Pushtimargi theology relied on remarkably parallel
epistemologies of exposure that could, perhaps, have been productively
combined. This did not happen. But, as I explore in greater depth elsewhere, by
positioning the self as a key site for the articulation of the colonial public,
the Maharaj Libel Case did anticipate what would later become a major idiom of
colonial politics: the early-twentiethcentury ‘ethical turn’ perhaps most
famously associated with M. K. Gandhi’s writings on ‘self-rule’.5 In
their Gujarati-language writings of the late 1850s and early 1860s, Mulji and
the Maharaj had both positioned the self as the primary object of religious
reform and did so in a way that drew on Hindu, Protestant, and liberal
techniques of self-formation.6 Here, in complementary fashion, I
hope to show that religious reformers were not alone in problematizing the self
at this time; major public institutions were doing much the same. Indeed, it
was only by reshaping selfhood that the colonial ‘public’ could emerge as such.
A Public Spirit
In his much-quoted closing opinion, Puisne Judge Joseph
Arnould pronounced that Mulji had only been doing his ‘duty’ when he exposed
the Maharaj’s misdeeds: ‘A public journalist is a public teacher: the true
function of the press, that by virtue of which it has rightly grown to be one
of the great powers of the modern world—is the function of teaching, elevating
and enlightening those who fall within the range of its influence’ (MLC,
205). Arnould’s remarks might seem commonsensical. Implicitly defining the
public as consisting of ‘those who fall within the range’ of newspapers,
Arnould renders the phrase ‘public journalist’ all but redundant: print and the
public are constitutively interlinked. Here, contrary to standard accounts of
the liberal public sphere as independent of the state, we can see how the
British state worked to define and regulate the Indian public through
institutions like the courts.
Arnould’s claim about print is, of course, culturally and
historically specific, caught up with the extension of the eighteenth century’s
republic of letters from Britain to its overseas colonies, including India.7
To provincialize it, we need only follow it in its travels. Like other terms in
the cultural lexicon of modern English (e.g. religion), public
cannot be translated into South Asian languages without significant remainder.
Apparently aware of this fact, some colonial writers simply
transliterated the word (as pablik) into languages like
Hindi.8 Others sought vernacular equivalents to it. Karsandas Mulji,
our
5
Shruti Kapila,
‘Self, Spencer, and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of
Liberalism, 1890-1920’, Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 4, no. 1
(2007): pp. 109-127.
6
J. Barton Scott, Spiritual
Despots: Modern Hinduism, ‘Priestcraft’, and the Genealogies of Self-Rule
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
7
For an analysis
of one corner of this colonial world, see Michael Warner, The Letters of the
Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). AngloIndian newspapers
situated themselves within the larger world of Enlightenment letters by a
number of means, including literary quotation. The Poona Observer’s
motto, for instance, quotes Daniel Defoe’s claim that the ‘impartial writer’
dedicated to ‘truth’ should ‘expect martyrdom on both sides.’ Poona Observer
(15 Feb. 1862), p.79.
8
See for example
Shriman Munshi Dayaram Sahib Purv Tahasildar, Maharsi
Dayanandcaritamṛt (Meerut: Swami Press, 1904), pp. i-ii; Lala
Lajpat Ray, Maharsi Svami Dayanand Sarasvati aur Unka Kam, trans. Gopaldas
Devguṇ Sharma (New Delhi: Sarvadeshak Arya Pratinidhi Sabha 1967
[1898]), p. 275.
defendant, is a case in point. In an 1858 essay, he
chided Bombay for its ‘Want of
Public Spirit and Independence’.9 This is a title with an implicit
double meaning. Not only, according to Mulji, do some of Bombay’s most
prominent citizens lack the courage to stand up for their views on
controversial topics like widow remarriage. Gujarati even lacks words for what
Mulji positions as distinctively British ‘virtues’ (guṇ).
In translating public into Gujarati, however, Mulji cannot quite close
this gap: to translate is to proliferate shades of meaning.
Mulji is hardly the only person to have identified ‘public
spirit’ as central to the political life of modern Britain; Jürgen Habermas
does much the same.10 But in trying to translate ‘the public’, Mulji
disarticulates two distinct senses of the word that the English liberal
tradition had only provisionally reconciled. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the word public can be used to describe that which is
‘open to observation’ and ‘carried out without concealment’, as well as
anything ‘of or relating to the people as a whole’. Mulji’s Gujarati
‘jaher himat’ (‘public spirit’) has a much greater affinity for the
first of these meanings. Derived from the Arabic verb to appear, the
Urdu adjective zahir denotes the outward, exterior, apparent,
open, or overt.11 While in contemporary Gujarati, it can indicate
that which belongs to all people (the sarvajanak), as in the
phrases for ‘public transit’ (jaher vahan) and ‘public
service’ (jaher seva), etymologically its more fundamental
sense is as the opposite of ‘secret’ (gupt, which is in turn
not entirely equivalent to the Urdu, batin).12
That jaher cannot quite encompass both senses of the English public
is suggested by Mulji’s translation of Judge Arnould’s closing speech: ‘A
public writer [jaher lakhnar] is counted as the people’s
public teacher [lokono jaher shikshak]’.13 In
English, a ‘public teacher’ can, however tautologically, address ‘the public’
(i.e. a set of persons defined by having been so addressed). In 1860s Gujarati,
it would seem, jaher could not designate audience in quite
this way; to be fully public, in the doubled sense of that term, an ‘open
writer’ must be tied to ‘the people’ (lok) explicitly.
The public here is that which sutures
‘the people’ to an attitude of openness, or which brings the people into being
in relation to such an attitude. It is, in short, not just a social formation;
it is also a formation of the subject. Publics imply an orientation of the
self— whether a way of being in public that lays the self open to the
scrutiny of unknown others, or a writing of the self into the outward surface
of a text. To analyze the history of colonial publics, then, we also need to
pursue the history of colonial subjectivity.
