Devotional rupture: Bengali Vaiṣṇavism and colonial modernity

This thesis probes the dynamics of modernity in the context of colonial Hinduism. It challenges prevailing assumptions that the encounter with British colonialism effected a wholesale historical rupture within Hindu traditions and, moreover, that this rupture is constitutive of their modernity. It urges, in sum, that modern Hinduism need not in every case imply a Hinduism severed from its pre-colonial moorings. The thesis grounds this undertaking in an investigation of colonial-era developments within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, a prominent Hindu devotional current that traces its roots to the sixteenth-century ecstatic Bengali Vaiṣṇava devotee Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533). It examines in particular the life and thought of the influential colonial Gauḍīya intellectual and religious leader Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinod (1838–1914). A member of the cosmopolitan Bengali elite, Bhaktivinod’s theological, journalistic, and organisational endeavours played a key role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vaiṣṇava flourishing in Bengal. This work proved pivotal for subsequent globalising developments within the tradition. Nevertheless, for much of the last century, Bhaktivinod – like almost every other Bengali Vaiṣṇava figure of the period – has been almost wholly bypassed in scholarship on modern Hinduism. And on the handful of occasions when he has been a subject of scholarly attention, he has largely been held up as a way of further extending the notion of historical disjuncture within the colonial Hindu landscape. This thesis proposes that both of these treatments of Bhaktivinod¬ – that is, categorical occlusion and the imputation of rupture – betray the workings of a deeply entrenched diffusionist master-narrative surrounding modernity’s emergence within the Indian subcontinent. Against this narrative, the thesis argues that paying proper attention to the work of colonial representatives of sampradāyic Hindu currents such as Bhaktivinod proffers fecund resources for a re-evaluation of the dynamics of modern Hinduism – one that better reflects the forceful persistence of pre-colonial religious modalities amidst and, at times, contra colonial transformation.