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uk on 17 June 2020
The Journal of Hindu Studies 2020;13:1–9 doi:10.1093/jhs/hiaa005

Gaunaya VaiX>avism and Modernity

Lucian Wong
Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
*Corresponding author: lucian@ochs.org.uk

Religion has frequently been taken as ‘the prototype of traditionality’ (Shils 1981,
p.95) and its demise a harbinger of modernity’s progress. This position is advanced
most notably in what have been styled ‘subtraction stories’ of secularisation (Taylor
2007). Taking their cue from Max Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung),
such narratives portray the rise of modernity, propelled by Reason and Science, as
entailing the inevitable erosion of religious faith and practice, and the consequent
relegation of religion to the margins of society. Yet, while the idea of disenchantment
might constitute a key element of the grand récit of modernity, the past half a century
has made it increasingly apparent that secularisation in the West has led not to the
erosion of religion in toto, but merely the withdrawal of the authority of religious
institutions from public spaces (Berger 1969, p.107). Indeed, ‘[t]he world today’, Peter
Berger declares, ‘is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so
than ever’ (1996/97, p.3).
If the religious history of the modern West has thrown up challenges to strong
readings of the Weberian thesis, the case of India has presented it with an even more
complex testing ground. Indian religions have shown few signs of retreat in the face
of the onslaught of the juggernaut of colonial modernity and its aftermath, the
nation’s formal declaration of constitutional secularity notwithstanding.
Reflecting on the region’s contemporary cultural landscape, Charles Taylor con-
cludes that ‘it seems evident that disenchantment hasn’t occurred in a meaningful
sense for the mass of the Indian population’ (2016, p.24). On the contrary, modern
Indian public spaces remain veritable tapestries of religious activity and symbolism;
Indian society ‘seethes’ with what T. N. Madan has dubbed ‘a vibrant religiosity’
(1987, p.750).
Weber himself notoriously explained such persistence in terms of what he per-
ceived to be India’s inherent structural hindrances to the ‘rationalization of life
conduct’, which he took to be the driving force of modernisation (1958, p.325).1
Many since, however, have looked to the manifest tenacity of Indian religious life
as an indispensable guide to understanding the particular shape, dynamic, and tra-
jectory of modernity in the subcontinent. Conceptualising modernity in this context
has been seen as requiring an account not of the abatement of religion, but rather its
‘transformation’ (Hatcher 2006, p.55).
Any serious attempt to understand such transformation will inevitably need to
grapple with the unfolding of the British colonial project in the region. As is well
established, the combined forces of British administrative intervention, Christian

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2 Gaunaya VaiX>avism and Modernity

missionising, and orientalist scholarship had profound consequences for indigenous

conceptions of religion; some, of course, maintain that the very notion of ‘religion’ in
this context is an extraneous imposition associated with these forces (e.g. Masuzawa
2005; Mandair 2016). Moreover, Indian religious traditions and practitioners had to
contend with the far-reaching sociocultural impact of colonially imported technol-
ogies and corporate forms. While the colonial enterprise was by no means the sin-
gular ‘cause’ to which all modern Indian religious transformation can be reduced,
colonialism certainly functioned as what we might refer to as a notable ‘constraint’
that operated upon it.2
There has been a pronounced tendency among those seeking to explore the
nature of transformation within the modern Indian religious sphere to direct their
attention to religious thinkers and institutions bearing the distinct marks of an
Enlightenment-inflected rationality and its reformative impulses. This is borne out
clearly in scholarship on the modern Hindu context, wherein modernity is com-
monly associated with ‘the idea of reform’ (Pennington 2017, p.151). Presuming an
‘equation of Modern Hinduism and Reform Hinduism’ (Weiss 2019, p.10), such
approaches place distinct emphasis on Hindu thinkers and institutions that ‘bear
the clear “impress”of western, Christian values’ (Hatcher 2016, p.8).3 In doing so,
they recapitulate more or less the same narrowly circumscribed genealogy of mod-
ern Hinduism to the point of its attainment of academic canonicity.4 One would
certainly not want to deny the importance of agents of reform to an understanding
of modern Hinduism. However, foregrounding their significance to the point of
obscuring all else is not only to acquiesce to a diffusionist, Eurocentric master-
narrative of modernity, but also to posit a distorted image of the modern Hindu
landscape.
One of the upshots of this historiographical propensity has been the occlusion of
Hindu currents associated with colonially shaped notions of the so-called ‘irrational’
– and, by implication, ‘non-modern’ – from the rubric of modern Hinduism. Of par-
ticular note in this regard are traditions (samprad@ya) of Hindu practice and belief
rooted in the Pur@>as and Tantras that pre-existed the advent of British colonial
presence in the subcontinent. As has been argued elsewhere, such traditions ‘con-
tinued to exert a potent hold over the Hindu imaginary’ throughout and beyond the
period of British colonialism, participating in and shaping modern Hindu discourse
(Wong and Sardella 2020, p.6). The focus of this special issue of the Journal of Hindu
Studies is the significant yet oft-overlooked contribution to Hindu modernity of one
such samprad@yic current – namely, Gaunaya VaiX>avism, or the Hindu devotional
tradition that finds its tangible origins in the sixteenth-century ecstatic Bengali
KPX>a bhakta Śra KPX>a Caitanya (1486–1533).5
Being the centre of colonial rule until 1911, Bengal was the first region in the
subcontinent to feel the full force of British interventions and Western intellectual
culture. Home to the ‘the first Asian social group of any size whose mental world was
transformed through its interaction with the West’ (Raychaudhuri 1988, p. ix), the
region famously produced the so-called ‘forerunners of Indian modernization’,
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Lucian Wong 3

Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) and the Brahmo Samaj (Kopf 1979, p.xiii), as well as a
host of other mainstays of the modern Hindu ‘canon’. Upon close inspection of the
region’s cultural landscape, one nevertheless encounters a sustained ‘murmur of
dissent’ against the self-assurance of rationalist forces (Kaviraj 2016, p.169).
Among the manifold expressions of such dissent, one can point to the remarkable
phenomenon of educated, upper-caste Hindu Bengalis (bhadralok) in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries flocking in droves to take up the study, practice,
and promulgation of passionate KPX>a devotion (bhakti) associated with the figure of
Caitanya and the tradition he inspired.6 This VaiX>ava turn among the colonial
Bengali intelligentsia represents what has been aptly described as ‘an independent
trajectory of modernity’ that departed from paradigms advanced by ‘Enlightenment
thinkers from Europe and early nineteenth-century Bengal alike’ (Fuller 2016, p.91).
Recent years have witnessed something of a flourishing in scholarship on this
hitherto neglected chapter in modern Hindu history. In 2015, with an eye to co-
ordinating work in this area, scholars associated with the Oxford Centre for Hindu
Studies (OCHS) inaugurated the Bengali Vaishnavism in the Modern Period Project.7
All but one of the articles that form this special issue (i.e. Bhatia) are the outcome of
research presented at the second symposium organised by the project, which was
hosted in Oxford at the OCHS in February 2018.8 Each of the ensuing articles explores
an aspect of Gaunaya VaiX>avism’s engagement with modernity. By way of brief
outline, the principal themes addressed in the issue are as follows:

Global occult

The occult played a vital role in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century global

cultural exchange, representing a significant ‘countercurrent’ to the more recog-
nised streams of knowledge during this period (Green 2015). Occultism in fact exerted
a considerable influence in many of its varied cultural settings, which has, however,
often been passed over – a neglect, it has been suggested, that is largely the result of
the occult’s perceived association with ‘cranks’ and the irrational (Bergunder 2014,
p.401). In terms of the colonial South Asian context, the Theosophical Society, which
was the predominant transnational institutional conduit of the occult at this time,
has in recent years begun to attract increased scholarly attention (Rudbog and Sand
2020). Theosophy has been noted as a formative feature of the colonial Bengali
bhadralok milieu, which by the late nineteenth century had emerged as something
of ‘a space for esoteric culture’ (Mukhopadhyay 2017, p.104). In her article for this
issue, Varuni Bhatia spotlights Gaunaya VaiX>ava participation in global occult net-
works in fin de siècle Bengal. She nevertheless opts to explore the place of occultism in
Bengal beyond (or rather behind) its association with Theosophy. Bhatia directs her
focus instead to spiritualism, the practice of communicating with the dead through
living mediums, which, she avers, is a ‘forgotten chapter in the history of global
occult in India, especially as practiced by Indians themselves’. More specifically,
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4 Gaunaya VaiX>avism and Modernity

Bhatia examines the important role spiritualist practice played in the lives of mem-
bers of the Ghosh family associated with the notoriously anti-colonial Amrita Bazar
Patrika Press. In the context of Gaunaya VaiX>ava Studies – in large part due to the
important scholarly spadework of Bhatia (2017) herself – the Ghosh brothers, par-
ticularly Sishir Kumar (1840–1911) and Motilal (1847–1922), are best known for their
substantial journalistic contribution to the broad programme of bhadralok VaiX>ava
recovery that was in full swing by the latter decades of the nineteenth century. What
has so far been little explored, however, is the Ghoshes’ deep and pioneering involve-
ment in the occult, as evidenced by, for example, the regular spiritualist séances held
in the Ghosh family home from the mid-1860s as well as their founding and running of
Hindu Spiritual Magazine, a popular early twentieth-century occult-focused periodic-
al. In the hands of the Ghoshes, the figure of Caitanya is re-imagined in terms of
‘psychic states’ and thereby embedded within global occult flows. The case of the
Ghoshes, Bhatia maintains, illuminates ‘the esoteric roots of Indian modernity’ and
its deep links to ‘anticlerical, non-rational, transnational religious movements’.

Print culture

The emergence of print culture in India is commonly highlighted as one of the key
markers of modernity in the region, entailing, among other things, the ‘nuanced dis-
placement’ of pre-print literary and oral/aural modalities and the forging of indigen-
ous literary publics (Bhattacharya 2005, pp.108–51). As the seat of the earliest
indigenous printing and publishing industry in the subcontinent, Bengal was the first
South Asian region to witness the profound social, cultural, and religious consequences
of these developments. The various print forms were by no means uniform in their
functions and implications. Necessitating as it did the acquisition and preservation of a
committed subscriber base for its sustenance, the periodical genre was especially
suited to the task of fostering engaged literary communities. It has, unsurprisingly,
thus been a subject of repeated focus in the historiography of colonial Bengal. While
studies on the Gaunaya VaiX>ava tradition in this context have often engaged with
VaiX>ava periodical sources, the research potential of the VaiX>ava periodical corpus
as a whole remains conspicuously unexploited. This is so despite the fact that Bengali
VaiX>avas were avid participants in the burgeoning indigenous periodical arena, col-
lectively producing an impressive array of devotionally oriented journals (Stewart and
Basu 1983). Sporadic Gaunaya VaiX>ava experimentation with the medium of the peri-
odical dates as far back as the 1830s (Chakrabarty 1985, pp.393–4). Nonetheless, the
1880s through to the 1920s witnessed a massive proliferation of VaiX>ava journal
culture. In its current form, the material produced by this enterprise is widely dis-
persed across archives in Bengal and beyond. Santanu Dey’s article for this issue
represents the first attempt to thematically engage with this body of literature in its
expanse, proffering what will no doubt serve as an indispensable ‘point of reference
and orientation with regard to navigating a terrain that is little traversed’. Drawing
upon a representative sample of these periodicals, Dey distils their shared features and
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Lucian Wong 5

objectives, outlines the principal themes they address, and probes the related issues of
readership and the economics of periodical publishing. Dey’s analysis reveals a com-
plex web of alliances between western-educated bhadralok reformers, landed wealthy
patrons, and traditional Sanskrit scholars, who collaborated to carve out ‘a vibrant
Vaishnava devotional space’ within the literary public sphere of colonial Bengal.

Modern institutions and Anglo–Hindu law

Attempts to bring about greater cohesion within Gaunaya VaiX>avism – a loosely coordi-
nated network of localised communities for much of its history – have taken a variety of
shapes. Such attempts might be broadly characterised as the expression of centripetal
forces in dynamic interplay with the inherent centrifugality of the guru-disciple lineage
system to which Gaunaya VaiX>avas have invariably resorted in transmitting their teach-
ings and values. Nevertheless, in the context of colonialism, these centripetal impulses
were at times radically accentuated, engendering the emergence of ‘hard’ institutional
forms grounded upon ‘centralized or coercive authority’ (O’Connell 2019, p.28).
Somewhat ironically, these new institutional modalities have, in turn, frequently created
the conditions for more intense forms of factionalisation and splintering. In his article for
this issue, Ferdinando Sardella presents a detailed account of a prominent instance of one
such institutional schism, namely the crisis of succession that engulfed the Gaudiya Math
and Mission after the departure of its founder, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati (1874–1937).
The case of the Gaudiya Math and Mission’s succession crisis is of particular interest to
explorations of Gaunaya VaiX>avism’s negotiation of modernity in its having played out in
the context of British India’s law courts. Sardella examines the first three dramatic
months of what became a decade-long legal battle between two rival factions of the
institution that held to conflicting interpretations of their guru’s last wishes, ‘bringing
a tradition-internal discourse of succession into the jurisdiction of Anglo-Indian law’.
Drawing on legal files of the case hitherto unexamined by scholars, Sardella presents a
wealth of new information about the events surrounding the break-up of
Bhaktisiddhanta’s institution, which inadvertently led to the birth of a plethora of cognate
modern Gaunaya VaiX>ava organisations, including not least the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness. Both sides of the legal dispute deployed arguments invoking
traditional notions of j@ti, @śrama, and the agency of deities that sat alongside claims
pertaining to modern corporate and financial law. Sardella’s article thus illustrates the
legal complexities with which British and Indian jurists were confronted when attempt-
ing to venture into disputes concerning modern Hindu institutions.

Transnational mission

Although some may contend that pre-colonial Hindu traditions were devoid of pros-
elytising tendencies (e.g. Sharma 2012), even a casual acquaintance with pre-colonial
Gaunaya VaiX>ava textual sources and history should suffice to convince one of the
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6 Gaunaya VaiX>avism and Modernity