In what follows, I pursue two different inquiries related to
this broader set of concerns. On one hand, I distinguish between the two
distinct models of human personhood implied by British libel law and
Pushtimargi devotionalism; on the other, I suggest that both these cultural
formations used parallel tropes of exposure, such that each can be understood
as hailing a subject
9 Karsandas Mulji, Nibandhmaḷa:
Saṃsar Sambandhi Visayo (Mumbai: Union Press, 1870), pp. 95-98.
10 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 93-95.
11
John T. Platts, A
Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974), p. 755.
12
Sarth
Gujarati Jodaṇikosh (Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vidyapiṭh, 2006), p.
348. The standard antonym in Urdu would, of course, be batin.
13
[Karsandas
Mulji], trans., Maharaj Laibal Kes, tatha Eni Sathe Sambandh Sakhnar
Bhaṭia Kanspiresi Kesno Riporṭ (Mumbai: Daftar
Ashakara Chapakana, 1862), p. 176.
constituted by a desire for hidden or veiled
knowledge. While my characterization of both libel law and Pushtimargi devotion
is necessarily schematic, I try to present the cultures that collided in this
1862 courtroom not as reified or timeless entities, but as the mobile products
of ongoing histories; where I schematize, I do so in the hope that the use of
heuristic ideal types can illuminate cultural phenomena, the complexity of
which inevitably exceeds them.
Making the Bombay Public
The history of Bombay is inseparable
from the economic expansion of the British Empire
across South Asia and the Indian Ocean world. It is
also inseparable from the history of religion— of the Hindus, Muslims, Jews,
Jains, Christians, and Parsis who crisscrossed India, Africa, and East and
Southeast Asia to make their city one of the nineteenth century’s most
cosmopolitan. With modern technologies like the steamship and the printing
press enabling a lush proliferation of devotional practices, religion became an
especially productive cultural field during this period, whether politicized in
a Ganesh festival or aestheticized on a cinema screen.14
Bombay changed profoundly during the nineteenth century, and
perhaps never more rapidly than in the 1860s. This was the time of the cotton
bubble, the transition to Crown rule, and the formation of proto-nationalist
groups like Dadabhai Naoroji’s East India Association. Within twenty years,
industrial cotton mills and neo-Gothic buildings constructed largely on infill
would decisively transform the urban landscape. Other forces, meanwhile, were
remaking the city’s social terrain. Bombay had long been comprised of distinct
communities demarcated by caste, language, and religion. Parsis, Bohras,
Bhattias, and other
groups intermixed in street and market, but the center of civic life arguably
laid elsewhere—in the panchayats, mahajans, and other bodies that governed
these ‘encapsulated’ communities.15 Indeed, the word ‘community’ has
been said to obscure the way in which these groups functioned as self-governing
political spaces; it is probably better, as Amrita Shodhan suggests, to term
them ‘caste polities’.16
Sometime after the 1850s, Bombay’s center of civic gravity
shifted away from these polities and toward an emergent public sphere closely
associated with the colonial milieu. There were several reasons for this shift,
ranging from the relatively abstract pressure of the market (which, as a
cultural form, required the reconstitution of communally embedded subjects as
autonomous individuals within an undifferentiated public) to more concrete
changes in urban institutions.17 Bombay’s
‘merchant princes’ or shetias had been collaborating
across community lines for decades; after the 1850s, however, their ‘concerted
action’ against the British (to use Naoroji’s phrase) amplified the
14
Gyan Prakash, Mumbai
Fables (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Nile Green, Bombay
Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Teena Purohit, The
Agha Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2012); Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics and
the Cultures of Hinduism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).
15
J. C. Masselos, Towards
Nationalism: Group Affiliations and the Politics of Public Associations in
NineteenthCentury Western India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974).
16
Amrita Shodhan A
Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law (Calcutta: Samya,
2001). 17 Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market
Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009).
significance of this
collaboration. Just as important was the rising tide of ‘Young Bombay’, the
English-educated ‘intelligentsia’ that advocated for social reform in newly
founded newspapers, libraries, and debating societies.18
Together, these constellated institutions, which existed outside of and in
tension with caste polities, comprised the colonial public.
The Maharaj Libel Case demonstrates in miniature how this
transition occurred. Bania and Bhattia Mahajans and the Pushtimargi Maharajas
had traditionally worked together to resolve conflicts and enforce caste norms.
As these traditional alliances began to erode, caste members increasingly
turned to the colonial courts to adjudicate conflicts. In doing so, however,
they undermined the caste polity’s ability to self-govern. Colonial courts,
after all, tended to interpret the community’s efforts at self-governance as
criminal interference with the law (this was especially clear the Bhattia
Conspiracy Case that preceded the Maharaj Libel trial proper). Eventually, as
Shodhan argues, the shift in civic gravity prompted a transformation in how
caste was understood. What had been ‘recognized as a political space of debate,
dispute, and hierarchy’ was now seen primarily as an ‘attachment’ of an
‘individual’ subject defined by his or her place within a socially
undifferentiated public sphere. Henceforth, caste would function chiefly as a
sociological descriptor or ‘anachronistic identity’ borne by subjects whose
political being derived from elsewhere.19
The press played an important role in this process. Several
kinds of publicity overlapped during Maharaj Libel affair. Some were
spectacular, like the quasi-theatrical spaces of the courtroom and police
office, which at one point was so packed with ‘vast masses of human beings’
that it seemed like the floor might collapse.20 Others were more
intimate, like rumor and gossip. Still others were allegedly supernatural, as
when a Poona medium claimed to have received the judges’ final opinions days
before they were read out in court.21 But as a mass-mediated
scandal, the Maharaj Libel affair was most quintessentially associated with
print—especially Bombay’s major Englishlanguage dailies, the Times of India
and the Bombay Gazette, and the Gujarati-language Rast Goftar ane
Satya Prakash.
As Chief Justice Matthew Sausse observed, if Karsandas Mulji
had sincerely wanted to reform his caste, he would have addressed his
complaints only to its members. By broadcasting his critique to a wider reading
public, Sausse argued, Mulji had renounced his claim to the sort of ‘justifying
occasion’ that would absolve him from the charge of libel. The ‘mode of
publication,’ said Sausse ‘quite exceeded the bounds suited to the occasion’ (MLC,
199). Mulji may well have agreed with this assessment. By at least one account,
he had intended only to introduce reforms from ‘within’ his caste group, but
ultimately ‘found to his dismay that he had wrecked more than he had
constructed’.22 It is possible that he failed to realize that his
message could not be readily separated from its medium: to critique caste
customs from the pages of a newspaper was to alter the city’s social terrain.
It was, in the standard period metaphor, to open or ‘expose’ the caste polity
18 Masselos, Towards Nationalism;
Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and
Communities in Bombay City, 1840-1885 (London: Oxford University Press,
1972). 19 Shodhan Question of Community, pp. 118-19, 125.
20
Bombay Gazette (24 Sept. 1861), p. 914; (25 Oct.
1861), p. 1023.
21
Bombay Gazette (12 May 1862), pp. 449-450.
22
N. A. Thoothi, The
Vaishnavas of Gujarat (London: Longmans, 1935), p. 97.
to the prying eyes of the reading public (MLC,
205).
This rhetoric of ‘exposure’ had ample precedent. Consider
Bombay Supreme Court Justice Erskine Perry’s comment of the early 1850s:
in courts of justice the veil which
shrouds the privacy of Oriental life is necessarily drawn aside, the strong
ties which at other times bind together caste and family in pursuit of a common
object are loosened under the pressure of stronger individual interests… [such
that] the motives, reasonings, and actions of the native population of India
are displayed in broad light.23
In annexing ‘Oriental life’ to the imperial
information order, in other words, the act of unveiling also alters the
subjectivities of those whom it opens to public scrutiny. The bonds of caste
and tradition dissolve to reveal self-interested, atomized individuals. Like
other such ‘subtraction stories’, this tale naturalizes the liberal individual
by implying that individuality was there all along, underlying the constraints
of tradition. It thus draws attention away from the modern social imaginary
that forms this individual—an imaginary that consists, among other things, of
the very notion of a public sphere defined by an epistemology of exposure.24
Press coverage of the Maharaj Libel
Case relied heavily on such rhetoric. The Times of India
was perhaps most expansive:
Through a long night of superstition
and darkness, vile creatures like this Maharaj have been able to make their
dens of vice and debauchery seem to their spell-bound followers to be the holy
temples of God. But as soon as the morning light comes, the place is found in
full corruption and uncleanness; magical spells lose all effect; and all men of
a better sort rise disgusted, and at any cost break loose from such a haunt.25
The press, we are to surmise, is a force for
disenchantment, freeing humanity from magicians whose spells cannot withstand
the light of truth. The Bombay Gazette likewise condemned the Maharajas’
‘hidden works of darkness’ and the ‘disgusting and abominable things’ that they
did ‘in secret’.26 So did the reformist Rast Goftar and Satya
Prakash (amalgamated from the longstanding Parsi newspaper and Mulji’s
Hindu reform paper). After the trial concluded, it reveled in its titular
metaphor, noting that ‘in the end, the truth will out. In the end, there is the
light of truth’.27 Or, as it observed some weeks later, ‘Like the
light of the sun, the light of the Maharaj’s immorality has reached from one
end of the earth to the other’.28
23
Erskine Perry, Cases
Illustrative of Oriental Life and the Application of English Law to India,
Decided in H. M. Supreme Court at Bombay (London: S. Sweet, 1853), iv.
24
Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007); Warner, Letters
of the Republic, p. 82. I analyze the epistemology of exposure in greater
depth in ‘Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair’, History
of Religions Vol. 49, no. 2 (2009): pp. 172- 196.
25
Times of India (2 May 1862), quoted in Karsandas
Mulji, History of the Sect of Maharajas, or Vallabhacharyas in Western India
(London: Trübner & Co, 1865), p. 134.
26
Bombay Gazette (23 Apr. 1862), p. 382.
27
Rast Goftar
and Satya Prakash
(27 Apr. 1862), p. 199. 28 Rast Goftar and Satya Prakash (18 May 1862),
p. 237.
During the affair, these public exposures returned
insistently to a single object: the body of the Maharaj. For both judges, the
case hinged on the ‘material fact’ of Jadunathji’s alleged case of the ‘French
pox’. Sausse concluded that the two doctors (one of whom was leading Bombay
citizen Bhau Daji) were telling the truth. Not only had they rigorously kept
themselves to giving medical evidence; their testimony had been corroborated by
Lakhmidas Khimji, ‘one of the leading men in the sect of Vallabhacharyas in
Bombay’. Weighing the conflicting evidence, Sausse ruled against the Maharaj.
Reasoning that he must have allowed ‘personal interests’ to overcome his
‘respect for truth’, Sausse dismissed his entire testimony as compromised (MLC,
203). Arnould followed the senior judge’s lead. Thus did the truth of the trial
come to rest on a question of sexuality: Jadunathji’s body divulged secrets
that, once fixed by official forms of knowledge, determined how the public
would understand Pushtimargi religion.
Indeed, the precise nature of the Maharaj’s flesh was
arguably the question at the center of the trial. Was this man a god? A few
years earlier, the Rast Goftar (translating the Bombay Guardian)
had observed that if ‘these divine avatar men enter a court of justice to give
their testimony they will become unholy and their high status will be much
lessened’.29 Not surprisingly, then, Jadunathji’s presence in court
during the Maharaj Libel Case caused something of a sensation. When he entered
the courtroom, heads craned, people stood, and a general whisper of ‘he is
coming’ pulsed through the crowd (MLC, 166). After his arrival, his
physical being remained at issue. While in the witness box, Jadunathji fretted
that someone might brush up against him from behind. Thomas Anstey, the pleader
for the defence, replied harshly: ‘Why should you not be touched? ….You are not
a God. As for me I won’t touch you with a pair of tongs’ (ibid., 173).
By at least one measure, the Rast Goftar’s prediction
that the Maharaj’s status would be diminished was necessarily fulfilled.
Legally, this was not a case of blasphemy, or offence against religion; it was
a case of alleged libel. Jadunathji had sued to protect his ‘private property
of character’ (MLC, 198). In doing so, he presented himself to the court
as an ordinary individual and not a divine incarnation of Krishna. His flesh
was thus legally transformed: no longer sacred, it was now a form of private property
safeguarded by the British state and regulated through state-sanctioned truth
procedures like those of scientific medicine.
Genealogies of Libel Law
One of several overlapping categories that modern states have
used to regulate the public, libel also implies a historically and culturally
specific vision of what it is to be a self. Libel law hinges on the notion of
‘reputation’. This is a notion that, as legal theorist Robert Post explains,
establishes ‘an image of how people are tied together, or should be tied
together, in a social setting,’ as well as ‘an implicit theory of the
relationship between the private and public aspects of the self’.30
Two distinct and mutually contradictory concepts of reputation are pertinent
here: property and honour. As property, reputation is understood
as a form of intangible wealth with implicit monetary value. In the words of
one Anglo-Indian legal manual, ‘[a] man’s reputation is his property and, if
possible, more valuable than other property. No mere poetic fancy suggested the
truth that a good name is
29
Rast Goftar (11 Sept. 1859), p. 453.
30
Robert C. Post,
‘The Social Foundations of Defamation Law: Reputation and the Constitution’, in
California Law Review, Vol. 74, no. 3 (May 1986), pp. 691-742.
rather to be chosen than great riches’.31
Reputation can be cashed in either in everyday financial transactions (a good
reputation translates into creditworthiness) or, in exceptional circumstances,
through the award of pecuniary damages by a court. It is also the product of
labor: an honest merchant or a skilled carpenter builds his reputation through
hard work, and, if he loses it, he can in theory build it again. Not so
reputation-as-honour. Once lost, it cannot be remade. Whereas the
property-concept prevails in market-based industrial societies, the
honour-concept characterizes ‘deference societies’ like that of early modern
England. In such societies, a person does not produce his own honour; he claims
honour based upon the status with which his social role is invested, thus
blurring the distinction between private and public selfhood. The preservation
of honour, relatedly, is essential to the maintenance of society as a whole and
not just the individuals who comprise it.32
The tension between Post’s two concepts can be seen
concretely in the history of English defamation law (i.e. the law of libel, or
written defamation, and slander, its oral counterpart). Although key aspects of
English libel law have been said to date to the ancient Mediterranean world,
and even to the dawn of writing itself, its most important principles are of
more recent derivation. In particular, the early nineteenth century seems to
have seen a decided shift away from an honour-based concept of reputation to a
property-based concept. Here, I will sketch this shift in what is probably too
stark a manner. In actuality, early modern legal forms persisted into the
nineteenth century, interlayering with newer forms in complex ways.
Slander against the ‘leading men’ of England had been
considered a crime since the thirteenth century and was a means of protecting a
social order based on ‘personal bonds of honour and loyalty’.33 By
the eighteenth century, this offence was termed ‘seditious libel’. Notably, it
refused truth as a defense: a true statement against a highborn man could be
even more damaging to the social order than a false one.34 It was
not until the early nineteenth century that libel law, instead of restricting
publication to protect the powerful, was reconceived as a means of protecting
private persons. As late as 1818, Francis Holt’s Law of Libel included
only a single chapter on libel against private persons, devoting space instead
to libel against the King’s Government (which warrants two chapters), the Two
Houses of Parliament, the Courts of Justice, the Law of Nations, Morality and
the Law of Nature, and the Christian Religion (the line separating libel and
blasphemy, or ‘libel against religion’, remained thin).35 The flurry
of treatises on libel that appeared in the 1810s seem to indicate that the
concept was changing and in need of recodification at this time, however. As an
1815 review of four such books (including Holt’s) quipped: ‘The law of libel!
There’s no such thing. After an attentive perusal of all four of the above
treatises, we are still constrained to say that the law of libel is
rather a circumlocution-saving phrase than a description of an entity’.36
31
Ratanlal
Ranchhoddas and Dhirajlal Keshavlal Thakore, The English and Indian Law of
Torts, (Bombay: Bombay Law Reporter Private Ltd, 1965 [1897]), pp. 159,
164-65.
32
Post, ‘Social
Foundations’, pp. 700-702
33
Norman L.
Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of
Libel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 4.
34
Post, ‘Social
Foundations’, p. 705.
35
Ibid., p. 702; Francis Ludlow Holt, The
Law of Libel (New York: Stephen Gould, 1818 [London, 1812]).
36
A Review of
the Late Publication on Libel of Messrs. George, Holt, Starkie, & Jones, by
a Barrister of the Inner Temple (London: Reed and Hunter, 1815), pp. 7-8.
The reviewer’s specific complaint is that the
treatises all based their conception of libel on the preservation of public
peace rather than on the standard of truth (i.e. the honour-concept, which
preserves the social order at all costs, rather than the property-concept,
which strives to correctly calibrate earned and actual reputation).
Libel law was the topic of lively, if sporadic, debate in
Parliament from the 1810s through the 1840s, culminating in the enactment of
the Libel Act of 1843. Reformers were puzzled by what had come to seem like
inconsistencies in defamation law. They were especially keen to align criminal
defamation law with the body of civil law that had grown up alongside it to
regulate the primarily oral defamation of merchants. For civil defamation
suits, truth was an ‘absolute justification’, as the law could offer no recompense
to a person who claimed a reputation he did not deserve.37 Reformers
wanted to eliminate the distinction between libel and slander (itself only
codified in 1812); to introduce the standard of truth into criminal libel; and
to temper the absoluteness of truth as justification in civil suits by
penalizing ‘malicious’ publications not in the public interest. In various
iterations, these reforms were included in bills proposed between 1816 and
1843, when they were enacted into law—although in a much-reduced form that, as
historian Paul Mitchell suggests, was a mere ‘shadow’ of the reforms proposed.
