Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book review

Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal. By BRIAN A. HATCHER. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. xiv + 226. $65.

With this new book, the scholar of neo-Vedanta Brian Hatcher returns to a slim volume of tracts he had discovered when researching his Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (1996, reviewed in this journal, vol. 118 [1998]: 307). It is a rare find. The Sabhyadiger vaktrta, published in Calcutta in 1841, is known thus far from a single copy preserved in the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections of the British Library (title page reproduced on p. 106). It constitutes an important discovery since it collects twenty-one "discourses by members" of the incipient Tattvabodhini Sabha, or "Society for the Propagation of the Truth," delivered from 1 December 1839 to 17 May 1840, more than three years before the Society began publishing its influential journal. It captures the early thoughts of the "small group of earnest young men" first convened by Debendranath Tagore after the death of Rammohan Roy, who went on to play a defining role in the shaping of neo-Vedanta and the Bengal Renaissance (p. 3). The faith they developed for the bhadralok, the educated Bengali middle to upper classes, was "a bourgeois religion of godly worship grounded in the diligent pursuit of worldly success" (p. 8). It still informs, Hatcher argues, our understanding of present-day neo-Hinduism in India and in the Indian diaspora.

Hatcher characterizes his find as an "unpretentious little book" (p. 111). He examines it in a sober manner, acknowledging that it was not influential, since its rarity points to its not having been widely distributed. Yet the immense care and subdued excitement with which he brings this collection of discourses to light is well deserved. What makes the volume doubly fascinating is the range of distinctive voices with which members of the Society already spoke in these early years and how none sought to cloak himself in Rammohan's mantle. In what records the earliest recovered thoughts of the later towering figures of...