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Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion
Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "Hinduism" came into being. He argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalists and missionaries. Rather, he says, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors as well, who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, sati, tolerance, and conversion.
260 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 2005
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November 30, 2025
Despite the provocative title, this book is a sober scholarly work of comparative religion focusing on a period in early colonial British India, during which the two religious communities, Christian and Hindu, interacted and influenced each other. One can almost visualize a publisher taking up a serious work of research and slapping on a title on it, to catch the attention of book critic and reader.
Pennington begins with a very careful statement of aims that clarifies that Hinduism was not "invented" in the sense that something new was brought into being. He does not deny continuity with the past, nor a pre-existing religious identity that may not have been called "Hindu" but nevertheless existed in the minds of its practitioners. Instead, what happened was that Hindu practitioners reacted to the colonial environment as well as to the concomitants of modernity it ushered in - western education, urbanization, the emergence of new economic elites - and actively refashioned their religion to answer the questions of the new era.
Pennington identifies three influences on his work: (1) history of religions since it allows the examination of concepts internal to religions and their transformations (2) postcolonial studies, since it foregrounds power relations and (3) the examination of "religion" as a sociological concept.
Chapter 2 examines the origin of the British evangelical impulse. In the late 18th-early 19th centuries, there was rapid social change in England in the context of the enclosures of agricultural land and the nascent industrial revolution. This led to the growth of an urban proletariat even as colonial conquests was creating new subject peoples. Anglican religious figures were interested in the uplift of both groups - in fact they placed the urban poor sunk in the vices of drunkenness, adultery and crime as morally equivalent to the pagans of the colonies. Conversion for both was supposed to coincide with moral improvement, and to cleaner lifestyles and material prosperity. The proselytizers stuck on an ingenious method of seeking penny contributions from the urban poor to furnish the means of colonial evangelism - had the added benefit of creating identification with the church's aims among the working class as well as a sense of moral superiority, that they were contributing to the uplift of the heathen. But there was also a strong puritanical and hypocritical strain in the churchmen's attitudes towards the poor. William Wilberforce for example, saw no contradiction between putting the onus for moral uplift on the individual, while vociferously denying any role for anti-poverty programs.
In Chapter 3, evangelism encounters its subject -- and in the process, British religion too was changed. Prior to 1750, there was a rediscovery of ancient Druidic religions aided by Romanticism and nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing rural life. Polytheistic Druidism was seen as something akin to Hinduism, genuine and natural. The second comparison was with Catholicism, which was seen as idolatrous and politically (if not theologically) threatening. Colonial evangelism led to a clarification of Anglicanism's own foundational principles, and a hardening of attitudes towards different religious persuasions. Interestingly, Chapter 3 also talks about a class angle to missionary activity. Whereas church elders were solidly upper- and middle-class, the missionaries themselves were the aspiring working-class, often drawn from the trades or lower professions. For them a missionary career was a means of uplifting themselves and gaining respectability among their superiors.
Chapter 3 also discusses several leading missionary figures. William Ward of the Christian Mission Society of Serampore near Calcutta, was author of a 2-volume work on Indian religion. In sharp contrast to the early "Indophilic" generation of scholars best represented by William Jones who preferred to analyze texts, Ward and his cohort sought to examine the lived experiences of ordinary believers. He anticipated Malinowski in his methods, and has been called a "proto-ethnographer." Claudius Buchanan, a military chaplain traveled to observe Christian communities all over India (Malabar Syriac Christians, Old Goan Portuguese Catholics, Tanjore Christians) and dreamt of improving their practices in line with orthodox Anglicanism. He wrote a sensational account of "Juggernaut." It was in contrast to these "outlandish" and "shocking" religious practices that British Christianity sought to define itself. Pennington quotes van de Veer's idea of a "colonialist imaginaire," through which colony and colonizer mutually formed each other. "The very condition for colonial knowledge is the mutual demarkation of identity and objectivity of both colonizer and colonized" (p. 99).