As Mitchell goes on to argue, a fully reformed libel law would become a reality
only in colonial contexts, as in New South Wales in 1847, where new laws could
take hold more readily than they could in London.38
Traces of this history can be seen in the 1860 Indian Penal
Code, Chapter 21 of which defines defamation as consisting ‘in the injury
offered to reputation, not in any breach of the peace or other consequence that
may result from it’. Its ‘essence’ is the emotional ‘pain’ it produces.39
This relatively narrow definition advances the property-concept over the
honour-concept, while also excluding previously common ideas like that of
‘libel against religion’. Other reformist proposals are also in evidence: the
Code erases the distinction between libel and slander; allows for justification
in cases where defamatory claims are both true and their publication in the
public good; and offers protection to those expressing ‘any opinion whatever’
about ‘a public servant in the discharge of his public functions’ (thus starkly
inverting the older concept of ‘seditious libel’).40
As a civil suit, the Maharaj Libel Case was tried under
common law and not the newly enacted Indian Penal Code. Even so, the Code was
part of the broader cultural field that shaped the trial. So
37
Rosenberg, Protecting
the Best Men, pp. 5-6; Peter Frederick Carter-Ruck, Libel and Slander
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), pp. 37-48.
38
Paul Mitchell,
‘The Foundations of Australian Defamation Law’, in Sydney Law Review,
Vol. 28 (2006), pp. 477-504.
39
W. Morgan and A.
J. MacPherson, The Indian Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860), with Notes
(Calcutta: G. C. Hay & Co, 1861), pp. 439-440. Henceforth cited in text as IPC.
40
The section of
Macaulay’s draft penal code of 1837 that handled sedition was omitted from the
1860 Indian Penal Code, allegedly ‘by some unaccountable mistake’. This
omission was corrected in 1870 with the addition of section 124-A. See Walter
Donagh, The History and Law of Sedition and Cognate Offences (Calcutta:
Thacker, Spin, & Co., 1911), p. 1.; W. R. Hamilton, The Indian Penal
Code with Commentary (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1895), pp.
132-142. For speculation as to the reasons for the omission of the sedition
statute, see Aravind Ganachari, Nationalism and Social Reform in Colonial
Situation (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2005), pp. 54-57. For a further
discussion of the history of British colonial libel law, see Mitra Sharafi, Law
and Identity in Colonial South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), pp. 276-285.
were the many guides to the tort of defamation that
had been published in the preceding decades, such as George Cooke’s Treatise
on the Law of Defamation (1844) and C. G. Addison’s Wrongs and their
Remedies (1860) (MLC, 76, 60). A full history of libel law in
colonial India has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be written. But given
the range of cases during the 1860s alone that were tried or publicized under
this rubric (including the Lucknow Libel Case [1860], the Nil Darpan Case
[1861], and the Parsi Priest Defamation Case [1870]), as well as the appearance
of legal guides (such as Jehangeer Merwanjee’s Gujarati manual of Libel and
Slander, apparently published on the heels of the Maharaj affair), it would
seem that in India, as in Britain, ‘libel’ remained a relatively mobile
concept, the boundaries of which were still in the process of being defined.41
For our purposes, we might describe libel as information out
of place: it puts into print what should not be there. Libel law, then, tries
to make information stay put, ordering it so as to safeguard privacy. But
because libel necessarily links the private self to the law and, with it, the
public domain, it ensures that the private can never be entirely excluded from
public discourse. Rather, the private self is always at risk of being dragged
into public to prove itself before the ‘tribunal’ of juridical and popular
opinion (MLC, 205, 209). If sexuality is one paradigmatic site whereby
the potential for the private to become scandalously public becomes actualized,
religion is another. To see how, we return to the Maharaj Libel Case—rejoining
the trial in medias res.
Unbecoming Krishna
‘By God, I mean Krishna’. Jumnadas Sevaklal answered tersely,
his pinched reply indicating irritation with Thomas Anstey’s interrogation of
his beliefs. The packed audience looked on as Sevaklal was threatened with a
fine of one hundred rupees for evading cross-examination. Under pressure, he
had little choice but to elaborate on his previous claim: ‘In my opinion, the
Maharaj is a representative of Krishna’. Anstey, not content to let the matter
rest here, pushed further:
Mr. Anstey: Do some Banias believe
the Maharaj to be a God?
Witness: We
consider him to be our gooroo.
Sir. M. Sausse: Tell witness if he
does not answer the question, he will be sent to jail.
Witness: What is the precise
question? (Interpreter explains) Some consider the Maharaj a god in the shape
of gooroo.
Mr. Anstey: Is Gooroo a God?
Witness: Gooroo
is gooroo.
Sir M. Sausse: Tell him if he does
not answer the question, most indubitably he will go to jail.
Sir Joseph Arnould: Tell him he is
asked what others believe, not as to his own belief.
Witness: I don’t know if others
believe him as God; I consider him simply a gooroo. (MLC, 134-36)
Here, the semiotics of devotion strain under the
weight of the colonial legal apparatus. Legal institutions were far from
neutral or empty sets in which public dramas could unfold. The court was a
technology of subjectivation, or rather a set of such technologies—here, the
witness stand functions as a sort of confessional booth, which imposes certain
unstated rules on the person within it.
41 Action for Libel (Lucknow:
Newul Kishore Press, 1860); Parsee Priest Defamation Case (Bombay:
Dorabjee Eduljee Tata, 1870); The History of the Nil Darpan, (Calcutta:
n.p., 1861); Geoffrey Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion, and Proto-Nationalism:
James Long of Bengal, 1814-87 (New York: Routledge, 2013 [1999]).
Merwanjee’s Libel and Slander is mentioned in the Bombay Gazette
(1 May 1862), p. 412.
To find voice at court, bhakti (roughly, devotional Hinduism)
had to translate itself into the language of propositional belief, reducing the
rich relational network of lived religion into dry theological statements like
‘Guru is God’. The juridical subject of belief necessarily precedes the
proposition that he assents to; otherwise, he would not have the legal standing
to grant his assent. Where the Pushtimarg had prized the ideal of
‘self-surrender’ (atmanivedan), the British court reduces religion to a
set of beliefs that a sovereign subject can ‘have’, thus replacing a faith that
unravels the self in the face of the other with a faith that presumes that
integrity of the believing subject.
We might say that during the Maharaj Libel Case, the faith
binding guru and devotee was rhetorically severed. Half of the relational bond
was delivered to the devotees as ‘belief’. The other half was given to the guru
as his ‘reputation’. What had served as a mode of relationship with a potential
to erode the boundaries of the self is, in both cases, rendered a form of
property that reinforces the sense of discrete personhood. By abstracting the
complex web of an individual’s social and professional relationships into a
discrete object, reputation reifies a community’s fluid perceptions as a form
of property. In a sense, it inverts the process whereby a subject is hailed by
her social order and offered a fixed position within it: one ‘has’ a
reputation, rather than being had by it. In this context, Jumnadas Sevaklal’s
plaintive refrain (‘Gooroo is gooroo’) acquires an almost deictic force,
pointing toward Jadunathji in his social immediacy as though to underscore the
bond between teacher and disciple.
The property concept of reputation was not, of course, alien
to India. A version of it had long been central to Gujarati merchant society,
where ‘the maintenance and improvement of reputation’ (abru) was a
matter with serious financial consequences.42 But it was not a
merchant’s reputation that was on trial during the Maharaj Libel Case. Instead,
the court found itself faced with the question of whether a ‘spiritual’ man
like the Maharaj could be defamed in his capacity as a ‘private’ citizen. Is a
priest legally equivalent to members of other, secular professions such as a
‘tradesman’ (MLC, 75)? Did the Maharaj even qualify as a ‘priest’?
What, after all, is the nature of ‘spiritual’ personhood?
The trial opened with an argument about whether libel law
could be applied in this case. Thomas Anstey, the pleader for the defence,
pointed out that in Britain a defamed ‘ecclesiastic’ would file suit in the
‘Courts Christian’ and not the ‘Court of Common Law’. In Bombay Presidency,
which had no such courts, there was consequently ‘no law of defamation of a
spiritual man’ (MLC, 8-9). Lyttelton Bayley, arguing for the
prosecution, responded that ‘this was a libel against the plaintiff not in his
spiritual capacity, but in his private character’ (ibid., 16). Chief Justice
Sausse concurred: it ‘was a libel against the plaintiff in his individual
capacity, segregated from his character of priest’ (19). While the arguments
made by both attorneys shifted somewhat during the trial (Bayley later claimed
that the plaintiff had been libeled ‘in his double capacity as man and as
Maharaj’ [167]), this basic logic held. There were two persons in court,
analytically ‘segregated’ from one another: the ‘spiritual’ Maharaj, and the
‘private’ Jadunath.
The court conceded that Mulji was well within his rights to
disparage the first of these persons. Religion, all parties seemed to agree,
must remain open to criticism. If calling a religious sect heretical were
deemed illegal, argued Anstey, then every Protestant and Catholic journal in
England and every philosopher from John Locke forward should be prosecuted, and
‘the whole body
42 Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and
Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City,
1852-1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 38, 56-58.
of missionaries from the East to the West, who preach
against the immorality of heathenism… would be brought up for libel every day!’
(MLC, 19, 154-56). Judge Arnould added the biblical prophets and church
fathers to this list of potential libelers (ibid., 428). In an earlier era of
British law, ‘libel against religion’ was harshly censured. As one early
nineteenth-century writer reflected (in discussing a famous early modern case
that centered on the claim that ‘Christ is a whoremaster, and religion is a cheat’),
‘libels against religion… may with equal propriety be said to be libels against
the public at large’.43 They dissolve the moral foundation of
society and so endanger the peace to a unique degree.
The cast of characters assembled in the Bombay Supreme Court
thought differently. For them, the ‘public at large’ cohered around a principle
other than religion. As has often been observed, the government of British
India was generally more secular than its metropolitan counterpart. The law of
libel suggests one way in which this was the case. In place of a blasphemy
statute (i.e. ‘libel against religion’), the Indian Penal Code (Section 298)
criminalizes religious offensive publications that wound ‘the religious feelings
of any person’. Here,
protection of religion as a collective cultural form that founds and maintains
‘the public at large’ is replaced by the protection of the individual ‘person’,
whom the statute presents as preceding her religion. Community, of course, was
never far behind. But the wording of the statute does indicate an important
shift in how religion was understood under secular law. Criticism of religion
per se was now protected, in that it was deemed unthreatening to social order;
criticism of the beliefs and feelings of private persons was carefully managed,
implying that the social order was now anchored in the sanctity of the liberal
individual. 44
Bayley’s response to Anstey’s defence of the right to
criticize religion is revealing in this regard. If the ‘doctrine’ implied by
denying the Maharaj the right to sue for libel were allowed, he argued, then
‘no Brahmin in the land would be safe; he could be slandered and libeled with
impunity, and redress denied him because he happened to be a spiritual person’
(MLC, 16). Here, ‘Brahmin’ is effectively redefined as an office
distinct from the person who ‘happens’ to holds it. The check placed upon the
criticism of religion derives from the legal distinction between a brahman’s
‘public’ capacity as priest and his ‘private’ character as an ordinary person:
the priest can be criticized with impunity; the private person cannot. This
distinction, of course, ignores how the ritual economy of caste Hinduism writes
status into the flesh. If a brahman has a private self that is analytically
distinct from and more fundamental to him than his spiritual personhood, then
we are dealing with something other than the traditional world of caste.
‘Spiritual personhood’ precedes the self; it does not follow from it.
Something similar holds for the Pushtimargi Maharajas, who
were traditionally held to be incarnations of Krishna. A god cannot be libeled
(at least in the modern sense of the term) because a god has no private self.
To defame a god is to defame all that he represents (e.g. ‘the public at
large’), but not him personally. By turning ‘spiritual personhood’ into a mere
office, the property-concept of libel prompted an important shift in the legal
regulation of religion in that the sanctity of the individual came to replace
the sanctity of religion per se as the primary object of legal protection. As
long as no ‘person’ was offended or libeled, one could criticize religion at
will.
43
Review of the
Late Publication, p.
27.
44
For further
consideration of Sections 298 and 295-A, see J. Barton Scott, ‘Aryas Unbound:
Print Hinduism and the Cultural Regulation of Religious Offence,’ Comparative
Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 35, no. 2 (2015):
forthcoming.
Manifestly Divine
The Pushtimarg, or the ‘Way of Grace’, had originated with
Shri Vallabhacharya (1479-1530), one of the most important early modern
exemplars of bhakti. Born to Telugu brahmans, he traveled widely throughout the
subcontinent, singing the praises of Krishna and initiating disciples into his sampradaya.
In his substantial corpus of written works in Sanskrit and Braj Bhasha, he
developed the philosophical system of shuddhadvaita (pure non-dualism),
which modified the earlier monism of Shankaracharya by eliminating the notion
of maya. Additionally, Vallabhacharya married and had two sons, Gopinath
(1512-1542) and Vitthalnath (1515-1585)—a fact of decisive importance for his sampradaya,
which does not prize celibacy like many other Hindu lineages. When Vallabha
died, his spiritual authority passed to these two heirs. Vitthalnath assumed
greater authority, and his seven sons (Vallabha’s grandsons) established
the ‘Seven Houses’ that remain the sect’s major structuring institution.
Control of the houses is inherited via primogeniture, although all of
Vallabha’s descendants through the male line are typically termed ‘Maharajas’.
From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, these religious leaders
pursued the patronage of commercial and political elites in Rajasthan, Gujarat,
and elsewhere in northern and western India— growing wealthy in the process.45
Pushtimargis consider both Vallabha and his son Vitthalnath
to have been incarnations of Krishna. Their immediate followers, meanwhile, are
considered incarnations of the gopis (the cowherding girls who were
Krishna’s consorts). When these first two generations of Pushtimargi devotees
died, they resumed their divine play in heaven.46 What happened next
is controversial. As Jadunathji Brizratanji insisted during the Maharaj Libel
Case, ‘Vallabhacharya and his son Gosaijee [Vitthalnath] are regarded as incarnations
of God but not so the sons of Gosaijee’ (MLC, 170). Given the quantity
of contradictory testimony, however, it seems likely that Jadunathji was
misrepresenting popular belief in his community; many Banias and Bhattias in
the 1850s and 60s do seem to have considered these later Maharajas to be divine.
Gopalldas Mahadevdass, the head of the Bania Mahajun, probably summarized the
situation fairly accurately when he explained to the court that ‘[s]ome people
do say that they are gods, while some deny that they are’ (ibid., 62).
The simple equation ‘Guru is God’, however, is too
reductive a summary of what is going on here. The Maharaj was not divine in and
of himself; he was divine insofar as he represented Krishna. To develop a more
nuanced picture of the Pushtimarg’s semiotics of devotion, we can turn to the
religious practices described during the trial. By Mahadevdass’s account, the
Maharajas worship the ‘idols’, while ordinary men and women worship the
Maharajas:
They prostrate themselves at the
Maharaj’s feet. By worshipping the Maharaj, I understand applying to him scent
and stuff, and offering him fruits and flowers, in the same way as the idols
are worshipped. When we fall down before the Maharaj, he blesses us. One mode
of worshipping the idol is by swinging it, and our women worship the Maharaj by
swinging him. (MLC, 63)
45
Thoothi, Vaishnavas
of Gujarat, pp. 92-98; Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhacarya
(Faridabad: Thomson Press, 1976); Shandip Saha, ‘Creating a Community of Grace:
A History of the Pushti Marga in Northern and Western India, 1479-1905’ (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Ottawa, 2004), pp. 107-127. A series of recent legal
disputes in Rajasthan over whether Pushtimargi temples are ‘public’ or
‘private’ (nij) entities would provide an interesting topic for further
research. See Peter Bennett, The Path of Grace: Social Organization and
Temple Worship in a Vaishnava Sect (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing
Corporation, 1993), pp. 83, 172-75.
46
Barz, Bhakti
Sect, pp. 21, 38.
Additionally, devotees eat the ‘remnants’ of the
Maharaj’s food and paan, as well as drinking ‘the water rinsed and rung’
from his dhoti (termed charanamrit, or ‘nectar of the feet’). Other
witnesses gave similar testimony.
The question remains as to how one should read such
practices. Was the Maharaj an index, an icon, or a symbol of the divine? One
view would opt for the index: as an incarnation, the Maharaj has a direct
physical relationship to Krishna. This indexical logic, moreover, permeates
many of the religious practices discussed during the Maharaj Libel scandal, as
Christopher Pinney has suggested: one eats the dust from the guru’s feet
because that dust is a physical trace of him; ingestion of it incorporates the
guru into the self.47 Here, the guru is semiotically porous,
bleeding out into his followers via the same kind of indexical connection that
links him to Krishna.
Another view would align the guru with the icon (i.e. the
image that provides a likeness of Krishna). As the Rast Goftar and Satya
Prakash explained: ‘The Maharajas serve the image [murti], and
devotees cannot serve the image, and so instead [tene badale] they serve
the Maharaj’, as by rocking him in a swing or offering him flowers and fruit
just he does to the murti.48 The use of the word murti
here is tendentious. Within the Pushtimarg, as Richard Barz explains, the
divine image is never referred to as a murti (representation) but rather
as a svarup (the ‘entity itself, not a likeness’).49
Devotional images are the self-manifestations of Krishna; like avatars, they
participate indexically in the divine. Thus, while it might seem that there is
an arbitrary exchange (badal) or substitution between two independent
entities, in the mode of the symbol, what we actually see here are two entities
that index a common referent; murti and avatar are two types of spark
issuing from a single fire.
There are good metaphysical reasons for this. The phenomenal
world, according to Vallabhacharya, comes to exist when Brahman (or the
Ultimate) ‘conceals part of himself’. This is the process that Vallabha calls tirobhava
(‘concealment, act of hiding, becoming invisible’; ‘capability of not becoming
an object of experience’). Brahman consists of three parts: being,
consciousness, and bliss (sat, cit, and ananda). In the
physical world, only being is in its ‘manifest’ or ‘apparent’ (avirbhuta)
condition; in the soul (jiva), both being and consciousness are
manifest. The problem of samsara, then, is a problem of wrong understanding:
the soul understands that it exists, but not that it is part of
Brahman-Krishna. Once it attains this understanding, it achieves bliss (or, rather,
its innate bliss becomes manifest).50 Shuddhadvaitic metaphysics, it
would seem, precludes a strict ontological distinction between sign and
referent: insofar as all beings participate in BrahmanKrishna, all beings bear
an indexical relationship to one another. As a 1910 primer on Pushtimargi
principles succinctly puts it, ‘Nothing is distinct from the Ultimate Being [parabrahm]’.51
To say that the Maharaj is God, then, is simply to state the obvious: all
entities are God,
47
Christopher
Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library,
2008), pp. 114-117.
48
Rast Goftar
and Satya Prakash
(23 Feb 1862), p. 91.
49
Barz, Bhakti
Sect, p. 9
50
Barz, Bhakti
Sect, pp. 63-71; Mrudula Marfatia, The Philosophy of Vallabhacharya
(Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), pp. 48-54.
51
Patvari
Raṇchoddas Vandravandas, Pushṭimargiya Siddhant athava
Shuddhadvaitna Muḷtattva, vol. 1 (Ahmedabad: Gujarat Printing Press,
1910), p. 101.
whether they realize it or not.52 Such
subtleties were, of course, lost on the Bombay Supreme Court. Even so, by
reading the Pushtimarg to highlight the doctrine of ‘concealment’ (tirobhava),
we discover a surprising resonance between its theology and colonial law: both
were preoccupied with what we might, by creatively stretching our translations,
term publicity. If the public (jaher) is that which is
‘outward’ or ‘apparent’, then the public is very much analogous to the
‘manifest’ (avirbhuta) aspects of the Pushtimargi divine.
Both, in fact, take the ‘secret’ (gupt) as their primary
antonym.53 If the Maharaj is a manifestation of Krishna, a making
visible of the divine in the world, then he is, by definition, always already jaher.
I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Advaitic
metaphysics and the colonial public’s epistemology of exposure are somehow the
same. They aren’t. But by aligning them in this way we can begin to develop an
alternative narrative that presents religion as plying something other than (in
the words of the Bombay Gazette and Times of India) ‘darkness’.
Like colonial print culture, the Pushtimarg organizes a particular distribution
of the visible that likewise implies particular notions about the nature of human
personhood. As Sandria Freitag has counseled, in constructing a genealogy of
the public in colonial South Asia, we need to look for the ‘indigenous bases
onto which western European notions of “the public” could have been grafted’.54
Pushtimargi metaphysics appears as one such base, especially when juxtaposed to
Karsandas Mulji’s translation of public as jaher.
Conclusion
After the trial, Jadunathji Brizratanji and several other
Maharajas quickly left Bombay, lest they be indicted for perjury.55
Mulji, meanwhile was feted for several months by his fellow reformists.56
Eventually, however, he too moved on to new challenges—most notably, a voyage
to England that furthered antagonized caste authorities. Some commentators
predicted that the libel case would extinguish belief in the Maharaj, but its
actual outcomes proved considerably more ambivalent. One newspaper noted that
the scandal had ‘only increased the ardour’ of the Pushtimargis’ devotion.57
Years later, another critic complained that the ‘incomprehensible psychological
phenomenon’ of ‘Maharajism’ had persisted unscathed.58 In reality,
this was not entirely true. The trial, as Jürgen Lütt has argued, presaged a
widespread retreat from the erotics of Krishna devotion that became
52
Bennett, The
Path of Grace, pp. 39-40, 59-60.
53
Vandravandas’s Pushtimargiya
Siddhant seems to use gupt and tirobhav
more or less interchangeably. Āvirbhāv, meanwhile, becomes prakaṭ,
when shifted from technical to more ordinary Gujarati. It is possible that
author thought the Arabic-root jaher as too ‘Islamic’ to be
used in a Hindu devotional context.
54
Sandria Freitag,
“Introduction: Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia,” in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 14, no. 1 (1991), p. 7.
55
Bombay Gazette (3 May 1862), p. 420.
56
Bombay Gazette (16 July1862), p. 672.
57
Poona Observer (11 March1862), supplement, pp. 1-2
58
Behramji M.
Malabari, Gujarat and the Gujaratis (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1983
[1889]), pp. 226-227.
more pronounced by the early twentieth century.59
The Pushtimarg seems to have participated in this general trend—at least in its
self-presentation to the Gujarati print public. For instance, as its title
suggests, the book Pushtimargi Principles, or the Original Form of Pure
Non-Dualism (1910) emphasizes Vallabhacharya’s monistic philosophy over the
affective practices of Krishna worship. Strenuously denying the by-then common
claim that pushti means ‘to eat, to drink, and to become contented’, its
author sets out to prove by copious textual example that Pushtimargi teachings
are fully concordant with those of the Vedas, the Gita, and other canonical
scriptures.60 One can see here how the trial shaped and constrained
the Pushtimarg for years to come.
One might ask whether this story could have ended
differently. For example, what would have happened if Mulji had reframed the
anglophone rhetoric of public ‘exposure’ in terms of the Pushtimargi notion of
divine ‘manifestation’? Could he, by more carefully managing not only his
medium but also the cultural idioms that accompanied it, have articulated a
more effective critique of the Maharajas? Perhaps.
Regardless, it might seem safest to accept a piece of old
advice that was revived during the trial: ‘Better have no opinion of God at all
than an injurious one.’61 But upon closer inspection, one finds that
this early modern maxim is not so easily transposed to the nineteenth century.
Journalists in Victorian India frequently quoted English Enlightenment
classics; but in doing, they tended to neglect how the world had changed since
the days of Francis Bacon. This was certainly case with respect to the state’s
management of religion. In 1862, it seems, ‘injurious’ opinions about God were,
in themselves, legally permissible; injury to the reputation or feelings of the
individual person, on the other hand, was the object of careful regulation.
59
Lütt, ‘From
Krishnalila to Ramarajya’
60
Vandravandas, Pushtimargiya
Siddhant, pp. vi-vii, 2-5.
61
Francis Bacon, as
quoted in the Bombay Gazette (4 Dec. 1861), p. 1158.
62
The Accepted
Manuscript (AM), the final draft of this author manuscript, is licensed under
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 
