The origins of religious nationalism in Southeast Asia during the colonial period ............

1
Introduction: The Indian Ocean as a unit of analysis ........................................ 1
1. Religion and culture in the Indian Ocean in premodern times ...................... 1
2. The Age of the Gunpowder Empires 1500-1800.......................................... 5
3. The Age of the British Raj 1800-1950 ......................................................... 8
Islamic modernism: the role of print technology......................................... 11
Hindu and Buddhist modernism in South Asia: the role of Theosophy ....... 13
4. From Secular to Religious Nationalism 1950-2018 ................................... 15
Summary and Conclusion .............................................................................. 17
Appendix 1: Religious cosmopolitanism 1950-present .................................. 20
Appendix 2: Christian modernism in Africa ................................................... 21
References .................................................................................................................... 22
 THE ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD

Thomas Gibson
Department of Anthropology
University of Rochester

Lecture presented to the Department of History, Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, 14 June 2018.

Abstract:

Traditional states in South and Southeast Asia were legitimated in part by the role that

kings played in supporting and protecting the religious clergy. When European colonial

empires deposed these kings and established direct rule over their former subjects,

indigenous political and religious systems were thrown into a crisis. The local clergy

responded by adapting a new set of information technologies to preserve their religious

traditions. These included graded schools for spreading literacy to the lay population,

vernacular translations of the sacred scriptures, and the printing of commentaries,

textbooks, and periodicals on religious subjects for a mass market. Because religious

learning was now expressed in a national vernacular, these technologies created a new

kind of imagined community, in the words of Benedict Anderson. But it was only the

members of the local elite that had been educated for the local civil service during late

colonialism who imagined the national community as secular, while ordinary people

imagined it as religious. With the passing of the first generation of secular nationalist

leaders, religious nationalism became a growing force throughout the region, leading to

the marginalization of citizens who do not adhere to the dominant religious tradition of

each nation.
Introduction: The Indian Ocean as a unit of analysis

A number of volumes taking the Indian Ocean as a unit of analysis have appeared

in recent years. Given the importance of this area to long distance trade from early times,

there has been a natural tendency to focus on economic relationships among its

constituent societies. From the early modern period onward, there has also been a

tendency to orient discussion toward whichever European power was dominant in the

Ocean, beginning with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the

seventeenth century and the British in the nineteenth century (Bose 2000).

In my research on this area, I have deliberately focused on religion and culture

rather than economics and politics. This focus shifts the discussion away from the

relationships between European powers and their colonial possessions and toward the

relations among the peoples inhabiting the region. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam both

united and divided the peoples of the Indian Ocean long before the period when

Europeans came to dominate long distance trade in the region. These religions

maintained their internal coherence while continually adapting to rapidly changing

political and economic conditions throughout colonial and post-colonial times, ultimately

evolving into various forms of religious nationalism.

1. Religion and culture in the Indian Ocean in premodern times

The larger historical background against which these developments must be read

is the millennium preceding the arrival of Atlantic and Mediterranean powers in the

Indian Ocean around 1500. Sheldon Pollack has recently made a persuasive case that

Sanskrit literature provided a common ideological framework for social elites in much of

the Indian Ocean until the thirteenth century (Pollock 2006). The last major maritime
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 2

empire based on Sanskritic culture was that of the Cholas on the southeast coast of India.

The Cholas maintained trade relationships with the Tang dynasty in China, the Sailendra

dynasty in Java and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. The last Sanskritic empire in

Java, Majapahit, slowly declined in the fifteenth century and was finally defeated by the

coastal state of Demak in 1527. Many of the elite versed in its high cultural traditions

relocated to Bali, where Indic forms of ritual and kingship continued to thrive into the

twentieth century under the umbrella of Dutch hegemony over maritime trade.

Contemporary with the Chola Empire was the Fatimid Empire, a Shia state based

in Egypt that controlled trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea

between 970 and 1070. Fatimid missionaries reached Gujarat in 1067 and converted a

number of members of the merchant caste of Vaishyas to Islam. In 1094, the Ismailis

split between those who recognized al-Nizar, an older son of the Caliph al-Muntasir, as

his successor, and those who recognized a younger one, al-Musta’li. The “western”

Ismailis of Egypt, Yemen and Gujarat generally followed al-Musta’li. The “eastern”

Ismailis of Syria and Iran generally followed al-Nizar. In Gujarat, the followers of the

line of imams descended from al-Musta’li are known as Bohras (from Gujarati vohrvun,

“to trade”) while the followers of the line descended from al-Nizar are known as Khojas

(from Persian khwaja, “master”) (Blank 2001: 36-39).

