Essay 2 - Tolerant Hinduism: Evidence and Stereotype

Summary

It is proclaimed often and loudly that, unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism is a tolerant and non-proselytizing religion. Although this idea is peddled perpetually by the Hindu Right and receives an easy popular acceptance, it is rooted, to a significant extent, in the European writings on India. Half a millennium after Alberuni referred to the Indian xenophobia, a French doctor, François Bernier by name, who travelled widely in India during the 1660s, was one of the early Europeans to perceive Hindus as a tolerant people and to state that they “did not claim that their law is universal” (Halbfass 1990: 407). Similarly Herder (1744–1803), the forerunner of the Romantic glorification of India, referred to the Hindus as “mild” and “tolerant” and as “the gentlest branch of humanity”; and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said that they “do not hate the other religions but they believe they are also right.” Such views find a more prominent place in the writings of Orientalists such as William Jones, according to whom “the Hindus…would readily admit the truth of the Gospel but they contend that it is perfectly consistent with their Sastras” (Marshall 1970: 245). In the nineteenth century, religious reformers emphasized the idea of tolerance in Hinduism.