evident missionising orientation of the tradition from its very inception. Caitanya
himself is depicted throughout the Gaunaya biographical corpus as repeatedly
engaged in the task of convincing others of the religious supremacy of KPX>a-bhakti,
and popular Gaunaya biographical sources have themselves been deemed ‘vehicle[s]
to proselytize’ (Dimock and Stewart 1999, p.76). These tendencies would be further
nurtured by subsequent generations of Gaunaya teachers through whom the trad-
ition would expand its footholds in regions such as Bengal, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh,
Rajasthan, Assam, and Manipur. In the context of British colonialism and its ‘unpre-
cedented claims of universality and globalization’ (Halbfass 1988, p.217), these mis-
sionising tendencies nevertheless assume a new global dimension. While individual
Gaunaya missionising attempts in the West can be dated as far back as 1902 (Carney
2020), these acquired a modern institutional garb in the 1930s in the form of
Bhaktisiddhanta’s aforementioned Gaudiya Math and Mission. In his article for
this issue, Måns Broo examines the fascinating yet little studied case of Swami B.
H. Bon (1901–1982), an emissary of the Gaudiya Math and Mission in London and
Berlin in the 1930s, who had distanced himself from the movement after the passing
of his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta. Broo focuses on a portion of this latter, independent
phase of Swami Bon’s missionary work in the West. There exists, to be sure, a wealth
of scholarship on the impact of Hindu teachers in the West. Broo, however, offers a
wholly unique lens through which to explore this theme: British and American in-
telligence. British control over India was, Christopher Bayly reminds us, crucially
facilitated by intelligence gathering (1999). In Broo’s article, we discover that such
surveillance extended even to religious figures such as Swami Bon, who visited
Britain and America as well as Germany in sensitive times, and went so far as to offer
his services as a chaplain for Hindu soldiers in the field of British warfare. Navigating
the interstices of Hindu missionising, colonial concerns, and the intrigues of espion-
age, Broo’s analysis discloses patent colonial angst over whether peripatetic monks
like Swami Bon were potential antagonists of the imperial enterprise.
In sum, the articles that comprise this special issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies
offer valuable insight into Gaunaya VaiX>ava engagement with key facets of colonial
modernity and its role in shaping modern Hindu discourse. The issue’s publication, it
is hoped, will serve to both nurture the growing sub-field of Modern Gaunaya
VaiX>ava Studies and, more broadly, encourage greater attention to the important
contributions of other such samprad@yic Hindu currents to the texture and dynamics
of modern Hinduism.

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Notes
1 For a challenge to this prevalent reading of Weber, see Kantowsky (1982).
2 I draw here on a distinction developed in the work of Gavin Flood. Taking his cue from
John Bowker, Flood argues that in the case of religions ‘a simple causal explanation is
always insufficient; and the specification of constraints, or rather networks of con-
straint, becomes an enormously complex task that is never completed’ (2015, p.169).
3 Although traceable to J. N. Farquhar’s classic 1915 study of nineteenth-century reli-
gious currents, this tendency is observable in numerous other, more recent treatments
of the subject, which, in effect, purport to represent the ‘essence’ of Hinduism in the
modern period (e.g. Richards 1985; Sharma 2002, 2005).
4 Such canonicity is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the innumerable overviews
and introductory books on Hinduism, which, when treating the British colonial period,
almost invariably restrict their focus to the same list of Hindu reform-oriented asso-
ciated figures and institutions. As Richard Weiss has recently observed, these geneal-
ogies follow a standard formula, ‘beginning with Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo
Samaj, moving on to Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, and ending with
Swami Vivekananda’s “muscular” Hinduism’ (2019, p. 1).
5 The tradition is also commonly styled ‘Bengali’ or ‘Caitanya VaiX>avism’. Some have
voiced an explicit preference for the latter terminology on the grounds that it better
reflects the tradition’s transregionality, playing down as it does any ostensibly re-
strictive geographical associations (e.g. Sen 2018; O’Connell 2019, p.3). I would suggest,
however, that it is not so much the adjectival portion of the tradition’s nomenclature
that is potentially the most obfuscating element, but, rather, the homogenising effects
of the nominalising suffix ‘-ism’ (Wong and Sardella 2020, p.11).
6 For a brief survey of recent scholarship in this area, see Wong (2015, pp.322–5).
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Lucian Wong 9

7 The project was inaugurated by a two-day workshop held at Worcester College,

University of Oxford. The recently published book of essays The Legacy of VaiX>avism
in Colonial Bengal (Sardella and Wong 2020) is based largely on material presented at
this workshop. For more about the project, go to: https://ochs.org.uk/research/ben
gali-vaishnavism-modern-period (6 May 2020).
8 In addition to the contributors to this journal issue, special mention must be made of
Amiya P. Sen, who played a vital and much valued role at the symposium. For a
published version of his symposium presentation, see Sen (2018).