S.N.

Balagangadhara, The Heathen in his Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of
Religion. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Manohar, 2005 (1994). xii + 503 pages.

S.N. Balagangadhara, Reconceptualizing India Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2012. 288 pages.

Much of The Heathen and Reconceptualizing are devoted to uncovering how the West
produces knowledge of the world in general and about India in particular. Balagangadhara
argues that it is necessary to dissect how the West experiences the world in order to clear the
ground before the contribution of Indian culture can be assessed. For a few hundred years,
academic contexts have been dominated by questions Europe has asked. This way of asking
questions means that it has not asked questions in other ways. Whether adopted by Western
intellectuals or non-Western intellectuals, who parasitically formulate problems according to
it, that way is tied to Western culture. Only by understanding this can we discover how
Indians could ask different questions, and what contribution Indian culture can make.
Balagangadhara’s work establishes how little we understand Western culture. Speaking a
Western language does not mean we understand what it is.
Balagangadhara’s research programme is centred on founding a comparative science
of cultures. For him, a culture is how a particular social group, as it goes about in the world,
generates a process of learning as well as a process of learning to learn (meta-learning). What
distinguishes and gives shape to a culture are the ways of learning and meta-learning that
dominate and crystallise, structuring its way of going about. These learning processes
dovetail into teaching processes so that they can be transmitted to future generations. The
structuring of such processes stabilizes over a period of centuries, and cultural differences are
tied to these configurations of learning. As The Heathen discusses, for the West, religion
lends structure to its way of going about in the world. Religion generates the dominance of
theoretical knowledge and creates a way of going-about predominantly guided by knowing-
about. For Indian culture, ritual lends identity to its configuration of learning, this culture
imparts practical knowledge, and performative knowledge dominates there.
In Reconceptualizing, Balagangadhara elaborates what it means to be ‘cultural’,
showing how this adjectival use allows us to individuate culture when considering how a
person uses the resources of his socialization. The difference between individuals is a cultural
difference if it entails a specific way of using the resources of socialization. This allows
distinguishing what is a cultural as opposed to a psychological or social difference. In
Reconceptualizing, this is the opening for Balagangadhara to embark on a series of case
studies evaluating how the encounter between Western and Indian culture tells us something
important about both. Produced nearly two decades earlier, The Heathen meditates on the
same question through the problem of religion and, specifically, the claim that religion is a
cultural universal. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara furnishes a major set of insights,
identifying key components of Western culture through his study of religion, and
demonstrating their importance in structuring the Western experience. He persuasively shows
that there is a discontinuity of epistemology between Western and the pagan cultures of
Greece, Rome and India. It is the kind of epistemological discontinuity that depends on very
different configurations of learning.
The key is religion. Religion is an explanatory intelligible account of itself and the
cosmos. As such religion fuses a causal and an intentional account. The reason why the
universe came about is because God intended it to be so. God’s intention is also the reason
why religion came about. Judaism, Christianity and Islam share such a claim, which is why
they are the only instances of religion we have. They are also the best instance of what a
worldview is; it seems that only religions have worldviews. Those who have religion think

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that other cultures have rival religions, whether or not they have religion at all. As the West
explored, colonized and expanded, religions were found elsewhere. This did not depend on
empirical investigation; Westerners found what they already expected to. The dominant
configuration of learning meant that no society was permitted to be without religion, although
different kinds of religion could be admitted. The heathenism Christian theology spoke of
Indians practising was later developed into the different religions of Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Jainism.
If religions were thus ‘constructed’ in India and other parts of the pagan world, what
is the ontological status of such constructions? If members of one culture consistently claim
that another culture has religion, does that give rise to the existence of religions in that
culture? Prior to contact with the Semitic religions, Indian culture possesses neither
explanatory intelligible accounts nor worldviews. The multiplicity and inconsistency of
stories of ‘creation’ in Indian culture is testament to that. While the West must experience
other cultures as having religion, it does not follow that those cultures are endowed with it.
Those who proclaim the existence of Hinduism require that the imagination of one culture
have the effect of constituting religion in another. Many Indians, including those in the
diaspora today, talk as though Hinduism exists and is a religion, but they do not know what
this means to Westerners.
Constructing religions in Asia is merely a part of what Orientalism is. As
Reconceptualizing shows, Orientalism is the structuring in the experience of one culture, the
West, of the Orient, which is the experiential entity. As such, it tells us something about how
the Western culture structures its experience. This is how Balagangadhara offers a re-reading
of Said’s Orientalism. Orientalism does not provide factual descriptions of Oriental societies
and cultures, but reveals how the West brings together certain phenomena, according to how
it structures its experience of the world. Just as Western accounts put together unrelated items
to constitute Hinduism, so it was with other dimensions of knowledge. Differing from Said,
however, Balagangadhara argues that the current practice of social sciences cannot correct
Orientalism as they are tied to Orientalism. It cannot be corrected by adducing factual
evidence because the basis of its structuring enterprise lies elsewhere. Doing better studies of
Hinduism will not disrupt it but merely decorate it.
The structuring process takes us back to Christianity. It lends identity to the Western
culture and acts as its root model of order. The explanatory intelligible account which
religion is acts as the model of learning, teaching that humans are intentional beings and that
beliefs lie behind human practices. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara locates this manoeuvre
in Christianity’s early encounter with the Roman pagan milieu, when it had to defend itself
against pagan criticism. Christianity, it was said, was novel, and not like the ancestral
practices of the pagan traditions, which went back to the ancient past. Christians responded
by claiming that their doctrines were ancient. In so defending themselves, Christians
completely transformed the pagan question regarding tradition. The pagans argued on the
basis of the antiquity of their practices. Christians took a stand on the antiquity of their
doctrines. The reference for religio, which for pagans was traditio, was thereby transformed
by Christians. Belief and doctrine dominates, explains and justifies practices, a way of
knowing about human beings that became rooted as Christianity did.
Religion thus requires practices to be justified, founded and defended by reference to
doctrines. The ancient pagan and the Indian traditions that Christians encountered did not
justify or ground practices in that way. Behind their traditions lay ancestral practices, passed
on from generation to generation, changing in the process. When cultures that have religion
speak of human practices they refer to something different from those which do not have
religion. The Heathen shows that when Christians encountered India, they sought foundations
for Indian practices in their doctrines, and the content of Indian beliefs in their scriptures.