Chapter 4 focuses largely on the analysis of the journal Asiatick Researches, brainchild of William Jones, that was published continuously from 1789 to 1839 when it was split into separate publications focusing on the humanities and the sciences. A major themes in this chapter was that the fecundity of the Indian landscape mirrors the proliferation of the religious imagination, "polymorphic nature, polytheistic culture." From its founding until Jones died in 1794, the journal focused on the examination of texts and was largely admiring ("Indomania"). It was also significant that the British were only slowly establishing their ruling presence in the subcontinent. But in the early 19th century, the East India Company had become the hegemonic power, and its concerns shifted towards an understanding of laws and customs, in the actual lives of the people. Ethnography demonstrated the disjuncture between scriptural prescriptions and actual practice and created the groundwork for reform on issues such as sati, hook-hanging and infanticide. Still later, as British administrative machinery became still more prevalent, the journal began to focus on administrative information (censuses, topography, climate, flora/fauna, natural resources).
Chapter 5 analyzes the Samachar Chandrika, a Bengali newspaper published in the 1820s-50s. Only one year's copies of the newspaper are available, but luckily that year, 1830 was a consequential one following William Bentinck's ban on sati. The Chandrika defended sati and traditional institutions such as caste - or rather, it questioned the right of outsiders to mess with Hindu laws and customs. But the Chandrika reserved its bitterest invective not for the British, but for the rival Samachar Darpan edited by the reformer Ram Mohan Roy. For the Chandrika, the British were well-meaning outsiders who knew no better, but the Darpan were traitors who betrayed their religion and made British mischief possible. But defense of tradition was not the only concern of the Chandrika; its other objective was to provide guidance to its readers on vexing theological questions raised by the onrush of modernity, education and social change. Should upper caste students conduct the funeral rites of a low-caste teacher? Are Sanskrit rituals conducted by a low caste person valid? Should bhadralok brahmins be allowed to marry multiple times, if that meant less elite Brahmin boys could not find brides? These questions had never come up before since lower-caste persons never became teachers or learned Sanskrit, and none dared question the traditional privileges of the bhadralok. By taking up these questions and providing answers based on scripture, the Chandrika was in effect fashioning a new Hinduism for modern times.
Pennington's main conclusion in the book is stated in the final, sixth chapter: "The idea (Hindu) if not the label was already common Indian currency. The British did not mint this coin. They traded in it because Hindus handed it to them. The historic role of the colonizer was not to invent Hinduism by blunder or by design, but to introduce an economy of concepts and power relations that dramatically enhanced the value of such identity markers" (p. 172). So Hinduism was not invented in the 19th century, but neither did it exist before. But the label, when it emerged, was not surprising because it tapped into pre-existing social identities. The British created the environment for its emergence, but not solely - Indians reacted to the colonial power structures, but did not lack agency. And the traffic was two-way, the colonial encounter affected British Christianity too, if not to the same extent as it did Hinduism.
My only objection to this book is that sometimes Pennington comes across as too pedantic and concerned with nuance and detail that would be relevant only for a religious studies insider. For example, there is a strenuous defense of the idea that Hinduism may be classed as a "religion," which for most persons is an uncontested proposition. Pennington's objection seems to be that a definition of religion might be too specific (book-based, monotheistic, clergy-based etc.) and encompass only the Abrahamic religions, or be too broad (belief in supernatural beings), and include Pokemon Go and Harry Potter. But these definitional complications are interesting only to the academic specialist; the lay reader has no difficulty accepting that Hinduism is a religion, just the same as Christianity.
Pennington begins with a very careful statement of aims that clarifies that Hinduism was not "invented" in the sense that something new was brought into being. He does not deny continuity with the past, nor a pre-existing religious identity that may not have been called "Hindu" but nevertheless existed in the minds of its practitioners. Instead, what happened was that Hindu practitioners reacted to the colonial environment as well as to the concomitants of modernity it ushered in - western education, urbanization, the emergence of new economic elites - and actively refashioned their religion to answer the questions of the new era.