The Mongol conquests in central Asia and the Middle East during the thirteenth

century sent many Muslims fleeing south to India and west to Egypt. The Mongol

advance was stopped by the Delhi sultanate in India and by the Mamluks in Egypt. By

the middle of the fourteenth century, the rulers of most of the western Mongol successor

states had converted to Islam. The Delhi sultanate controlled the ports of Gujarat from
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 3

1303 until 1407, linking the trade routes of central Asia to the Arabian Sea and thence to

the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.

The first Islamic Sultanates in Southeast Asia appeared at the end of the thirteenth

century in northern Sumatra. Muslims dominated Indian Ocean trade throughout the

fifteenth century, with the Islamic sultanate of Melaka serving as the principle entrepot in

the east. The spices of eastern Indonesia were traded at this port in exchange for textiles

produced in India, and these spices and textiles were traded at the ports of the Red Sea in

exchange for gold and silver from Europe.

Well into the colonial period, the most important institution for transmitting the

Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic scriptural traditions in Asia was the personal instruction of a

properly qualified disciple by a spiritual master. The Hindu Vedas were transmitted from

one qualified Brahmin to another in Sanskrit; the Buddhist canon was transmitted from

one ordained monk to another in Pali; the Qur’an, hadith and schools of legal

interpretation was transmitted from one ‘alim to another in Arabic; and particular

mystical disciplines were transmitted from one sheikh or pir to another. The quest for

religious knowledge thus often required the novice to travel from one master to another,

as no one teacher was in possession of the totality of each tradition. This method of

transmitting complex, specialized knowledge is not altogether different from craft

apprenticeship, the principal means by which the division of labor was maintained in

premodern civilizations. Both economic and spiritual apprenticeships were based on a

simultaneous absorption of bodily skills and dispositions through extended physical

practices and oral commentaries that were adjusted to the degree of insight a pupil had

attained.
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 4

Despite retaining a certain degree of institutional autonomy from their social

environment, religious traditions also inevitably become entangled with institutions

dedicated to other goals. Kings sought to bolster their legitimacy by courting the

endorsement of religious leaders, and many religious leaders came to rely on the

patronage of royal courts to support the institutions that transmitted the religious

tradition. For Buddhists, strong kings were required to maintain order and discipline

within monastic orders. For Hindus, the production and preservation of Sanskrit

literature depended largely on patronage by royal courts. For Muslims, the sharia

required a sultan to enforce it and to patronize Islamic schools to teach it. But such

dependency also brought with it dangers of the specifically religious goals of the

traditions being corrupted by the worldly goals of the kings, and a part of the religious

establishment always sought to distance itself from royal power: forest monks,

mendicant ascetics and Sufi sheikhs.

Another commonality among all three religious traditions was the association of

certain features of the natural and built environment with key events in their sacred

narratives. These sites often become the object of sacred journeys that help to knit

religious communities together over vast expanses of time and space. The duty of every

Muslim to perform the hajj during which one visits a number of sacred sites in Mecca

and Medina that are associated with key events in the life of Muhammad is just one

example of this imperative. Pilgrimage centers helped to bring large numbers of ordinary

devotees together in a way that the quest for advanced religious instruction brought only

the religious elite together. Hindu temples, Buddhist monasteries and Muslim mosques

were among the most enduring symbols of the continuity of these traditions.
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 5

2. The Age of the Gunpowder Empires 1500-1800

The early modern period is usually characterized in terms of the maritime

expansion of western Europeans in search of direct access to Asian commodities such as

the spices of eastern Indonesia. Equipped with superior ships and cannon, the Portuguese

disrupted the existing trade networks throughout the Indian Ocean during the first half of

the sixteenth century. By 1550, however, Muslim merchants had found ways to

circumvent their attempted monopolization of long-distance trade. In the eastern Indian

Ocean, the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1512 resulted in the development of new

Islamic ports in Aceh in Sumatra, Banten in west Java, Demak in central Java and

Makassar in South Sulawesi. Each of these ports came to host a diverse population made

up of Southeast Asian, Chinese, Indian, Arab and European merchants. Spices and other

tropical products were exported to the west in exchange for Indian textiles and European

firearms.

