White Mughals (12 page)

Nevertheless, despite their enthusiasm, few of the Calcutta Sanskritists let their interest in Hinduism stray far beyond the intellectual. Jones himself remained a practising member of the Church of England, albeit one who showed an attachment to the idea of reincarnation: ‘I am no Hindu,’ he wrote, ‘but I hold the doctrines of the Hindus concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end.’
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But there were some others who went further. Technically it is impossible to convert to Hinduism: as much a social system as a religion, to be a Hindu you must be born a Hindu; traditionally there was no ceremony for conversion. No one, however, seems to have told this to ‘Hindoo Stuart’.

Not much is known about this strange Irishman who in the 1780s came out to India while still in his teens; but he seems to have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism, and within a year of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice—which he continued to his death—of walking every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges according to Hindu custom. As his obituary in the
Asiatic Journal
put it: ‘General Stuart had studied the language, manners and customs of the natives of this country with so much enthusiasm, that his intimacy with them, and his toleration of, or rather apparent conformity to their ideas and prejudices, obtained for him the name
Hindoo
Stuart, by which, we believe, he is well known to our readers.’
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In his writings he explicitly refers to himself as a ‘convert’ to Hinduism.
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Stuart’s military contemporaries, even those who were enthusiastic Indophiles themselves, never quite knew what to make of their General. At one point Hindoo Stuart was given command of the largest cavalry cantonment in central India, where he found that his deputy was an old acquaintance of James Kirkpatrick’s, William Linnaeus Gardner, who like Kirkpatrick himself was almost certainly a convert to Islam. Gardner’s letters to a cousin give a flavour of life in this bizarre outpost of the East India Company military establishment commanded by a pair of converts to India’s two rival religions.

The first reference to Hindoo Stuart in his deputy’s letters occurs just as the previous General is leaving and it has been announced that Stuart is to take over. ‘General Watson left us this morning,’ wrote Gardner, ‘and, good and kind as he is, I am happy he is off for the farewell dinners are most appalling events, particularly where a Man’s loyalty is measured by the number of Bottles he can gulp down. General Stuart, his successor, I suppose does not pride himself on the capacity of his stomach or the strength of his head as he regularly performs his
pooja
and avoids the sight of Beef.’

From this point Stuart features regularly in the Gardner correspondence, under the pet name ‘General Pundit’ or ‘Pundit Stuart’. On one occasion Gardner remarks: ‘The General is an odd fish. He wrote to me to come to him at Chukla Ghat where the Hindoos bathe—particularly the women! He has the
Itch
beyond any man I ever knew. On this spot he is going to build a pagoda [temple]! Every Hindu he salutes with Jey Sittaramjee!’ On another occasion Gardner says he is going to have to take command as the General is planning to go off for a week to bathe at the Kumb Mela. On another he reports how a friend had just returned from the weekly horse fair held at Saugor. In the midst of it he found Stuart sitting ‘surrounded by a dozen naked faqueers who, joining their hands over his head, gave him Benediction’.
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Stuart was not just an admirer of the Indian religions, he was also an enthusiastic devotee of Hindu women and their dress sense. In the early years of the nineteenth century he wrote a series of improbable articles in the Calcutta
Telegraph
in which he tried to persuade the European women of the city to adopt the sari, on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary European fashions, and warning that otherwise Englishwomen had no hope of competing with the beauty of the women of India:

If Stuart’s extreme passion for all things Hindu was definitely unusual, showing respect for Hinduism and participating in its rituals was not, and there are frequent references in the sources of the period to Company officials attending pujas, presenting gifts in temples and participating in sacrifices. James Grant, for example, gave a bell to the Durga temple in Benares after the priests there had prayed for his safety when he and his wife and children were caught in a whirlpool in the Ganges immediately opposite the temple.
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About the same time the British celebrated the Treaty of Amiens by marching with military bands to the Temple of Kali.
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Hindu texts confirm this open-minded attitude. At the suggestion of some Brahmins, General Richard Matthews is recorded in a Tamil history of the period as praying to a Hindu deity at a temple in Takkolam in order to be cured of some crippling stomach aches. According to the anonymous author of the history, Matthews was successfully cured of his pains and thereafter gave generously to the temple. The story opens with the General camped near the temple, where his troops hope to make use of the water from the temple spring. But after his ‘pariahs and lower [caste] attendants’ have entered the temple, the water supply which ‘usually fell through the Cows Mouth [in a jet] the size of an elephant’s trunk with great noise’ mysteriously fails:

‘General Matthews,’ adds the author, ‘remained six months in that place; and he used to have the water that fell from the cows mouth brought to him for his own drinking … When the general went away he left his concubine at this place.’
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Not all Company officials shared the enthusiasm of Generals Stuart and Matthews either for India in general, or for Hinduism in particular.

Most powerful of the critics was one of the Company’s Directors, Charles Grant. Grant was among the first of the new breed of Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company boardroom. Writing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, he proposed in 1787 to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.
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Within a few decades the missionaries—initially based at the Danish settlement of Serampore—were beginning fundamentally to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom, as Jones and Hastings believed, but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

The Rev. R. Ainslie was typical of Grant’s missionaries. In
British Idolatry in India,
a sermon printed and disseminated to the Evangelical faithful back home, the excitable Ainslie wrote of his visit to a temple in Orissa: ‘I have visited the Valley of Death!’ he told a hushed congregation. ‘I have seen the Den of Darkness!’ The sermon goes on for nearly twenty pages, describing the ‘sinful and disgusting scenes’ the Rev. Ainslie had witnessed. These ‘sinful scenes’, rather disappointingly, turn out to be nothing more than Company officials assisting the Hindus in their rites. Of the great Juggernaut procession in Orissa, Ainslie comments: ‘The cloths and mantles are furnished for the idol pageantry by British servants. The horrors are unutterable … Do not European gentlemen encourage these ceremonies, and make presents to the idol, and often fall down and worship?’
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One of the most outspoken of the missionaries was the Rev. Alexander Thompson, who after a lifetime of denouncing the evils of Hinduism devoted his retirement to writing a long and intemperate tract entitled
The Government Connection with Idolatry in India.
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According to Thompson, the enthusiasm of Company officials of the late eighteenth century had become one of the main causes of a major Hindu revival. Looking back to the 1790s, he reminds his readers that

The ‘Brahminised’ British—as they came to be known—did not go down before the missionary onslaught without a fight. It was to combat the intolerance of these Evangelicals that Hindoo Stuart anonymously published a pamphlet called
A Vindication of the Hindoos.
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In this text he tried to discourage any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing that, as he put it, ‘on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’. On the subject of Hindu mythology, which the missionaries ridiculed at every turn, Stuart wrote: ‘Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced.’ He also pointed out that the
Vedas
were ‘written at that remote period in which our savage ancestors of the forest were perhaps unconscious of a God; and were, doubtless, strangers to the glorious doctrine of the immortality of the soul, first revealed in Hindostan’.

The reaction that Stuart generated by writing his defence of Hinduism is a measure of how attitudes were beginning to change at the close of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. A full-scale pamphlet war broke out, with furious attacks made on the anonymous ‘Bengal Officer’ who produced the work, denouncing him as an ‘infidel’ and a ‘pagan’.
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Nor was it just missionaries who took against Stuart: his own colleagues were becoming equally scathing. ‘Incredible as it may sound reader,’ wrote one horrified officer, ‘there is at this moment a British general in the Company’s service, who observes all the customs of the Hindoos, makes offerings at their temples, carries about their idols with him, and is accompanied by fakirs who dress his food. He is not treated as a madman, but would not perhaps be misplaced if he had his idols, fakirs, bedas, and shasters, in some corner of Bedlam, removed from its more rational and unfortunate inmates.’
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