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Different religions sprang out of the earlier framework that had merely told of the heathenism
and idolatry of the Indians. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism became distinct, albeit false
religions. Hinduism became identified as the false religion of India. Brahmins got identified
as the ‘priests’ of this religion. Christian theology had said that all peoples were given the
revelation; the Vedas were the Indian version. Brahmins corrupted it by fooling people into
following idolatrous practices, worshipping the false gods of Hinduism.
Brahmins were also identified as preventing people from converting to Christianity.
The caste system, believed to have been instituted by the Brahmins, served to underline the
corruption of Indian society and culture. As Reconceptualizing indicates, it remains a mystery
what made the caste system into a system and what kept it in place, but yet believed that such
an evil exists, underlining the corrupt social structure of Indian society, and making
obligatory the immoral practice of caste discrimination. From this framework sprang
explanations of Buddhism as a protest against Hinduism and its caste system. The Heathen
shows that this does not square with how caste was presupposed in dialogues attributed to the
Buddha. Still the protest version of Buddhism is the frame according to which it is widely
understood. So with various bhakti movements, viewed as protest movements against
‘Brahmanism’.
The Christian-Orientalist story about non-Western cultures on its own was never
actually convincing on cognitive grounds. The Heathen and Reconceptualizing both show
how Christian accounts of Indian society were resisted by Indian interlocutors who argued,
from within their framework, that it was not necessary for them to accept the Christian story
or to convert. That religion suited Westerners just as the Indian traditions suited Indians. At
some point, the Christian-Orientalist account became acceptable to Indian intellectuals. How
can we explain this? Balagangadhara deploys the concept of ‘colonial consciousness’ in
Reconceptualizing. He shows that whatever else colonialism is, it is also an educational
project, forcing the colonized to accept the Western experience of his culture as his own. The
Western experience is made acceptable to the colonized by force or violence, thereby making
it an immoral project. To the colonized, neither his own experience nor that of the colonizer
is truly accessible. Indian and Western culture are both alien to him. Balagangadhara exhorts
Indians to first accept the fact of being colonized in this sense. Indians have to mount a
critique of colonial consciousness. Simply mimicking the West, as post-colonials might argue
for, is also immoral because it accepts, justifies and celebrates what the colonizer story that
the colonized is untrustworthy.
The asymmetrical relationship between the Indian and Western cultures is concretized
further in Reconceptualizing through a series of studies of contemporary descriptions of
Indian culture. These accounts also refer to dialogues in the context of asymmetry and
violence, exemplified in the psychoanalytical interpretations given in books by American
academics, Courtright on Ganesha and Kripal on Ramakrishna. Balagangadhara explains why
the kind of dialogical moves Courtright and Kripal engage in silence Hindus even as they are
provoked into outrage. He shows that the argumentation involves a certain moves that also
prove why the burden on the Hindus is asymmetrical. In such situations, dialogues may not
be antidotes to violence; they may provoke it.
There is much more in both books which cannot be discussed in a short review. The
Heathen told us how a comparative science of cultures would look like by plotting the
differences between the Western and an Asian culture, the Indian. Reconceptualizing takes
that project further by recasting a number of contemporary problems as part of a larger
comparative science of cultures. The promise of the first is partly fulfilled in the second, but
much more remains to be done. The books under review should constitute a serious
challenge, but they are also an inspiration. There are good grounds for thinking that it is
among Asian scholars that his challenge will primarily be taken up.

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 Prakash Shah
GLOCUL: Centre for Culture and Law, Queen Mary, University of London
London, United Kingdom

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