Pennington identifies three influences on his work: (1) history of religions since it allows the examination of concepts internal to religions and their transformations (2) postcolonial studies, since it foregrounds power relations and (3) the examination of "religion" as a sociological concept.
Chapter 2 examines the origin of the British evangelical impulse. In the late 18th-early 19th centuries, there was rapid social change in England in the context of the enclosures of agricultural land and the nascent industrial revolution. This led to the growth of an urban proletariat even as colonial conquests was creating new subject peoples. Anglican religious figures were interested in the uplift of both groups - in fact they placed the urban poor sunk in the vices of drunkenness, adultery and crime as morally equivalent to the pagans of the colonies. Conversion for both was supposed to coincide with moral improvement, and to cleaner lifestyles and material prosperity. The proselytizers stuck on an ingenious method of seeking penny contributions from the urban poor to furnish the means of colonial evangelism - had the added benefit of creating identification with the church's aims among the working class as well as a sense of moral superiority, that they were contributing to the uplift of the heathen. But there was also a strong puritanical and hypocritical strain in the churchmen's attitudes towards the poor. William Wilberforce for example, saw no contradiction between putting the onus for moral uplift on the individual, while vociferously denying any role for anti-poverty programs.
In Chapter 3, evangelism encounters its subject -- and in the process, British religion too was changed. Prior to 1750, there was a rediscovery of ancient Druidic religions aided by Romanticism and nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing rural life. Polytheistic Druidism was seen as something akin to Hinduism, genuine and natural. The second comparison was with Catholicism, which was seen as idolatrous and politically (if not theologically) threatening. Colonial evangelism led to a clarification of Anglicanism's own foundational principles, and a hardening of attitudes towards different religious persuasions. Interestingly, Chapter 3 also talks about a class angle to missionary activity. Whereas church elders were solidly upper- and middle-class, the missionaries themselves were the aspiring working-class, often drawn from the trades or lower professions. For them a missionary career was a means of uplifting themselves and gaining respectability among their superiors.
Chapter 3 also discusses several leading missionary figures. William Ward of the Christian Mission Society of Serampore near Calcutta, was author of a 2-volume work on Indian religion. In sharp contrast to the early "Indophilic" generation of scholars best represented by William Jones who preferred to analyze texts, Ward and his cohort sought to examine the lived experiences of ordinary believers. He anticipated Malinowski in his methods, and has been called a "proto-ethnographer." Claudius Buchanan, a military chaplain traveled to observe Christian communities all over India (Malabar Syriac Christians, Old Goan Portuguese Catholics, Tanjore Christians) and dreamt of improving their practices in line with orthodox Anglicanism. He wrote a sensational account of "Juggernaut." It was in contrast to these "outlandish" and "shocking" religious practices that British Christianity sought to define itself. Pennington quotes van de Veer's idea of a "colonialist imaginaire," through which colony and colonizer mutually formed each other. "The very condition for colonial knowledge is the mutual demarkation of identity and objectivity of both colonizer and colonized" (p. 99).
Chapter 4 focuses largely on the analysis of the journal Asiatick Researches, brainchild of William Jones, that was published continuously from 1789 to 1839 when it was split into separate publications focusing on the humanities and the sciences. A major themes in this chapter was that the fecundity of the Indian landscape mirrors the proliferation of the religious imagination, "polymorphic nature, polytheistic culture." From its founding until Jones died in 1794, the journal focused on the examination of texts and was largely admiring ("Indomania"). It was also significant that the British were only slowly establishing their ruling presence in the subcontinent. But in the early 19th century, the East India Company had become the hegemonic power, and its concerns shifted towards an understanding of laws and customs, in the actual lives of the people. Ethnography demonstrated the disjuncture between scriptural prescriptions and actual practice and created the groundwork for reform on issues such as sati, hook-hanging and infanticide. Still later, as British administrative machinery became still more prevalent, the journal began to focus on administrative information (censuses, topography, climate, flora/fauna, natural resources).