In the western Indian Ocean, the sixteenth century saw the expansion of agrarian

empires by the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman dynasties using new gunpowder

technologies that enabled rulers to centralize power to an unprecedented degree. All three

dynasties had their roots in central Asia and were new to the dynamics of Indian Ocean

trade in the sixteenth century.

The Safavid dynasty originated from a Sufi order that was founded in Azerbaijan

in the thirteenth century and that later declared its adherence to the branch of Shiism that

recognized twelve Imams following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Under Shah

Ismail (r. 1500-1524), the Safavis conquered most of present-day Iran and Iraq and

declared Shiism the state religion with the ruler as the Murshid-e Kabil, the Perfect Man.
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 6

The Mughals enjoyed the patronage of the Safavids during the early sixteenth

century and centralized power over northern India under Akbar (r. 1556-1605). In 1579,

Akbar issued an edict claiming to be the supreme arbiter in religious affairs within his

realm and contesting the claim of the Ottoman Sultan to the title of Khalifa of all Sunni

Muslims (Richards 1993: 39-40).

The Ottomans used the new gunpowder technology to defeat the Mamluks of

Egypt, to take control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and to seize the ports of

Mocha and Massawa in the Red Sea early in the sixteenth century. The Ottomans were

just as new to the Indian Ocean as the Portuguese were in the sixteenth century. They

soon expaned the older Islamic knowledge of the area with the new discoveries of their

own emissaries and merchants (Casale 2007). They challenged Portuguese attempts to

monopolize the trade of the Indian Ocean from their bases at the mouth of the Red Sea

early throughout the sixteenth century. By 1537, Ottoman troops were fighting on the

side of the sultan of Aceh on the far side of the Ocean (Reid 1993: 146). As a result, the

Ottomans developed a sense of themselves as a global empire, unlike the Safavids and

Mughals (Subrahmanyam 2006).

Ottoman protection of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca from Damascus, Cairo and

Aleppo in the north, and Mughal protection of pilgrimage routes from North India via the

ports of Gujarat facilitated the development of new trade routes. There were vast fortunes

to be made facilitating trade among these three empires. But their inability to police the

Indian Ocean due to the military superiority of European ships made this trade as risky as

it was profitable. Under these conditions, trade tended to remain in the hands of older

ethnic groups in the area whose members adhered to religious doctrines that differed
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 7

from those of the new royal courts. Gujaratis from many different religious communities

traveled west and settled in the ports of the Red Sea, including Sunni and Shia Bohras,

Hindu and Jain Banias and many others. At the same time, Sunnis and Shias from

Yemen and Sunni Sidis from the Swahili coast of Africa traveled east and settled in

western India. The list of ethnic groups with a religious basis in these port towns also

included Jews from Egypt and Iraq; Parsees from Iran; and Christians from Armenia. The

control of long distance trade by ethnic diasporas was a familiar phenomenon in the pre-

modern and early modern periods throughout the world.

For two hundred and fifty years, Catholics from Portugal and France and

Protestants from the Netherlands and England competed in the ports of the Indian Ocean

with all these indigenous ethnic groups. After 1750, the Gunpowder Empires of western

Asia began to disintegrate for a variety of complex reasons and the European colonial

powers began to acquire increasing hegemony over the land as well as the sea. The

Ottoman Empire was defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683 and lost control of Hungary

at the end of fifteen years of warfare with an alliance of Christian powers in Eastern

Europe. From 1670 to 1730, the Mughal Empire was engaged in constant warfare with

the Hindu Empire founded by Shivaji in Maharashtra. The ports of Surat were sacked

several times by the latter (Das Gupta 1979). The Safavids were over-run by Afghans in

the early eighteenth century and were replaced by the Zand dynasty in 1750.

As security in the ports of the older empires deteriorated during the eighteenth

century, the English and the Dutch were able to divert a growing share of the trans-

Oceanic trade to their new ports at Batavia, Singapore, Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

They were also able to gradually assert their military hegemony over the inland agrarian
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 8

kingdoms of India and Java and to divert tributary revenues from traditional royal courts

to their pockets. The British and Dutch East India Companies were transformed from

maritime enterprises with small, fortified trading posts in the seventeenth century to the

administrators of enormous agrarian empires beginning in the late eighteenth century.

Their governors became increasingly entangled not only with the bureaucracies they

inherited from the pre-colonial states of the area, but with Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist

religious institutions as well.

This was perhaps most strikingly the case in South India, where the East India

Company took responsibility for the management of tens of thousands of Hindu temples

in the early eighteenth century and began to staff their colonial bureaucracy with high

status Brahmins. The Madras presidency became the patron of huge temple complexes

(Dirks 1993, Frykenberg 2000). In the north, the Calcutta presidency gradually

appropriated many of the practices of the Mughal bureaucracy (Bayly 1996). In Java, the

Dutch cultivated a whole class of high status priyayi whose identity was rooted as much

in their ties to the Sanskritic past of Java as it was to contemporary Islam (Pemberton

1994).

3. The Age of the British Raj 1800-1950

Because of the central role played by royal courts in the reproduction and

legitimation of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam in the early modern period, the usurpation

of sovereignty by European Christians during the nineteenth century resulted not just in a

political crisis but also in a religious crisis wherever it occurred in Asia. The Muslims of

island Southeast Asia were among the first to experience this crisis, beginning with the

Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511, the leading Muslim Sultanate of the time.
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 9

During the seventeenth century as the Dutch United East-Indian Company (VOC)

imposed unequal treaties on local sultanates and became the titular overlord of scattered

territories throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Southeast Asia Muslims reacted by

transferring their allegiance to charismatic Sufi sheikhs who claimed ties to Mecca and

Medina, which were still under Ottoman rule. Similar processes were at work in South

Asia, as the British East India Company deposed one Muslim ruler after another during

the eighteenth century until they finally deposed the last Mughal Sultan after the

Rebellion of 1857. The Muslims of India felt doubly threatened by the loss of their

political and religious sovereignty to the British and by the gradual realization that they

constituted a minority community in a nation that was coming to think of itself as Hindu

(Metcalf 2007).

The gradual assumption of sovereignty by the EIC was less traumatic for the

Hindus of northern India than it was for the Muslims, as many Hindus had been living

under non-Hindu rulers since the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth

century. Hindus were thus merely trading Muslim for Christian masters. The situation

was different in South India, where the Hindu states survived longer, and in western

India, where Shivaji (1627-1680) founded a Hindu Empire in Maharashtra in 1674 that

fought the Mughal Empire to a standstill under Aurangzeb (1618-1707), and briefly

controlled much of the subcontinent.

The Theravada Buddhists of Sri Lanka and of mainland Southeast Asia were

among the last to experience a loss of sovereignty to European colonial power. Ties

among the sangha (monastic orders) of Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka were close for

many centuries, and monks corresponded with one another in the shared sacred language
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 10

of Pali. Sri Lankan monks led a major reform of the Southeast Asian sangha in the

thirteenth century. When the Sri Lanka sangha fell into disorder in the eighteenth

century, Thai monks were brought in to establish a new line of ordination known as the

Siyam Nikaya. The East India Company asserted its sovereignty over the Buddhist

kingdom of Kandy only in 1815. In the absence of the regulatory authority of a Buddhist

king, the Sri Lankan sangha again became increasingly disorganized during the

nineteenth century.

The loss of royal patronage for religious learning caused a major crisis in all of

the religious traditions of the Indian Ocean. Peter van der Veer has noted that the

religious traditions of Europe were undergoing their own forms of crisis during the

nineteenth century and that the religions of Europe were “modernizing” at more or less

the same time as the religions of South Asia. During this period, religious identities were

increasingly becoming identified with national identities, and national identities were

being recreated through the dissemination of printed texts, mass education and new forms

of civil association.

In Britain, evangelical Christianity provided a link between Anglicanism, Non-

Conformist Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, enabling Britons of all persuasions to

see themselves as belonging to a Christian nation with a duty to uplift the benighted

lower classes in their own country as well as the heathen peoples of their Asian colonies

(van der Veer 2001). The Bible was taught in British schools in a new way, which

stressed its literary and ethical characteristics and that downplayed the theological

controversies that had beset Europe since the Reformation (Starrett 1998).

