Manifestations
Temple control
- In several states (eg. draviDianists in tamiL nADu), government controls temple administration, and forces dilution and destruction of tradition.
- One can reduce their efforts to: “What stops a secular Government from appointing a non-Hindu woman who will enter the garbha griha during her monthly periods and offer beef biryani as prasad?” (Suren)
Support for british
We are not in favour of any measure, which, in operation, is designed, or tends completely, to undermine the influence and authority of the Britishers, who alone, in the present circumstances of India, are able to hold the scales even between creed and class, and to develop that sense of unity and national solidarity, without which India will continue to be a congeries of mutually exclusive and warring groups, without a common purpose and a common patriotism. We are of those who think that in the truest and best interest of India, its government should continue to be conducted on true British principles of justice and equality of opportunity. We are deeply devoted and loyally attached to British rule.
- Justice Party’s Dec 1916 Non-Brahmin Manifesto
Protestant background
If there were differences between Orientalists and Anglicists in this regard, they were very shallow. Anglicists found Indian culture and society intrinsically corrupt from the very beginning. Orientalists, however, saw India’s culture as being based on sound principles which steadily degenerated. But the cause of corruption, however, was in both cases the same, ie, ‘brahmanism’. …
If this suggestion is convincing, the prevalence of Europe’s conceptualisation in the modern Indian intellectual’s reflection on his own society is nothing but remarkable. Even though there existed a long tradition of criticism of brahmins and caste in India itself, Rammohun Roy, for example, while criticising contemporary brahmanism vigorously, merely echoed the assessment of the British. Similarly, Babasaheb Ambedkar did the same a century later when he took up its sacerdotal invention of caste along familiar lines. By doing so, both accepted exactly that which Orientalists and Anglicists shared: they ended up criticising ‘brahmins’ as ‘priests’ and ‘brahmanism’ as a deprived ‘religion of the priests’.
… It is also clear that the so-called differences between anglicist and orientalists are themselves dependent upon the same Judeo Christian conception of religion and are, therefore, distinctions which make sense within a theological framework only. From this perspective the anglicist was correct in saying that corruption was there from the very beginning - after all, it was a pagan worship inspired by the devil. But the orientalists - working within the same theological background - were correct too when they stressed that compared to the original books, in which sound conceptions of the divine could still be found, these insights were lost due to a mounting corruption of the priests ever since.
… When contemporary scholars take this divide as a valuable structuring framework for describing the history of modern India they end up being theologians in a secular guise (see Balagangadhara 1994 for an amplification of this theme). That this framework makes sense after all could be explained by dechristianised Christianity being part of the history of the west, and, hence, being constitutive of the west’s cultural and religious experience.
… However, when Indian intellectuals take the same story for granted, they end up repeating a protestant Christian theme without Christianity being fundamental to the construction of the Indian culture. What they say must, therefore, be vacuous to a double extent. That they keep repeating the west in endless mantras of anti-brahmanism is not only puzzling, it is tragic as well. They do not only stop thinking, they are bereft of their own experience. The world of the west will never be theirs while the world of their own is no longer accessible due to the western mantras which prevent them from seeing and reflecting upon their own experience. Therefore, if a novel and innovating step towards a different approach of Indian culture is desirable and sought after, it is high time that the Indian intellectuals start taking their colonial experience seriously.