“Passage to India”: The Multiple Definitions of Indian Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

Nineteenth-century American culture displays a remarkable diversity of attitudes toward Indian religion. While many authors and texts reflect the Orientalism posited by Edward Said, others violate the “exteriority” implied in the Orientalist stance. This variety in American treatments of Indian religion invites analysis using a more flexible critical framework such as Fred Dallmayr’s spectrum of modes of cross-cultural encounter. Christian writers, for example, might seem likely to exemplify the Orientalist stance, but they in fact reflect diverse attitudes. Some, like the Rev. Samuel Nott, certainly do paint an ugly caricature of Hinduism. Others, such as the editors of American Missionary, find a point of commonality between the Indian caste system and American slavery, while Lydia Maria Child practices “dialogic engagement” in applying objective criteria to Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian practices. Further, many Hindu and Buddhist texts were available in English translation, and Americans had a chance to hear the living voices of those traditions at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In the literary sphere as well, authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau imaginatively reworked Indian religious doctrines into moral lessons for their American countrymen. While none of these voices can claim to be the “real” India, they do complicate the notion of a monolithic Orientalism and invite a reconsideration of twentieth-century reception of India in America. 117