Kalapani: Zum Streit uber die Zulassigkeit von Seereisen im kolonialzeitlichen Indien.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

Kalapani: Zum Streit uber die Zulassigkeit von Seereisen im kolonialzeitlichen Indien. By SUSMITA ARP. Alt-und Neu-Indische Studien, vol. 52. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 2000. Pp. [iii +]258.

Susmita Arp's doctoral dissertation at the University of Hamburg takes its title from a Bengali play that was first performed in Calcutta in December 1892, at the height of the Sea-Voyage Movement. At a time when Indians were increasingly traveling to Britain after the opening of the Suez Canal, a vigorous public debate took place: were voyages over "the black water" permissible for Hindus or did they necessarily entail a loss of caste? Not only did families--such as Gandhi's--agonize over this issue, public polemics were rife. For associations that took up the issue, the primary concern had less to do with those who departed than with those who returned from voyages overseas. Arp sets about investigating the Sanskrit textual sources to which reference was made, and documents in Sanskrit, Bengali, and English in which opinions were expressed and campaigns launched.

Following a brief introduction, chapter 2 focuses on passages, altogether few, scattered in ancient dharmasastra literature, that condemn sea voyages for highcaste Hindus, brahmans in particular. Reasons for a ban are not explicitly stated, but presumably stemmed from concerns about maintenance of rules of commensality and ritual purity in the confines of a ship. Although pollution attendant to residence abroad is likely to have been a concomitant worry, Arp points to the curious fact that condemnations of travel to foreign countries do not occur in the same contexts.

Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the controversy that arose in the colonial period, and which was intimately bound with rising national sentiment. At the heart of the discussion was less the ritual status of the England-returned than issues of westernization and progress. In this instance as in many others, nationalism and Hindu traditionalism were intertwined.

Arp deals primarily with the controversy that evolved in Bengal. Sources in Sanskrit, Bengali, and English (and a few in other Indian languages, which were not used in this study) are listed in chapter 4 chronologically by language. The reader might have been better served by an integrated chronological list. In chapters 5 and 6 the focus is on texts by pandits, in particular the Sanskrit Samudrayanagamanadosamimamsa (1870) by Taranatha Tarkavacaspati, head of...