Rammohun’s object in the Tuhfat is an ‘enquiry into the truth and falsehood of various religions’ (p. 19), an undertaking which has had him dubbed the founder of a characteristically post-Enlightenment enterprise, the science of comparative religions.[39] Again and again, in impeccably rational-empiricist style, he opposes the dead weight of unreflective habit (fostered by those with a vested interest in the maintenance of traditional institutions) to the pristine endowment (intuition, reason, sensory experience) which affords humanity the ever-present possibility of true belief (‘Oh God give me strong power for making distinction between habit and nature’, p. 9). True belief is attainable ‘without instruction and guidance from anyone simply by keen insight into, and deep observation of, the mysteries of nature’ (p. 8). These capacities are manifest and irrepressible, as evidenced by the fact that people everywhere and at all times acknowledge ‘the existence of One Being’ (p. 1), even though they conceptualise that Being in different ways. Despite this, however, divergent concepts of the attributes and requirements of the One Being (‘an excrescent quality’, p. 1) engender sectarian conflict. In common with the philosophes, the Tuhfat attributes distortions of the truth to priestcraft, the founders of religion being the ‘first class of deceivers’ (p. 8), who exploit the credulity of the common people by claiming miraculous or supernatural corroboration for their missions. Once their followers have accepted illogical or impossible beliefs, the way is open for their tolerance of correspondingly baneful social practices. Pre-eminent among such illogical beliefs is idolatry, which Rammohun excoriates tirelessly. He is also concerned to discredit miracles, noting drily (p. 11) that people are less gullible when it comes to concerns more worldly than religion. Where phenomena defy human understanding (as in the cases of ‘many wonderful inventions of the people of Europe and the dexterity of jugglers’, p. 10) then intuition would prefer to attribute the failure to the limitations of our own understanding than to ‘some impossible agency inconsistent with the law of nature’ (p. 10).
Whether in the Tuhfat or in his later works, Rammohun’s writings only make consistent sense when they are read in relation to a constant set of strategic ends. Throughout his career, his sovereign end was equating monotheism with social benefit. So far as monotheism is concerned, Rammohun’s problems start with the Tuhfat’s founding premises. For it is either the case that acknowledgement of the One Being is universal or that illogical beliefs are producing polytheism and idolatry, but surely not both. Indeed, if it really were the case that monotheism was general, the Tuhfat would not have had a problem to address. Thus the appeal to popular sagacity which underlies the claim that monotheism is generally observable is starkly at odds with the Tuhfat’s contemptuous reference to the ‘Muquallids or common people following that religion [idolatry] by blind imitation’ (p. 5). The point is not, of course, to critique the Tuhfat but to show that its inconsistencies are consistently motivated by Rammohun’s pedagogical ends. Where they conduce to social benefit, for instance, religious beliefs that cannot be substantiated by either observation or reason are nonetheless excused the charge of illogicality. Hence irrational beliefs in souls and after-lives are to be excused in view of the restraining fear that they exercise, whereby people ‘refrain from commission of illegal deeds’ (p. 7). On this basis, even the founders of religion need not all be deceivers (Rammohun, after all, was later to become one himself). It depends on whether or not their teachings conform to Rammohun’s particular version of the truth. This nexus in the Tuhfat’s thinking – the necessary interdependence of dualistic monotheism and social welfare – lies at the heart of the difficulty that Rammohun was trying to overcome in 1804. Associated with the link between monotheism and social welfare is Rammohun’s dismay at the cruelty and corruption occasioned by religious sectarianism, which anticipates the Brahmo Samaj’s linking of theistic universalism with social harmony. Similarly, as noted, Rammohun’s desire to refute prophecy and revelation while privileging particular canonical traditions prefigures his selective invocation of the Vedanta.
The Orientalist narrative was inherently cyclical: a golden age had given way to an era of corruption from which redemption now offered itself. Given the Edenic structuring of this narrative (innocence – fall – redemption) the extent of its distribution through Western discourse is hardly surprising. By the same token, nor is it surprising that it should also structure Islamic discourse. In bringing together questions of reason, revelation, tradition and social welfare within an Edenic framework (founding truth – distortion – return to truth) the Tuhfat was conforming to a pervasive model. These Tuhfat themes continue to preoccupy Rammohun through his post-1815 writings, where they have been held to testify to a Christian and Utilitarian influence. I am not suggesting that the later Rammohun was unaffected by imported ideas – given the extraordinary historical foment in which he found himself, this would be unthinkable. Nonetheless, a reading of the Tuhfat shows that the principles of his anglophone ideology were already formulated before he could have been significantly exposed to such influences. In other words, Rammohun’s endorsement of foreign doctrines arose from their concordance with a position that he had previously developed rather than from their novelty. Moreover, the Tuhfat treats issues and themes which had been extensively discussed in Indian Islamic disputation. Rammohun’s characteristic arguments were recognisably drawn from this indigenous tradition, which had been developing in India for the better part of a millennium.[40]
Quite apart from these considerations, the idea that he could have been familiar with English writings in 1804 is rendered implausible by John Digby’s account of the timing of Rammohun’s acquisition of English. By 1801, he ‘could merely speak it well enough to be understood on the most common topics of discourse, but could not write it with any degree of correctness’.[41] His sustained study of English appears to have commenced as late as 1809, when he became Digby’s dewan (administrative agent) in Rangpur.[42] Rammohun’s own anonymous account clearly dates his acquisition of English as subsequent to the Tuhfat (and, incidentally, affirms the Tuhfat as a precursor to his engagement with Christianity):
...Rammohun Roy; who, although he was born a Brahmin not only renounced idolatry at a very early period of his life, but published at that time a treatise in Arabic and Persian against that system, and no sooner acquired a knowledge of English, than he made his desertion of idol worship known to the Christian world by his English publication.[43]
Rammohun’s association with Fort William College from 1801 to 1804, together with commercial activities that brought him into regular contact with East India Company servants, have been held to have been adequate for imparting a familiarity with Western philosophy and ethics,[44] but his lack of an adequate command of English makes this unlikely. Moreover, Colebrooke’s landmark Essay On The Vedas, from which Rammohun is alleged to have derived his later enthusiasm for the Vedanta, was not published until 1805 – i.e. after the Tuhfat[45] – so the monotheistic and socially benign principles that he was to divine in the Vedanta were certainly not new to him. Indeed, his most intense study of Hinduism would appear to have taken place at the same time as he was mastering English – in Rangpur, after 1809, in association with Hariharananda Tirthaswami.[46] In sum, therefore, the evidence renders any significant Western input into the Tuhfat implausible.
I have previously indicated some of the major lines of transmission whereby, mutatis mutandis, the Hellenistic legacy in Islam ‘was also incorporated into the Mughal theatre of Islamic civilization, where the young Rammohun, whose Brahmin father was a Mughal courtier, came to imbibe it as a central component of his polyglot education’.[47] Of particular note is al-Shahrastani’s Kitab al-milal wa’l-nihal, which was widely read in late eighteenth-century India, together with the teachings of Shah Wali-Allah of Delhi and his son Shah Abdul-Aziz. With more specific reference to Rammohun’s immediate milieu, the Persian Dabistan Mazahib (conference of religions), which was inspired by religious debates that had taken place at the court of the ecumenically-inclined Mughal emperor Akbar, is significant. The Dabistan
was well-known among Islamic scholars in eighteenth-century Calcutta. Maulavi Nazr Ashraf of the Sadr Diwani Adalat, whom Rammohun would have known, edited the first printed edition of the Dabistan.[48] Francis Gladwyn had translated the first chapter into English in 1789.[49] The rest of the work was not translated into English until 1843, ten years after Rammohun’s death (Anthony Troyer, one of the translators of the 1843 edition, had known him personally).[50] The Dabistan is devoted to comparative discussion of religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and others. So far as Rammohun is concerned, the most striking section occurs towards the end of the work – in the third volume – where Akbar’s Ilahi [personal faith] is represented by a philosopher who engages in disputation with, among others, a Muslim, a Christian and a Brahmin. The Dabistan’s philosopher thus took on adversaries almost identical to those whom Rammohun was later to engage.[51]
Whether or not Rammohun was directly indebted to the Dabistan, however, the point at issue is the availability of an indigenous discourse rather than his personal relationship to it.