As the nineteenth century wore on and rational criticism was brought to bear on
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 11

the Bible, many traditional doctrines of Christianity were abandoned by leading

intellectuals and replaced by a more generalized ethical approach that linked religion to

the progress of the nation. Freemasonry played a crucial role in the modernization of both

religious and national identities in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

(Jacob 1991). It was equally central to the rise of nationalism in the Philippines, whose

leader, Jose Rizal, joined Masonic lodges in Spain, Germany and France in the 1880s. He

and his associates went on establish Masonic lodges in the Philippines in the 1890s,

which played an important role in organizing the Philippine national revolution of 1896

(Karpiel 2001).

In the British Empire, the growing power of the colonial authorities over daily life

and the constant disparagement of local religious traditions by Christian missionaries led

to the reformation of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism on “rational” lines by figures such

as Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) in Egypt, Vivekananda (1863-1902) in India, and

Dharmapala (1864-1933) in Sri Lanka (Hourani 1962, van der Veer 2001). In each case,

an effort was made to “purify” the religion of superstitious corruptions and to base

orthodoxy on a canonical set of texts that were made available to a newly literate middle

class by the adoption of print technology.

Islamic modernism: the role of print technology

The imposition of direct colonial rule and a government bureaucracy staffed by

foreigners at the top and local commoners at the bottom led to a new crisis of legitimacy

that extended beyond the royal courts to the traditional clergy itself. The elitist form of

Islamic mysticism outlined above had always coexisted with an essentially populistic

form based on the interpretation of the religious scriptures by the ulama. This tendency
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 12

received a decisive boost from the introduction of new information technologies in the

nineteenth century. Francis Robinson has shown that print technology was resisted as a

medium for communicating religious knowledge throughout the Islamic world for

centuries after it became available. Jewish refugees from Spain set up printing presses in

Istanbul as early as 1493 and began producing both Bibles and secular books (Robinson).

The first Muslims to put printing to use for religious purposes were those subjugated by

Tsarist Russia, where a press was established by the Tatars of Kazan in 1800 (Bukharaev

2000: 311). The next Muslim presses were established in British India, using the newly

invented technique of lithography. In 1824 the EIC set up lithographic presses in each of

its Presidencies. Among the first Islamic texts to be reproduced was Syed Ahmad

Barelvi’s Sirat al-Mustaqim, which set out the basis of a purified Islam. It was composed

in Persian but then translated and published in Urdu (Proudfoot 1997: 169). Muslim

lithography spread over the next few decades from India into Iran in 1835 and Southeast

Asia in 1848 (Proudfoot 1997: 165)

With the deposition of the last Mughal rule in 1858, anxiety over the fate of

Islamic learning in British India became acute. British missionary activity in India began

to pick up after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and was often associated with the

establishment of new schools.1

In 1866 a new kind of madrasah was founded in Deoband that organized teaching

along the same lines that had become common in Christian mission churches complete

with textbooks in the local vernacular and graded classrooms. By the 1870s, thousands

of books were being produced each year in centers of religious learning such as Delhi,

Lucknow, and Deoband to feed the growing market of literate Muslims (Robinson 2000:
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 13

75-77). Robinson notes that in the short run, the tremendous expansion of literacy and

book production enhanced the power and influence of the ulama who oversaw their

production. In the long run, however, mass education and mass communications tend to

marginalize the traditional clergy, and in the next phase of history it was lay devotees

who took over the task of religious reform.

Hindu and Buddhist modernism in South Asia: the role of Theosophy

The Theosophical Society played a role in the modernization of Hinduism and

Buddhism similar to that played by Freemasonry in the modernization of Christianity and

Islam. Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New

York in 1875. They toured Sri Lanka in 1880 and “took pansil”, i.e. publicly declared

their intention to follow the five vows of Buddhism. In 1882 Olcott and Blavatsky left

Sri Lanka and settled in Madras, where they helped to inspire a modernist Hindu revival.

In 1886, the Theosophical Society founded Ananda College, the first of many modernist

Buddhist schools in Sri Lanka. A product of this system, D. B. Jayatilaka, went on to

found The Young Men’s Buddhist Association in 1898 and a network of Dhamma

Schools beginning in 1919.