Chapter 5 analyzes the Samachar Chandrika, a Bengali newspaper published in the 1820s-50s. Only one year's copies of the newspaper are available, but luckily that year, 1830 was a consequential one following William Bentinck's ban on sati. The Chandrika defended sati and traditional institutions such as caste - or rather, it questioned the right of outsiders to mess with Hindu laws and customs. But the Chandrika reserved its bitterest invective not for the British, but for the rival Samachar Darpan edited by the reformer Ram Mohan Roy. For the Chandrika, the British were well-meaning outsiders who knew no better, but the Darpan were traitors who betrayed their religion and made British mischief possible. But defense of tradition was not the only concern of the Chandrika; its other objective was to provide guidance to its readers on vexing theological questions raised by the onrush of modernity, education and social change. Should upper caste students conduct the funeral rites of a low-caste teacher? Are Sanskrit rituals conducted by a low caste person valid? Should bhadralok brahmins be allowed to marry multiple times, if that meant less elite Brahmin boys could not find brides? These questions had never come up before since lower-caste persons never became teachers or learned Sanskrit, and none dared question the traditional privileges of the bhadralok. By taking up these questions and providing answers based on scripture, the Chandrika was in effect fashioning a new Hinduism for modern times.
Pennington's main conclusion in the book is stated in the final, sixth chapter: "The idea (Hindu) if not the label was already common Indian currency. The British did not mint this coin. They traded in it because Hindus handed it to them. The historic role of the colonizer was not to invent Hinduism by blunder or by design, but to introduce an economy of concepts and power relations that dramatically enhanced the value of such identity markers" (p. 172). So Hinduism was not invented in the 19th century, but neither did it exist before. But the label, when it emerged, was not surprising because it tapped into pre-existing social identities. The British created the environment for its emergence, but not solely - Indians reacted to the colonial power structures, but did not lack agency. And the traffic was two-way, the colonial encounter affected British Christianity too, if not to the same extent as it did Hinduism.
My only objection to this book is that sometimes Pennington comes across as too pedantic and concerned with nuance and detail that would be relevant only for a religious studies insider. For example, there is a strenuous defense of the idea that Hinduism may be classed as a "religion," which for most persons is an uncontested proposition. Pennington's objection seems to be that a definition of religion might be too specific (book-based, monotheistic, clergy-based etc.) and encompass only the Abrahamic religions, or be too broad (belief in supernatural beings), and include Pokemon Go and Harry Potter. But these definitional complications are interesting only to the academic specialist; the lay reader has no difficulty accepting that Hinduism is a religion, just the same as Christianity.
October 3, 2009
Pennington does a great job engaging Post-Colonial theory and complicating what is often a monolithic view of the West. Though he does not fully support his theory of "polyphonic" forces, probably due to lack of available textual sources, he makes an excellent case for including religion as a category of study in Post-Colonial research. Too often religion is disregarded as an "empty" category that is simply a political tool, but Pennington shows how it can also be a place of dialogical resistance for those being "constructed" by Colonial powers. Though the amount of Hindu discourse analyzed is rather limited, the amount of Missionary discourse is amazing and very revealing, much of which is still functioning in Western Christianity today.
November 20, 2024
I picked this up because I was rather taken with the apparent audacity of the question. Did the British Empire structure a formerly chaotic multiplicity of cults and ritual, with endless regional and other variations, to make it somehow comprehensible and more manageable, more fit to take its place alongside the arguably more unitary Abrahamic religions? Something of the sort has been suggested, and Pennington has set himself the task of testing whether the idea has any merit.
This is a very scholarly book, and Pennington is evidently au fait with debates that I either don’t understand or have never heard of, and he takes considerable care to position himself so he’s not vulnerable to attack from certain quarters. Such is the price of maintaining one’s credentials in those circles. As a scholar of religion, he must be both critical and respectful of his subject matter, which is no mean feat given the fundamentally irrational nature of religious belief. He carries this off with aplomb. That said, his approach to the subject matter is pretty straightforward, though his reading is formidable.