Where intertextualities are concerned, it is difficult to nail down particular influences from within a complex and evolving world tradition with any degree of confidence. It has been asserted that the major Islamic influence on the Tuhfat was the Mu’tazilite school (or heresy) which flourished in Baghdad and other centres from the eighth to the eleventh centuries of the Christian era.[52] The Mu’tazilites championed the primacy of reason and freedom of the will, maintained the strictest interpretation of monotheism and denied the eternity of the Qur’an. They also insisted that their beliefs conduced to a just social order.[53] The Mu’tazilites would thus seem to present a plausible precedent for Rammohun’s central contentions (though his concept of social justice was at stark variance to theirs). But there is no reason why he should have lifted his ideas from one Islamic source alone. Rather, the premises and concepts which animate the Tuhfat recur throughout Islamic disputation. To illustrate the manifest general influence, it is hard to avoid arbitrariness. I happen to find greater resonance between the writings of al-Razi and the Tuhfat than I do between the Mu’tazilites and Rammohun’s text, but this is not to say that this influence was necessarily formative either. Al-Razi’s attitude to knowledge was consistent with utilitarianism. He valued knowledge in proportion to its practical worth. The three means whereby he ensured the reliability of knowledge were the same as those of the Tuhfat – reason, intuition and authentic tradition. Consistently with this, al-Razi valued treatises on astronomy, logic, geometry and medicine more highly than sacred works, even than the Bible and the Qur’an.[54]
These sentiments not only recall the Tuhfat. They also harmonise with the controversial letter on education that Rammohun was to write to Lord Amherst nearly twenty years after the Tuhfat was published. In this letter, Rammohun recalled the ‘sanguine hopes’ that money earmarked for an educational institution would have been ‘laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful Sciences’. Since a traditional Hindu school had been chosen instead, one like those that already abounded in India to no social advantage, Rammohun complained that ‘This seminary ... can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of no practicable use to the possessors or to society.’[55] These sentiments, which are clearly in accord with the views of al-Razi and others like him, also recall the split that Partha Chatterjee has shown to haunt the articulation of Indian nationalism.[56] For Rammohun would have plenty of time for metaphysics in other contexts. But metaphysics belonged in the inner world of Indian culture and spirituality, a world that was quite separate from the outer world of material advancement that it was proper for Europeans to make available to Indians.
Al-Razi was familiar with Indian science, which he employed in his medical practice. The traffic was not one-way. Further, while al-Razi himself may not have attracted widespread support, his works were extolled by al-Buruni, whose writings on India secured him continuing attention there.[57] The correspondences multiply. Half a millennium after al-Razi, the aforementioned Shah Abdul-Aziz exhibited a split attitude to the British which also anticipated Rammohun’s. As observed, Rammohun was to treat traditional Sanskritic learning as an internal Hindu matter, demanding that the British should not involve themselves with ‘useless’ (in material-scientific terms) metaphysical concerns but should provide a progressive Western education. Similarly, Shah Abdul-Aziz issued a fatwah declaring land occupied by the British to be daru’l harb (infidel territory)[58] whilst simultaneously permitting the study of English and extolling British achievements in arts and industry.[59] This ambivalence prefigures the division in the Indian Muslim elite, embodied in the Deoband and Aligarh schools, which corresponded to the division in Brahmo Samaj ranks that David Kopf has attributed to Rammohun’s own split approach.[60]
In short, one could go on citing correspondences indefinitely. Persistence is ultimately unnecessary, however, since the Tuhfat itself explicitly and abundantly declares its Islamic orientation. The issue is not the Tuhfat’s Islamic credentials, which can hardly be doubted, but its continuity with Rammohun’s anglophone campaign of reform as that was conducted in texts that he published after settling in Calcutta in 1815.