One of the most important modernizers of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Anagarika

Dharmapala, was also not a traditional Buddhist monk. He was born in 1864 and was

named Don David Hewavitarne (1864 - 1933). He came under the influence of Olcott

and Blavatsky in his youth and first studied Pali at their urging. He later broke with them

over their belief that there was truth in all religions. He signified his intention to live a

celibate life in the service of Buddhism without being ordained as a monk by changing

his name to Anagarika Dharmapala, “Homeless Protector of the Dharma”. He founded

 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 14

the Mahabodhi Society in Colombo in 1891 and moved it to Calcutta in 1892 as part of

an effort to reclaim the original sites of the Buddha’s life from the Hindus in India. In his

later years, he adopted increasingly anti-Muslim and anti-Christian views, helping to

create the ideology of modern Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka that only regards

Sinhalese Buddhists as full members of the nation.

A leading modernizer of Hinduism in India, Vivekananda, was not a traditional

Brahmin priest, but the product of British colonial schooling. He was born in 1863 with

the name Narendranath Datta; his father was an attorney in Calcutta’s High Court. He

began his studies in western logic, history and philosophy at the Scottish Church College

in 1880. At some point before he graduated from the College in 1884, he joined the

Freemasons. In 1881, he visited an illiterate Saivite priest, Ramakrishna, on the

suggestion of the College’s Principal, Hastie. He studied under Ramakrishna until the

latter’s death in 1886. He took monastic vows soon after this, and took the name Swami

Vivekananda. His teachings aimed to reconcile western rationalism and eastern

mysticism, to inspire a revival of the Hindu nation, and to lift up the masses of low-caste

Hindus.

In 1887, Blavatsky moved back to Europe, where in 1889 she met and converted

Annie Besant, the woman who was to succeed her as head of the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky and Besant met the young Mohandas Gandhi in London in 1889 and inspired

him to read the Bhagavad Gita and other religious works, although he did not join their

Society. In 1894, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress in South Africa, which

agitated for the right of Indians to play more important roles in the British Empire in

Africa. In 1906, Gandhi pushed for Indian troops to be used in military actions against
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 15

the Zulus and commanded a corps of stretcher-bearers for British troops.

Annie Besant became President of the Theosophical Society upon Olcott’s death

in 1907. She became increasingly devoted to Hinduism and between 1907 and 1917 was

active in the founding of Benares Hindu University. When Gandhi returned to India in

1916, he allied with Besant to launch a campaign for home rule. In 1918, Gandhi

launched the first of many non-violent movements of civil disobedience against the

British colonial authorities. Besant opposed Gandhi’s increasingly confrontational

tactics, and the political influence of the Theosophical society declined in the 1920s and

1930s. Nevertheless, Theosophical ideas played an important role in the early education

of the first president of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and of Indonesia, Sukarno.

4. From Secular to Religious Nationalism 1950-2018

The end of the British Raj in India in 1948 and the decolonization of the eastern

and western coasts of the Indian Ocean over the next 15 years led to new forms of

nationalism and the unraveling of many of the entanglements sponsored by the Raj.

Everywhere around the Indian Ocean, attempts were made to supplant older pluralistic

identities with newer, monolithic ones. Religious minorities were marginalized by

religious majorities in many postcolonial nations. Muslims were marginalized in India,

Burma and Thailand; Hindus of Tamil descent were marginalized in Malaysia and Sri

Lanka; and Muslims of Arab, Swahili and Gujarati descent were marginalized in the

nations of East Africa.

In the modern period, clerical forms of shariah-minded Islam have been displaced

by even more egalitarian forms of Islam in which educated laymen claim the right to

interpret vernacular versions of the sacred scriptures for themselves. Of particular

 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 16

significance for this development was the publication of elaborate translations of and

commentaries on the Quran in vernacular languages by authors such as Rashid Rida in

Arabic (1912), Abu A’la Maududi in Urdu (1942-1972), Hamka (Hajji Abdul Malik

Karim Amrullah, 1908-1981) in Indonesian (1959-1966), and Muhammad Asad (1900-

192) in English (1980). These translations played a role that was comparable to that

played by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) among Christian Fundamentalists in

America, which also provided a readable translation of the scriptures along with

commentaries pointing out their relevance to the new developments in the contemporary

world and served as the basis for politicized religious movements (Boyer 1992).

In Malaysia, Malay ethnic identity has been closely identified with Islam for

centuries because of the role played by the Malay language in the spread of Islam

throughout Island Southeast Asia. The constitution of independent Malaya that came into

effect in 1957 declared that all Malays were Muslim be definition and that any Malay

who converted to another religion ceased to be Malay. This constitution was extended to

Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963.

Ethnic riots between Malays and Chinese in 1964 contributed to Singapore’s decision to

exit the Federation in 1965. A new round of riots in 1969 led to the introduction of the

New Economic Policy in 1971 that favored Malays at the expense of Chinese and Tamils.

Ethnic tensions have had a religious aspect ever since.

In India, Vivekananda’s teachings inspired both the tolerant nationalism of

Mahatma Gandhi, and the intolerant nationalism of the World Hindu Council (Visva

Hindu Parisad, VHP). The latter organization was founded in 1964 by Swami

Chinmayananda. By 1982, the VHP claimed 2,700 branches in India and 3,000 branches
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 17

in twenty-three other countries. It seeks to reconcile all religions it sees as being the

product of Hindu civilization, including Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, while excluding

Islam, Christianity and secularism (van der Veer 1994: 132-134). In 1984, the VHP

launched a campaign to have the site of a Muslim mosque in Ayodhya recognized as the

birthplace of Rama, the god-hero of the Ramayana and returned to Hindu control. The

campaign culminated in the demolition of the mosque in 1992, provoking communal

violence across India. The religious nationalism stirred up by this campaign contributed

to the electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a Hindu nationalist political

party, in the elections of 1991, when it received 20% of the vote, and in 1998, when it led

the winning coalition and headed the new government (van der Veer 1994: 1-12). It

remains in power today under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Summary and Conclusion

In the medieval period, the religious scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam

helped to unify the Indian Ocean as a cultural whole despite its political fragmentation.

Port cities along the coast were populated by ethnically diverse trading communities

organized along the lines of religious affiliation. Their links to similar communities

across the seas enabled them to maintain a certain autonomy from local inland rulers

whose primary tax base consisted of peasants. The links of the religious clergy to

cosmopolitan religious traditions were reinforced by the necessity to travel far and wide

to accumulate religious knowledge. As the sources of their religious authority were not

confined to any one political state, they maintained a certain distance from any local

court.

In the early modern period, the introduction of gunpowder technology enabled

 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 18

inland rulers throughout Eurasia to centralize political power to an unprecedented degree,

and to attempt to eliminate the independence of the clergy. During this period, European

colonial powers were still largely confined to fortified port cities scattered along the

coasts and enjoyed military supremacy only over the sea lanes. In certain cases, the

European trading companies took over the traditional royal role of patronizing local

temples and employing local elites to continue administering the state.

During the period of high colonialism, European empires established their

hegemony over inland territories, marginalized the local royal courts, and threatened the

continued existence of the local clergy that had depended on royal patronage. The

introduction of new print technologies such as lithography, new forms of pedagogy such

as tuition-based schools employing standardized textbooks, and the distribution of

religious literature in vernacular languages created a new kind of public sphere and a new

kind of mass politics. These developments to a new kind of lay religious expert and

marginalized the traditional clergy. Rationalist, anticlerical organizations such as the

Freemasons and the Theosophical Society gained support from local elites who had been

educated in European schools and provided a model for organizing new forms of political

resistance. These elites tended to combine anti-clericalism and anti-colonialism with a

secular socialist ideology.

Among the masses, however, anti-colonial nationalism was always closely

associated with the religious identity of the majority. It was not until the first generation

of secular nationalist leaders passed from the scene that politicians appealing directly to

religious nationalist sentiments began to come to power. The target of these movements

is no longer the European colonial states that once threatened the transmission of their
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 19

sacred traditions, but religious minorities who are viewed as disloyal to the local nation

state. Separatist sentiments are strong among many of these minorities in the nations

surrounding the Indian Ocean today: among the Muslims of the Philippines, Thailand,

Myanmar and Kashmir; and among the Hindus, Muslims and Christians of Sri Lanka.

Lay religious institutions did much to both preserve the religious traditions of

Asia from the effects of the loss of royal patronage and to transform them in fundamental

ways. It was the generation that acquired a school-based understanding of knowledge that

initiated anti-colonial struggles across Asia in the early twentieth century, and that had

capture the bureaucratic state for itself by the middle of the century.