Pennington considers evidence from three main sources. Early colonial scholarship concerning Indian religious culture was largely the work of amateurs, published in the journal ‘Asiatick Researches.’ Later the Church Missionary Society’s ‘Missionary Papers’ did much to acquaint the British public with Indian religion, mediated through a lens of strong Christian disapproval, and presented with an eye to soliciting donations. Lastly, speaking for Hinduism, the Bengali anti-reformist Hindu organisation Dharma Sabhā’s bi-weekly newspaper ‘Samācār Candrikā’ holds the line for Indian perspectives in a changing society. While the missionaries deplored the paganism and depravity of India, the amateurs tended to see a once great civilisation, as evidenced by ancient texts, which had degenerated, and was in need of reform. Certain practices, ‘widow burning’ and ‘hook swinging,’ were lightning rods for controversy. Read the book if you want details.
Stated baldly, Pennington’s conclusion is that India had a vital and coherent body of belief and practice that defied British efforts to impose preconceived Western notions upon it. Indians negotiated with the British, treating criticism with seriousness, but their beliefs and practices were not drastically eroded by British efforts to transform them. Pennington, however, does not state anything baldly. Everyone is in favour of nuance, or will usually say so, but this book may test some readers’ patience with it. Pennington is very thorough. He responds to various critics for whom Hinduism is not a meaningful category but a sort of umbrella term for Indian religion, and addresses also the value of the category ‘religion’ to describe the phenomenon which we call Hinduism. This is a short book (less than 200 pages), but a very thoughtful one. It’s a bit off the beaten track for me, but I’m happy to have encountered it.
This is a very scholarly book, and Pennington is evidently au fait with debates that I either don’t understand or have never heard of, and he takes considerable care to position himself so he’s not vulnerable to attack from certain quarters. Such is the price of maintaining one’s credentials in those circles. As a scholar of religion, he must be both critical and respectful of his subject matter, which is no mean feat given the fundamentally irrational nature of religious belief. He carries this off with aplomb. That said, his approach to the subject matter is pretty straightforward, though his reading is formidable.
Pennington considers evidence from three main sources. Early colonial scholarship concerning Indian religious culture was largely the work of amateurs, published in the journal ‘Asiatick Researches.’ Later the Church Missionary Society’s ‘Missionary Papers’ did much to acquaint the British public with Indian religion, mediated through a lens of strong Christian disapproval, and presented with an eye to soliciting donations. Lastly, speaking for Hinduism, the Bengali anti-reformist Hindu organisation Dharma Sabhā’s bi-weekly newspaper ‘Samācār Candrikā’ holds the line for Indian perspectives in a changing society. While the missionaries deplored the paganism and depravity of India, the amateurs tended to see a once great civilisation, as evidenced by ancient texts, which had degenerated, and was in need of reform. Certain practices, ‘widow burning’ and ‘hook swinging,’ were lightning rods for controversy. Read the book if you want details.
Stated baldly, Pennington’s conclusion is that India had a vital and coherent body of belief and practice that defied British efforts to impose preconceived Western notions upon it. Indians negotiated with the British, treating criticism with seriousness, but their beliefs and practices were not drastically eroded by British efforts to transform them. Pennington, however, does not state anything baldly. Everyone is in favour of nuance, or will usually say so, but this book may test some readers’ patience with it. Pennington is very thorough. He responds to various critics for whom Hinduism is not a meaningful category but a sort of umbrella term for Indian religion, and addresses also the value of the category ‘religion’ to describe the phenomenon which we call Hinduism. This is a short book (less than 200 pages), but a very thoughtful one. It’s a bit off the beaten track for me, but I’m happy to have encountered it.
February 22, 2024
This is a lucid and well-organized account of how colonialism and Christian missionaries influenced the collective identity of Hinduism in the 19th century (and vice versa).
March 25, 2025
Deconstruction of constructionial and postcolonial theory
August 14, 2012
Very book on Hinduism.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews