other versions of it. H.T. Colebrooke’s transla-
tion of the gayatri-mantra, which runs: ‘Let us meditate on the adorable light of the divine ruler;
may it guide our intellects’, is fairly close to Max Mueller: ‘Let us obtain/meditate on that adorable
splendor of Savitri [the sun]; may he arouse our minds!’117
However, Jones’s translation of the same verse is more baroque and diverges radically from
both Colebrooke and Max Mueller: ‘Let us adore the supremacy of that divine sun (opposed to the
visible luminary), the godhead who illuminates all, who recreates all, from whom all proceed, to
16 S. GANGULY

whom all must return, whom we invoke to direct our understandings aright in our progress
towards his holy seat’. The following is Jones’s gloss on this verse:

What the sun and light are to this visible world, that are the supreme good, and truth, to the intellectual
and invisible universe; and, as our corporeal eyes have a distinct perception of objects enlightened by the
sun, thus our souls acquire certain knowledge, by meditating on the light of truth, which emanates from
the Being of Beings: that is the light by which alone our minds can be directed in the path to
beatitude.118

The point of this rather long-winded translation and gloss is Jones’s anxiety to preserve the
verse, and thus Hinduism’s origin, from all traces of idolatry. Adoration of the sun was a sign of
pagan idolatry.119 The sun, light, and visible world of images needed to be distinguished from that
which they were merely metaphors of: the supreme good and truth. Jones wanted to appropriate
the sun as a Christian sign which must be ‘looked through’ rather than looked at as an end in
itself, on pain of taking the figurative as literal, the signifier as signified.120
More specifically, Jones’s extraordinary translation recalls the simile of the sun in Plato’s
Republic, which Socrates resorts to in order to explain the form of the Good: ‘The good has
begotten it [the sun] in its own likeness, and it [the sun] bears the same relation to sight and
visible objects in the visible realm that the good bears to intelligence and intelligible objects in the
intelligible realm’.121 While Plato articulates an opposition between sight (the world of fallen,
degraded images) and intelligence (the world of forms), it is noteworthy that he also depends on
metaphors of the sun and sight to describe intelligence and the good, going so far as to designate
the sun as begotten of (the son of?) the good.122
Likewise, Jones’s translation and gloss uneasily demarcate the visible and intellectual realms,
and are anxious to establish that the sun spoken of in the gayatri mantra refers exclusively to the
latter. Yet the (visible) sun resembles the monotheistic God, insofar as they possess alike ‘powers
of pervading all space and animating all nature’.123
Jones thus reworks the gayatri mantra into Platonic metaphysics. Through an act of epistemic
violence, Jones interpolates Plato’s simile of the sun into Hinduism’s originary verse. This may be
cited as an instance of what Jenny Sharpe means when she describes Jones’s founding of a
‘secondary origin’ for Hinduism.124

2.5. God’s Word and Idolatrous Fables

Jones identifies metaphor as an important source of idolatry. Poetry and fable, which are
dependent on metaphor, are related sources. While ‘the metaphors and allegories of moralists
and metaphysicians have been … very fertile in deities’; ‘numberless divinities have been created
solely by the magick of poetry; whose essential business it is, to personify the most abstract
notions, and to place a nymph or a genius in every grove and almost in every flower’.125
This poetic magic, which relies on metaphor, is an anthropomorphic magic giving rise to the
multiple deities of idolatry. Jones believed that tangled myths and allegories could be decoded and
the surplus of signification inherent in metaphor pared away, to uncover moral or metaphysical
truths buried underneath. Specifically, Hindu fables could be decoded to confirm Mosaic accounts
of Biblical history, and that is why they deserved investigation. Such studies ‘may even be of solid
importance in an age, when some intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt the
authenticity of the accounts, delivered by Moses, concerning the primitive world’.126
Jones’s hermeneutic thus involves a flirtation with metaphor/idolatry but also an ultimate
drawing away from them; in the same manner that the sun conceals/reveals the truth of
philosophy and religion. He translates from the Bhagavat-Purana an episode from the life of
Satyavrata, and designates it as the fable of ‘an Indian king of divine birth, eminent for his piety
and beneficence, whose story seems evidently to be that of Noah disguised by Asiatick fiction’.127
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 17

Such flirtation with idolatrous fiction, however, can set up moments of indeterminacy and
undecidability in Jones’s text. His essay entitled ‘On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and
Hindus’ has for its object ‘a singular species of poetry, which consists almost wholly of a mystical
religious allegory, though it seems on a transient view to contain only the sentiments of wild and
voluptuous libertinism’. In approaching such poetry, although ‘the limits between vice and
enthusiasm are so minute as to be hardly distinguishable, we must beware of censuring it severely,
and must allow it to be natural, though a warm imagination may carry it to a culpable excess’.128
The ‘warm imagination’ of Asiatic poetry which is capable of giving over into ‘culpable excess’
and which like idolatry blurs the line between the sensual and sacred, is marked by Jones as a
civilizational trait. In his second discourse to the Asiatic Society on its second anniversary, Jones
made the proclamation that ‘reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds, while
the Asiaticks have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination’. Europeans alone ‘seek
nothing but truth unadorned by rhetorick’.129
Jones also makes explicit the political correlates of the epistemic relationship he postulates
between Europe and Asia: ‘though we cannot agree with the sage preceptor of [Alexander the
Great], that the “Asiaticks are born to be slaves”, yet the Athenian poet seems perfectly in the
right, when he represents Europe as a sovereign Princess, and Asia as her Handmaid’.130 Besides
projecting unequal epistemic relations between Europe and Asia onto a political terrain, such a
reference to classical precedent also dehistoricises and naturalises that relationship. As with Mill,
Europe is assigned the place of logos, and logocentrism is played out within the space of
ethnocentrism. Mill’s axiomatics of imperialism thus treads well-worn ground; he reinscribes
oppositions which were already firmly in place.
The hyperactive Asian imagination can be a source of idolatry. As Jones observes: ‘Gods of all
shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination’.131 As we have
seen, however, idolatrous fables have some value for Jones in establishing divine truth. At the
same time, this procedure may have its dangers if the correspondences appear too close. He thus
baulks at equating the Christian trinity with the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and, Shiva, as
had been proposed:
one or two missionaries have been absurd enough, in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to urge,
‘that the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesa [another
name for Shiva], were no other than the Christian Trinity’; a sentence, in which we can only doubt, whether
folly, ignorance, or impiety predominates. The three powers, Creative, Preservative, and Destructive, which
the Hindus express by the triliteral word OM, were grossly ascribed by the first idolaters to the heat, light,
and flame of their mistaken divinity, the sun … the tenet of our Church cannot without profaneness be
compared with that of the Hindus, which has only an apparent resemblance to it, but a very different
meaning.132

This passage highlights the anxieties present in Jones’s rhetoric, in that it permits reversible
readings and shows up tendencies towards idolatry and polytheism within Christianity itself. The
notion of the Trinity, for example, comes close to fracturing monotheism, with its suggestions of a
triple divinity governing the universe. Plato’s simile of the sun has its resonance within
Christianity, in which the sun, begotten by the Good in its own likeness, becomes Christ, begotten
by God in His likeness. Sun worship by idolaters could be likened to son worship, or the adoration
of Christ as God’s son by Christians.
Jones encounters this very situation in a confrontation with a Muslim theologian at Madeira,
who accused Christians of blasphemy in calling ‘our Saviour’ the son of God. Jones’s reply to this
charge bears examination:
The commentator was much to blame for passing so indiscriminate and hasty a censure; the title … which
gives you such offence, was often applied in Judea by a bold figure, agreeably to the Hebrew idiom, though
unusual in Arabic, to angels, to holy men, and even to all mankind, who are commanded to call God their
father; and in this large sense, the Apostle to the Romans calls the elect the children of God, and the Messiah
the first born among many brethren; but the words only begotten are applied transcendently and
18 S. GANGULY

incomparably to him alone; and as for me, who believe the Scriptures which you also profess to believe,
though you assert without proof that we have altered them, I cannot refuse him an appellation, though far
surpassing our reason, by which he is distinguished in the Gospel…133

The turns in this passage are revealing and call for analysis. In it appear many of the motifs
involved in the discourse on idolatry. According to Jones, the phrase ‘son of God’ is poetic figure,
metaphor, which he elsewhere identifies as a source for idolatry. This metaphor does not bear up
well to being translated into Arabic, which underscores its contingent status; translatio is the Latin
equivalent to the Greek metapherein, meaning ‘to transfer’ and signalling here the vulnerable
transfer of meaning from one signifier to another.134 Interestingly, Jones does not extend this
principle of charity to translations from Sanskrit into English, where he assumes that language is
simply transparent.135
Jones had explained correspondences between Christianity and Hinduism by attributing them
to the circulation in India of a falsified version of the Gospels.136 The motif is inverted here, with
the Gospels returning as a corrupted copy of Islam, which has the true revelation. Jones responds
to this imputation by abruptly suspending the contingency of metaphor: the phrase ‘only
begotten’ now bears an incomparably transcendent reference, far surpassing reason. The only
justification for such a title is its appearance in the Gospels; here Jones falls back on a straightfor-
ward assertion of faith.

2.6. James Mill: Idolatry at the Origin

Mill perceived some of the aporias present in the discourse of Jones and the Orientalists. He cited
the Orientalists themselves to show that even the most ancient and originary Hindu texts
contained idolatrous notions; there was thus never a nonidolatrous origin.
We have seen how Jones assimilated the gayatri mantra to a nonidolatrous monotheistic model
through his translation of it; Mill, however, points out the discrepancy between Colebrooke’s and
Jones’s translations of the gayatri mantra and cites Colebrooke on this and similar passages of
ancient Hindu scripture: ‘The ancient Hindu religion, as founded on the Indian scriptures,
recognizes but one God, yet not sufficiently discriminating the creature from the Creator [Mill’s
italics]’. Confusing creation with the Creator is of course, trevolution proposed by Millhe grand
error of idolatry: the visible object is merely the creation, whereas the Creator is invisible.137 Mill
uses this citation to press home his critique of previous Indological work: ‘This is an important
admission, from one of the most illustrious advocates of the sublimity of the Hindu religion. Had
he reflected for one moment, he would have seen that between not sufficiently, and not-at-all, in
this case, there can be no distinction [Mill’s italics]’.138
Mill’s italics emphasize that there is no such thing as part idolatry; the divide between idolatry
and monotheism is an absolute one. He did not credit Colebrooke’s idea that Hinduism was
originally monotheistic. Even when mention of a singular deity appears, this is merely a mode of
flattery, a means of exalting one’s patron deity over other existing deities.139
Having identified idolatry at Hinduism’s origin, Mill also attacked the hermeneutic principle
favoured by Jones, of proving Christian revelation by correspondences in Hindu fable: ‘As
[interpreters of pagan mythology] translated an arbitrary cipher, they could extract from any
fable any sense which was adapted from their favourite system of religion and philosophy’.140 Mill
suspected that Jones ‘fastens a theory of his own creation upon the vague and unmeaning jargon
which [Brahmins] delivered to him’.141
Mill insisted on a rigorous separation of truth and fable: philosophy’s drive to unify is
fundamentally at odds with narrative’s polysemy and mythology’s multiplicity. His characteriza-
tion of pagan mythology as an ‘arbitrary cipher’ is close to the traditional Christian view of an idol
as the very limit of representation, a signifier that is ‘no-thing’.142 In mediaeval Christian
tradition, idols literally spoke nonsense, which ‘obfuscates and blurs the direct referentiality of
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 19

things to their meanings, the social and divine contract of human language, and in a sense is a
paradigm for idolatrous representation that likewise severs signifier from signified’.143
Mill subscribed to Enlightenment notions of a distinctive primitive mentality, which erected
gods and goddesses and worshipped them driven by fear of the forces of nature.144 Idolatry dated
from the beginning of time; with Mill, myths of regress into idolatry began to be replaced by
myths of progress from idolatry. Indian civilization was not decaying but static and unchanging; it
was stuck in an idolatrous time warp.145 One no longer spoke, as in Jones, an idiom of ‘discovery’
or ‘restoration’ but of moving from darkness to light. One dispensed as well with myths of a
Hindu golden age.146
Frank Manuel describes the psychologizing of religious experience in the historical context of
the primitive world as one of the great intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment era.147 This
intellectual revolution lies between Jones and Colebrooke on the one hand, and Mill on the other.
The intellectual revolution that Mill proposes has been emphasized in Javed Majeed’s study of
Mill, titled Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism.
Majeed lays stress on Mill’s philosophic radicalism and his difference from Jones and the early
Orientalists, and disputes the status of Mill’s History as a hegemonic text of imperialism, even
though in Majeed’s own words: ‘The History became a standard work for East India Company
officials, and eventually a textbook for candidates for the Indian civil service. It was also the
official textbook of the Company’s college at Haileybury’.148
Majeed argues that ‘Mill’s purpose was to attack the powerfully dominant ideology of British
society at the time and his History used British India as a matrix to do so. In its attack, it defined a
secular language in which cultures could be compared and contrasted, as well as criticized’.149
However, even if one were inclined to grant Majeed’s dubious premise that the History was
primarily an attack on British society, the political and discursive relations which allowed British
India to become an ideal matrix for the criticism of British society are not addressed by Majeed.150
The ‘secular’ language that Mill elaborated to compare and criticize cultures was that of utility.
However, utility can only be assessed relative to certain ends, which have normative cultural
standards built into them. In Mill’s case many of these standards were theological, as we will see.

2.7. The Scattering of God’s Seed

The intellectual revolution proposed by Mill is in practise a limited one. On theological matters,
Mill argued that ‘just and rational views of God can be obtained from two sources alone: from
revelation, or, where that is wanting, from sound reflection upon the frame and government of the
universe’ [italics mine].151 Mill’s primary criterion is thus revelation or a straightforward knowing
through faith, as when Jones in debate with a Muslim theologian cited revealed scripture as
sufficient authority for the phrase ‘only begotten son of God’.
Rational reflection, Mill’s secondary source for a knowledge of God, is meant to reveal the
universe as modelled on a machine, suggested by Mill’s phrase ‘frame and government of the
universe’. What rational reflection outlaws is representation of the universe on the model of an
organism, and of its creation on the model of biological reproduction:
if a description of the creation presents no idea but what is fantastic, wild and irrational; if it includes not
even a portion of that design and contrivance which appear in the ordinary works of man; if it carries the
common analogies of production, in animal and vegetable life, to the production of the universe, we cannot
be mistaken in ascribing it to a people whose ideas of the Divine Being were grovelling.152

Mill thus subscribes to the Christian logocentric model of creation through mental intention and
verbal utterance. God may be thought of in this model as a kind of supra-Cartesian subject: ‘I
think, therefore the world is’. Hinduism, by contrast, models creation on sexual reproduction: ‘the
Hindu could picture to himself the production of a human being, even by the Deity, only in the
way of a species of birth’.153
20 S. GANGULY

At this point, we encounter one of Mill’s own aporias. Hinduism is criticized for its anthro-
pomorphism in modelling creation on sexual reproduction; yet Mill’s own favoured model of
God-as-devisor-of-the-universe-as-machine does not escape either metaphoricity or anthropo-
morphism. If idolatrous error is the result of man creating the world (or God) in his own image,
Mill’s more ‘sublime’ conception makes over God in the image of industrial rather than agricul-
tural man.
For clues to why Mill considers Hindu cosmology to be ‘grovelling’, we need to turn to anterior
Judeo-Christian discourse on idolatry. The discourse on the idol has a sexual dimension. Idolatry
may have a sexual motivation and be a cover for sexual permissiveness; the appeal of idolatry may
lie in the erotic temptation of idolatry itself, or the lifestyle accompanying it.154 Idolatry is
described as something brought in especially by gentile women who married Israelites.155
Idolatry is analogous to whoring.156 It is also related to sodomy, homosexuality, and sexual
perversion.157
The Augustine epigraph at the head of this chapter demonstrates that the association of
idolatry with sexual transgression is not accidental but internal to the logic of the Christian
sign.158 Augustine equates the letter or signifier with flesh; the ‘habit of taking signs for things’ is a
carnal error, since it subjects the spirit to the materiality of the signifier as flesh. This carnal error,
which affects understanding and reason, makes men descend to the level of beasts.
All these themes recur in Mill’s discourse on India. Hindu religious observance preserves
according to Mill the primacy of the signifier; it stresses ‘outward’ rituals and ceremonies to the
detriment of ‘inward’ belief and morality:
On all occasions ceremonies meet the attention as the pre-eminent duties of the Hindu. The holiest man is
always he, by whom the ceremonies of his religion are most strictly performed. Never among any other
people did the ceremonial part of religion prevail over the moral to a greater, probably to an equal extent …
many positive declarations ascribe infinite superiority, to rites and ceremonies, above morality.159

As a mark of mediation by the material sign, ‘the visible agency of the Deity is peculiarly
required’ by Hinduism.160 Mill proffers an instance of such mediation, in which the maids of
Vraja encounter Krishna in the flesh:
With a garland of wild flowers, descending even to the yellow mantle that girds his azure limbs, distin-
guished by smiling cheeks, and by ear-rings that sparkle as he plays, Hari [or Krishna] exults in the
assemblage of amorous damsels. One of them presses him with her swelling breast, while she warbles
with exquisite melody. Another, affected by a glance from his eye, stands meditating on the lotos of his face.
A third, on pretence of whispering a secret in his ear, approaches his temples and kisses them with ardour.
One seizes his mantle, and draws him towards her, pointing to the bower on the banks of Yamuna, where
elegant vanjulas interweave their branches. He applauds another who dances in the sportive circle, whilst her
bracelets ring, as she beats time with her palms. Now he caresses one, and kisses another, smiling on a third
with complacency; and now he chases her whose beauty has most allured him. Thus the wanton Hari frolics,
in the season of sweets, among the maids of Vraja, who rush to his embraces, as if he were pleasure itself
assuming a human form; and one of them, under a pretext of hymning his divine perfections, whispers in
his ear: Thy lips, my beloved, are nectar.161

There is a crossing of the languages of religion and eroticism in this passage, where Krishna’s
essence is mediated to his worshippers by his physical appearance and the lust he arouses among
the ‘amorous damsels’ of Vraja. Krishna has the miraculous ability to project an image of himself
to each of his myriad lovers, and thus satisfy them simultaneously.162 Here lust and the image that
arouses lust become the medium of worship, a play on the conventional biblical portrayal of
idolatry as a cover for sexual licence and lust.
Mill is harsher on such manifestations and epiphanies of Eastern religion than Jones:
It may be matter of controversy to what degree the indecent objects employed in the Hindu worship imply
depravity of manners; but a religion which subjects to the eyes of its votaries the grossest images of sensual
pleasure, and renders even the emblems of generation objects of worship; which ascribes to the supreme
God an immense train of obscene acts; which has these engraved on the sacred cars, portrayed in the
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 21

temples, and presented to the people as objects of adoration, which pays worship to the Yoni, and the
Lingam, cannot be regarded as favourable to chastity.163

Idols in Gothic iconography are nearly always depicted nude, sometimes with enlarged genitals,
betokening a ‘diabolization of desire’ in the Christian tradition.164 Michael Camille has argued
that ‘the rejection of the body in Christian art – an absolute reversal from the aesthetic standards
of the ancient world – is one of the most crucial transformations in the history of Western art’.165
Hindu images do not partake of this ‘rejection of the body’ and Hindu gods and goddesses are
often depicted naked, thus seeming to correspond with the idols of Christian tradition.
Controlled by the perspectives of Christian religious representation Mill, who had once been a
preacher, labels Hindu stories and emblems as gross and monstrous.166 Hinduism’s carnality
orients it towards perverse sexual practice, and Mill has Hindu women perform a kind of fellatio
with naked holy men: ‘Naked fakirs … swarm around the principal temples. It is customary for
the women to kiss, and as it were to adore, their secret, or rather, public parts’.167 Mill cites the
missionary William Ward as evidence that ‘the intercourse of the sexes approaches very near to
that of the irrational animals’ among Hindus.168
Promiscuity and sexual perversion are not only practised by Hindus but also projected on to
their gods and goddesses. Thus, Krishna consorts simultaneously with the many married milk-
maids of Vraja. Brahma harbours incestuous desires: ‘Even Brahma, finding himself alone with his
daughter, who was full of charms and knowledge, conceived for her a criminal passion’.169
Lust is taken to be so universal within Hinduism that it is set up as the principle of creation
itself. Thus, Mill cites a traditional Hindu cosmogony as set out in the Institutes of Manu: ‘“The
self-existing power”, says Manu, “having willed to produce various beings, first with a thought
created the waters”. This is not a despicable conception: but what succeeds? “He placed in those
waters a productive seed”’.170
This spilling of divine seed, not always equally productive, marks out Hinduism from a ‘sublime’
monotheism. Even where Hinduism provides indications of being monotheistic, as when Brahma is
addressed as the ‘Single Being’ and ‘ONE God’, his incestuous desire makes him fall short of ‘high and
noble ideas of the creating power’.171 God’s scattering of seed subjects the Hindu word and Hindu
discourse to the force of dissemination. They are placed outside logos, and seen as playing themselves
out at the very limit of subjectivity. Thus, Mill characterizes Hindu discourse as ‘incoherence,
inconsistency, confusion … discourse without ideas’. This characterization runs obsessively through
Mill’s text.172
This idolatrous form of subjectivity is opposed to the Judeo-Christian God, who represents the
ideal Cartesian subject fully present to itself:
How infinitely removed is [the Hindu conception of divinity] from the sublime conception which we
entertain of the Divine Being; to whose thoughts all his works past, present, and to come, and every thing in
the universe from eternity to eternity, are present always, essentially, perfectly, in all their parts, properties,
and relations!173

The world displays itself to the omniscient gaze of the Judeo-Christian God as a succession of
Platonic Ideal Forms. By contrast, Hindu deities are prone to becoming and sexuality. Derrida
has suggested that dissemination and the scattering of seed/meaning might inscribe ‘a different
law governing effects of sense or reference … a different relation between writing, in the
metaphysical sense of the word, and its “outside” … The space of dissemination does not
merely place the plural in effervescence; it shakes up an endless contradiction, marked out by
the undecidable syntax of more’.174 Mill sets out a theory of language which rigorously
excludes dissemination: ‘The highest merit of language would consist in having one name
for every thing which required a name, and no more than one. Redundancy is a defect in
language, not less than deficiency’.175
In Mill’s conception, things exist as an ‘outside’ to names and to language, whereas Derrida
raises the problem of what happens when things become names, and names things. This problem
22 S. GANGULY

arises in a radical way in the sphere of theology, where we know gods exclusively by their
names.176
In a manner analogous to Jones, the genesis of the world from a seed rather than an idea
conjures up for Mill the spectre of materialism. Mill compares the views of creation in the Old
Testament and Institutes of Manu as follows:

The coincidence appears in the chaotic description here applied to the earth; the discrepancy consists in this,
that the Jewish legislator informs us of the previous creation of the shapeless mass, the Hindu legislator
describes it as antecedent to all creation.

This chaos, this universe, then, in its dark, imperceptible, undefinable state, existed, according to Manu,
antecedent to creation. This too was the idea of the Greeks and Romans, who thence believed in the eternity
of matter … It appears, indeed, that [Hindus] were unable to make any clear distinction between matter and
spirit, but rather considered the latter to be some extraordinary refinement of the former. Thus even the
Divine Being, though they called him soul, and spirit, they certainly regarded as material.177

The ‘Divine Being … regarded as material’ is of course a formula for idolatry, which emerges
again as the heart of the matter, or perhaps the matter at the heart of the matter.
The notion of the eternity of matter, its existence prior to being shaped by logos, is according to
Mill what distinguishes pagan from Christian/monotheistic views of the universe. It is also, one
might note, disturbing to logocentrism. Derrida speaks of a notion of materialism according to
which matter is another name for ‘absolute exterior or radical heterogeneity’.178 He wishes ‘to
apply the name “matter” to that which lies outside all classical oppositions’.179
The idolatrous notion of a material chaos antecedent to creation, which resembles Saussure’s
characterization of thought prior to language, converges as well with Derrida’s thinking of matter
as radical heterogeneity, an absolute exterior to logos.180 The Hindu view of the divine being falls
outside the classical opposition of matter and spirit, and could in fact conceive spirit to be ‘some
extraordinary refinement of [matter]’. Such a transgression is equally unpalatable to the classiciz-
ing Jones and the modernizing Mill, both of whom subscribe to similar views of language as
referential rather than differential.181
Jones’s reputation of having ‘discovered’ India and the Orient does not satisfactorily account
for the unsettling character, ambiguous elements and aporias present in his encounter with
Oriental texts. His bewilderment at the Sufi poetry of Hafiz, which he considers an exemplar of
Asian mystical poetry, impressively registers this ambiguity. In Hafiz’s poetry, some of the verities
and classical oppositions of ‘western metaphysics’ are vertiginously deconstructed:

Many zealous admirers of HA’FIZ insist, that by wine he invariably means devotion; and they have gone so
far as to compose a dictionary of words in the language, as they call it, of the Sufis: in that vocabulary sleep is
explained by meditation on the divine perfections, and perfume by hope of the divine favour; gales are illapses
of grace; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; idolaters, infidels and libertines are men of the purest
religion, and their idol is the Creator himself; the tavern is a retired oratory, and its keeper, a sage instructor;
beauty denotes the perfection of the Supreme Being; tresses are the expansion of his glory; lips, the hidden
mysteries of his essence; down on the cheek, the world of spirits, who encircle his throne; and a black mole,
the point of indivisible unity; lastly, wantonness, mirth and ebriety, mean religious ardour and abstraction
from all terrestrial thoughts. The poet himself gives a colour in many passages to such an interpretation; and
without it, we can hardly conceive, that his poems, or those of his numerous imitators, would be tolerated in
a Muselman country, especially at Constantinople, where they are venerated as divine compositions: it must
be admitted, that the sublimity of the mystical allegory, which, like metaphors and comparisons, should be
general only, not minutely exact, is diminished, if not destroyed, by an attempt at particular and distinct
resemblances, and that the style itself is open to dangerous misinterpretation, while it supplies real infidels
with a pretext for laughing at religion itself.182

In a manner analogous to the legends of Krishna, metaphors drawn from the realm of the sensory
and erotic invade the sacred. Sufi poetry may refer the qualities of the Supreme Being to features
on a lover’s body. Jones, according to whom ‘most of the Asiatick poets are of that religion [of the
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 23

Sufis]’, experiences this as profoundly unsettling.183 He wonders that such poetry is not just
tolerated but sometimes venerated in Muslim societies such as Ottoman Turkey.
Unable to draw the line between religious enthusiasm and vice in such poetry, Jones hesitates
between approval and denunciation. While a degree of sublimity may be attributed to such
compositions, they are dangerously liable to misinterpretation. While a detailed explanation of
analogues and resemblances in Sufi poetry is necessary for it to find acceptance in Muslim
countries, the same procedure paradoxically detracts from its sublimity and renders it a potential
tool in the hands of enemies of religion.
While the sensory and erotic may be read off in terms of the sacred, this protocol of reading is
reversible: the sacred too may be read in terms of the erotic, providing ‘infidels with a pretext for
laughing at religion’. Such protocols introduce a dangerous ambiguity into Sufi (and Asiatic)
poetry, unlike that of Spenser who ‘has distinguished his four Odes on Love and Beauty, instead of
mixing the profane with the divine’.184
These ambiguities are expressed in relation to not only Oriental texts but also elements of
physical landscape, as we had seen earlier in Jones’s experience of the Indian sun. Chandra
Mukerji has extended J.H. Elliott’s observations, on the European encounter with the New
World as a revolutionary encounter with new physical realities, to apply as well to the discovery
and exploration of Asia and Africa. More than the encounter with new metaphysical or intellec-
tual systems, exposure to the natural wonders and artefacts of these newly discovered continents
produced a crisis of meaning in Europe.185
For a scholar and intellectual like Jones, the crisis arose at both levels: in terms of his encounter
with an ‘other’ landscape as well as texts, knowledge, languages, and metaphysical systems that
were foreign. Jones’s description of his voyage to India in his discourse founding the Asiatic
Society captures this sense of newness, of novel physical objects, artefacts, social and intellectual
systems waiting to be discovered:

I found one evening, on inspecting the observations of the day, that India lay before us, and Persia on our
left, whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern … It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself
in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has been
esteemed the nurse of sciences, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders,
and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and
languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men. I could not help remarking, how important
and extensive a field was yet unexplored, and how many solid advantages unimproved.186

By the time Mill began to write his History of British India, however, the emphases of the colonial
state, and together with it the intentions and purposes of scholarly activity, had begun to alter.
The ambiguities of the encounter with India’s landscape and peoples were sought to be controlled
by means of a cognitive mapping that excluded physical, sensory experience and its attendant
sense of newness. This transformation in the nature of the colonial government also marks the
intellectual distance from Jones to Mill.

2.8. Polytheism, Philosophy and the State

Subsequent to Jones’s death, the British presence in India had undergone a transformation from a
regime of trade and plunder to the setting up of a unitary centralized state with long-term
imperial goals. C.A. Bayly has shown how the period of Richard Wellesley’s governor-
generalship (1798–1805) was instrumental in this transition, which ‘finally forged a European
military despotism out of the loose congeries of independent mercantile corporations and creole
armies which it had been in Hastings’s time’.187 Wellesley felt the need for a college that would
provide training for Company servants and turn them into functionaries of the new colonial state.
The college would ensure that:
24 S. GANGULY

their early habits should be so formed, as to establish in their minds such solid foundations of industry,
prudence, integrity and religion, as should effectually guard them against those temptations, with which the
nature of this climate, and peculiar depravity of the people of India, will surround and assail them in every
station, especially upon their first arrival in India.188

For this purpose, Wellesley set up the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. Although this
college did not function as initially planned for long, the Haileybury college was set up on the
same principles and with a similar curriculum in 1805, around the time that Mill began writing
his History.189 After it was published, it became ‘required reading’ at Haileybury College.190
Mill’s History diffracts the new emphases of the colonial state. It is an effort to re-centre
colonial knowledge of India by effacing its newness and controlling its ambiguities. Adam and Eve
were beguiled by the senses and sinned through sight and taste. The Carolingian theologian
Hincmar of Reims ruled that diverse varieties of idolatry all had the following feature in common:
the eyes do not see the reality veiled within appearances.191 Continuing a long metaphysical
tradition, John Locke claimed that idolatry was the consequence of a natural human tendency to
fall back and rest upon ordinary sensible objects and images.192 Wellesley wanted to ensure that
fresh Company servants acquire knowledge of India that would counteract their physical experi-
ence of it.
Mill’s History is also a diatribe against images and impressions received through the senses, as
well as against the (imag)ination thought of as peculiarly susceptible to such influences. If Jones
had envisaged imaginative Asia as a ‘Handmaid’ of rational Europe, Mill turns imagination itself
into an idol, a demoness meant to be proscribed by Reason.193
Mill imitates Plato’s gesture of exiling poets, who traffic in eidolons and hence deviate from the
truth. Plato worried that poets, through their circulation of eidolons, weakened the spirit of reason
and the state by arousing passion.194 For Mill, as we will see, the preponderance of idolatry and
the imaginative faculty among Hindus explained their inability to form a nation state; they could
not but be governed by a foreign power.
Mill’s discourse assimilates India as body, as recalcitrant matter not amenable to being shaped
by ideas. India is ‘a body of statements, given indiscriminately as matters of fact, ascertained by
the senses … [an] assemblage of heterogeneous things’. Mill positions himself relative to India as
knowing philosophical subject, bent on ‘extracting and ordering the dispersed and confused
materials’ in order to constitute ‘knowledge of India, once for all’.195
His History won him the job of Assistant Examiner of the East India Company’s correspondence
to India in 1819, from which he succeeded to Chief Examiner in 1830. The post of Chief Examiner
placed him at the very centre of power, and he got his chance at playing philosopher-king:

It is the very essence of the internal government of 60 millions of people with whom I have to deal; and as
you know the government of India is carried on by correspondence; and that I am the only man whose
business it is, or who has the time to make himself master of the facts scattered in a most voluminous
correspondence, on which a just decision must rest, you will conceive to what an extent the real decision on
matters belonging to my department rests with the man who is in my situation.196

Thus Mill becomes, in his self-description, literally the eye of power. The government of India,
carried on by correspondence, is conceived here as pure information archive into which India as
matter has already been mastered and transcribed, an immense retrieval and transmission system
which inscribes a bloodless, bodiless logos of empire.197
This logos excludes materiality in the sense of radical exteriority and irreducible excess, much
as in the Christian view of creation matter does not exist prior to logos but is willed by logos.
Imagination, where materiality appears in the form of the floating signifier not yet tethered to a
specific signified and thus a potential source of newness, is viewed as a threat within both
Christian and imperial logocentrism.
The triumph of the unitary colonial state represents a triumph of spirit, over India as
recalcitrant matter and irrational imagination. Mill, as master of the logos of empire, is placed
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 25

in the position of key decision-maker. It is entirely symptomatic of this regime of spirit and of
empire as information archive that Mill, who never visited India or knew any Indian language,
found himself at the very centre of power.
Since very few can access the whole archive or possess spirit and philosophical reason of this
kind, it follows that the government of India is an elite business, to be concentrated in the hands
of very few. Since Hindu myths and legends cannot be ordered in terms of a few supreme
concepts and unconditioned causa sui principles, subjectivities that harbour such polymorphous
signification fall outside both philosophy and monotheism.
One of the consequences of Hindus’ frame of mind is, according to Mill, the inability to form a
nation state:
Of all the results of civilisation, that of forming a combination of different states, and directing their powers
to one common object, seems to be one of the least consistent with the mental habits and attainments of the
Hindus. It is the want of this power of combination which has rendered India so easy a conquest to all
invaders; and enables us to retain, so easily, that dominion over it which we have acquired.198

Even in the sphere of state formation, it would appear, Hindus are unable to rise above their
idolatrous subjectivities to the level of the idea; only monotheism provides a satisfactory template
for the nation state. For this reason, Mill argues that the Hindus were subjugated not only by the
British, but also by Muslims (another monotheistic power).199
Mill’s denunciation of Hindu polytheism and discounting of Hindu monotheism thus makes
Hindus responsible for their own subjugation, and clears the way for the unitary colonial state. In
doing so, the earlier theological view of Hindu gods as demons were transformed by Mill into
figures of frightful psychological irrationality and social pathology, which guaranteed a misguided
and miscreating society unless reformed through external invasion and conquest.
Mill’s History unfolds a Manichean fable of Indian society, a fable whose emancipation from
theology is questionable. The status of this text as a standard work for East India Company
officials and candidates for the Indian civil service attests to its importance in framing imperial
subjectivities. Mill had edged out Jones as the knowing subject of the East India Company.

3. The aesthetic image and the idolatrous grotesque: John Ruskin, Alice Perrin and
E.M Forster
The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake whether through the Bosphorus
or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the
strangest experience of all
‒ E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Sometimes he was even conscious himself of the terrible fascination of this Power of Darkness … He could
well imagine the frenzied emotion of it all, the splendour, the madness as well as the degradation of
idolatry … to vanquish this terrible foe he had come out to India
‒ Alice Perrin, Idolatry

Get yourself to be gentle and civilised, having respect for human life and a desire for good, and somehow or
other you will find that you will not be able to make such pretty shawls as before. You know that you cannot
make them so pretty as those Sepoys [participating in the Indian Mutiny] do at this moment
‒ John Ruskin, The Two Paths

As writers and/or art critics John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, and E.M. Forster are all concerned with the
‘proper’ artistic image and its boundaries, and in that context all take up the representation of
Indian gods as an exemplary way of figuring the ‘grotesque’. While to a lesser or greater extent,
the effort in their texts is to exile the idolatrous grotesque to the margins of artistic discourse, the
idolatrous image turns out to be potent rather than empty; Indian gods and the grotesque have a
way of returning and assuming centre stage in issues of artistic representation and cognitive
mapping.
26 S. GANGULY

In the novel Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin (1867–1934), this process is narratively staged
through the transformations of Anne Crivener and other Anglo-Indian protagonists in turn-of-
the-century India, who are initially repelled by aesthetic and social practices connected to idolatry
but later drawn into fatal complicity with it.200 John Ruskin (1819–1900), who came into literary
prominence with a long poem on Indian idolatry entitled Salsette and Elephanta (1839), brought
evangelical Christian perspectives to bear on his criticism of art.201 Ruskin is centrally concerned
with a ‘barbarous grotesque’ linked to Indian gods. His efforts to distinguish it from a ‘noble
grotesque’ that is indispensable to art lead to insurmountable problems in his art theory (which is
simultaneously social theory) and testify to the enveloping power of idolatry.
Relationships between idolatry, sexuality, and the artistic image are a key concern in two texts by
E.M. Forster (1879–1970) of which a reading will be offered in this section: ‘The Life to Come’
(1922) and A Passage to India (1924).202 ‘The Life to Come’ is concerned with idolatrous adoration
and pagan eroticism as a disfiguration of Christian love, and powerfully engages the context of
colonial disciplinarity within which such invocations occur. Such concerns are carried forward in A
Passage to India where in addition, in a modernist update of James Mill, India and its landscapes
come to stand as figures for materiality, dispersion, the nontranscendent image, and loss.

3.1. Idolatry and the Ruskinian Grotesque: the Peat Cottage and the Ivory Palace
As an advocate of the crucial social importance of art, Ruskin’s views of art and society may at
first sight be taken to be opposed to the utilitarian perspectives of James Mill. Ruskin’s aesthetic
and social criticism involved a significant critique of utilitarian values in nineteenth century
England. Playing on Bentham’s utilitarian credo of the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’
Ruskin declared in Unto this Last ‘that country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of
noble and happy human beings’.203 The book targeted political economy based on the principle of
maximization of utility.204
As we saw in the earlier section, Mill’s normative definition of the philosopher’s role required a
distancing from the world of images. The aesthetic imagination can be radically misleading as a
cognitive mode, and art therefore plays a marginal role in Mill’s political economy. Ruskin’s The
Political Economy of Art, by contrast, conceived of an alternative political economy in which art
would play a central role and aesthetics constitute a crucial arbiter of social production and
value.205 Ruskin was himself a painter, and interested particularly in the visual arts: painting,
sculpture, and architecture. Consideration of the visual arts, particularly sculpture, brings up the
issue of idolatry, which plays a crucial role in Ruskin’s aesthetic. In addition to the mimetic
instinct, Ruskin considers the idolizing instinct necessary for true sculpture.206
Ruskin vociferously condemned the ills promoted by the Industrial Revolution, such as
aesthetic ugliness and environmental degradation.207 Reversing conventional Enlightenment tele-
ologies, he evinced a preference for Gothic over Renaissance architecture.208 Correspondences
between Gothic and Indian architectural styles had been perceived since the end of the eighteenth
century, to which the romantic movement as well as travellers in search of the ‘picturesque’ had
lent a particularly sharp edge.209 Ruskin’s response to Indian art, however, is not as appreciative as
his response to the Gothic, but is marked by a curious disjunctive doubleness. For Ruskin, the
productions of Indian art, architecture, and society in general are marked by idolatry which,
despite its necessity for sculpture, is a distinctly problematic category. This problematic character
appears in Two Paths (1859), an essay which examines Indian art and points the way towards
aporias present in Ruskin’s general theory of art.210
Two Paths begins with a contemplation of scenery in the north of Scotland, which for Ruskin is
marked by ‘a peculiar painfulness … caused by the non-manifestation of the powers of human
art’. Characteristic of this scenery is the peat cottage, which is ‘literally a heap of grey stones,
choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered heather; the only approach to an
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 27

effort at decoration consists in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof, so
as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines’.
In the midst of Ruskin’s distressed contemplation of such scenery, however, news from
another, very different quarter of the world breaks in: ‘while I was wandering disconsolately
among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no art to be found, news of peculiar interest
were every day arriving from a country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate
kind, to be found’. This is a quarter of the world more renowned for the ‘ivory palace’ than peat
cottages, and the news breaking in on Ruskin is of the Indian Mutiny.
This news is sufficient to make up his mind about Indian art:

And we are thus urged naturally to inquire what is the effect on the moral character, in each nation, of this
vast difference in their pursuits and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers of the tartan, or
the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere, fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our
answer. … Among all the soldiers to whom you owe … your avenging in the Indies, to none are you bound
by closer bonds of gratitude than to the men who have been born and bred among those desolate Highland
moors. … Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is
fruitful in the work of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice, idolatry, bestiality,
‒ whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell.211

Ruskin’s radicalism and difference from Mill on aesthetic matters does not thus translate into a
politics or a view of idolatry that’s any different from Mill. The aesthetic value embodied in the
ivory palace entails a worship of appearance and the image, hence idolatry and corruption, while
the lack of it in the peat cottage signifies Scottish purity and nobility. At this point, Ruskin falls
back upon a conventional pattern of associations and antitheses, opening up the very disjunction
between aesthetics and morality his theory was meant to avoid.
These antitheses also appear in his early poem Salsette and Elephanta, written in 1839 at the
age of twenty. In this poem, the architecture of the cave-temples of Salsette and Elephanta,
expressive of the spirit of Indian architecture, is associated with idolatry, oppression and evil:

Thus, in the fevered dream of restless pain,

Incumbent horror broods upon the brain;
Through mists of blood colossal shapes arise,
Stretch their stiff limbs, and roll their rayless eyes.
….

The sculptor learned, on Indus’ plains afar,

The various pomp of worship and of war;
Impetuous ardour in his bosom woke,
And smote the animation from the rock.

Idols here are phantoms of the imagination, conjured up in dream states and subsequently carved
out of rock by the sculptor, bringing about a reign of image and appearance. This reign may be
dispelled and the phantoms of imagination exorcised by the dawning of knowledge of the
true God:

_ the rays that bless,

They come, they come. Night’s fitful visions fly
Like autumn leaves, and fade from fancy’s eye;
So shall the God of might and mercy dart
His day beams through the caverns of the heart;
Strike the weak idol from its ancient throne …212

As Ruskin had never been to India, the poem is clearly a product of textual discursivity and
iterativity. Early European accounts of sculptures Salsette, Elephanta and similar cave temples in
28 S. GANGULY

western India attributed to them a ‘diabolic’ character, and some of them were even subjected to
attacks by Portuguese soldiers.213 Ruskin copiously cites such sources in his footnotes to the
poem, among whom is the sixteenth century Portuguese traveller J.H. van Linschoten, cited by
Ruskin on the ‘horrible and fearful forms that … make a man’s hayre stande upright’ of the
sculptures at Salsette.214 Linschoten’s contemporary Joao do Castro, who also visited Salsette,
reported on its sculptures that
I believe this work to be so amazing that it is almost one of the seven wonders of the world, except if its
worth were undermined by its seeming that men are not capable of it, and that the craft and possibility to
achieve it did not lie within their understanding and power, but that it was made by spirits and diabolical
art. As for me I am in no doubt of it at all.215

These accounts establish a diabolic stereotype that are reiterated in later European accounts of
Salsette and Elephanta, and surfaces in Ruskin’s poem.216
Significantly, accounts by Englishmen since the rise of the romantic movement attest to a
change in taste, and begin to apprehend Salsette and Elephanta as the ‘picturesque’. But this is
something that Ruskin’s poem does not pick up on, despite his own sympathy for ‘picturesque’
sights in England.217 In suggesting how easily the idolatrous may slide into the picturesque,
however, this points up a split within Ruskin’s notion of idolatry, as simultaneously enabling good
sculpture and promoting the kind of moral evil of which the Indian Mutiny is seen as an
exemplar.
Is the split between the aesthetic and the ethical irreconcilable, as the Scottish/Indian dichot-
omy suggests? Or is nonidolatrous art conceivable? Two Paths suggests that Indian art does not
copy its forms from nature, but seeks rather to render the ‘imagination of the thoughts of their
hearts’.218 This is what makes it especially culpable.
Art ‘in its delicate form’ can be ‘one of the chief promoters of indolence and sensuality’; indeed, it
has ‘hitherto … appeared only in energetic manifestation when it was in the service of
superstition’.219 To rescue art from the condition of idolatry, with which much of art history is
tainted, an ‘earnest and intense seizing of natural facts’ is called for: ‘seize hold of God’s hand, and
look full in the face of His creation, and there is nothing He will not enable you to achieve’.220 The
dichotomy between (Scottish) peat cottage and (Indian) ivory palace may be resolved in terms of the
Scottish poetry of Scott and Burns, which proffer examples of such a reverent imitation of nature.221
Yet as soon as Ruskin has established these principles for nonidolatrous art, he goes to great
lengths to hedge them with qualifications. He specifies that what he has in mind is the ‘inter-
pretation’ rather than ‘imitation’ of nature.222 While idolatry consists of pursuing the ‘imagination
of the thoughts of the heart’, what distinguishes the fine arts from the manufacturing arts is the
use of the heart in addition to the head and the hand.223 Art is not just a ‘clear statement and
record of the facts’ but requires ‘the manifesting of human design and authority in the way that
fact is told’.224
‘Love of nature’ cannot suffice for art; what ‘needs to be superadded is the gift of design’; and
‘design, properly so called, is human invention’.225 Exclusions and escape clauses proliferate; if the
copying of nature is a condition for nonidolatrous art, it always requires a supplement that
violates those conditions. Ruskin makes the creation of nonidolatrous art sound like walking a
narrow precipice:
But a time has always hitherto come, in which, having thus reached a singular perfection, [art] begins to
contemplate that perfection, and to imitate it, and deduce rules and forms from it; and thus to forget her
duty and ministry as the interpreter and discoverer of Truth. And in the very instant when this diversion of
her purpose and forgetfulness of her function take place ‒ forgetfulness generally coincident with her
apparent perfection ‒ in that instant, I say, begins her actual catastrophe; and by her own fall ‒ so far as
she has influence ‒ she accelerates the ruin of the nation by which she is practised.226

Thus, Ruskin’s formulation makes out as if the very attainment of the ideal of nonidolatrous art
creates the conditions of its destruction. If this is so, the moment of perfection is actually the
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 29

catastrophe; presence is shot through with absence. Moreover, failure in the aesthetic sphere can
have ruinous political consequences.
Similar aporias appear in Ruskin’s formulations on the grotesque and its relation to art. The
presence of an element of the grotesque, it turns out, is indispensable to art: ‘there is no test of
greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the development, among them or in them,
of a noble grotesque’.227 Byzantine art showed itself as that of a declining nation, according to
Ruskin, through absence of the grotesque element.228 There is another order of the grotesque,
which consists of ‘evidences of a delight in the contemplation of bestial vice, and the expression of
low sarcasm’.229 The grotesque element in art, therefore, can be simultaneously vitalizing and
degrading.
The aesthetic task at hand, then, becomes one of distinguishing between these orders of, on the
one hand, the ‘noble’ grotesque and on the other an ignoble or barbarous grotesque of which an
archetype is ‘the work of Hindoo and other Indian nations’.230 Ruskin formulates this distinction
in various ways: as the distinction between fear and licence, or the distinction between true fear
and a manufactured excitation which is the simulation of fear.
In one formulation, the function of the true grotesque is the promotion of fear and awe, arising
out of the contemplation of issues like sin, death and the power of God:

I understand not the most dangerous, because most attractive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending
to exalt the beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless infinitude of mercy, and blind obliteration of
the work of sin: and which does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances of God’s kindness on
the face of creation … Wrath and threatening are invariably mingled with the love; and in the utmost
solitudes of nature, the existence of Hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances,
as that of Heaven.231

According to James Mill, however, gods and goddesses inducing fear and awe is a sign of
primitive mentality. Ruskin himself views the sculptures of Indian gods and goddesses at
Salsette and Elephanta as inducing fear, and this associates them with idolatry and evil. This
formulation therefore confuses rather than clarifies the distinction between the ‘noble’ and the
‘barbarous’ grotesque.
Ruskin makes another formulation of the same distinction which may seem to resolve the
problem:

The horror which is expressed by the one [who experiences the true grotesque] comes upon him whether he
will or not; that which is experienced by the other is sought out by him, and elaborated by his art. And
therefore, also, because the fear of the one is true, and of true things, however fantastic its expression might
be, there will be reality in it, and force. It is not a manufactured terribleness, whose author, when he had
finished it, knew not if it would terrify any one else or not: but it is a terribleness taken from the life; a
spectre which the workman indeed saw, and which, as it appalled him, will appal us also.232

According to this distinction, the difference between the true and false grotesque is that between
true and manufactured terribleness, and the kinds of fear induced by them. Following this
formulation, the fear induced by images at Salsette would be an artificial fear, since induced by
artificial entities rather than the true wrath of God. This formulation ends up reiterating the
distinction between true and false gods, and thus introduces a troubling circularity in the
argument, which started out by trying to distinguish the barbarous grotesque of Hindu and
other pagan art from the noble grotesque of, for instance, Gothic art by using criteria internal to
the art itself rather than to the belief systems to which they refer. Ruskin hopes, weakly, that the
reader may ‘instinctively feel the difference’, as ‘he may yet find difficulty in determining wherein
that difference consists’.233
Since Ruskin cannot adequately theorise the two types of grotesque art and the distinction
between them, to apprehend their difference there is little recourse but to fall back upon ‘instinct’,
or to put the matter slightly differently, upon preexisting aesthetic ideologies. To explain matters,
he offers an analogy which is a symptom rather than a resolution of the problem. Visions of the
30 S. GANGULY

noble and barbarous grotesque alike arise in dreams, through the activity of the imagination. If the
mind is conceived as a mirror, the distinction between the two types of grotesque arises from the
quality of the mirror in which the visions of the imagination are glimpsed.
As St. Paul said, however, we all see through a glass (or into a mirror, in Ruskin’s adaptation of
the metaphor) darkly: ‘And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and
that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it’.234 The distinction between true
and false grotesque, therefore, appears to turn upon the difference between visions of the
imagination as mirrored respectively by, not a perfect and a distorting glass, but a dim and a
distorting one.235
The laboured and convoluted character of this analogy makes clear Ruskin’s difficulty in
arriving at a resolution: his inability to extricate the noble from the barbarous grotesque replicates
the difficulty he faces in extricating visual art, particularly sculpture, from idolatry.

3.2. The Exorcism of Colour

Other than idolatry and the barbarous grotesque, another element of the visual arts related to
artifice, and therefore placed in a comparable situation of indispensable supplementarity, is
colour. Colour, a repressed term in Ruskin’s vocabulary of the visual arts, is habitually associated
with Indians:
Abstract colour is of far less importance than abstract form; that is to say, if it could rest in our choice
whether we could carve like Phidias (supposing Phidias had never used colour), or arrange the colours of a
shawl like Indians, there is no question as to which power we ought to choose. The difference of rank is vast:
there is no way of estimating or measuring it.236

The colours on an Indian shawl do not represent anything in nature, but are entirely invented and
smack of artifice.237 Hence, they are inferior to forms that are imitated from nature. Through
artifice, colour is also connected to cruelty: ‘The fancy and delicacy of eye in interweaving lines
and arranging colours ‒ mere line and colour, observe, without natural form ‒ seems to be
somehow an inheritance of ignorance and cruelty, belonging to men as spots to the tiger or hues
to the snake’.238
Neither does Indian art (or other Oriental schools of art, like the Chinese), pay any attention to
the representation of light, another natural entity: these schools ‘have been content to obtain
beautiful harmonies of colour without any representation of light’.239 By contrast, Greek art is
held to privilege light over colour. The following passage from The Queen of the Air (1869), worth
quoting at length due to the influence of some privileged themes of idealist Western philosophy
that it reveals, finds Greeks of classical antiquity to be in fact deficient in their perception of
colour:
In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are all of this dark colour, yet the serpents
are said to be like rainbows; but through all this splendour and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly that the
literal ‘splendour’, with its relative shade, are prevalent in the conception; and that there is always a tendency
to look through the hue to its cause. And in this feeling about colour the Greeks are separated from the
Eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times. I cannot find that they take pleasure in
colour for its own sake; it may be in something more than colour, or better; but it is not on the hue itself ….

I have yet to trace the causes of this … but it is, I believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow
of death over the Greeks, without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of colour on their vases to
dim red (or yellow) with black and white, is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the
melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of colour perception is partly noble, partly
base.240

Unlike Indians or other Orientals who are liable to dwell on hue itself, Greeks are able to look
through the hue to its cause, through the signifier to its signified, and thus escape idolatry. Ruskin
takes the apparent absence of colour and privileging of light in Greek art to betoken an elevated
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 31

tragic consciousness, ennobled by having risen over the mere ‘playfulness’ of colour. He connects
this imputed privileging of light in Greek art with the role played by sunlight in the cave episode
of Plato’s Republic:
if you will look at the beginning of the 7th book of Plato’s Polity [Republic Book VII; where the cave episode
occurs], and read carefully the passages in the context respecting the sun and intellectual sight, you will see
how intimately this physical love of light was connected with their philosophy, in its search, as blind and
captive, for better knowledge.241

Derrida has pointed out how truth in Western philosophy is authenticated through the
metaphorics of light, involving particularly the relationship of sunlight to intellectual
sight.242 Ruskin’s meditations on the imputed privileging of light in Greek art place him
squarely within this philosophical tradition, and make him assign to colour a subordinate
status. At no point in these meditations does he take into account the possibility that the
absence of colour in classical Greek artefacts may be explained simply by their fading due to
age, the simplest explanation for why serpents that are said to be like rainbows do not actually
have the colour of rainbows.
Once natural principles such as form and light have been incorporated, there is now the
possibility of a dialectical return to colour. This is what the art of the ‘best designers of Christian
times’ makes available, in relation to which Greek art may now be seen as deficient or ‘partly
base’. Starting with Plato, Ruskin inscribes in his text the history of Western metaphysics by
enacting at this point a Hegelian manoeuvre: the Greek school (light without colour) engenders its
(unequal) antithesis in Oriental art (colour without form), while the triumphant Aufhebung
bringing together these poles is the art of Christian Europe.243
However, if colour is the repressed, subordinate term in the movement of this Aufhebung,
Stephen Bann’s fine essay ‘The Colour in the Text: Ruskin’s Basket of Strawberries’ points out the
return of the repressed in terms of an ungovernable eruption and excess of colour in Ruskin’s
text.244 Having each time ostensibly settled the question of colour his text returns to it obsessively;
in Bann’s words ‘as if colour had simply refused to lie down’.245 Bann shows how certain recurrent
patterns of colour in the text have a libidinal significance and may be diagnosed to reveal
psychosexual contents. In this case, there is a clear parallel between Ruskin’s denial of colour
and his disastrous attempts to form relationships with women cleansed of sexuality.246

3.3. Romancing the Stone

Ruskin’s attempts at defining and isolating the phenomenon of idolatry paradoxically promote a
productivity of meaning and accrue to it a more generalized referent. Idolatry grows progressively
more difficult to exorcise and expel. In a note entitled ‘Proper Sense of the Word Idolatry’,
appended to the second volume of his Stones of Venice, he notes that ‘idolatry is, both literally and
verily, not the mere bowing down before sculptures, but the serving or becoming the slave of any
images or imaginations which stand between us and God, and it is otherwise expressed in
Scripture as “walking after the Imagination” of our own hearts’.247 It can encompass phenomena
as diverse as ‘covetousness’ and ‘the denial of God’: covetousness is to set up material wealth as
one’s ultimate goal, and the denial of God often follows upon it.248 Ruskin describes
two forms of deadly Idolatry which are now all but universal in England.

The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth … which is briefly to be defined as
the servile apprehension of an active power in Money and the submission to it as the God of our life.

The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter,
instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity ….

No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful idolatry than the modern notion in the
minds of certainly the majority of English religious persons, that the Word of God … may yet be bound at
32 S. GANGULY

our pleasure in morocco, and carried about in a young lady’s pocket, with tasselled ribands to mark the
passages she most approves of.249

At this point, far from being the obstacle to be overcome in a civilizing discourse that is applicable
to non-industrial societies, the referent of idolatry is globalized. It can encompass belief in the
value of money, the ideological basis of industrial capitalism; it can include as well bibliolatry, or
the belief most widespread in Protestant Christianity that religion consists of reading the Bible.
Given the proliferation of its referent, Ruskin tries to differentiate benign from more culpable
versions of the phenomenon:
the deliberate and intellectually commanded conception is not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is
one of the grandest and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of evil idolatry
begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence.250

The italicized words, however, expose the contingency of the definition of idolatry: it is entirely
relative to one’s belief in what constitutes real presence. Ruskin goes on to specify the kinds of
presence that are real to him with references to the Bible: ‘If there be a real presence in a pillar of
cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin to bow down before these’.251
Ruskin offers a hypothetical example of what (to his mind) would be an irretrievably idolatrous
act, without redeeming features:
if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably
lay it aside in some, to him, sacred place, and believe the stone itself to be a kind of god, and offer prayer and
sacrifice to it.252

For his Stones of Venice project, however, Ruskin studied stones of old buildings, which he
regarded as witnesses speaking of the glory of Venice’s past. He set out to draw and measure
literally everyone of the Byzantine and Gothic buildings within a five square mile area of Venice,
and to make as accurate a record as possible of their every object and feature.253 He described his
intention as being to go ‘stone by stone, to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch’.254
In a letter to a friend, his new bride Effie Gray describes a typical day during what was their
first visit together to Venice:
Mr. Ruskin is busy all day till dinner time and from tea till bed time. We hardly ever see him excepting at
dinner, for he has found that the short time we are able to remain is quite insufficient for the quantity of
work before him. He sketches and writes notes, takes daguerrotypes and measures of every place, house, well
or anything else that bears on the subject in hand, so you may fancy how much he has to arrange and think
about. I cannot help teasing him now and then about his sixty doors and hundreds of windows, staircases,
balconies and other details he is occupied in every day.255

And in another letter she writes:

John excites the liveliest astonishment to all and sundry in Venice and I do not think they have made up
their minds yet whether he is very mad or very wise. Nothing interrupts him and whether the Square is
crowded or empty he is either seen with a black cloth over his head taking Daguerrotypes or climbing about
the capitals covered with dust, or else with cobwebs exactly as if he had just arrived from taking a voyage
with the old woman on her broom-stick.256

Noteworthy in these descriptions is the fetishistic accumulation of architectural features such as

doors, windows, balconies, staircases, and his relative neglect of Effie Gray for whom he seems to
have little time. Effie portrays him as a man possessed and compares his occupation with forms of
magical activity such as witchcraft.
In contrast to his devotion to and obsessive cataloguing of objects, Ruskin has few compli-
mentary things to say about the actual residents of Venice, who he sees as spiritually empty,
indolent, and depraved.257 His attitude to Venetians and Italians made him condone the stripping
of Venetian buildings for panels and architectural pieces to be sold in England, although his object
was to promote the preservation of Venice’s old buildings.258
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 33

He paid more attention to the stones of Venice than its people, or for that matter his new bride:
the vast amount of data on its architecture he compiled during 15 months of painstaking labour in
Venice were of dubious value to his project of writing The Stones of Venice, or to anything else.
Thus, he wrote later in his autobiography of his notes and drawings: ‘six hundred quarto pages of
notes for it, fairly and closely written, now useless. Drawings as many … useless too’.259
His labours are not completely explained by his book project; he collected buildings in Venice
as assiduously as Mill collected facts of Indian history. His biographer Wolfgang Kemp remarks
on his ‘naive appetite for objects’ as well as his ‘need to incorporate them totally’.260 His is a
specific fetishism of objects, driven by the encyclopaedic ideal of a total incorporation of a whole
field of objects, the same impulse that drives Mill’s ambition to write a total history for India. He
thought that the stones of Venice could be interpreted to reveal a universal meaning regarding the
rise and fall of nations, particularly for England which was now a great maritime power as Venice
had once been.261
What Effie Gray thinks of Ruskin’s obsession with objects, on their first trip together to Venice
to which she might have attached a romantic meaning, is conveyed by the not wholly compli-
mentary tone of her letters.262 Ruskin’s absorption in objects thus appears comparable to that of
the hypothetical savage with the meteoric stone.
Ruskin reveals his own idolatry in a letter to his father, where he describes the way he relates to
paintings and material things, and compares that with the way he relates to human beings:

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have
none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of
attachment I have are to material things. If the great Tintoret here [in Venice] were to be destroyed, it
would be precisely to me what the death of Hallam was to Tennyson ‒ as far as this world is concerned ‒
with an addition of bitterness and indignation, for my friend would perish murdered, his by a natural
death. … in exact proportion to the pleasure I have in getting a Turner, or saving some record of a piece of
architecture, is the pain I have in losing a Tintoret, or seeing a palace destroyed.263

Ruskin’s idolatry did not escape the attention of a perceptive reader and admirer of his work:
Marcel Proust.264 According to Proust, Ruskin ‘exhibits a kind of idolatry which no one has
defined better than he … this very “idolatry” lies at the root of Ruskin’s talent’.265
At times, Ruskin’s own text breaks through into an awareness of the inescapability of idolatry,
its rootedness in sentiments of human attachment and love, despite the challenge that it offers to
post-Reformation models of subjectivity unmediated by material objects. Thus, in an appendix to
the second volume of The Stones of Venice, entitled ‘Proper Sense of the Word Idolatry’, Ruskin
wrote

which of us is not an idolater? … For indeed it is utterly impossible for one man to judge of the feeling with
which another bows down before an image.

… strong love and faith are often the roots of [idolatrous acts], and the errors of affection are better than the
accuracies of apathy.266

One could perhaps make the same remark about Ruskin’s own idolatrous acts. There is no doubt
that for him Venetian buildings and paintings were animated by a real presence, and that the
manner in which he related to them was impelled by similar love and faith. The fact that he
cannot himself escape the influence of idolatry leaves its traces in his attempts to theorise the
position of idolatry in art. Like Hegel, Ruskin seeks to merge theory and history; but the more he
seeks to expel idolatry from a systematized history of art, the more forcefully it reasserts itself as a
problem. In doing so, Ruskin allows us to glimpse the limits of a post-Reformation model of
disembodied subjectivity even as he operates from within its terrain and seeks to reinforce its
claims.
34 S. GANGULY

3.4. Alice Perrin: Idolatry as Contagion

Alice Perrin’s 1909 romance Idolatry offers a novelistic treatment of the metaphysical problems
having Indian idolatry as a prime referent, that are worked through in Ruskin’s artistic and social
criticism. Perrin’s father was a General of the Bengal Cavalry; she married a medical officer of the
Indian Civil Service and spent 25 years with him in India.267 She wrote a large number of novels
set in India, dealing primarily with British social life in the country. Although (or because)
Idolatry belongs to a subcanonical genre (the romance), it helps contextualize and flesh out the
subjective dilemmas of characters similar to those which appear in more rarefied and sublimated
ways in canonical writings on India by E.M. Forster.
In Perrin’s novel, idolatry signifies initially the alien and repellent features of Indian society,
seen from the point of view of its British characters. But the circle of idolatry expands, threatening
to engulf the latter. It is with the force of idolatry as contagion, therefore, that the novel is
primarily concerned.
The novel begins with an invocation of the devil, but in the context of fashionable London
society rather than at an isolated Indian outpost: ‘It’s the devil!’ declares Sir Richard Crivener, on
discovering that his mother has run through her fortune without leaving an inheritance for Anne
Crivener, her granddaughter and the novel’s heroine.268 A fashionable young woman, Anne was
brought up in comfort and luxury but now finds herself without a means of subsistence. In the
worldly London society that she inhabits, this is perhaps the nearest equivalent to being damned.
Her social world is ruled by material details and we come to know of her grandmother chiefly
through the material legacy she has left behind, an assortment of commodities of which the text is
richly descriptive:
The silver toilet set, the little pictures, knick-knacks, photographs, books, would never again be set out here,
and tomorrow the familiar white suite, and the French bed, and the cosy couch and armchair would all be
taken off to the pantechnicon with the rest of the furniture to await Lady Crivener’s orders as to what was to
be kept and what sold. Anne rebuked herself for these sentimental feelings; she opened a drawer with a
determined jerk and began to disentangle scraps of ribbon and lace, pieces of trimming and embroidery,
soiled gloves (worth cleaning now), an accumulation of odds and ends that she had intended, for an
indefinite period, to ‘go through when she had time’.269

The novel thus begins with concerns of money and class. The objects named in the passage
represent a commodified order. In an important sense, these knick-knacks are Lady Crivener, like
the paintings that take the place of Ruskin’s friends. Brought up in a world of fashion, Anne
herself has undergone a kind of self-fashioning learnt from her grandmother:
She felt nearer to tears as recollections of her dauntless old kinswoman surged through her brain ‒ the
worldly wise Granny, gone out of her life forever, from whom she had learnt tolerance, good manners, self-
control; who had drilled her in the art of being agreeable without trouble to herself; of being polite and
punctilious without going to any great personal inconvenience; of evading tiresome obligations and
engagements by the manufacture of such excuses as would please and convince instead of causing offence
‒ all the little niceties of the craft of humbug that ensure exemption from boredom and yet make for pleasant
and profitable company.270

Anne’s ‘undeniably good looks and the thoroughbred air’ are an asset for her in the matrimonial
market; as Anne herself puts it: ‘marriage would be the best way out of the [present] difficulty’.271
Anne is a rational subject in its original etymological sense, i.e. she reckons, and engages in profit-
maximizing behaviour.272
She is thus the ideal subject of a utilitarian political economy which has as its goal,
the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. Anne’s father, however, had bucked
this trend by undertaking an ‘undesirable marriage’ to the daughter of a missionary in India: ‘a
little insignificant “nobody” … having neither connections nor money, nothing in the world to
her advantage save a singularly pretty face’.273 When Anne looks at a photograph of her mother,
she is placed in terms of inappropriate clothes and other material details: ‘How absurd it looked!
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 35

The self-conscious pose against a balustrade … the strained hair, the atrocious gown, the glimpse
of a broad boot’.274
When Anne first comes to know about her mother, who had left for India upon her father’s
death and is now married to Mr. Williams, another missionary, she is concerned only ‘to conceal
the rather unpleasant fact’.275 Anne’s mother is thus placed in the position of the colonized.276 She
is an origin Anne must disavow, but which, as the plot proceeds, she must return to. Anne learns
that Dion Devasse, one of her rejected suitors, has recently come into a fortune and is now in
India, in the very town where her mother coincidentally happens to be.
Anne therefore sets out in pursuit of Dion, and renews contact with her mother whose house
she puts up in. Anne thus relies on others for a living, a relationship structurally homologous to
colonialism. Her motivation for proceeding to India, indeed, is the seeking of a fortune.
This quest brings her to Sika, a town of yells and smells, heat and dust. The syllables of ‘Sika’
transposed spell ‘Kasi’ or Benares, Max Mueller’s dream city; indeed, the description of Sika as
‘the sacred Hindu city’ on the banks of the Ganges matches that of Kasi.277 Anne moves in with
her mother and her stepfather John Williams, a missionary who has chosen Sika and surrounding
villages to spread the gospel. Despite the best efforts of John Williams and other missionaries,
however, ‘idolatry at Sika certainly would not be lessening’.278
As we have seen, the notion of idol as false god is linked to the idea of duplicity. John Williams’
efforts at conversion appear to be defeated by the duplicity of Hindus, as in the case of a Hindu
woman who shows up at his mission asking to be baptized. When he places her intentions under
scrutiny and visits her house, she pretends not to know him at all.
Anne regrets that ‘this good, sincere man’ has to be ‘wasting his time, brains, and energies on a
being whom he suspected of pretending to seek after Truth that she might spite her relations!’279
However, Anne herself cannot avoid being caught up in this regime of dissembling; Williams
places her own intentions under scrutiny. He suspects her motivations for putting up in his
household, which are not so much to seek after the truth of her origins (her true mother) but
rather to acquire a rich husband (Dion Devasse).280
By contrast to the missionary figure of Williams, described as ‘an enemy to everything false’,
Anne appears as ‘practically a pagan’.281 Williams’s colleague Oliver Wray goes out to the river’s
edge, where Hindu pilgrims and worshippers gather and thus the very site of idolatry, to preach.
Wray acquires a disciple in Ramanund, the son of Rajah Rampal Singh, a local aristocrat.
Ramanund presents a sensual and idolatrous surface: ‘oiled, scented, exotic, jewels in his ears,
on his hands, at his throat, dressed fastidiously in rich colours, having a feminine grace of
carriage, and a languid indifference of manner’.282
Seeking the message of Christianity, Ramanund nevertheless manifests a love of masks,
disguises, subterfuge, which he must adopt in order to meet or send emissaries to Wray without
news of their liaison reaching his father.283 Ramanund asks Wray whether he can adopt
Christianity while keeping his caste, to which Wray replies that Christianity and caste are
incompatible, since ‘the rules and ceremonials of caste enjoin avoidance and contempt of
others’.284 Ironically, Anne’s mother Mrs. Williams had to return to India because she became
an outcast in Anne’s circle, an object of ‘avoidance and contempt’ due to her colonial origin.
Another query by Ramanund, however, causes Wray greater unease. The question pertains to
the lifestyle of English missionaries:

Have [the followers of Christ] not bungalows like unto other sahibs? and women, and servants, and
offspring? Do they not have three, four meals in the day and drive forth in a carriage to eat the air, and
sleep on beds and wear good raiment? Sahib, thy pardon for these words; I do not mock. … It may be right
according to the Christian scriptures, but the Brahmins maintain that it is not what the people regard as a
holy man with a message to deliver.285

Like Kipling, Perrin puts archaic diction in the mouths of her native characters to convey the
antique character of the civilization they represent, thought to practise ‘cults and customs handed
36 S. GANGULY

down unchanged through countless generations’.286 Despite the use of such devices for framing
Ramanund’s speech it has the status of a colonial hybrid, which Homi Bhabha describes as ‘the
ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at
once disciplinary and disseminatory’.287 It corresponds to the ‘sly civility’ with which Indian
villagers demand an Indianized gospel in Bhabha’s essay ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’.288
Thus, instead of engaging Wray directly on the terrain of religious doctrine, Ramanund brings
up the apparently irrelevant but unsettling detail of the missionaries’ lifestyle; to what extent it
conforms to that of the ‘other sahibs’ or the order of commodification and rules of money, caste,
and class that govern Anne’s world. Although Wray has given up his own property in England
and come to India in order to devote himself to the battle against idolatry, it strikes him that from
the perspective of those he attempts to proselytise, ‘he was just a sahib who was paid to come
among them and preach the sahib’s religion; and in no other way did he differ from the rest of the
sahibs who helped to govern the country’.289
Wray faces the same dilemma as the writers of the Ezourvedam: was the most appropriate way
of conveying Christianity in India through modes of discourse that were Indian? Or would such a
repetition refashion the Christian text itself, causing it to unravel and ultimately get swallowed up
in difference? Wray decides to take the risk, as he is the only one among the missionaries to join
the idolatrous throng at the river’s edge, mingling among holy men and ascetics to preach his
message.

3.5. The Sick Fascination of Sika

On the steps leading down to the river in Sika is an intoxicating medley of sights and smells: ‘a
throng of human beings draped in dyed garments − saffron, orange, rose − hung about with
garlands of blossoms, jessamine, tube-rose, and the pungent-scented marigold’, representing a
‘living kaleidoscope’ which even at sunset is ‘almost dazzling to the Englishman’s vision’.290
Confronted with this spectacle, Wray considers himself in the presence of something vampir-
ish: ‘the incarnation of everything evil … that sucked all purity from the spirit leaving
corruption only’; yet a ‘vampire that enslaved and bewitched all who yielded to her spell!’291
The spectacle by the riverside is marked by a profusion of bodies, human, animal, and
artificial:

Pilgrims were arriving from every quarter of India, weary with their travels, yet uplifted by the joy of
reaching this holy spot … Aged people were borne along by their relatives to die within sight, at least, of the
River of Purification; beggars, priests, fakirs, devotees of every known Hindu sect, crowded the narrow
passages, and rapid were the profits of the dealers in brass and clay images, brisk the sales, to ardent
worshippers, of garlands and oil and grain … The clear, cold weather atmosphere vibrated with sound − the
pulsing of temple bells, the cry of the mendicant priest … the voices of happy children, scolding women,
busy men … idols everywhere. Siva in his various incarnations, Kali, Ganesh, Hanuman, Durga − the whole
accursed host, staring, grinning, brandishing arms and legs and weapons, stained red as with blood
symbolising sacrifice, murder, wickedness … [Wray] pushed his way through the steaming crowd, not
only of human beings, but of monkeys, sacred bulls, pariah dogs, and hastened to reach the cool stillness of
his little bungalow, that he might think and pray alone.292

The description suggests that it is this collective religious body, resembling Bakhtin’s evocation of
the grotesque body of carnival, that is demonized as vampirish and idolatrous: ‘To the missionary
the air was tainted, heavy with idolatry’.293 This admixture of religion and carnival is threatening
to Wray who desires to escape into the space of the lone transcendental subject of nonidolatrous
religion, to ‘think and pray alone’. But Wray himself is not proof against the seductions of
idolatry, having experienced its spell.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown how the response aroused by carnivalesque
spectacle may be ambivalent, with mingled elements of desire and disgust.294 This is true of
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 37

Wray’s response to the idolatrous crowd, and is brought to a head when he notices in their midst
the figure of a lone Englishwoman − Anne Crivener:

an English girl with bright brown hair and long, brilliant eyes, clad daintily in softest white, shod with little
tan shoes. At her bosom blazed a cluster of gaudy marigolds that sounded a note of violent contrast, yet only
emphasised her beauty. A sacred bull, sleek and arrogant, brushed past her as he foraged unrebuked among
the stalls for grain. Staring at her with objectionable interest were Brahmins, calmly superior as holding
themselves part of the divine; citizens, villagers, pilgrims, and grotesque specimens of the religious fanatic
half drunk with hemp, hideously maimed with bodily penance.

To Wray the reaction seemed violent − from the poisonous influence of idolatry in positive form, to a vision
that gratified the eye and the senses. He felt as though in a dream, as though his fate hung on the moment,
and he had been forced to hold out unwilling arms to some loathsome goddess, when lo! she had
transformed herself into a creature of gentle loveliness, subtle, alluring, the easier to tempt him to her
allegiance.295

To Wray, Anne’s image is split between ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of symbolism: there is a ‘violent
contrast’ between, on the one hand, the ‘softest white’ of her dress and on the other, the ‘gaudy
marigolds’ blazing at her bosom. While the former signifies the purity of English womanhood, the
latter represents an eruption of colour that Ruskin had sought to repress because of its association
with cruelty and sin and that connects Anne with the idolatrous crowd as the blossoms were
probably picked up from the fair in their midst. And yet, Wray cannot deny that the marigolds
‘only emphasised her beauty’.
At work in this passage is a logic of contamination. The ‘high’ (English womanhood) is
brought in close juxtaposition to the ‘low’ (the idolatrous crowd) and exposed to contamination
by it, of which the ‘sleek and arrogant’ sacred bull touching Anne as it brushes past her is a
metonymic expression. The ‘objectionable’ gaze directed at her by the crowd is no less contam-
inating. Wray reads into them a ‘contemptuous relish’ which drives him to fury:

In one burning moment all his concern and devotion for the spiritual welfare of these people, to whom he
was dedicating his life, went from him, driven out by a savage instinct of antagonism and defence. The men
around him were no longer his equals in the sight of God, to be pitied for their blindness to the truth, to be
loved, and saved, and helped, and excused; but members of a vitiated race devoid of chivalry, without
reverence for womanhood, to whom the female is naught but a necessary evil.296

On the most obvious level, there is a fault line in Wray’s perception of natives, caught as he is
between Christian universalism and colonial contempt. There is, however, reason to examine the
grounds for Wray’s fury. The point of view attributed to the crowd, in which ‘the female is naught
but a necessary evil’, is mirrored in Wray’s own response when the figure of Anne merges with
that of a loathsome pagan goddess. Wray finds himself plunged into a dreamlike state as he
projects his own desire on to the crowd, whom he sees as staring at her with ‘objectionable
interest’.
Stallybrass and White have shown that the low placed in close proximity to the high is a
transgression in the symbolic domain which heralds the possibility of a disruption of social
order.297 More specifically, Jenny Sharpe in her study of English womanhood as a signifier in
the social civilizing mission articulates how native insurgency and crises of British authority in
colonial India since the Mutiny were recoded as barbaric attacks by Indian men on white
women.298 Thus, the contaminating gaze and touch directed at Anne may be seen as questioning
the legitimacy of British rule itself.
Anne herself is by no means innocent of awareness of these codings. When Wray rushes to her
side trying to get her away from the crowd, she asks him ‘are we on the verge of a mutiny?’299
Moreover, it turns out that Wray’s sexualization of Anne is returned by Anne.
As he holds forth to her on the edifying prospect that ‘a higher standard of morality may
develop generally in the native mind’ her mind wanders:
38 S. GANGULY

she was not at all interested in the missionary’s theories, though, as an individual, he was certainly
attractive. … She began to picture him in the regulation tailoring of the man of the world; in tweeds, in
hunting kit, in London ‘get up’, in dress suit. He would look at home in them all … She glanced again at the
clean-carven face, the expressive lines of mouth and chin, the mettle of the ice-grey eyes under brows black
and straight. It might be interesting to see him in a real rage, not merely angry, as he undoubtedly had been
just now with the natives around her … It might be still more interesting to see him in love − he would
make an ardent, masterful lover. At this point Anne checked her thoughts aghast at her own vulgarity …
Was it possible that the climate and surroundings of this unspeakable country had already worked a
deteriorating effect upon her mind? How disgusted Granny would have been with her!300

Anne has at this point already achieved the seduction of Dion, her primary purpose in coming to
India. Until this point, she has been governed solely by the imperatives of utilitarian reason. She is
very clear regarding what the seduction of Dion means for her: the restoration of her social
position.301 Yet Anne finds herself sexually drawn towards Wray, a situation which could (and
eventually does) jeopardize her relationship with Dion.
Her visit to the ‘bazaar’ − the site of native carnival where she enjoys ‘the sunshine, the noise,
the bright colours, the novelty’ and later the company of Oliver Wray − brings into play the
possibility of different selves.302 It displaces her utilitarian subjectivity whose principles her
grandmother had instilled in her in the direction of ‘idolatry in a positive form’, i.e. towards
‘vision[s] that gratified the eye and the senses’. Like Wray, she too is subject to the contagion of
the crowd and feels ‘a deteriorating effect upon her mind’.
She attributes it to ‘this unspeakable country’, making India the agent of her deterioration.
Curiously, the country itself becomes a constitutive principle and animating agent, repeating the
animism that is supposedly the preserve of pagan religion and closely linked to fetishism.
Thanks to the contagion effect, the battle that Wray wages against idolatry is no longer external
but internal. It now rages within his own soul, as he struggles to shut out Anne’s image from it:

She was a poisoned weapon of the enemy that he would give his life to crush and conquer … All unwittingly
he had yielded tribute to the foe, his love itself was but a species of idolatry, a vulnerable spot … And he
must fight − fight to the death if need be.303

The struggle subjects him to increasing strain. One day as he is preaching by the riverside he has a
vision of Anne, with ‘gay marigolds blazing at her breast’, at the top of a flight of steps beckoning
to him. As he climbs the steps to the top he finds himself

face to face with a wild-looking fakir of unusual height, whose eyes burned with an unholy excitement produced
by a deadly drug; whose thick hair, many feet long and matted with cowdung, was piled up on his head in
fantastic shape; whose gaunt, powerful body looked white as snow in the moonlight, for it was plastered with
clay and ashes. Necklaces of beads, and festoons of marigolds, hung down below his waist … And behind him
pressed a crowd of similar faces and forms, grotesque, loathsome, very incarnations of evil …304

Between Wray and the fakir, ‘whose eyes burned with an unholy excitement produced by a deadly
drug’, there is a moment of recognition. In Wray’s case, the ‘deadly drug’ is Anne, and Wray sees
in the fakir and in the grotesque figures accompanying him the demonized shapes of his own
desire. Wray swoons at this sight and is thrown into delirium.
Like the ‘Boum’ heard in the Marabar caves of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, levelling
differences in the minds of its English characters, Wray’s delirium is a moment of existential
doubt: ‘the doubt that had arisen and confronted him with such insistence on the morning of his
first encounter with Ramanund, now … became fiercely importunate. … Analogies brushed
through his mind, Trinity, Triad; Christ, Krishna; Atonement, blood sacrifice; baptism,
bathing’.305
Wray’s transformation is complete by the end of the novel when he becomes a fakir, taking up
the life of a wandering ascetic. This is a process associated with the disintegration of subjectivity.
It is like the moment in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when Indiana Jones comes under
idolatrous priest Mola Ram’s spell and appears as a Hindu priest himself. As Padre Williams
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 39

sombrely warns, ‘preaching Christ from an Oriental standpoint … has almost always resulted in
loss of health or reason, or worse, in death’.306
Anne undergoes a similar process of derangement. Losing her earlier self-assurance she is by
turns depressed and hysterical, and breaks off her engagement with Dion. She dreams repeatedly
of the Buddhist ruins at Thanesur, outside Sika, a spot which also holds for Wray ‘a subtle
fascination’. At this site

in ages past, had gleamed temples, monasteries, towers, and the buildings of a sacred city. Now the golds and
crimsons of early morning fell upon ruin and desolation. The broken ground was strewn and cumbered with
ancient remains of wall and foundation, scattered fragments of ornamental sculpture, masses of crumbling
brick, mounds covered with coarse, rustling vegetation − a veritable cemetery of dead mysteries whose
perishing tombstones revealed, even to the most learned archaeologist, but a fraction of the secrets buried
underneath. From out the débris rose a massive tower, battered, defaced, shorn of its crown, thatched now
with waving grass, and even a few stunted, weakly trees − a melancholy memorial to the greatest reformer,
save One, that the world has ever known.307

The Thanesur ruins are an excellent objective correlative for the English characters’ sense of India
as an antique and decadent civilization, and figure Wray’s and Anne’s ambivalence towards it.
Wray feels the country to be ‘so old in wisdom and civilization yet drugged still with the powerful
narcotic of idolatry’; in the shapes of a ruined city Wray contemplates, like Max Mueller, a past
golden age and present decay.308 In Anne’s dream, the mounds and stones of Thanesur call out
her name, and thus become the site of an uncanny recognition.309
Wray likes to dwell on the history of ‘the greatest reformer, save One’ i.e. the Buddha, who like
Wray after him is supposed to have taken up cudgels against idolatry:

This man’s influence, in spite of failure and discouragement, had delivered half the world for nearly ten
centuries from the trammels of idolatry … Wray reminded his hearers that only within a few miles of where
they were gathered together [Thanesur] Buddha had preached his first sermon, had made known the
convictions that were so to stir the Indo-Aryan mind … yet, in the end he had failed, Idolatry had
triumphed once more.310

As in the discourse of Indology, positing an ‘Indo-Aryan mind’ also postulates a point of common
origin where it is possible to return, accounting for the uncanny impression produced by the ruins
at Thanesur. Wray conceives his project in India as one of paring away later religious and cultural
accretions stemming from idolatry to reveal an originary Indo-Aryan subject. Texts of colonial
fiction such as Idolatry reveal close interconnections with the discourse of Indological scholarship,
relying often on the same tropes for generating their effects of meaning and pathos.
However, despite the efforts of the Buddha (or of Wray) idolatry triumphs again, accounting
for the ideological meaning of the broken masonry and stonework at Thanesur. The shattered
tower − which Anne notes as a ‘massive erection’ with a ‘crooked, battered crown’ – resembles
nothing more than a monument to ruined masculinity, the effect that India and idolatry have on
the British and particularly on Wray.311 At the site of these ruins, Anne and Wray discover love,
which deflects both of them from their greatest goals: in Anne’s case a successful marriage, and in
the case of Wray a successful campaign of proselytization.
Compelling grounds for comparison between Anne Crivener and Adela Quested, heroine of A
Passage to India, suggest themselves. Both come out to India to contract a marriage. Like Dion
Devasse in relation to Anne, Ronny Heaslop too is a ‘decent’ but unimaginative type who cannot
engage Adela’s passions. Both women are afflicted by ennui and return to England empty handed
and stripped of their illusions.
While Adela’s desire for Aziz is unsaid and unspeakable within a colonial context Anne’s desire
− directed at white man Wray − can be articulated and is ‘spoken’ more by Idolatry’s narrative.
For Anne, the ruins of Thanesur speak the secret of her desire: she wishes to and eventually meets
Wray at this site once before returning to England ‘with her secret buried deep in her heart’.312
40 S. GANGULY

Wray, too, confesses at Thanesur the desire he feels for her and implores her to leave before he
succumbs to his desire.313
Michel Foucault has suggested that sex and sexual desire are not so much outlawed as placed at
the outer limit of modern discourse; they constitute ‘something akin to a secret whose discovery is
imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary,
dangerous and precious to divulge’.314 This formulation certainly fits manoeuvres around sex in
Idolatry. Thus, sexual attraction between Anne and Wray is the secret within the text ‘whose
discovery is imperative’; Thanesur becomes the site of a ‘difficult and necessary’ confession where
the ‘truth’ of the subject is revealed; the novel achieves hermeneutic resolution and closure with
Anne disclosing to Dion that in reality she was in love with Wray.315
Is there anything left unsaid in this narrative, are there yet more anomalous forms of desire and
transgression lodged within the text? Thanesur is characterized by a certain ‘hypnotic languor’
which does not yield all its secrets equally directly.316 It is the estate of the corrupt Rajah Rampal
Singh, who presides tyrannically over a Gothic establishment that epitomizes the evils of
idolatry.317 Ramanund is heir to this estate, and desires to usher in reform under the guidance
of Wray. Interestingly, Wray very often thinks of Anne in conjunction with Ramanund.
For example, just prior to his vision of Anne turning into a fakir on the river steps he sees
Ramanund with the Rajah and his companions, and the paroxysm of anger he experiences when
one of them directs an insulting gesture at him reminds him of the moment when he had seen
Anne in the midst of the bazaar crowd.318 After the last encounter with Anne among the ruins of
Thanesur, Wray’s steps turn unconsciously towards Thanesur fort where he learns that
Ramanund’s marriage is taking place, a piece of news that leaves him ‘as one transfixed’ and
eventually ‘brain-sick and despairing’.319
On an earlier occasion, when Anne visited Wray’s quarters at night, she found at his place a
figure with ‘naked brown arms and legs’ and a ‘shabby loin cloth’ who slipped out on catching
sight of her: none other than Ramanund himself in one of his disguises.320 Ramanund’s
nocturnal and clandestine visits to Wray for the purposes of religious instruction have more
the character of an illicit romantic liaison. Wray gave Ramanund a Bible to read which he
always carried inside his garments; although he could not interpret its contents he ‘touched
caressingly the volume’.321
Given the imputed fetishistic character of natives, it is possible to view the book as a fetish
object, a token substituting for Wray himself. Wray is counselled by Williams that ‘these secret
meetings should cease’. But when he does receive a message from Ramanund that the latter
cannot meet him anymore he experiences a ‘helpless yearning’ and realizes with a ‘sudden, tearing
shock’ that he has not taken the opportunity of sending back an answer.322
All these are signs embedded within the text of something it must disavow in its ideological
register: that Ramanund’s oiled, scented, and bejewelled exterior and languid and feminine
manner may have held their charms for the missionary, a desire which would on his part breach
colonial discipline and disfigure the civilizing mission of which the pedagogic project that Wray
undertakes with respect to Ramanund is an offshoot. It would constitute sodomy, a form of
idolatry far more grievous than a heterosexual love affair among the governing English; hence an
eruption of the carnivalesque which would make a mockery of Wray’s project of reforming
Indians’ idolatry. The text is at great pains to fend off the carnivalesque, as the portrayal of the
scenes by the riverside or at the bazaar with Anne Crivener suggest.
The disclosure of the affair between Anne and Wray is therefore also a means of covering up of
the traces of the far more transgressive relationship between Wray and Ramanund. James Mill’s
fears about India come true in Perrin’s text. Idolatry is endowed with the force of contagion and
contaminates English characters who come into contact with India. Analysis of overt disgust
reveals a covert desire. As in Ruskin’s text, the more forcefully idolatry is sought to be exorcised,
the more it reasserts itself.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 41

We now turn to a text which deals more explicitly with erotic subtexts underlying the
Christian-pagan encounter in a colonial situation: turning E.M. Forster’s short story ‘The Life
to Come’ into a dark and mordant allegory of colonialism.

3.6. E.M. Forster and the Coming of Christ

The expression unite men with God and with one another [John 17: 21] may seem obscure to people
accustomed to the misuse of these words that is so customary, but the words have a perfectly clear meaning
nevertheless.
− Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?

E.M. Forster’s great grandfather Henry Thornton was a founder member of the Clapham Sect,
along with Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and others; as we have seen before, the Clapham
Sect were militant advocates of an evangelizing campaign against Indian idolatry and
superstition.323 The infant Forster, however, was noted by his elders for his intense enjoyment
of physical objects, which made his great-aunt Marianne Thornton fear that he might be
susceptible to idolatry when he grew up. Marianne wrote his aunt Laura Mary Forster regarding
his ‘intense enjoyment of this world & all it contains & his proportionate misery when anything is
withheld from him. He seems to have the attachment of grown-up people for each other, for
inanimate objects’.
Marianne feared that with his ‘memory for old toys and love for sticks and stones’ he would
grow up to be an idolater; for him ‘any pleasure I am sure is double what it is to other people’.324
This double inheritance of Forster’s nicely frames his profoundly ambivalent attitude to the
artistic/sensory/erotic image as well as to India, which in his writing is assimilated to idolatry,
imagination, materiality, dispersion, the autonomy of the signifier, and loss.
Although the short stories in Forster’s collection The Life to Come and Other Stories were
written in the time period from 1922 to 1958, none of them found publication till 1972, two years
after Forster’s death, due to the homosexual content of many of them.325 ‘The Life to Come’ turns
upon native misrecognition and disfiguration of the message of Christian love, a theme which
resurfaces in A Passage to India and will be a principal focus in my readings of Forster.
‘The Life to Come’ was written in 1922, the same year that Forster’s Egyptian lover,
Mohammed el Adl, died. He had been arrested by British authorities in Egypt on a trumped up
charge, and Forster considered his stint in prison to have wrecked his health.326 Powerful
homosexual and anti-colonial motifs come together in ‘The Life to Come’ which Forster claimed
to have written ‘in indignation’.327 Its frame of ideological reference, therefore, is one that is
distinctly different from Perrin’s Idolatry, and enables it to interrogate and bring out elements that
were implicit in the latter.
Vithobai, the youthful chief of a pagan tribe in ‘The Life to Come’, is the equivalent of
Ramanund; while Paul Pinmay, a missionary sent into the forest to preach Christianity to
Vithobai, is Oliver Wray’s opposite number. Vithobai is reputed to be ‘the wildest, strongest,
most stubborn of all the inland chiefs’. However, Paul encounters ‘a gracious and bare-limbed
boy, whose only ornaments were scarlet flowers’.
Vithobai wishes to discover more about ‘this God whose name is Love’. When Pinmay tells
him ‘Come to Christ!’ he mistakes Christ to be Pinmay’s own name.328 Attracted by the boy’s
exotic beauty, Pinmay makes love to him, which Vithobai understands to be the inner meaning of
Christianity and gets converted.
As discussed in the previous section, the discourse on the idol has a sexual dimension, and
is related particularly to forms of sexual ‘perversion’ such as homosexuality. In misrecognizing
the Christian message Vithobai commits, in essence, the fallacy of idolatry. Construing
Pinmay (a human being) to be Christ (who is divine), Vithobai conceives a sensual relation-
ship with him and understands their love affair to be the essence of religion.
42 S. GANGULY

In a process analogous to events in Idolatry Christianity, as it struggles against and attempts to

overcome idolatry, itself gets drawn into idolatry’s sphere of influence. The victory of the Church,
in terms of the conversion and baptism of Vithobai’s tribe, is itself a form of defeat in terms of the
idolatrous meaning that Vithobai attributes to Christianity.
Idolatry becomes a sign of the polymorphously perverse and existentially evil, contaminating
and corrupting its opponents even in defeat. Diabolic inspiration is seen to underlie the mani-
festations of this polymorphous perverse in Vithobai’s behaviour:
Yes, to tempt, to attack the new religion by corrupting its preacher, yes, yes, that was it, and [Vithobai’s]
retainers celebrated his victory now in some cynical orgy. Young Mr. Pinmay … remembered all that he had
heard of the antique power of evil in the country, the tales he had so smilingly dismissed as beneath a
Christian’s notice, the extraordinary uprushes of energy which certain natives were said to possess and
occasionally employ for unholy purposes. … he confessed his defilement (the very name of which cannot be
mentioned among Christians), he lamented he had postponed, perhaps for a generation, the victory of the
Church, and he condemned, with increasing severity, the arts of his seducer.329

While the ‘extraordinary uprushes of energy’ which natives deploy ‘for unholy purposes’ might
have a sexual meaning, it also suggests diabolic possession and inspiration. Thus, when Pinmay
and Vithobai make love next to an open Bible a scarlet flower obscures the text, and Pinmay
throws out the flowers with the Bible after them. Like the marigolds worn by Anne in Idolatry, the
scarlet flowers worn by Vithobai and strewn everywhere during the course of their lovemaking are
suggestive of idolatry, profane sexuality, and the scattering of meaning and logos.330
Ironically, what Pinmay considers a defeat is seen by his fellow missionaries as a great victory, and he
is given charge of a whole district. Consequently, he does not disabuse anyone of how the conversion of
Vithobai’s people came about. Neither does he explain to Vithobai the nature of his error.
When the latter, now rechristened Barnabas, asks him when Christ’s coming is going to be he
replies ‘Not yet’, gaining Barnabas’s acquiescence with an indefinite promise for the future.331
Pinmay’s long sojourn in the district brings to it the usual benefits of colonial ‘progress’: clearing
of the forests, mining concessions, schools, fines, disease. The teleology of progress is schemati-
cally and ironically indicated by the succession of titles of the four sections of the story: ‘Night’,
‘Evening’, ‘Day’, and ‘Morning’.
Pinmay had previously taught ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is intimacy and emotion’ but no longer
emphasizes this message, as it is liable to be misunderstood. On the contrary, he is now inclined to
stress the sinfulness of the human condition and the untrustworthiness of native converts; he
applies to the latter ‘the gloomy severity of the Old Law’.332 Pinmay’s continued insecurity turns
him into a colonial despot, treating the natives − particularly Barnabas − with harshness and
vindictiveness. The latter loses not only his former religion but also his lands and authority.
Barnabas, who had pinned his hopes on Pinmay’s ‘Not yet’, gradually begins to lose hope of
‘coming to Christ’. He questions as well the supposed benefits of colonial progress: ‘as if to himself
he said: “First the grapes of my body are pressed. Then I am silenced. Now I am punished. Night,
evening, and a day. What remains?”’333
But Pinmay himself is afflicted by a form of existential uncertainty and doubt: ‘The dark erotic
perversion that the chief mistook for Christianity − who had implanted it? He had put this
question from him in the press of his earlier dangers, but it intruded itself now that he was
safe’.334 Like Wray beginning to formulate analogies between Christianity and Hinduism subse-
quent to his encounters with Ramanund, Pinmay fears the dissemination of the Word when
repeated in alien contexts.
The delicate play on Christ’s coming makes it refer both to the possibility of a Second Coming
and to that of Pinmay’s coming in a sexual encounter with Vithobai. The harsh regime of colonial
discipline he imposes on natives is designed to place limits on the dissemination of the Word and
lay down strict differences between Christianity and paganism.
In the last section of the story, Pinmay goes to visit a dying Barnabas. He has contracted
consumption, one of the diseases introduced by civilization. Pinmay finds him lying naked with
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 43

some flowers on the roof of his house: he appears to have reverted to his former religion. Needing
Barnabas to cure himself of his ambivalence and self-doubt, Pinmay tells Barnabas of the joys of
the life to come, and that it is time to confess the ‘sin’ they had committed together.
Thinking him neutralized by his disease, Pinmay even ventures to lay his head on Vithobai’s
body in an act of Christian charity. The dialogue which follows between them has a double
reference, indicating that the play between Christian and erotic love cannot in fact be closed off
and one delimited from the other:

[Vithobai] whispered, ‘Too late’, but he smiled a little.

‘It is never too late’, said Mr. Pinmay, permitting a slow encircling movement of the body, the last it
would ever accomplish. ‘God’s mercy is infinite, and endureth for ever and ever. … We have erred in
this life but it will not be so in the life to come’.
The dying man seemed to find comfort at last. ‘The life to come’, he whispered, but more distinctly. ‘I
had forgotten it. You are sure it is coming?’
‘Even your old false religion was sure of that’.
‘And we shall meet in it, you and I?’ he asked, with a tender yet reverent caress.
‘Assuredly, if we keep God’s commandments’.
‘Shall we know one another again?’
‘Yes, with all spiritual knowledge’.
‘And will there be love?’
‘In the real and true sense, there will’.
‘Real and true love! Ah, that would be joyful’. … Soon God would wipe away all tears. ‘The life to come’,
he shouted. ‘Life, life, eternal life. Wait for me in it’. And he stabbed the missionary through the heart.335

The climax of the story thus reinforces rather than annuls Vithobai’s misrecognition of the
Christian message. Pinmay means to say that it is never too late to confess one’s sins and repent;
but from Vithobai’s point of view, their intimacy and embrace come too late at the point of his
death. Pinmay means that they will have knowledge of and love for each other in the afterlife as
disembodied souls, but Vithobai takes the promise of eternal life to mean that they can resume
their carnal joys that had been interrupted in this life.
Following his literal interpretation of Pinmay’s words he kills Pinmay, so that the latter can
accompany him into the next world. Vithobai exemplifies on multiple levels St. Augustine’s
notion of ‘carnal error’: not only through carnal desire for Pinmay, but also by taking ‘that
which is said figuratively … as though it were literal’.336
But the text underlines the cruelty implicit in transcendental as well as idolatrous/carnal
versions of love. While Vithobai’s acceptance of the Christian message requires him to yield to
the yoke of colonial discipline and restraint that Pinmay lays upon him, his killing of Pinmay is as
much an outcome of the desire to have Pinmay accompany him into the next world of unrest-
ricted carnal bliss as an act of revenge.
Vithobai’s understanding of Christianity parallels Mill’s and Jones’s reading of Eastern religion,
where the erotic invades the sacred. Pinmay evinces an anxiety for limiting the dissemination of
the sacred word parallel to Mill’s attempts at limiting the dissemination and unravelling of
European truth and reason by excluding sensory contact and experience. Finally, with his
ambivalent ‘Not yet’ and his hesitation in clarifying the nature of Barnabas’s error, Pinmay is
himself complicit in the dissimulation of the word of truth, like the authors of the Ezourvedam.

3.7. Heat and Lust: A Passage to India

First we say that things [simply] are; second, that they are related to one another in a variety of ways, they
are causally connected and depend on one another. This second moment, the moment of understanding,
cannot be present at this stage
− G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
44 S. GANGULY

One of [the inscriptions] … consisted, by an unfortunate slip of the draughtsman, of the words, “God si
Love”.
God si Love. Is this the first message of India?
− E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

‘The Life to Come’ provides a convenient point of entry into A Passage to India, where the
conceptual oppositions schematically laid out in the former story receive fuller expression and
development, and in which the interplay of sexuality, divinity, and politics in colonial India is
explored. In addition, Passage connects with and brings to a point of crisis the thematics of
idolatry developed in Ruskin, Perrin, Jones, Mill, and Max Mueller.
When Forster visited India for the first time in 1912, he did so at the invitation of Syed Ross
Masood, an Indian with whom he was in love.337 He hoped that he would find there a new
opening for his imagination.338 Thus, in Forster’s mind India was tied with his hopes of both
artistic and erotic fulfilment.
In the event India turned out to frustrate both aspirations. On the basis of his experiences
there, he wrote six chapters of the novel, but could not proceed further. Also, he could enjoy few
moments of privacy with Masood, as the latter’s house was always chock-full of friends and
relatives.339
When he returned to India in 1921, he took the chapters with him expecting to finish the
novel, but found writing in India very difficult:
I took the chapters with me and expected that the congenial surroundings would inspire me to go on.
Exactly the reverse happened. Between the India I had tried to create and the India I was experiencing there
was an impassable gulf. I had to get back to England and see my material in perspective before I could
proceed.340

Although unlike Mill or Max Mueller Forster did visit India, he encountered a similar gap
between India experienced and India assimilated through texts. Like Pinmay’s experience in
Vithobai’s district, Forster’s experience in India proved highly equivocal. Just as in Pinmay’s
case, the equivocal character of Forster’s 1921 visit to India had to do with sex and subsequent
guilt.
While Passage consists of a transmutation of Forster’s experiences in India, a finished,
accomplished and superbly crafted piece of writing, a more direct record is available in
‘Kanaya’, a short, fragmentary memoir written immediately after his return to England in 1922
and published only after his death.341
While in India Forster had taken the position of secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas, a princely
state. At Dewas, however, Forster found himself affected by the climate: ‘The climate soon
impaired my will; I did not suffer from the climate in other ways, but it provoked me sexually …
masturbation brought no relief … In the slackness and silence, nothing seemed to exist except
lust’.
He felt desire for a teenaged coolie at the Maharaja’s palace: ‘My passion for him bored and
humiliated me, but I could not throw it off, on account of the climate and my empty mind’.342
Forster was fearful that word about his proclivities would get around and become generally
known, thus compromising his position at the palace. The prospect pushes him to the verge of
hysteria:
I held out for four days. I had lost my self-respect, and saw signs around me that I was mocked and despised.
Everything except outward ceremonial had gone, and I determined to have the matter out with H.H. [‘His
Highness’, or the Maharaja] and to offer my resignation, which was, I thought, the card he was forcing me to
play.343

Eventually, Forster made a clean breast to the Maharaja, who provided him with Kanaya, a servant
with whom Forster contracted sexual relations. Kanaya, however, was of little help in keeping
matters confidential; he talked to courtiers, and eventually propositioned the Maharaja himself.
Forster, who detected ‘an air of rollicking equality’ in the courtiers’ attitude towards him, was not
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 45

amused by any of this. In what must be quite uncharacteristic of him and exemplify the level of
his frustration, he punished Kanaya by beating and raping him.344
Although these experiences held up the writing of Passage while Forster was in India, they
returned to it in transmuted form when it was eventually written.345 Thus, as Adela is climbing up
to the Marabar caves with Aziz, she is distracted by the hot weather, and her thoughts dwell on
Aziz:
What a handsome little Oriental he was … She did not admire him with any personal warmth … but she
guessed he might attract women of his own race and rank, and regretted that neither she nor Ronny had
physical charm. It does make a difference in a relationship − beauty, thick hair, a fine skin. Probably this
man had several wives − Mohammedans always insist on their full four, according to Mrs. Turton.346

Like Anne Crivener with Dion Devasse, Adela had contracted a marriage of convenience with
Ronny Heaslop, but realizes on the way up with Aziz: ‘She and Ronny − no, they did not love each
other’.347 Thereafter, she sexualizes Aziz, idly wondering about his physical attributes, just as
Forster had sexualized Kanaya or the teenaged coolie. She undergoes a bout of hysteria, parallel to
Forster’s at the Maharaja’s palace, and accuses Aziz of attempting to rape her.348 She has him
arrested and cast into prison and thereby punishes him, just as Forster punishes Kanaya.
The effect of India on Forster’s imagination is thus complex and equivocal: while it does enable
him to write Passage, close proximity to it inhibits the writing of the novel. Although Forster
wrote a string of successful novels prior to his first visit to India in 1912, his novelistic production
ceased abruptly after the writing of Passage, midway through his career. It is as if India was
assimilated closely to imagination, and the difficulties of relating to it signified a general failure of
the imaginative faculty itself.349 I will argue that ‘India’ in Forster’s narrative economy resembles
an idolatrous image, a signifier which opens up a metaphysical gap because it stimulates but
indefinitely postpones the fulfilment of desire. This gap is articulated in the final sentence of the
novel: ‘ … “No, not yet”, and the sky said, “No, not there”’.350
In terms of its thematic of imagination, Passage reveals a gap between Indians and Englishmen
in terms of their receptivity to poetry and literature. At a gathering of Aziz’s friends, as Aziz
recites Urdu poetry, the company
listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization. The police
inspector, for instance, did not feel that Aziz had degraded himself by reciting, nor break into the
cheery guffaw with which an Englishman averts the infection of beauty … The poem had done no ‘good’
to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nightingale between
two worlds of dust.351

Thus, Forster at this point affirms the creative power of literature, and associates it with Indians.
Yet there are problems with the quality of imagination that is expressed through this literature.
When Aziz recites his poem
It had no connection with anything that had gone before, but it came from his heart and spoke to theirs.
They were overwhelmed by its pathos; pathos, they agreed, is the highest quality in art; a poem should touch
the speaker with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and
flowers. … words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air. Not as a call to battle, but as a calm
assurance came the feeling that India was one; Moslem; always had been; an assurance that lasted until they
looked out of the door.352

The poetic faculty of Aziz and his friends is associated here with artifice and illusion. It promotes
the delusion that India is still in Muslim hands; a conceit that pleases Aziz and his Muslim friends
although it bears no relation to the realities of British rule and Hindu empowerment. It consists of
an appeal exclusively to the heart, but not to the head, giving rise to sentiments that are relatively
superficial with pathos as the dominant element.
This reinscribes the opposition between imagination and reason that had appeared in William
Jones and James Mill: while India is associated with the life of the imagination, Europe is the
home of reason. Indian imagination is aligned with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have
46 S. GANGULY

described as ‘fancy’: a faculty which resembles but is actually inferior to true imagination.
Coleridge considered fancy as having
no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of
Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that
empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE.353

The narrator’s judgments on the poetry that Aziz recites to his friends in Passage echoes very
closely Coleridge’s definition of fancy. Thus, according to the narrator, Aziz’s poetry plays with
fixities and definites, such as a resemblance between mankind and flowers. It is a mode of
memory emancipated from time and space, as in Aziz’s memories of the Mughal empire. Fancy
develops a kind of free association, which is also the principle on which Aziz’s mind works. As an
empirical phenomenon of the will fancy is guided essentially by arbitrary caprice, and hence is
close to fetishistic modes of thinking.354
Aziz’s fancy also acts as a barrier to intimacy between him and Fielding. While Fielding cuts
ties with fellow Englishmen in order to back him unconditionally during his imprisonment and
trial, Aziz is morbidly suspicious that Fielding is having an affair with Aziz’s accuser Adela
Quested. The part played by an ‘Oriental imagination’ in constituting Aziz’s suspicions is apparent
in the following exchange between Fielding and Aziz:
Presently [Aziz] said: ‘So you and Madamsell Adela used to amuse one another in the evening, naughty boy’.

… Fielding … lost his head and cried: ‘You little rotter! Well, I’m damned. Amusement indeed. Is it likely at
such a time?’

‘Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m sure. The licentious Oriental imagination was at work,’ he replied, speaking
gaily, but cut to the heart.355

Aziz’s licentious Oriental imagination may be likened to the ‘warm imagination’ of Asiatic poetry
that Jones discovered, likely to give over into ‘culpable excess’. It is this element of excess that
qualifies Fielding’s Indian experiences as ‘muddle’, a word that recurs through the novel.
Subsequent to the disruption of his relationship with Aziz, Fielding returns to England through
Italy. At Venice he discovers ‘form’ in place of ‘muddle’:
The buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the right place,
whereas in poor India everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol
temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty? … In the old undergraduate days
he had wrapped himself up in the many-coloured blanket of St. Mark’s, but something more precious than
mosaics and marbles were offered to him now: the harmony between the works of man and the earth that
upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood
subsisting. Writing picture-postcards to his Indian friends, he felt that all of them would miss the joys he
experienced now, the joys of form, and this constituted a serious barrier. They would see the sumptuousness
of Venice, not its shape ….356

It is only at Venice − geographically midway between India and England − that Fielding arrives at
a point of satisfactory mediation between reason and sensory experience, spirit, and matter, giving
rise to the joys of artistic form: ‘the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting’.
The two poles of this antithesis, however, do not have equal valency for ‘the southern exit [out of
the Mediterranean towards India and “muddle”] leads to the strangest experience of all’.357
The reference to precious ‘mosaics and marbles’ of Venice which Fielding can wrap himself in
like a ‘many-coloured blanket’ points to fetishism of a Ruskinian type; the aesthetic discrimina-
tions that Fielding sets up in this passage are reminiscent of those of Ruskin.358 The contrast
drawn between ‘idol temples’ and Venice’s ‘beauty of form’ connects failures in Indian architec-
ture and sensibility to idolatry, as in Ruskin. As a preponderance of material signifiers over
definite signifieds, idolatry is not conducive to good art. As a participant in Hindu religious
worship during his tenure at Dewas Forster wrote:
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 47

There is no dignity, no taste, no form, and though I am dressed as a Hindu I shall never become one. I don’t
think one ought to be irritated with Idolatry because one can see from the faces of the people that it touches
something very deep in their hearts. But it is natural that Missionaries, who think these ceremonies wrong as
well as inartistic, should lose their tempers.359

Unlike Ruskin, Forster adjudged idolatry to be not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘inartistic’. It was the
reason why ‘in poor India everything was placed wrong’. What is remarkable, however, is that this
sense of formlessness and wrongness extends not only to architectural edifices but also to natural
objects; so that the ‘lumpy hills’ of India are held in contrast to the mountains of Crete.
There is a sense of anthropomorphic intention here which is pervasive through Passage. While
serving as a convenient expressionist device it also repeats the gesture that it condemns, partaking
of an animism closely related to idolatry. In his veneration of Gothic or Renaissance era Venetian
architecture (in place of Mughal era poetry), Fielding also repeats a gesture that the narrator
attributes to Aziz: sentimental nostalgia for a vanished past.
The passage induces an effect of pathos not dissimilar to the one which overtakes Aziz while
reciting Urdu poetry. There is more than a touch of ressentiment behind Fielding’s gratuitous
reference to his absent Indian friends as incapable of experiencing the ‘joys of form’; in keeping
with norms of idolatrous aesthetics they would notice ‘the sumptuousness of Venice’ though ‘not
its shape’. The gratuitousness of the reference suggests that Fielding is not as wrapped up in
Venetian architecture as appears in the above passage; he is still thinking about his Indian friends,
notably Aziz, with whom his differences are not merely aesthetic but also personal and political.
‘Muddle’ aptly describes the state of affairs in the Hindu princely state of Mau, where Aziz
retires subsequent to his bruising encounter with British authorities. It is particularly apparent in
scenes of idolatrous worship during Gokul Ashtami, the religious festival celebrating the birth of
Krishna:
They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint; they did not do one thing which the
non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct; this approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call it), a
frustration of reason and form. Where was the God himself, in whose honour the congregation had
gathered? Indistinguishable in the jumble of his own altar, huddled out of sight amid images of inferior
descent, smothered under rose-leaves, overhung by oleographs, outblazed by golden tablets representing the
Rajah’s ancestors, and entirely obscured, when the wind blew, by the tattered foliage of a banana.360

This scene of idolatry, as a ‘frustration of reason and form’, can be contrasted to Fielding’s
discoveries in Venice. Yet the parenthetical ‘as we call it’ problematizes the notion of ‘muddle’,
which may be so only from a certain perspective. It is not only that details in this scene do not
appear ‘dramatically correct’, but also that it yokes together incompatibles, muddying categories
and transgressing domains demarcated by post-Reformation Christian subjectivity and ideology.
Thus, as Professor Godbole dances in the midst of Gokul Ashtami’s revelry, he has a religious
epiphany involving Mrs. Moore:
He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of
his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position of the
God and to love her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God, ‘Come, come, come,
come’.361

Vaishnava devotees of Krishna routinely place themselves in the position of Radha, the god’s
human lover. Here Godbole actually fantasizes that he is Krishna, making love to Mrs. Moore as
Radha.362
This fantasy transgresses more domains than one could think of. It transgresses the social
taboos of colonial India (He was a Brahman, she Christian). It transgresses the categories of life
and death (Mrs. Moore is dead at this point). It crosses borders between humanity and divinity, as
well as between eroticism and religion, the latter of which is especially evident in the play on
‘coming’. In ‘The Life to Come’ Pinmay takes the position of Christ, as Godbole does here of
Krishna; the short story incorporates the same play on the notion of Christ’s coming.
48 S. GANGULY

Among the ‘inappropriate’ signs present at the scene of the worship of Krishna is the
inscription ‘God si Love’, with respect to which the narrator queries: ‘Is this the first message of
India?’363 The message of India would then have to do with a displacing and estranging of the
message of Christian gospel (God is Love) by inserting it into novel frames, one of which is
suggested by Godbole’s vision of Mrs. Moore. Thus, although its proportions are wrong and
dramatic effect a failure, the scene of the nativity of Krishna skirts dangerously close to that of
Christ:
a Brahman brought forth a model of the village of Gokul (the Bethlehem in that nebulous story) and placed
it in front of the altar. … Here, upon a chair too small for him and with a head too large, sat King Kansa,
who is Herod, directing the murder of some Innocents, and in a corner, similarly proportioned, stood the
father and mother of the Lord, warned to depart in a dream.364

As the narrative of Krishna’s nativity proceeds, it becomes apparent that ‘God si love’ names not
just a lack, but also fills out certain elements that are missing in the Christian gospel:
‘God si love!’ There is fun in heaven. God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from
beneath His own posteriors, set His own turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when he bathes. By
sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity had shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All
spirit as well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is
incomplete.365

The God named in this passage is an immanent rather than transcendent deity. The world and its
beings on whom God plays practical jokes are all incorporated within God’s own being, annulling
the distance between divinity and humanity. Unlike nonidolatrous religions which rigorously
exclude matter (and levity), both spirit and matter can participate in salvation, and practical jokes
are part of its scheme.
Apart from the message of Christian gospel, the Indian tendency towards idolatry and ‘muddle’
also disfigures and dismantles some of the ‘truths’ of Orientalism with which the novel works.
Things in India exceed their identification, and cannot be held in place by a network of colonial
signifieds. Adela wonders ‘how can the mind take hold of such a country?’ as her party proceeds
towards the Marabar caves.366 Hinduism seems equally mysterious, escaping the surveillance of
colonial power:
Hinduism, so solid from a distance, is riven into sects and clans, which radiate and join, and change their
names according to the aspect from which they are approached. Study it for years with the best teachers, and
when you raise your head, nothing they have told you quite fits. Aziz, the day of his inauguration, had
remarked: ‘I study nothing, I respect’ − making an excellent impression. There was now a minimum of
prejudice against him.367

According to one of Orientalism’s ‘truths’ Aziz, a Muslim doctor, should have found it impossible
to function in a Hindu kingdom. However, he produces an ‘excellent impression’ with his remark
intended to clarify that he does not intend to participate in exercises of colonial knowledge and
power. Meanwhile, the ‘best teachers’ of that knowledge cannot quite get a hold of their object,
which would then appear to resemble ‘muddle’.
As part of the conceptual ‘confusion’ of idolatry, the boundaries of divinity, sexuality, and
politics are continually transgressed in Indian affairs. Deification of human agents as political
leaders is an aspect of idolatry, as it crosses the boundary between humanity and divinity.368
Mrs. Moore accuses her son Ronny Heaslop, City Magistrate of Chandrapore, of crossing this
boundary and acting like a god in his running of administrative affairs:
‘Your sentiments are those of a god’, she said quietly …
Trying to recover his temper, he said, ‘India likes gods’.
‘And Englishmen like posing as gods’.369
In this instance, it is left undecided who has a greater penchant for the idolatrous deification of
political authority: Indians or Englishmen. Subsequent to Adela’s accusation of Aziz, as Collector
Turton oversees Aziz’s arrest, he is ‘revealed like a god in a shrine’.370
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 49

Indians, however, select a different person to deify as Aziz’s trial proceeds: they choose
Mrs. Moore. As the issue of the evidence of Mrs. Moore, whom Ronny had put on a ship to
England, is discussed in court, the crowd outside the courtroom chants her name, Indianizing it to
‘Esmiss Esmoor’. The name is taken up like a ‘charm’ and spreads; the Magistrate finds it
impossible to stop its spread ‘until the magic exhausted itself’. ‘Esmiss Esmoor’ thus functions
as a magic name, a fetish; eventually, Mrs. Moore becomes ‘a Hindu goddess’.371
In an essay entitled ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, Gayatri Spivak has
written about the role of rumour in promoting insurrection by subaltern groups. Spivak shows
how rumour, although oral and used by communities with predominantly oral forms of commu-
nication, conforms to a Derridean sense of writing: ‘This rumour is not error but primordially
(originally) errant, always in circulation with no assignable source. This illegitimacy makes it
accessible to insurgency’.372
The chant ‘Esmiss Esmoor’, together with the notion that Ronny has spirited away Mrs. Moore
to prevent the truth from coming out at the trial, has this structure of insurgent rumour. Coming
from ‘no assignable source’, the Magistrate is powerless to put a stop to it. If agency may be
assigned for it at all, it originates from the subaltern group of Indian servants at Ronny’s place
who may have overheard Mrs. Moore’s remarks on Aziz.373
Although ‘errant’ in terms of hybridizing Mrs. Moore’s name, the rumour does have an
important element of truth: it is apparent from Ronny’s conversations with Mrs. Moore that he
fears the evidence she might give at the trial if summoned.374 Not only does the chant have a
mobilizing function for the crowd collecting outside the courtroom, it also calms the unstable
Adela’s nerves as she steps up and gives evidence that exonerates Aziz.375 Idolatry, in terms of the
divinization of Mrs. Moore, thus becomes a relay in the propagation of subversive rumour. If, as
Ronny Heaslop says, ‘India likes gods’, they also select their gods to suit their political purposes
and do not fall for the ones Englishmen set up for them.
Present as well at the courtroom is a living idol: a punkah-puller of low birth who works the
manually operated fan and is compared by the narrator to a God. In a strangely ambivalent
representation the punkah-puller is apparently unaware of his surroundings, yet controls the
proceedings of the court:

the first person Adela noticed in [the courtroom] was the humblest of all who were present, a person who had
no bearing officially upon the trial: the man who pulled the punkah. Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he
sat on a raised platform near the back, in the middle of the central gangway, and he caught her attention as she
came in, and he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to
flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then
nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god − not many,
but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her. This man would have been
notable anywhere: among the thin-hammed, flat-chested mediocrities of Chandrapore he stood out as divine,
yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish heaps. … Opposite him, also
on a platform, sat the little assistant magistrate, cultivated, self-conscious, and conscientious. The punkah-
wallah was none of these things: he scarcely knew that he existed and did not understand why the Court was
fuller than usual, didn’t even know he worked a fan, though he thought he pulled a rope.376

In the curious and apparently gratuitous figure of the punkah puller occurs an interchange of
‘high’ and ‘low’ attributes. Thus, someone who is almost devoid of subjectivity appears to control
the proceedings; someone close to ‘dust’ and ‘garbage’ is compared to a God. Stallybrass and
White have observed that ‘the top includes [the] low symbolically, as a primary eroticized
constituent of its own fantasy life … It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so
frequently symbolically central’.377 The untouchable punkah puller’s place at the social periphery
is indicated by his literal position at the periphery of the courtroom; yet, as the first person to
catch Adela’s attention, he is symbolically central to it.
The set-piece with the assistant magistrate seated opposite the punkah-puller illustrates the set of
antinomies which structure this scene. The assistant magistrate, who is caught in a conflict between
50 S. GANGULY

‘cultivated’ classes of the English and elite Indians, is self-conscious and nervous, displaying an
excess of subjectivity; by contrast, he is physically ‘little’. He is fully clothed, displaying the insignia
of his position in the court. By contrast, the punkah puller is ‘almost naked’ and clad only in a
loincloth. He is seated in a position which emphasizes his lower bodily topography. Stallybrass and
White have pointed out the importance of bodily postures which appear physically debased and
emphasize lower bodily topography in fixating bourgeois desire for the ‘low’.378
In this scene of a living idol, the eroticised body of the ‘low’ inserts itself into and appears to control
‘official’ court proceedings, serving to remind Adela of the provincial character of her concerns:
Something in his aloofness impressed the girl from middle-class England, and rebuked the narrowness of
her sufferings. In virtue of what had she collected this roomful of people together? Her particular brand of
opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them − by what right did they claim so much
importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization?379

The figure of the nominally gratuitous punkah puller in Passage inverts the scene in Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom where idolatrous priest Mola Ram promises an uprising against the
Hebrew God on behalf of Kali Ma. Here, a living Indian God countermands the sanctions of a
‘suburban Jehovah’. Like the ‘Esmiss Esmoor’ chant, this is another element of the courtroom
scene that moves Adela to finally exonerate Aziz.
The figure of the punkah puller in the courtroom serves not only to remind Adela but also to
alert the reader of the text to an occluded subaltern presence, a third-term structuring relations
between the two contending groups in the novel: the English and elite Indians. Thus when
Collector Turton organizes a ‘Bridge Party’ where, following Max Muellerian typologies, the
English at the Club at Chandrapore may encounter socially the ‘Aryan Brother’, certain types of
Indians are excluded from the gathering:
near the Courts the pleaders waited for clients; clients, waiting for pleaders, sat in the dust outside. These
had not received a card from Mr. Turton. And there were circles even beyond these − people who wore
nothing but a loincloth, people who wore not even that, and spent their lives knocking two sticks before a
scarlet doll − humanity grading and drifting beyond the educated vision, until no earthly invitation could
embrace it.380

Although the novel focuses on civilizational encounters between the English and educated and/or
property owning Indians it registers on occasion, as we saw in the courtroom scene, the presence
of an Other named here as ‘humanity grading and drifting beyond the educated vision’. The
presence of this subaltern other is coded through symbolic topographies of the human body,
psychic forms, and geographic space which, as Stallybrass and White suggest, are overlapping
domains for the expression of social hierarchy.381
Colonial hierarchies are mapped here through spatial metaphors of concentric circles as well as
those in the ‘lowly’ position of sitting in the dust outside the courtroom. The human body may
appear wearing a loincloth (like the punkah puller), or sometimes not even that; while the lowest
psychic form imaginable is that of an idolater, portrayed here in the stereotypical terms of a naked
man knocking two sticks together before a scarlet doll. Likewise, when Godbole sings his song to
Krishna for the small party gathered at Fielding’s place, the servants of the household are his only
appreciative audience. Among whom is a man gathering water chestnuts who ‘came naked out of
the tank, his lips parted with delight, disclosing his scarlet tongue’.382
These are not speaking subjects in the novel, but may be identified through a chain of
metonymic associations such as nakedness/idolatry/the colour scarlet. However, they may become
the objects of a bourgeois desire for the ‘low’, as when Adela muses:
the true India slid by unnoticed. Colour would remain − the pageant of birds in the early morning, brown
bodies, white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet and blue − and movement would remain as long as there
were crowds in the bazaar and bathers in the tanks. … But the force that lies behind colour and movement
would escape her even more effectually than it did now. She would see India always as a frieze, never as a
spirit ….383
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 51

Adela had been contemplating at this point the monotonous life of marital duties and social
rounds that marriage to Ronny would entail. Like Anne Crivener, in a similar situation in Idolatry
she becomes a voyeur of sights at the bazaar, among which are eroticized elements of the ‘low’
such as brown bodies, bathers in tanks, and idols with coloured flesh. As in Ruskin’s text,
eruptions of colour signify the return of the repressed. Colour and movement indicate both an
excess and a troubling lack of signification: they capture no coherent ‘spirit’ although many idols
of coloured ‘flesh’ are on display.
Similar confusion marks the journey to the Marabar caves during which the surrounding
landscape displays an excess of signs and the caves themselves reveal their empty centre. Aziz’s
group is mounted on an elephant, which raises it above the surrounding landscape; while
travelling on foot with the elephant, apart from the servants accompanying the group, are the
‘scurf of life that an elephant always collects round its feet − villagers, naked babies’.
Social hierarchies of colonial India are once again inscribed into the landscape and mapped by
a spatial metaphor: perched on the elephant ‘ten feet above the ground’ are elite Indians in
(momentary) intimacy with the Englishwomen Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested, while at its feet
and close to the ground are subaltern Indians, servants, and villagers.384
The intimate exchanges between Aziz and the Englishwomen presuppose full subjects engaging
in civilizational encounters, a principal object of representation in the novel. Villagers and
servants, like the punkah puller, are denied access to subjectivity by the text, although their
presence is recorded at its margins; symptomatically, subaltern Indians gathered in this scene are
referred to as ‘the scurf of life’.
As they travel, they spot some mounds by the side of the track. The narrator is unsure about
their nature: ‘What were these mounds − graves, breasts of the goddess Parvati?’ Adela spots a
thin, dark object on the ground which could either be a live black cobra or a dead tree branch.
Due to the hallucination-inducing excess of signification encountered as the company proceeds to
the caves ‘everything seemed cut off at its root, and therefore infected with illusion’.385
The travellers appear to be moving in a realm of the pure signifier, cut off from referentiality.
This refers to the idea of idolatry as appearance, which beguiles but belies reality. The association
is reinforced by the reference to features in the landscape as ‘breasts of the goddess Parvati’. As we
have seen before, idols are deities whose sexuality is emphasized. The heat and features of the
landscape induce sexual thoughts in Adela, which will emerge in her sexualization of Aziz.
While subaltern Indians are denuded of subjecthood, the Indian landscape itself appears
endowed with an uncanny subjectivity. Thus, as Adela looks out at fields and landscape during
the train ride which constituted the initial segment of the group’s journey to the caves she muses:
‘[India] knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her
hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never
defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal’. The Indian landscape is thus endowed with an
uncanny half-life analogous to that which is attributed to the idol by mediaeval Christian
tradition.
As we have encountered before, in this tradition, idols can utter speech without signifying, and
following their speech leads to metaphysical disappointment. The Indian landscape issues a
metaphysical invitation, ‘Come’; but does not endow it with any further content or specify what
one is being invited to. As Adela’s company watches the sun rise, metaphysical disappointment is
bound up with the landscape:

They awaited the miracle. But at the supreme moment, when night should have died and day lived, nothing
occurred. It was as if virtue had failed in the celestial fount. … a profound disappointment entered with the
morning breeze. Why, when the chamber was prepared, did the bridegroom not enter with trumpets and
shawms, as humanity expects?386

The landscape thus becomes identified with failure, both metaphysical and erotic, and anticipates
the mental breakdown Mrs. Moore suffers on entering one of the Marabar caves. She finds that
52 S. GANGULY

the cave had become too full, because all their retinue followed them. Crammed with villagers and servants,
the circular chamber began to smell. She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her,
couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad. She tried to
retain the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back. She hit her head. For an instant she
went mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic. For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there was also
a terrifying echo. …

After Mrs. Moore all the others poured out. … As each person emerged she looked for a villain, but none
was there, and she realized she had been among the mildest of individuals, whose only desire was to honour
her, and that the naked pad was a poor little baby, astride its mother’s hip. Nothing evil had been in the cave,
but she had not enjoyed herself; no, she had not enjoyed herself, and she decided not to visit a second
one.387

Inside the cave ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of spatial and social hierarchy, which had been kept separate
during the long journey on elephant-back across the plains, have been suddenly compressed and
brought into close proximity; even bodily contact. Mrs. Moore has lost contact with Aziz and
Adela, her erstwhile companions, and been brought in touch with the lowly ‘scurf of life’. The
strong sunlight outside gives way to dark.
The scene inside the cave resembles many scenes we have encountered in this book as it enacts
the twilight of Western subjectivity. It could be a return to the allegory of enlightenment and its
obverse in Plato’s cave, whose bound prisoners are prey to shadowy illusions. It could be a plunge
into the subterranean chambers of the evil Temple of Doom, whose idolatry tempts Indiana Jones.
It also resembles scenes of religious pilgrimage and gatherings at dusk by the riverside in Idolatry
where ‘lowly’ senses such as smell and touch begin to predominate over sight, and the sacred bull
grazing past Anne Crivener in the bazaar is the equivalent of the naked baby’s hand settling on
Mrs. Moore.
Just as in the scene of Anne Crivener at the bazaar, ‘high’ and ‘low’ in contaminating contact
are a threat to social order, a prospect to which Mrs. Moore, like Wray in Idolatry, responds with
hysteria. Although we are not told in the text what happened to Adela when she entered a cave,
both Adela and Mrs. Moore are terrified by the echo they hear, and both emerge with a sense of
having been in the presence of evil. It is reasonable to deduce, therefore, that they have similar
negative experiences in the caves.
It is significant that the sense of evil reemerges in the text during moments of civil disorder and
potential threats to social stability. Thus, as a crowd gathers for a demonstration at the civil
hospital run by Major Callendar, one of the mainstays of the Chandrapore administration, the
situation is described in the following terms: ‘The earth and the sky were insanely ugly, the spirit
of evil again strode abroad’.388
According to Forster’s biographer P.N. Furbank, Mrs. Moore’s breakdown in the caves was
suggested to Forster by the insanity of Lady Herringham, an acquaintance of his who made full-
scale copies of the frescoes in caves at Ajanta. Lady Herringham was haunted by India and
believed that Indians bore her a grudge for intruding into the caves.389 Forster studied her copies
of the frescoes at Ajanta, and also visited the cave-temples at Ellora which, like the ones at Salsette
and Elephanta that Ruskin wrote about, are full of ‘idolatrous’ sculptures.
Forster was familiar with Ruskin’s writings on Indian gods, and his chief impression of the
sculptures at Ellora was that they were too diabolic to be beautiful – ‘Satanic masterpieces to
terrify others’.390 Forster’s association between caves and evil is thus mediated by the notion of
idolatry. By conjoining matter and spirit, idolatry fuses the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, analogous to the
manner in which spatial levels of ‘high’ and ‘low’ during the journey to the Marabar caves are
brought together inside them.
Idols are a potent trope of symbolic inversion: as deities that are man-made objects, they
reverse the hierarchy of creation. Mrs. Moore finds that ‘divine words’ of Christianity such as ‘Let
there be light’ are reduced by the caves to the echo ‘Boum’.391 As opposed to the ‘high’ ideals of
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 53

light and spirit, we are told that ‘very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel’ into the
caves; they are also associated with carnality.392
Thus, they induce carnal thoughts in Adela, and inspire in Mrs. Moore the reflection: ‘centuries
of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man’.393 On multiple levels,
therefore, the caves are concerned with reducing the ‘high’ to the ‘low’. The uniform echo
‘Boum’ it produces is a fixed and empty signified in response to all signifiers.394 This is a situation
contrary to the one during the journey to the caves, when there was a plethora of signifieds. In
both cases, however, signifier is severed from signified which, as we have seen before, is a
paradigm for idolatrous representation.
It is useful to regard Passage as a limit-text of Orientalism.395 Although it works within a
network of tropes and generalizations deployed and familiarized by Orientalism, it brings them to
a point of crisis and has a self-cancelling character. Thus, while Indians in the text are emotional
and impulsive, Englishmen are controlled, phlegmatic, rational and calculating, in conformity
with the established stereotype.396 However, it turns out that subsequent to Aziz’s arrest, ‘the
[Anglo-Indian] herd had decided on emotion. … Nothing enraged Anglo-India more than the
lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. … Pity, wrath,
heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated’.397
Although lapses in rationality are sometimes attributed to the Indian climate, this notion is also
parodied in the theory held by McBryde, the District Superintendent of Police:

no Indian ever surprised him, because he had a theory about climatic zones. The theory ran: ‘All unfortunate
natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30. They are not to blame,
they have not a dog’s chance − we should be like them if we settled here’. Born at Karachi, he seemed to
contradict his theory, and would sometimes admit as much with a sad, quiet smile.398

The climactic incidents at the caves in the central section of the novel are thus cancelled and
counterpointed by another scene of idolatry in its final, ‘Temple’ section. In the carnival like
scenes of the Gokul Ashtami festival opposites are reconciled and the chain of events builds
towards a different sort of climax. Idolatry and formlessness are reconciled as a religious proces-
sion proceeds to the waterside for the symbolic immersion of the gods:

On either side of [Krishna’s palanquin] the singers tumbled, a woman prominent, a wild and beautiful
young saint with flowers in her hair. She was praising God without attributes − thus did she apprehend Him.
Others praised Him with attributes, seeing Him in this or that organ of the body or manifestation of the
sky.399

Chosen to return the gods to the elements by immersing them is a naked Indian boy, of the type
of the naked babies and idolaters encountered so far in the text:

The village of Gokul reappeared upon its tray. It was the substitute for the silver image, which never left its
haze of flowers; on behalf of another symbol, it was to perish. A servitor took it in his hands, and tore off the
blue and white streamers. He was naked, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted − the Indian boy again triumphant
− and it was his hereditary office to close the gates of salvation. He entered the dark waters, pushing the
village before him, until the clay dolls slipped off their chairs and began to gutter in the rain, and King Kansa
was confounded with the father and mother of the Lord. Dark and solid, the little waves sipped, then a great
wave washed and then English voices cried ‘Take care!’400

On many levels, this passage stages a collision of incompatibles. Thus divinity, represented here
through a chain of substitutions, is being consigned to the elements to perish; and performing this
important function is a naked Indian boy − type of the ‘low’. Fielding has come to visit India with
Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter; but Aziz, under the impression that Fielding has married Adela and
brought her to India, is trying to avoid them. In this scene King Kansa, who tried to kill Krishna,
collides with Krishna’s parents; while Aziz is watching this, his boat collides with the one carrying
the English he had been trying to avoid, flinging everyone into the water where English, Indians,
gods, and mythic villains mingle: ‘That was the climax, as far as India admits of one’.401
54 S. GANGULY

This scene, like the episode of the Marabar caves, stages a series of collisions of mutually
incompatible symbolic levels. Rather than signifying evil, however, these collisions represent
Forster’s favoured theme of connection.402 Aziz and Fielding become ‘friends again’ after this
episode, while the moment of Krishna’s birth coincides with the Rajah of Mau’s unobtrusive
death, which does not interrupt the festivities.403 As Aziz fell into the water at Mau, he thought
‘how brave Miss Quested was and decided to tell her so, despite my imperfect English’. As Stella
observes, at this point ‘the Marabar is wiped out’.404
For Ruskin, Perrin and Forster idolatry is a conception necessary to enable the rhetoric of
colonial order, and becomes what Stallybrass and White have called the ‘scene of its low other’ for
the ambivalent projection of disgust and desire.405 Although they start out with the assumption
that idolatry is an alternative cognitive mode unique to India or the East, attempts to define its
character open on to generalized questions of imaginative vision and artistic practice, and lead
ultimately to the elaboration of a notion of the grotesque.
Since the identities of all three of them are tied up with the question of artistic practice, to an
extent far greater than those operating within a more ‘scholarly’ Indological domain such as Jones,
Mill, or Max Mueller, this induces in them particular tensions and anxieties of self-definition.
Forster deals with such tensions and anxieties with a kind of self-cancelling irony that brings out
best the fragility of the idolatry trope, and goes furthest among the three of them down the path of
carnival. While his texts are not necessarily revolutionary or subversive of colonial order, they
stage the terms within which it is constructed and render its scaffolding, props and struts visible.

4. Conclusion
Political or civil liberty has been erected into an idol, and extolled with extravagant praises by doting and
fanatical worshippers
− John Austin/The Province of Jurisprudence Determined

I do not want, or try, to “demystify” things. One day we shall be blamed for our “demystification” by the
descendants of those we once colonized. They will say to us: “You exalt the creativity of your Dante and your
Vergil, but you demystify our mythologies and our religions. Your anthropologists never stop insisting on
the socioeconomic presuppositions of our religion or our messianic and millenarist movements, thereby
implying that our spiritual creations, unlike yours, never rise above material or political determining factors.
In other words, we primitives are incapable of attaining the creative freedom of a Dante or a Vergil”. Such a
“demystifying” attitude ought to be arraigned in its turn, on charges of ethnocentrism, of Western
“provincialism”, and so, ultimately, be “demystified” itself
− Mircea Eliade/Ordeal by Labyrinth

Idolatry, thought of comprising Indian subjectivities, was conceived by colonial discourse as a

belief in ‘things’ and ‘images’, sometimes extended to ‘rituals’, ‘ceremonies’ and ‘practices’ to
which could be ascribed a materiality due to their repetitive character. By contrast, a belief in
‘ideas’, whether true or false, was ipso facto thought to reflect the operation of a superior mode of
cognition. In what has been described by Louis Althusser as an ‘ideology of ideology’, the
Enlightenment held up ‘ideology’, or the sphere of ideas, as a term to be contrasted with ‘idolatry’
and its concomitant ‘superstition’.406
The ideology/idolatry opposition is a restatement of the distinction between idea and image, or
signified and signifier, which has been seen by Derrida as the essential opposition that has been
reworked through the history of western metaphysics. Althusser’s theorization of ‘ideological state
apparatuses’, according to which a subject’s ideas are ‘his material actions inserted into material
practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological
apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject’, suggests a fertile way of moving beyond
these entrenched oppositions.407
According to this conception, the subject of ideology is as materially determined as the subject
of idolatry. The sphere of ideas, regardless of whether they are thought by an ‘idolatrous’ or a
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 55

rational and ‘modern’ subject, are intimately related to (not opposed to) the subject’s participation
in certain material rituals prescribed by ideological apparatuses, which are also material in the
sense that they pre-exist the subject and are not freely chosen. Thus, Althusser reads Pascal as
saying, regarding Christian belief: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’,
scandalously inverting the priority of belief over practice that is asserted by modern idealism.408
The same can be said about the colonial school. Although Macaulay thought that the
Anglicized education disseminated through the colonial educational system would efface idolatry
within a generation, the colonial school itself was a material apparatus which provided access to
government jobs, and which ritually examined candidates on a standardized curriculum premised
on Macaulay’s famous dictum that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia’.409
The following episode in a colonial classroom in Calcutta, involving the Scottish missionary
Alexander Duff, illustrates my point about the colonial school as an ideological apparatus:

Duff asked his students to supply the Bengali word for cow, which is goru. He next asked whether they knew
another Bengali word resembling it in sound, which happened, of course, to be guru, or Brahmin teacher.
Dwelling at ample length on the patterns of similarity in form and sound between the two words, Duff
quietly built up to his solemn query about what purpose was served by a guru and whether goru was not
more useful than guru.410

Ostensibly meant to be a language catechism, a repetitive ritual through which languages are
learnt, Duff’s pedagogy is in reality designed to undermine belief in Brahminical concepts.
Ironically, Duff performs here the task of a guru or spiritual teacher himself, just as the colonial
school replaced idolatry with ideology.
One of the useful effects of adopting Althusser’s notion of ideology is to do away with the
‘problematic of the lie’, or the notion of ideology as fabrication underpinning the colonial
discourse on idolatry. This notion accounts for the origin of idolatry by attributing it to conscious
fabrication by a wily and self-interested Brahmin priesthood. Likewise, fetish religion in Africa is
attributed to the invention of ‘fetish priests’, meant to hold in thrall the rest of the populace. By
regarding ideology as the effect of a material apparatus which reproduces itself, Althusser’s notion
of ideology elegantly disposes of the problem of the origin of ideology. There is no longer any
need to attribute ideology to the conscious action of a subject or a ‘clique’ of rational conspirators;
it arises out of insertion into a material apparatus, as in Pascal’s understanding of the genesis of a
Christian believer.411
Regardless of the extent to which one might agree or disagree with Althusserian formulations on
ideology, it is a fallacy to regard the non-Western/nonmodern/idolatrous subject as any more marked
by material objects/images/practices/institutions than the modern subject of reason. Pietz’s observa-
tion on the discourse of fetishism applies equally to that of the idol: ‘The discourse of the fetish [or
idol] has always been a critical discourse about the false objective values of a culture from which the
speaker is personally distanced’.412 To name someone an idolater is to name an Other, a worshipper
of false gods as opposed to the true gods that determine one’s own existence.
As the Eliade epigraph cited at the head of this chapter warns, a too-quick demystification of
the Other runs the risk of being unaware of the material markings which determine one’s own
identity and subjecthood, and therefore opens one’s own self up to demystification. ‘Idolatry’
serves as an overdetermining signifier in the colonial imagination of India, thereby itself becoming
an instance of what it critiques: a situation where the signifier is made to carry too much weight.
If European accounts of idolatry attempted to set up Indian society as a scene of Otherness and
difference, this sense of difference was shared by thinkers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay as
well when he asserted that the concept of ‘religion’ was not applicable to Indian society,
paradoxically because it pervaded all of it. Although this difference is essentialized in Bankim’s
instance, it is worth querying what elements this sense of difference may consist of.
56 S. GANGULY

Idolatrous and polytheistic societies are characterized as being simultaneously chaotic, hetero-
geneous and fissiparous, and promoting despotism and dogmatism. The following passage by
sociologist Louis Dumont suggests what might underlie these perceptions:
Everyone knows that religion was formerly a matter of the group and has become a matter of the individual
(in principle, and in practice at least in many environments and situations). But if we go on to assert that
this change is correlated with the birth of the modern State, the proposition is not so much a commonplace
as the previous one … Once [religion] became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacity and
became one among other apparently equal considerations, of which the political was the first born.413

Although Dumont has medieval Christendom in mind when he speaks of the ‘all-embracing
capacity’ of religion, or of religion as a matter of the group rather than the individual, this
characterization corresponds with what Bankim has to say about Hinduism. From the point of
view of the post-Reformation individual religion as an affair of communal practice rather than
individual conscience would seem coercive and despotic; this is because idolatrous/polytheistic/
mediaeval religion arrogated to itself many political functions since performed by the modern
state.
Given that colonialism introduced into India the idea of the modern state, which it saw as
upholding order against the chaos and heterogeneity of indigenous society, idolatry named the
otherness of a society that lacked a modern state apparatus. Seen from the point of those who
possessed or represented one, idolatrous societies did not conform to the standards of a properly
‘historical’ society following laws of progress, but were subject instead to decay, analogous to the
decay that was the lot of the material idol itself.
This ideology of idolatry deflects attention from ideologies/idolatries informing the ‘rational’
subjects of a colonial state. It is expressed in an exemplary form by Hegel: ‘in the history of the
world, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state … The State is the Divine
Idea as it exists on earth’.414 The false gods of premodern societies must be displaced by this ‘true’
theology of the colonial, or totalitarian, state.
In a poem called ‘The New Idol’, Friedrich Nietzsche questions and inverts the priorities
informing Hegel’s apotheosis of the state. According to Nietzsche, the new idol is the state itself:
A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: ‘I,
the state, am the people’.

Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings
over them.

This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour under-
standeth not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs.

But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath
stolen.

Madmen [worshippers of the state] all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their
idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.415

In this poem, language characterizing idolatry and idolaters is turned around on the state. Like
the stone idol, the state is a cold, unfeeling monster. Like the putative acts of Brahmin priests in
India and fetish priests in Africa it engenders the absolute lie, and hangs a ‘hundred cravings’ over
people to cement its power. It steals from people and induces insanity in its worshippers.
Like Nietzsche, Bankim too sets up the nation state as an idol. But unlike Nietzsche, he assigns
to it a positive value. In doing so, Bankim articulates a certain ‘truth’ of modern idolatry, a
principal locus of which tends to be the nation state.416 Placing the nation state at the interstice
between idolatry and ideology, Bankim gestures at the formal equivalence of both.
The colonial discourse on idolatry, by instituting a hierarchy between ‘idea’ and ‘image’, ‘belief’
and ‘practice’, could administer a despotism in India in the name of ‘reason’. As by dint of their
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 57

idolatry, very few of colonialism’s native subjects could be deemed in possession of ‘reason’, they
could be excluded from power. The language of idolatry, having its origins in theology, carries the
baggage of a colonial version of knowledge, which instituted its own theology of reason. As the
long political history of the term shows, further use of it may be justified only if its formal
equivalence to ideology is fully and explicitly acknowledged. Colonialism may be past, but the
high priests of a theology of ‘reason’ are still legion in independent India.

Notes
1. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was well received both at the box office and by critics. It sold over
53 million tickets in the US alone and was the tenth-highest grossing film of all time during its release
(Figures from Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=indianajone
sandthetempleofdoom.htm, accessed on 1 September 2016). On the widely visited movie review aggregator
site Rotten Tomatoes, the film won a remarkably high approval rating of 85% from critics, based on 65
reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10 (latest available figures at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/
indiana_jones_and_the_temple_of_doom/, accessed on 1 September 2016).
2. The Taliban released a video of its destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=xYYBlPWYb7Y, accessed on 1 September 2016. Satellite imagery of the destroyed Temple of Baalshamin
is available at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34090536, accessed on 1 September 2016.
Both the Bamiyan Buddhas and Temple of Baalshamin had earlier been declared by UNESCO to be World
Heritage Sites.
3. Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” 24.
4. See Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” 5–17, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” 23–45, and “The Problem
of the Fetish, IIIa,” 105–23.
5. See Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” 36, 37.
6. This definition raises the problem of what constitutes ‘proper’ as opposed to ‘exaggerated’ and ‘superfluous’
cult practice. Lactantius settled the problem in a way which refers us back to the notion of idolatry:
‘religion is the cult of the true [God], superstition that of the false’ (see Ibid., 29). In a more modern sense,
superstition is generally understood as belief in events that defy natural causation, which raises the problem
of how one understands ‘natural causation’, an understanding that may itself be culturally relative.
Christian ‘miracles’, which also exceed a ‘scientific’ notion of natural causation, may not be classified as
‘superstition’.
7. Ward, A View of the History, xxxix; and Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 667. One of the
instances of the rationalist trickery of Brahmins that Dubois cites is that of a man standing concealed
behind an idol and pretending to speak in the name of the idol; the words of this ‘oracle’ always have some
ambiguous or double meaning, which the Brahmins then interpret to square with their own predictions
and cement their power (see Ibid.). Curiously enough, the French manuscript of Hindu Manners, Customs
and Ceremonies, which Dubois sold to the East India Company as if it were his own work in 1808, was
substantially plagiarized from writings on India by G.L. Coeurdoux, S.J., compiled by Coeurdoux’s younger
contemporary N.J. Desvaulx as Moeurs et Coutumes Des Indiens in 1776–7 (see Sylvia Murr’s preface to her
edition of Coeurdoux/Desvaulx, Moeurs et Coutumes Des Indiens, 1987). Dubois enriched himself through
this piece of ‘trickery’, living subsequently on the proceeds from the sale (see Beauchamp, “Editor’s
Introduction” in Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, xvi).
8. For the senses of eidolon, latreia and eidos, see the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entries for ‘idol’ and
‘idolatry’.
9. Plato, The Republic, 264.
10. See “The Philosopher Ruler,” and “Theory of Art,” Ibid., 260–325 and 421–39 respectively.
11. See Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” 24–31.
12. See Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 111.
13. See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 7–9, 92.
14. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 3–72.
15. See “Definition of the Philosopher,” “The Divided Line,” and “The Simile of the Cave” in Plato, The
Republic, 263–80, 309–25.
16. See OED entry for ‘idea’. The entry lists the following usage: ‘Where on a top or high Mount is
conspicuously set the Idea of a horrible Caco-demon’ (1634). This usage of ‘idea’ corresponds to the
notion of idols as demons.
17. See Hare, Plato, 32.
18. ‘The Platonists realized that God is the creator from whom all other beings derive, while he is himself
uncreated and underivative. They observed that whatever exists is either matter or life, and that life is
58 S. GANGULY

superior to matter, that the form of matter is accessible to sense, that the form of life is accessible to
intelligence. They therefore preferred the “intelligible” to the “sensible”. By “sensible” we mean that which
can be apprehended by bodily sight and touch, by “intelligible” that which can be recognized by the mind’s
eye’ (St. Augustine, City of God, 308).
19. This dictum was often repeated in Christian texts of the thirteenth century. See Camille, The Gothic
Idol, 13.
20. See Ibid., xxv–vi.
21. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 13.
22. Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 27.
23. See Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” 23.
24. According to Peirce, an ‘iconic’ sign resembles what it stands for (e.g., a photograph of a person), while an
‘indexical’ sign has a relationship of contiguity with the signified object (e.g., smoke with fire, or spots with
measles). In terms of Peircian categories, while an idol could be treated as an ‘iconic’ sign, a fetish may be
regarded as an ‘indexical’ sign, or alternatively, a ‘symbolic’ sign, where the relationship between signifier
and signified is entirely arbitrary. See Peirce, “Sign,” 239, 240.
25. Derrida amplifies the notion of a ‘transcendental signified’ and questions its idealist affiliations in the
following formulation: ‘The maintenance of the rigorous distinction – an essential and juridical distinction
between the signans and the signatum, the equation of the signatum and the concept, inherently leaves
open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought,
independent of a relationship to language, that of a relationship to a system of signifiers. By leaving open
this possibility … Saussure … accedes to the classical exigency of what I have proposed to call a
“transcendental signified”, which in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier, would exceed
the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier. On the contrary, though, from the
moment that one questions the possibility of such a transcendental signified, and that one recognizes that
every signified is also in the position of a signifier, the distinction between signified and signifier becomes
problematical at its root’ (Derrida, Positions, 19, 20). Within monotheistic religions, the concept ‘God’
would function as such a ‘transcendental signified’.
26. Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” 6.
27. Halbfass, India and Europe, 39, 40.
28. ‘Should the intercourse between the individuals of both nations [India and Britain], by becoming more
friendly, produce a revolution in the religion and usages of [India]; it will not be to turn Christians that
they will forsake their own religion; but rather, (what in my opinion is a thousand times worse than
idolatry) to become perfect atheists’ (Dubois, Letters on the State, 50). Atheism and materialism in Indian
religion are related issues for Dubois. Thus, he avers about an atheist sect: ‘Their doctrine is pure
materialism. Spinoza and his disciples endeavoured to palm it off as a new invention of their own; but
the atheists of India recognized this doctrine many centuries before them, and drew from it pretty much
the same deductions which their European brethren afterwards drew, and which have been propagated in
modern times with such deplorable success’ (Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 464).
29. See Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 111.
30. See Plato, Phaedrus, 274b–8b; also Derrida’s analysis of the speech/writing opposition in Plato, “Plato’s
Pharmacy” in Derrida, Dissemination, 142–55. Derrida stresses the ‘affinity between writing and mythos
created by their common opposition to logos [the goal of metaphysics]’. (Ibid., 145fn). Prior to Derrida,
Friedrich Nietzsche also inverted the poles of the Platonic/rationalist hierarchy that informs the philosophy/
myth opposition. Taking Plato and Homer, respectively, to represent the two opposed outlooks, Nietzsche’s
sympathies were decidedly with the fabulist (Homer) than with the metaphysician (Plato): ‘on the one side,
the wholehearted “transcendental”, the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the
golden nature’ (“The Genealogy of Morals” III: 25, in Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 783).
31. See Derrida, Dissemination, 145fn.
32. Ward, History, Literature, and Religion, xxxiii.
33. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts, 132–40.
34. Ward, History, Literature, and Religion, xxxii.
35. Trevelyan, Christianity and Hinduism Contrasted, 4, 81.
36. Ibid., 72, 73. According to Trevelyan, a Muslim Thug even proposes that Bhowanee (another name for
Kali) and Fatima, daughter of prophet Muhammad, are ‘one and the same person’ (73).
37. The British avoided heavy, dark forms of post and lintel construction, which to them were reminiscent of
‘idolatrous’ Hindu temples, but accommodated in their architecture forms such as the arch and the dome,
which gestured heavenwards. See Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 157, 158.
38. On the place of imagination in Enlightenment psychology and the connections between idolatry and the
imaginative faculty, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 123–8.
39. See Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 515–636.
40. For Hegel’s notion of progress in history see Hegel, The Philosophy of History.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 59

41. See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 272–99.

42. Ibid., 316. For Hegel’s exposition of ‘the religion of phantasy’ see Ibid., 316–52, 579–604.
43. Ibid., 317.
44. Ibid., 347.
45. Ibid., 350.
46. Ibid., 347, 348.
47. Nigel Wood in Davies and Wood, Theory in Practice, 66.
48. On the ‘interpellation’ of subjects by ideology, see Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State,” 170–83.
49. See Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, 27.
50. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 624.
51. For an amplification of this argument, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 133, 134. Halbertal and
Margalit compare the syllogism on which the search for a final cause is based to the following (fallacious)
syllogism: because every girl is loved by a boy, there must be one boy who loves all the girls.
52. On subject constitution through the mirroring of an absolute Other Subject, see Althusser, “Ideology and
Ideological State,” 177–83.
53. Mill, The History of British India, 10, vol. 1.
54. Ibid., 7, 8.
55. Ibid., 27.
56. Ibid., 7.
57. “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Derrida, Dissemination, 86.
58. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 3. On the alignment between Derrida’s reading of western metaphysics and a
critique of Eurocentrism see Young, White Mythologies, 17–19.
59. Mill, History of British India, 4, vol. 1.
60. ‘If philosophers have the capacity to grasp the eternal and immutable, while those who have no such
capacity and are not philosophers and are lost in multiplicity and change, which of the two should be in
charge of a state? … It would be absurd not to choose the philosophers’ (Plato, The Republic, 276, 277). For
the general argument, see “The Philosopher Ruler,” chapter 7 in Ibid., 260–325.
61. Ibid., 289.
62. Mill, History of British India, 3, vol. 1
63. Ibid., 9.
64. Ibid., 3.
65. Turgot, Life and Writings of Turgot, 160, 161.
66. Mill, History of British India, 452, vol. 1.
67. Mill, Autobiography, 30.
68. See Stokes, The English Utilitarians, 62–8; and Lively and Rees, Utilitarian Logic and Politics, 49, 50.
69. See Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 1–4, 117–21; and also Jenny Sharpe, “The Violence of Light,” 26–46. Cf.
also Jones’s own statement: ‘I read and write Sanskrit with ease, and speak it fluently to the Brahmans, who
consider me as a Pandit; but I am now only gathering flowers: the fruit of my Indian studies will be a
complete Digest of Law … my translation of which will, I trust, be the standard of justice to eight millions of
innocent and useful men, so long as Britain shall possess this wonderful kingdom’ (Jones, The Letters, 813).
70. “A Hymn to Lacshmi” in Jones, The Works, 290.
71. Jones, Letters, 4–30 August 1787, 749, vol. 2.
72. I Corinthians 13:12.
73. See “Phaedo” in Plato, Dialogues of Plato, 132, 133. For Jones’s reputation as a classics scholar, see
Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 19–24; and also “Introduction” in Marshall, The British Discovery of
Hinduism, 14.
74. Letter to George Hardynge, 24 September 1788, in Shore, Memoirs of the Life, 320.
75. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 111.
76. “A Hymn to Lacshmi” in Jones, Works, 298, vol. 13.
77. Jones describes the ‘Orientalist’ philosophy of governance as follows: ‘the British residents in India be
protected, yet governed, by British laws; and … the natives of these important provinces be indulged in
their own prejudices, civil and religious, and suffered to enjoy their own customs unmolested; and why
these great ends may not now be attained, consistently with the regular collection of revenue and the
supremacy of the executive government, I confess myself unable to discover’ (“Charge to the Grand Jury,” 4
December 1783, in Jones, Works, 4, vol. 7; italics mine).
78. For a positive evaluation of this ‘Orientalist’ mode of governance advocated by Jones, see “Orientalist in
Search of a Golden Age” in Kopf, British Orientalism, 22–42. For a negative evaluation, see “Sir William
Jones” in Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 11–46; and Sharpe, “The Violence of Light.”
79. Chaudhuri, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 49.
80. See “Introduction” in Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, 22; and also Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century, 129.
60 S. GANGULY

81. See Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism
and the Postcolonial Predicament, 234–8.
82. Jones, Letters, late September 1785, 686, vol. 2.
83. Ibid., 24 October 1786, 720, 721.
84. Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism
and the Postcolonial Predicament, 237.
85. See Derrida, Dissemination, 142–55.
86. Jones, “On the Gods of Greece,” in Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, 209.
87. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 196.
88. “Institutes of Hindu Law” in Jones, Works, 88, vol. 7.
89. See Derrett, Religion, Law and the State, 247, 248.
90. “Charge to the Grand Jury,” 10 June 1787, in Jones, Works, 29, vol. 7.
91. Ibid., 4 December 1783, 33, 34.
92. ‘The Armenian, whom I mentioned under the head of perjury, being also charged with having forged the
bond, to the due execution of which he positively swore … the great question again arises, whether the
modern statute, which makes forgery capital, extend, or not, to these Indian territories. On the fullest
consideration, I think the negative supported by stronger reasons than the affirmative … Nevertheless, I
still think the question debatable’ (Ibid., 4 December 1783, 43).
93. For a fuller account of Nandakumar’s sentencing and execution, see Mill, History of British India, 561–6,
vol. 2. Mill, who was hardly friendly towards Indians, had this to say regarding the procedures adopted for
the sentencing: ‘But that all regard to decorum, to the character of the English government, to substantial
justice, to the prevention of misrule, and the detection of ministerial crimes, was sacrificed to personal
interests, and personal passions, the impartial inquirer cannot hesitate to pronounce’ (Ibid., 566).
94. For a history of readings of the Ezourvedam and the controversy surrounding it, see Rocher’s introduction
to his edition of Ezourvedam: A French Veda, 4–73.
95. L. Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda, 7.
96. Ibid., 60, 72, 73.
97. The Chumantou/Biach opposition corresponds to the one that Nietzsche formulated between Plato and
Homer: ‘Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the true antagonism’. Nietzsche’s sympathies, however,
are ranged on the side of the fabulist rather than the metaphysician: ‘on the one side, the wholehearted
“transcendental”, the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature’. See
“The Genealogy of Morals” III: 25, in Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 783.
98. Julius Richter, cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda, 25.
99. Halbfass, India and Europe, 48. See also Teltscher, India Inscribed, 91, 92.
100. William Hodge Mill, cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda, 26.
101. Voltaire, cited in Halbfass, India and Europe, 58.
102. Voltaire, cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda, 6.
103. See Figueira, “The Authority of an Absent,” 201–33.
104. Chatterji, “Sir William Jones: 1746–1794,” 82.
105. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 100, 110.
106. Inden, Imagining India, 44.
107. Cited in Rocher, Ezourvedam: a French Veda, 17, 19, 23, 24. Julien Vinson writes of the Ezourvedam that it
‘is a pastiche, a suppositious book, a fraud, that passed unnoticed in India, but which one has tried in vain
to give some credit in Europe. It is without value and without interest. Scholars should no longer waste
their time on it’ (cited in Ibid., 25).
108. Halbfass, India and Europe, 46.
109. Jones, “On the Hindus,” in Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, 251.
110. As recently as 1963, the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, in its chapter on Indian mythology, has
the following on offer: ‘Even in our days, on the south-east slope of the Deccan, piety is shown to hideous
she-ogres such as Kali and Durga, ferocious deities of Hinduism’ (Guirand et al., New Larousse
Encyclopaedia, 325).
111. “The Enchanted Fruit,” in Jones, Works, 215, vol. 13.
112. The two words have different phonetic and orthographic values in Indian languages; while ‘kali’ (the age)
lacks an accent in its first syllable, ‘Kali’ (the goddess) comes with that accent.
113. See the argument in Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 77, 85, 86.
114. “On the Hindus,” 254, and “Charge to the Grand Jury,” 9 June 1792, in Jones, Works, 72, vol. 7. ‘Gentoo’,
derived from Latin ‘gentile’ and Portuguese ‘gentio’, was a term used to refer to Indian heathens (von
Stietencron, “Hinduism: On the Proper,” in Sontheimer and Kulke, Hinduism Reconsidered, 12). Note that
although Athenians too are gentiles, Jones develops here a contrast between ‘Athenian’ and ‘Gentoo’.
115. On gymnosophists, see Halbfass, India and Europe, 12–44.
116. “On the Hindus,” 254, in Jones, Works.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 61

117. Colebrooke, Asiatic Researches, 400, vol. 8, 20 vols, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1788–1839; and Max
Mueller, Lectures on the Origin, 269.
118. “Extract from a Dissertation” in Jones, Works, 367, vol. 13.
119. Cf. Jones: ‘the principal source of idolatry among the ancients was their enthusiastick admiration of the
Sun; and that, when the primitive religion of mankind was lost amid the distractions of establishing regal
government, or neglected amid the allurements of vice, they ascribed to the great visible luminary, or to the
wonderful fluid, of which it is the general reservoir, those powers of pervading all space and animating all
nature, which their wiser ancestors had attributed to one eternal MIND’ (“The Argument: A Hymn,” Ibid.,
278). Jones may have had in mind Deuteronomy 4: 16–19 or similar pronouncements in the Bible: ‘Lest ye
corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or
female … And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the
stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD
thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven’.
120. See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 309.
121. Plato, The Republic, 308. For Plato’s elaboration of the simile see Ibid., 305–9.
122. Cf. the following spoken by Socrates: ‘let us give up asking for the present what the good is in itself … But I
will tell you, if you like, about something which seems to me to be a child of the good, and to resemble it
closely’ (Ibid., 305).
123. See note 119 above.
124. Sharpe harnesses Derrida’s notion of a ‘secondary origin’ to describe the process of translation and
codification of Hindu law by British Orientalists in Jones’s time, so that ‘as the one who gives the natives
their own laws, the translator is the authoritative source of jurisdiction. Thus, displacing a divine origin,
the British civil servant assumes a seat of command’. See the argument in Sharpe, “The Violence of Light,”
37–40.
125. Jones, “On the Gods of Greece” in Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, 197, 198.
126. Ibid., 119.
127. Ibid., 205.
128. “On the Mystical Poetry,” in Jones, Works, 212, vol. 4.
129. “Second Anniversary Discourse” in Jones, Works, 12–14, vol. 3.
130. Ibid., 12.
131. Jones, “On the Gods of Greece” in Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, 196.
132. Ibid., 243.
133. Jones, Works, 9, 10, vol. 2.
134. See Sharpe, “The Violence of Light,” 37.
135. In his discourse on the founding of the Asiatic Society which was to undertake the translation of Sanskrit
works, Jones proposes an instrumentalist view of language: ‘I have ever considered languages as the mere
instruments of real learning, and think them improperly confounded with learning itself’ (Jones,
“Discourse on the Institution” in Chaudhuri, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 5). On Jones’s sense of
the superficiality of linguistic differences, see Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 15.
136. After recounting legends of Krishna which paralleled episodes from the life of Christ, Jones opined that
‘This motley story must induce an opinion that the spurious Gospels, which abounded in the first age of
Christianity, had been brought to India, and the wildest part of them repeated to the Hindus, who ingrafted
them on the old fable of Cesava [or Krishna]’ (Jones, “On the Gods of Greece” in Marshall, British
Discovery of Hinduism, 244).
137. See Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 141.
138. See Mill, History of British India, 189, vol. 1.
139. See Ibid., 168, 169, 182, 183.
140. Ibid., 185.
141. Ibid., 379.
142. Cf. The New Testament: ‘an idol is nothing in the world, … there is none other God but one’ (I Corinthians 8: 3).
143. Camille, The Gothic Idol, 134.
144. ‘The timid barbarian, who is agitated by fears respecting the unknown events of nature, feels the most
incessant and eager desire to propitiate the Being on which he believes them to depend … as nothing to his
rude breast is more delightful than adulation, he is led by a species of instinct to expect the favour of his
god from praise and flattery’ (Mill, History of British India, 167, vol. 1).
145. ‘The Hindus, at the time of Alexander’s invasion, were in a state of manners, society, and knowledge,
exactly the same with that in which they were discovered by the nations of modern Europe’ (Ibid., 29).
146. Mill likened the European discovery of India to the discovery of America, and thought that the hetero-
geneity of these two discoveries accounted for notions of a Hindu golden age: ‘Having contemplated in the
one, a people without fixed habitations, without political institutions, and with hardly any other arts than
those indispensably necessary for the preservation of existence, [Europeans] hastily concluded, upon the
62 S. GANGULY

sight of another people, inhabiting great cities, cultivating the soil, connected together by an artificial
system of subordination, exhibiting monuments of great antiquity, cultivating a species of literature,
exercising arts, and obeying a monarch whose sway was extensive, and his court magnificient, that they
had passed from one extreme of civilization to the other … The progress of knowledge, and the force of
observation, demonstrated the necessity of regarding the actual state of the Hindus as little removed from
half-civilised nations. The saving hypothesis … was immediately adopted, that the situation in which the
Hindus are now beheld is a state of degradation; that formerly they were in a state of high civilization; from
which they had fallen through the miseries of foreign conquest and subjugation’ (Ibid., 460).
147. See “The Birth of the Gods” in Manuel, The Eighteenth Century, 127–48.
148. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 128. For Majeed’s critique of the characterisation of Mill’s text as
hegemonic, see Ibid., 3–5, 132, 133, 148, 195–200.
149. Ibid., 200.
150. Expressing a point of view consistently sustained through his History, Mill instituted the following
comparison between Indian civilisation and European feudal society: ‘Should we say that the civilisation
of the people of Hindustan, and that of the people of Europe, during the feudal ages, is not far from equal,
we shall find upon a close inspection, that the Europeans were … greatly superior, notwithstanding the
defects of the feudal system … the gothic nations, as soon as they become a settled people, exhibit the
marks of a superior character and civilisation to those of the Hindus’ (Mill, History of British India, 481,
482, vol. 1). Majeed’s premise is dubious insofar as it is hard to see how such a perspective fits into a
critique not of Indian but of contemporary British society, which Mill considered far in advance of
European feudal society.
151. Ibid., 186.
152. Ibid., 163.
153. Ibid., 164.
154. Ibid., 23–5.
155. ‘And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites,
and Jebusites: and they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and
served their gods’ (Judges 3: 5–6).
156. ‘And it came to pass … that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made
Baal-berith their god’ (Judges 8: 33).
157. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans speaks of idolaters who have ‘changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into
an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them upto uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour
their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served
the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto
vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And
likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men
with men working that which is unseemly’ (Epistle to the Romans 1: 23–7). See also Camille, The Gothic
Idol, 90–2.
158. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.5.9.
159. Mill, History of British India, 193, vol. 1.
160. Ibid., 170.
161. Ibid., 176.
162. ‘Krishna, who saw the innocence of [the maids’] hearts, graciously gave them entire satisfaction; and by a
miracle continually renewed, in all that multitude of women, each was convinced that she alone enjoyed
the Deity, and that he never quitted her an instant for the embraces of another’ (Ibid., 176, 177).
163. Ibid., 205, 206.
164. See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 84–90.
165. Ibid., 94.
166. Mill studied Divinity at the University of Edinburgh for four years, after which he served the church for a
while as a preacher. See Guha, “Biographical Notice of James Mill” in Mill, History of British India, viii,
vol. 1.
167. Ibid., 310.
168. Ibid.. 241.
169. Ibid., 179.
170. Ibid., 163.
171. Ibid., 179.
172. Ibid., 163. To quote a few instances of the repetition of this characterisation: ‘the unparalleled vagueness which
marks the language of the Brahmans … the multiplicity of their fictions, and the endless discrepancy of their
ideas … no coherent system of belief seems capable of being extracted from their wild eulogies and legends’
(Ibid., 160). ‘Whenever indeed we seek to ascertain the definite and precise ideas of the Hindus in religion, the
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 63

subject eludes our grasp. All is loose, vague, wavering, obscure, and inconsistent. Their expressions point at
one time to one meaning, and another time to another meaning; and their wild fictions, to use the language of
Mr. Hume, seem rather the playful whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious asseverations of a
being who dignifies himself with the name of rational’ (Ibid., 170). ‘No people … have ever drawn a more
gross and disgusting picture of the universe than what is presented in the writings of the Hindus. In the
conception of it no coherence, wisdom, or beauty, ever appears: all is disorder, caprice, passion, contest,
portents, prodigies, violence, and deformity’ (Ibid., 187). ‘The darkness, the vagueness, and the confusion,
which reign in [Hindu accounts of creation], need not be remarked; for by these the Hindu mythology is
throughout distinguished … the ideas are heterogeneous, and incompatible’ (Ibid., 249).
173. Ibid., 249, 250.
174. Derrida, Dissemination, 42, 43.
175. Mill, History of British India, 384, vol. 1.
176. See on this problem “The Wrong God,” Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 137–62.
177. Ibid., 251, 252.
178. See Derrida, Positions, 64.
179. Derrida, Dissemination, 4.
180. See de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 110, 111.
181. On Jones’s attitude to language and sense of the superficiality of linguistic difference see Majeed,
Ungoverned Imaginings, 15. On Mill, see Ibid., 37.
182. “On the Mystical Poetry,” in Jones, Works, 227–228, vol. 4.
183. Ibid., 230.
184. Ibid., 223.
185. See Mukerji, From Graven Images, 20, 21. See also Elliott, The Old World.
186. Jones, “Discourse on the Institution” in Chaudhuri, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 2.
187. Bayly, Indian Society, 79. For an account of Wellesley’s period of governor-generalship see Ibid., 79–105.
188. Richard Wellesley, ‘Extracts from the Governor-General’s Notes for an official despatch …’, 10 July 1800,
cited in “The Recruitment and Training” in Cohn, An Anthropologist, 521, 522.
189. See Ibid., 522–7.
190. See Inden, Imagining India, 45.
191. See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 59, 60.
192. See “The Birth of the Gods” in Manuel, The Eighteenth Century 142.
193. According to Mill, ‘To the imagination of the eastern poets, and above all, of the Hindus, may be aptly
applied, in many of its particulars, the description of the Demoness, Imagination, in the enchanted castle of
Hermaphrodix:
Under the great arches of an immense portico,
A confused morass of modern and antique
Walked a brilliant phantom,
with a soft foot, a glittering eye,
quick gestures, a wandering step,
head high, decked with tinsel,
One sees her body always in motion,
And her name is Imagination,
Not that beautiful, charming goddess
Who presided in Rome and Greece
Over the beautiful works of so many great writers,
Who spread the brilliance of her colors;
But she who abjures good sense:
That scatterbrained, alarmed, insipid one
that so many writers closely approach …
By her was Gibberish
Talkative monster caressed in her arms.
The Maid of Orleans, 17th song’ (Mill, History of British India, 403, vol. 1).
I am grateful to Lynn Festa for this translation of the poem from the French. Note that demoness
Imagination is described as lacking even in respect to the goddess which presides over ‘pagan’ Greece
and Rome, and that Mill considers it to apply particularly to Hindus. This corresponds rather well with
Mill’s demotion of Hindu civilisation below not just the European present but past states of European
civilisation as well. See Ibid., 478, 481, 482.
194. For Plato’s argument against poets see Plato, The Republic, 129–65, 421–39.
195. Mill, History of British India, 1, 2, vol. 1.
196. Letter from Mill to Dumont cited in Stokes, The English Utilitarians, 48.
64 S. GANGULY

197. On the British empire as information archive, see Richards, The Imperial Archive. The problem with this
otherwise insightful book is that it treats the project of coordinating bits of information from far-flung
corners of the empire into a single, vast and coherent body of knowledge as pure fantasy, ignoring the
reality inducing effects of that fantasy and reinscribing Mill’s irreducible opposition between fact and
fantasy. For the instrumental uses of colonial knowledge as a systematised body of facts see Ludden,
“Orientalist Empiricism” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,
250–78.
198. Mill, History of British India, 477, vol. 1.
199. Mill shares the Orientalist assumption of essential difference between Hindus and Muslims and of the
‘foreignness’ of Muslims in India, which ‘ultimately derives from the long history of western (Christian) –
Arab (Muslim) rivalry’ (“The Foreign Hand” in Peter van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial
Predicament, 33). Mill, however, treats ‘Mahomedan civilisation’ as more evolved and higher up in his scale
of civilisations than the Hindus; see “Mahomedan and Hindu Civilisation” in Mill, History of British India,
697–724, vol. 1.
200. Perrin, Idolatry.
201. Ruskin, “Salsette and Elephanta,” in Cook and Wedderburn, Complete Works, 90–100, vol. 2. Written in
1839 at the age of twenty, this poem won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford ‒ where Ruskin was
enrolled as an undergraduate ‒ and brought him to the notice of William Wordsworth (see Ibid., xxv–vii,
vol. 2; and also Evans, John Ruskin, 64, 65).
202. Forster, A Passage to India, 1984. “The Life to Come” in Stallybrass, The Life to Come, 65–82.
203. “Unto this Last,” in Ruskin, Complete Works, 105, vol. 17.
204. See ‘Unto this Last’, Ibid., 13–114. The first sentence in the first of four essays in ‘Unto This Last’ indicates
their target: ‘Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of
large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious ‒ certainly the least creditable ‒ is the modern
soi-disant science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be
determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection’ (Ibid., 25).
205. See “The Political Economy of Art,” reprinted in “A Joy for Ever,” in Ruskin, Works, 9–103, vol. 16.
206. ‘And the second great condition for the advance of sculpture is that the race should possess, in addition to
the mimetic instinct, the realistic or idolising instinct; the desire to see as substantial the powers that are
unseen, and bring near those that are far off, and to possess and cherish those that are strange. To make in
some way tangible and visible the nature of the gods ‒ to illustrate and explain it by symbols; to bring the
immortals out of the recesses of the clouds, and make them Penates; to bring back the dead from darkness,
and make them Lares’ (“Aratra Pentelici” in Ruskin, Works, 223, vol. 20).
207. See, for example, “Fors Clavigera” in Ruskin, Works, 5–676, vol. 27; and also “The Storm Cloud” in Ruskin,
Works, 1–80, vol. 34. These are visionary, apocalyptic accounts of the disruption of natural order by
industrial civilisation.
208. ‘Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructive faculties
from the Grand Canal to Gower Street; from the marble shaft, and the lancet arch, and the wreathed
leafage, and the glowing and melting harmony of gold and azure [features of Gothic style], to the square
cavity in the brick wall’ (“The Stones of Venice, Vol. III” in Ruskin, Works, 4, vol. 11). Editors Cook and
Wedderburn add in a footnote that ‘Gower Street is … selected, as a type of modern ugliness’ (Ibid.). For
Ruskin’s appreciation of Gothic style see “The Nature of Gothic” in Ruskin, Works, 180–269, vol. 10.
209. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 120–40.
210. “Two Paths” in Ruskin, Works, 253–424, vol. 16.
211. See Ibid., 259–63.
212. “Salsette and Elephanta” in Ruskin, Works, 94–9, vol. 2.
213. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 21, 34, 35.
214. “Salsette and Elephanta” in Ruskin, Works, 94 fn, vol. 2. van Linschoten’s account was translated into
English in 1598 as The Voyage of John Huyghen.
215. Joao do Castro, “The Pagode of Salsette,” translated from Portuguese by Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters,
327.
216. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 158.
217. For accounts of Salsette and Elephanta as the ‘picturesque’, see Ibid., 120–40. For Ruskin’s affinity to the
‘picturesque’ see Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes, 76, 77.
218. “The Two Paths” in Ruskin, Works, 266, vol. 16.
219. Ibid., 264.
220. Ibid., 284, 287.
221. See Ibid., 266.
222. ‘Art, so far as it was devoted to the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and ennobling
also’ (Ibid., 268); ‘You observe that I always say interpretation, never imitation’ (Ibid., 269).
223. See Ibid., 294, 295.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 65

224. Ibid., 268, 270.

225. Ibid., 284, 285.
226. Ibid., 269.
227. “The Stones of Venice, Vol. III” in Ruskin, Works, 187, vol. 11.
228. Ibid., 190.
229. Ibid., 145.
230. Ibid., 189.
231. Ibid., 164.
232. Ibid., 168, 169.
233. Ibid., 188, 189.
234. Ibid., 181.
235. See the argument in Ibid., 178–81.
236. “Modern Painters, V” in Ruskin, Works, 414fn, vol. 7.
237. Cf. the following observation by Ruskin: ‘the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the
composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not
necessarily convey the image of anything but itself’ (“The Nature of Gothic,” and “The Stones of Venice,
Vol. II” in Ruskin, Works, 215, 216, vol. 10).
238. “The Two Paths” in Ruskin, Works, 307 fn, vol. 16. See also quote from Ruskin in epigraph to this chapter:
the cruelty and lack of civilisation of Indian mutineers were related to the fact that they wove pretty shawls.
Christopher Bayly has pointed out that many Indian weavers ruined by the flooding of the Indian market
with cheap industrially produced textiles from England joined the mutiny, and that many rebel proclama-
tions referred specifically to their plight (see Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi,” 307–10). Although Ruskin is
generally sympathetic to the victims of industrialisation, this is superseded by the politics of imperialism:
he withholds all sympathy in the instance of Indian rebels.
239. Ruskin, “Light,” “Lectures on Art,” Works, 153, vol. 20.
240. Ruskin, “Athena Keramitis,” “The Queen of the Air,” Works, 382, 383, vol. 19.
241. Ruskin, “Light,” Works, 152, 153, vol. 20.
242. See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy,
trans. from French by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 209–71.
243. ‘The consummate art of Europe has only been accomplished by the union of both [light and colour]’
(Ruskin, “Light,” Works, 154, vol. 20).
244. See Stephen Bann, “The Colour in the Text: Ruskin’s Basket of Strawberries” in Harold Bloom (ed), John
Ruskin, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, 105–16.
245. Ibid., 108.
246. Ruskin’s marriage of six years to distant cousin Effie Gray was annulled on grounds of non-consummation;
Effie had already left him at this point for the painter John Everett Millais. Soon after he met and fell in
love with Rose La Touche, a girl aged 9, who appeared to him half-angelic, half-diabolic, and was 30 years
younger than him. In 1866, when Rose was 16, he asked her to marry him, but was finally turned down by
her in 1872. By then she had started manifesting signs of mental and physical illness, and died insane in
1875. Ruskin himself lost his mental balance and was incapacitated for the last ten years of his life (See
Clive Wilmer’s introduction to John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, Penguin Classics, 1985,
7–37). Wilmer notes ‘it seems probable that the sexuality of adult women terrified Ruskin and repelled
him; in consequence, perhaps, he found it easier to direct his emotions to girls’ (Ibid., 31).
247. Ruskin, “Proper Sense of the Word Idolatry,” “The Stones of Venice” Vol. II, Appendix 10, Works, 451,
vol. 10.
248. Ibid.
249. “Idolatry,” and “Aratra Pentelici” in Ruskin, Works, 240, 241, vol. 20.
250. Ibid., 230; italics mine.
251. Ibid., 231; the references are to Exodus 33: 9, 3: 2 and I Kings 19: 2, respectively.
252. Ibid., 230; author’s italics.
253. See Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes, 161.
254. Letter to Ruskin, Verona, 2 June 1852, Ruskin, Works, xxvi, vol. 10.
255. Effie Gray, letter dated 15 January 1850, cited in Trevelyan, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle, 49.
256. Effie Gray, cited in Lutyens, Effie in Venice, 146.
257. The following description of contemporary Venetians is typical of The Stones of Venice: ‘Round the whole
[of St. Mark’s] square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafés, where the idle
Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals: in its centre the Austrian bands play
during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes, ‒ the march drowning the
miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening among them, ‒ a crowd which, if it had its will, would stiletto
every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest
classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children, ‒ every heavy
66 S. GANGULY

glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, ‒
gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble
ledges of the church porch’ (“St. Mark’s,” and “The Stones of Venice, Vol. II” in Ruskin, Works, 84, 85,
vol. 10). Juxtapositions in this passage such as ‘men … basking in the sun like lizards’ or ‘children … young
eyes full of desperation … throats hoarse with cursing … snarl’ contribute to its overall effect of a sense of
unnaturalness and decadence.
258. See Kemp, The Desire of my Eyes, 198.
259. “Praeterita” in Ruskin, Works, 483, vol. 35. See also Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes, 162–4.
260. Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes, 161.
261. The Stones of Venice begins with the heavily portentous words: ‘Since first the dominion of men was
asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones
of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains, of the Second,
the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forgets their example, may be led through prouder
eminence to less pitied destruction’ (“The Stones of Venice, Vol. I” in Ruskin, Works, 17, vol. 9). Ruskin’s
painstaking study of Venetian architecture is meant to aid in the project of emulating her past glory while
avoiding her present decadence.
262. In the period of their engagement, during what must have been the height of their courtship, Ruskin wrote
to Effie: ‘I find work good for me and when I am busy upon architecture or mathematics I sometimes very
nearly forget all about you! – and retain merely a pleasant sense of all’s being right’ (Ruskin, cited in Kemp,
The Desire of My Eyes, 139).
263. Letter from Venice to Ruskin, 28 January 1852, Ruskin, Works, 436, vol. 10.
264. Proust translated Ruskin into French and followed his lead in many things: for example, in his enthusiasm
for Giotto’s allegorical paintings in Padua, to which Ruskin made frequent allusions. For Ruskin’s influence
on Proust, see Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes, 312, 331, 463.
265. Marcel Proust, cited in Kemp, The Desire of my Eyes, 464.
266. “Proper Sense of the Word Idolatry” in Ruskin, Works, 451, 452, vol. 10.
267. For a brief biography of Perrin, see Cowasjee, Women Writers of the Raj, 261.
268. Perrin, Idolatry, 3.
269. Ibid., 23.
270. Ibid., 12, 13.
271. Ibid., 11. ‘She ought to have married well, too, long before this, with her undeniably good looks and the
thoroughbred air’ (Ibid.).
272. ‘Reason’ is derived from the Latin root ration-em, among whose senses are ‘reckoning, account, relation’.
Reason itself may signify ‘monetary reckoning’; when used in the plural it could stand for ‘accounts,
moneys’. See Oxford English Dictionary entry for ‘reason’.
273. Perrin, Idolatry, 9.
274. Ibid., 23–24.
275. Ibid., 8, 9.
276. The narrative tells us further that as Anne looks at her mother’s photograph, she guesses at ‘the mental
discomfort the poor little creature must have endured when she came to England to live among her
husband’s people − the silent slights, the quiet contempt; the help withheld in social difficulties; the notice,
without kindly correction, of mistakes; the hundred little negative cruelties of which, Anne knew very well,
the members of Granny’s world were capable towards one not of themselves. Then, left to their mercy,
without the love and support of her young husband, the widow had fled, back to her own kin, deeming the
surrender of her baby a price worth paying for her freedom’ (Ibid., 24).
277. Ibid., 33.
278. Ibid., 47.
279. Ibid., 136, 137.
280. See Ibid., 135–7.
281. Ibid., 136, 143.
282. Ibid., 102.
283. See Ibid., 217, 218, 270, 276, 277. ‘The fact of Ramanund’s visits to him being accomplished only by an
elaborate system of deception − a system in which the boy took a curious racial pleasure as being a triumph
of intrigue − gave Wray matter for serious perplexity’ (270).
284. Ibid., 107.
285. Ibid., 108.
286. Ibid., 102.
287. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 173.
288. See Ibid., 163–84.
289. Perrin, Idolatry, 110. For Wray’s sacrifice of his family property, see 112.
290. Ibid., 34.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 67

291. Ibid.
292. Ibid., 113–5.
293. Ibid., 114. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque body of carnival is presented ‘not in a private, egotistic
form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As
such, it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to
renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and of the body. … The material bodily principle
is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are
continually growing and renewed’ (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19, 20).
294. See Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics.
295. Perrin, Idolatry, 115, 116.
296. Ibid., 117.
297. See “Introduction” in Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 1–26.
298. See Sharpe, Allegories of Empire.
299. Perrin, Idolatry, 119.
300. Ibid., 120–2.
301. ‘For a sharp moment, the difference of [Dion’s] nature as compared with her own smote Anne with a sense
of shame, and a revulsion of feeling against her subtlety nauseated her. She was the snarer − Dion her
victim. Yet, after all, was she not working to their mutual advantage? If, when the time came, she told Dion
she loved him and would marry him, would he not, in his ignorance, consider himself the happiest being
on earth, and why should he ever be disillusioned? And would not she herself have gained all that, to her,
meant happiness? − money, independence, position, an adoring indulgent husband’ (Ibid., 98).
302. Ibid., 117, 118.
303. Ibid., 318.
304. Ibid., 288, 289.
305. Ibid., 320.
306. Ibid., 322.
307. Ibid., 100, 101. For Anne’s dreams involving the ruins see Ibid., 215, 291, 292.
308. Ibid., 111.
309. See Ibid., 215.
310. Ibid., 156, 157.
311. Ibid., 171.
312. ‘She thought of Thanesur and her dream. Ah! to think that they might linger together in reality among the
ruins, breathing the sunny, scented air; that they might have long, intimate talks! … Perhaps if she only
went for two days – three days? – and then came back … her secret buried deep in her heart, and the past
behind her for ever?’ (Ibid., 333). For Anne and Wray’s final meeting at Thanesur see Ibid., 336–54.
313. At Thanesur, Wray tells Anne that ‘it has been one awful struggle to shut your image from my heart. For
me, there is only one way − for me such thoughts are sin … as if I bowed down before the gods that I am
here to overthrow! … I have told you the truth. Now that you know it, I beseech you go back to Sika …
Anne, be kind to me – go back!’ Anne obligingly sees herself as ‘a temptation in his path, as a weight on his
soul, as a distraction from his religious purpose’ (Ibid., 345); she returns to Sika and eventually to England.
314. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 35.
315. See Perrin, Idolatry, 395, 396.
316. Ibid., 342.
317. The Rajah is said to be enfeebled by ‘opium, self-indulgence, and excess’ (Ibid., 185). His mind is ‘steeped
in superstition; omens, dreams, charms, spells, evil spirits were a direct and perpetual reality to him, and he
carried out no undertaking that was not sanctioned by some lucky token’ (Ibid., 195). See the description of
his household and affairs in Ibid., 181–99.
318. See Ibid., 286, 287.
319. Ibid., 354.
320. Ibid., 217.
321. Ibid., 271.
322. Ibid., 272, 277, 278.
323. On Henry Thornton’s connection with the Clapham Sect see Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, 3, 4, vol. 1.
324. Marianne Thornton, cited in Ibid., 15.
325. See on this Stallybrass, “Introduction” in Forster, The Life to Come, xii–xiii.
326. See Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, 62, 63, vol. 2. El Adl’s imprisonment may have suggested to Forster a
model for the unjust imprisonment Aziz undergoes in A Passage to India; the experience turned El Adl, as
it did Aziz, strongly anti-British.
327. Ibid., 115.
328. Forster, The Life to Come, 66, 67.
329. Ibid., 68.
68 S. GANGULY

330. ‘“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not – ” a scarlet flower hid the next
word, flowers were everywhere, even round [Pinmay’s] own neck. Losing his dignity, he sobbed “Oh, what
have I done?” and not daring to answer he hurled the flowers through the door of the hut and the Bible
after them …’ (Ibid., 65).
331. See Ibid., 69–72.
332. Ibid., 70.
333. Ibid., 76.
334. Ibid.
335. Ibid., 81.
336. See Augustine epigraph in previous section.
337. See Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, 146, vol. 1.
338. See Ibid., 184, 215.
339. See Ibid., 226, 228. Masood knew of Forster’s passion for him but was cool in his response; see Ibid., 194,
195.
340. Forster, The Hill of Devi, 298.
341. “Kanaya” in Forster, The Hill of Devi, 310–24. ‘Kanaya’ was excluded from the first edition of The Hill of
Devi published in 1953, as the homosexual acts recounted in it were punishable offenses at the time. See
Heine, “Editor’s Introduction,” Ibid., ix, xxxvii–xl.
342. Ibid., 311, 312.
343. Ibid., 314.
344. See Ibid., 314–24. On his rape of Kanaya Forster wrote: ‘I resumed sexual intercourse with him, but it was
now mixed with the desire to inflict pain. It didn’t hurt him to speak of, but it was bad for me, and new in
me, my temperament not being that way’ (Ibid., 324).
345. Forster’s diary entry of 31 December 1921, towards the end of his sojourn in India, provides further
evidence of his difficulty in writing the novel: ‘India not yet a success, dare not look at my unfinished
novel, can neither assimilate, remember, or arrange. … Sex has blurred my perceptions, especially at
evening … Had K. [Kanaya] not been a chatterbox, I should have avoided feeling trivial and being brutal’
(“Entries from the Locked Diary” in Forster, The Hill of Devi, 326). In suggesting that experiences initially
narrated in the ‘Kanaya’ memoir return to Passage in a transmuted form I am developing Elizabeth Heine’s
insight: ‘The “Kanaya” memoir suggests that the central section of A Passage to India − the long account of
a hot season of emotional oppression and mental and sexual confusion … is a triumphantly imagined
transmutation of Forster’s experience of lust, shame, and guilt in his homosexual relations with the
servants of Dewas Senior’ (Heine, “Editor’s Introduction” in Forster, The Hill of Devi, viii).
346. Forster, A Passage to India, 169. On the heat and Adela’s distracted thoughts, see Ibid., 166–8.
347. Ibid., 168.
348. Adela’s hysteria could plausibly be attributed to guilt at her betrayal of Ronny, just as Forster’s hysteria is
traced to his guilt at betraying the trust the Maharaja had placed on him; see “Kanaya” in Forster, The Hill
of Devi, 313. While Adela transgresses race in her desire for Aziz, Forster transgresses both race and
heterosexism in his sexual pursuit of the Maharaja’s servants.
349. Prior to Passage, Forster wrote in succession Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey
(1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910): novels which established his literary reputation.
He began writing Passage in 1912 and completed it in 1924. During this period, he also wrote Maurice,
completed in 1915, an overtly homosexual novel never published during his lifetime. Although he was only
45 when Passage was published, he wrote and published no further fiction during the remaining 46 years of
his life. See Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life; and also Davies and Wood, A Passage to India, 4. Wood notes in
this regard that ‘it was as if the rocks, the birds, the sky that had imposed their veto … on the possibility of
friendship between the Indian Aziz and the Englishman Fielding [in Passage] continued, too, to embargo
those ethical and imaginative connections that his fiction had worked so hard to achieve’ (Ibid.).
350. Forster, A Passage to India, 362.
351. Ibid., 114.
352. Ibid., 113.
353. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 167.
354. On the role of arbitrary and unmotivated caprice in the formation of fetishistic mentality see Pietz, “The
Problem of the Fetish, I,” 8, 9.
355. Forster, A Passage to India, 304. Aziz’s imagination and emotionality goes with a lack of ability to reason
from evidence: ‘Aziz had no sense of evidence. The sequence of his emotions decided his beliefs, and led to
the tragic coolness between himself and his English friend’ (Ibid., 302).
356. Ibid., 313, 314.
357. Ibid., 314.
358. These discriminations were shared by Forster, as is evident in his annoyance at a group of American
tourists with whom he took a boat ride to view the marble palaces of Udaipur, a Venice-like scenario: ‘I …
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 69

felt rather depressed with the Americans, who seem even more indiscriminating in India than elsewhere. …
From the stern came cries of “This knocks Venice cold”. Does it?’ (Letter to Forster’s mother,
17 December 1912, reprinted in Forster, The Hill of Devi, 166–8). Forster’s annoyance at the Americans
appears to stem from their inversion of a conventional hierarchy between Venetian and Indian
architecture.
359. Letter to Forster’s mother, 23 August 1921, reprinted in Forster, The Hill of Devi, 63–5.
360. Forster, A Passage to India, 319.
361. Ibid., 326.
362. The name ‘Godbole’ is significant in this context. If broken up into the components ‘God’ and ‘bole’, the
latter of which is Hindi for ‘speaks’, it suggests ‘God speaks’.
363. Ibid., 320.
364. Ibid., 322.
365. Ibid., 324.
366. Ibid., 150.
367. Ibid., 327, 328.
368. For example, the following passage from the Bible narrates the woes of the idolatrous king of Babylon, who
aspires to the condition of divinity: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! …
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God …
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought to hell,
to the sides of the pit’ (Isaiah 14: 12–15). Here the king of Babylon, who aspires to a throne beyond the
stars and thus resemble God, is destined instead to be cast into the pit of hell, the lowest of low places.
369. Forster, A Passage to India, 51.
370. Ibid., 180.
371. Ibid., 250.
372. Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 23.
373. Ronny’s deposition in court clarifies from whom the rumour might have originated: ‘Before she sailed, her
mother had taken to talk about the Marabar in her sleep, especially in the afternoon when servants were on
the veranda, and her disjointed remarks on Aziz had doubtless been sold to Mahmoud Ali for a few annas:
that kind of thing never ceases in the East’ (Forster, A Passage to India, 250).
374. See Ibid., 220–9.
375. Ronny and Adela have the following exchange regarding the chant, which testifies to the effect it has on
Adela: ‘“I’m afraid it’s very upsetting for you”. “Not the least. I don’t mind it”. “Well, that’s good”. She had
spoken more naturally and healthily than usual. Bending into the middle of her friends, she said: “Don’t
worry about me, I’m much better than I was; I don’t feel the least faint; I shall be all right, and thank you,
thank you, thank you for your kindness”’ (Ibid., 251).
376. Ibid., 241, 242.
377. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 5.
378. See “Below Stairs: the Maid and the Family Romance,” Ibid., 149–70. I am greatly indebted to Sriparna
Basu for having pointed out to me the significance of the bodily posture of the punkah puller, as well as
some of the general codings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ present in this scene.
379. Forster, A Passage to India, 242.
380. Ibid., 26, 37.
381. See Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 2, 3.
382. Forster, A Passage to India, 84, 85.
383. Ibid., 48.
384. Ibid., 154.
385. Ibid., 155.
386. Ibid., 150–2.
387. Ibid., 162, 163.
388. Ibid., 262.
389. See Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, 216, vol. 1.
390. For Forster’s response to Ellora, see Ibid., 254. Forster’s reading of Ruskin is reflected in the following
extract from a Ruskinian essay he wrote at school, which refers to Indian gods: ‘In the north, the builder
heaved from the mountain side masses of rock, and with them he made his church, huge, rough, irregular
like one of his own cliffs, with great dark entrances like the caverns that yawned in the face of the hills. And
he would not do without ornament, but hastily struck out from rough blocks fantastic forms and grotesque
shapes, such as we may see today in the churches of Rouen and the houses of Lisieux, not the creation of a
diseased mind, like the gods of India, but the creations of a new and vigorous life’ (cited in Ibid., 48).
Forster appears to be making here the Ruskinian distinction between the noble and barbarous grotesque,
which distinguishes the Gothic architecture of Rouen or Lisieux from that of Indian cave temples.
391. Forster, A Passage to India, 166.
70 S. GANGULY

392. Ibid., 137.

393. Ibid., 149.
394. See ibid., 163.
395. I am indebted to Sriparna Basu for first suggesting this to me.
396. The contrast between English and Oriental character types is spelt out by Forster in the essay “Notes on
English Character,” 3–15.
397. Forster, A Passage to India, 183.
398. Ibid., 184.
399. Ibid., 352.
400. Ibid., 353.
401. Ibid., 354.
402. In Howards End, Forster expresses this theme as follows in the thoughts of Margaret Wilcox: ‘Only connect
the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in
fragments no longer, only connect’ (Forster, Howards End, 187). The same theme is restated in A Passage
to India in terms of Fielding’s belief that ‘the world is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another
and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence’ (Forster, A Passage to India, 65).
403. See Ibid., 340, 341, 355.
404. Ibid., 356.
405. See Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 202.
406. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State,” 165–8.
407. Ibid., 169.
408. Ibid., 168.
409. “Minute on Indian Education” in Macaulay, Selected Writings, 241. Macaulay compiled prose readers to be
taught in Indian schools (see Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest, 54).
410. Ibid., 58.
411. For Althusser’s comments on the notion of ideology arising out of clique conspiracy see Althusser,
“Ideology and Ideological State,” 162–5.
412. Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” 14.
413. Dumont, “Religion, Politics, and Society,” 32.
414. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 39.
415. Nietzsche, “The New Idol” in Levy, The Complete Works, 54–6, vol. 11.
416. Benedict Anderson has shown the nation state to be an ‘imagined community’ that is among the most
universally legitimate ideologies of modern times. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1991.

Disclosure statement
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