1
The first efforts at mass education were conducted not in Europe but in the British

colony of Madras. In 1789, an Anglican priest named Andrew Bell applied the

teaching methods he had observed in a local Malabari school to the school he ran for

the orphaned boys of British soldiers. This involved using older boys, or monitors, to

teach younger boys the alphabet by writing in sand strewn on a slate. Bell wrote an

account of his methods that was picked up by Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker, who

publicized it throughout the world. Among those who adopted the monitorial method

was Stamford Raffels, who was appointed lieutenant governor the British colony of

Bencoolen in 1816.
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 20

Appendix 1: Religious cosmopolitanism 1950-present

Paradoxically, many of the nationalistic religious reform movements of the

twentieth century in Asia were also linked to global missionary movements that sought to

spread their teachings to the west. It was only when Hinduism and Buddhism had been

reformulated as universal religions that could be packaged in a rationalistic form

acceptable to the former colonial powers that they could be put forward as ideologies on

which modern states could be founded. This also made them more appealing to western

converts, who played a crucial role in legitimating modernized forms of these religious

traditions as a basis for national development.

The Hindu reformer Vivekananda and the Buddhist reformer Dharmapala

initiated the outreach of Asian religions to the west when they traveled to Chicago to

attend the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Vivekananda set up a branch of the Vedanta

Society in New York in 1894 and an ashram in San Francisco in 1900.

Despite these nationalistic developments, the religious cosmopolitanism

advocated by the Theosophical Society in the nineteenth century also lived on in the

twentieth century. As the Cold War became the dominant geopolitical struggle between

1950 and 1970, Asian spirituality promised a third way for many, both in Asia and in the

West. Buddhism, Hinduism and yoga attracted a new generation of westerners

discontented with the nascent American empire. A link between the cosmopolitan

counter-cultures of the 1880s and the 1960s is provided by Krishnamurti (1895-1986), a

protege of Annie Besant who broke with the Theosophical Society in 1929 and preached

a universalist message based on Hinduism and yoga around the world for the rest of his

long life. Another link is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008), who earned a degree in
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 21

physics at Allahabad University (formerly Muir Central College). At the age of 21, he

became secretary to Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the first incumbent of one of the

four ancient seats of Vedic learning in 150 years. In 1954, the Maharishi began teaching

a version of the latter’s meditation technique under the name of Transcendental

Meditation, and began promoting around the world in 1958. He became famous in the

West as guru to the Beatles in 1967. One of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s disciples, Sri Sri

Ravi Shankar (b.1956) established the Art of Living Foundation, which was accredited by

the United Nations as a Non-Governmental Organization in 1996. It claims to have

programs in more than 140 countries around the world.

Appendix 2: Christian modernism in Africa

Opposition to colonial rule in Africa had its roots in progressive forms of

Christianity. Among the earliest critics of British colonial policy in South Africa was

John Colenso (1814–1883), an Anglican clergyman who was appointed Bishop of Natal

in 1853 and who formed close ties to the Zulu rulers of his day. In response to questions

about Christian theology from his African students, he began to abandon some of the

doctrines of orthodox Anglicanism at the time, such as the historical accuracy of the

Bible, eternal punishment, and the necessity of Holy Communion for salvation. He was

led by his experiences to develop an early version of liberation theology and vigorously

criticized the brutal methods employed during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1878-1879

(Sugirtharajah 2001: chapter 4). His children carried on his work and contributed to the

organization that eventually became the African National Congress.

The situation along the coast of East Africa was rather different, as the British

initially ruled through Swahili speaking Muslims with ties to the sultan of Oman. Upper-
 The Origins of Religious Nationalism 22

class Swahili speakers often traced their origins to southern Arabia, while lower-class

Swahili speakers were often descended from enslaved Africans. When the British took

over Swahili ports on the mainland in 1895, they incorporated existing Omani governors,

or liwalis, into the colonial bureaucracy. During the twentieth century the rise of

nationalist sentiment throughout Africa made the situation of the Swahili and of the

Indians who had been brought to Africa by the British became increasingly problematic,

culminating in the expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1972 during the rule of Idi Amin.

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