John Stevens (University College London)
‘Inspired Prophet’ or ‘Clownish Juggler’? Keshab Chandra Sen and the English Unitarians, 1878-1884
The Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen visited England in 1870. He met with many of the most prominent public figures of the time, he attracted large crowds at his public sermons and addresses, and his activities were reported extensively in the British press. Brahmo ideals had developed through an interaction with Christian, particularly Unitarian, beliefs, and the many Unitarians with whom Keshab was in contact declared his appearance in England to be one of the most significant religious events of the era. At the time of his visit, Keshab spoke warmly of Christianity and expressed his optimism that a British program of ‘liberal reform’ in India would lead to the regeneration of Asia.
The Bengali Brahmo religious and social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen visited England in 1870. He met with many of the most prominent public figures of the time, he attracted large crowds at his public sermons and addresses, and his activities were reported extensively in the British press. Brahmo ideals had developed through an interaction with Christian, particularly Unitarian, beliefs, and the many Unitarians with whom Keshab was in contact declared his appearance in England to be one of the most significant religious events of the era. At the time of his visit, Keshab spoke warmly of Christianity and expressed his optimism that a British program of ‘liberal reform’ in India would lead to the regeneration of Asia.
However, between his return to India in 1870 and his death in 1884, Keshab’s attitudes to the West changed considerably. After a brief experiment which aimed to replicate ‘Western liberal reform’ through ‘Indian’ methods, Keshab shocked the British (and Calcuttan) public when he announced his decision to marry his underage daughter to an Indian Maharajah, in violation of a Marriage Bill Keshab himself had fought hard to make law. The Unitarians, who had regarded Keshab previously as a emblem of modern Indian progressive values, and a shining example of the beneficial effects that Western rule could engender in Indian subjects, were astonished by his decision and struggled to interpret his apparent return to ‘orthodox Hinduism’.
In fact, Keshab’s views were far from ‘orthodox’ - he gradually moved away from both Christianity and Hinduism, and propounded an eclectic universalistic religion, proclaiming himself to be divinely inspired. Western reason, he argued, was insufficient without madness; theology was to be tempered by inspiration and ritual; materialism was to be subordinated to spirituality. The Unitarians remained in contact with Keshab until his death, but became increasingly unsettled by his apparent rejection of the principles of progress through social reform and rational, scientific faith which formed the core of their beliefs.
This paper follows the extraordinary transformations in Keshab’s thought in the last decade of his life and examines the ways in which commentators in England interpreted his changing ideas. An examination of the increasingly fractured relationship between Keshab and the English Unitarians provides a provocative lens through which wider issues concerning the relations between Britons and colonial subjects can be viewed. In their struggle to decide whether Keshab was an ‘inspired prophet’ to be revered, or a ‘clownish juggler’ to be ridiculed, the Unitarians turned to a range of intersecting discourses in order to interpret and order Keshab’s ‘colonial subjectivity’. They were forced to re-examine their own religious beliefs, to set limits on the appropriate relations between the spiritual and material world, and to reconsider the proper balance of power between colonized and colonizer, ‘East’ and ‘West’.
