Presbyterianised Hindusand and Anglicising Catholics

Those of you who have read last week’s article will understand where this “Hindu tradition and belief comes from. It does not originate in India. It originates in 19th century Europe. It is the theory of stagnant India which has neither changed nor progressed as has Europe. Rather India is the remnant of the untouched knowledge of the Garden of Eden. It is the India for whom the only hope is to be colonised.

And again in Renaissance of SPIC: “The development of mutually exclusive creeds is a comparatively recent phenomenon appearing only in the Kali Yuga (note: the time of darkness and trials) started after the war depicted in the Mahabharata, a contest which in Hindu tradition, dates between 3000 BC and 1500 BC.” For SPIC then Judaism, Christianity, Islam are associated with the Kali Yuga, that time of great Hindu tribulations which, according to Early Indian cosmology, will last 432,000 years.

In India for the VHP-RSS, the time of Kali Yuga was the time of the Muslim Indian States, the time of the entry of Christianity — although the dates are hardly ever mentioned — the time of British rule and above all the time when Congress, headed by Nehru, is in power and refuses the demand for a Hindu State. Congress India is Secular India and therefore Kali Yuga India.

Kali Yuga — PNM

For the TT Hinduvta Movement, many of whose members were involved with SPIC, the Kali Yuga is all that, but above all, the time that the PNM is in power, having won over the Independence demand for a block Hindu vote or better the partition of Trinidad. It is his articulation of this demand, in the 50s and early 60s, which gives the tailor HP Singh the reputation of the Father of Indian nationalism.

There is however a problem. The battle of the Mahabharata has never been traced, leading archaeologists and historians to believe that it was only a localised affair which came to symbolise the end of clan society. There is no mention of “the emergence of these mutually exclusive creeds” in the Mahabharata. Those who have read last week’s article will recognise where this all comes from: it is Voltaire’s natural religion before the emergence of Jews and priests. The tradition that the writers of Renaissance speak of, is a new “tradition” concocted in Europe. Nor is there the concept of belief in Hinduism — unlike Abrahamic religions. A Hindu is not required to believe but only to carry out caste duties. There are atheists in Ancient Hindu India who are good Hindus. There are today. Hindus can believe in Shiva, a stone, a tree, Siparia Mai or the Trinity Cross.

Anti-Hindu

No Hindu was ever required to believe what the ruling elite believed nor to believe what the Brahmins believed. It is this which makes the reaction to the Trinity Cross incomprehensible as a Hindu religious gesture even if the Trinity Cross was religious, and it is not. Hindu princes and rulers were always having deities and symbols which differed from those of their subjects. This would be unheard of in Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

A Presbyterianised Hinduism

In that Renaissance article what we find is the 19th century Presbyterian Missionary John Morton. It is first of all from Morton that TT Indians learn of the Garden of Eden, stagnant India and belief. Sat’s argument that Hinduism is a revealed religion —ie, one with prophets to whom are revealed the nature of God and the commandments of God, and whose revelations are compulsorily followed by believers — only indicates the extent to which Tring Hinduism has been Presbyterianised.

Nineteenth century missionaries

The 19th century missionary period is unlike missionary periods that preceded it. In the 19th century there is a wave of Christian expectation that the return of the Messiah is at hand. This return, it was believed, was heralded and assisted by European colonial conquest. All that was needed was to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.

John Morton was one of the 19th century missionaries. Planters and Indian indentured labour were windows of opportunity for conversion. Out of this Morton hoped to dispatch missionaries to India — he would send out Balaram, the Brahmin mentioned in my last article — and ensure that the Indians who remained were of a ‘holier faith.’ There was another window of opportunity which is never mentioned: the disarray of the Trini Catholic Church.

Spanish and Catholic inheritance laws

Spain, in the treaty signed with Britain, was careful to include a clause which guaranteed Catholics the freedom to practise their religion. It was hoped that this would shield Trinidad from becoming another Ireland. In Ireland the penal laws had barred Catholics from much ownership, disenfranchised them from political power, and forbad the saying of Mass. These penal laws were not only in Ireland. They were in force in Barbados.

During the period of slavery the British had done little to change Spanish-Catholic laws. It was those laws which, in part, accounted for the rapid growth of a Coloured/Black slave owning group unlike the minuscule group in Barbados. Property/descent Spanish Catholic laws permitted illegitimate children to inherit from their parents in the same way as legitimate children. At a period when Trinidad was still untouched by Victorian morality — to the same extent as it had Britain and post-famine Ireland — most planters had double, triple, quadruple families, all of whom inherited. While it is true that Trini slavery was one of the harshest in the English speaking Caribbean at the time, the manumission figures (ie, the freeing of slaves by their owner) are also the highest.

While some of these may have represented the habit in some slave societies of the Caribbean of freeing elderly slaves and therefore escaping the responsibility of their upkeep, a fair number in Trinidad represented the habit of freeing illegitimate offspring and their mothers, the children would then inherit. In this Trini slavery was certainly benign — and a scandal for Protestants. If these laws were in force there would be no question of Hindu or Muslim offspring losing property because their parents had married under Hindu or Muslim rites. In both legitimate and illegitimate children, parents disposed of property as they liked.

In 1843 an ordinance was passed which took away this right of inheritance for illegitimate children. A few months later the Spanish/Catholic right of women to keep the ownership of their property after marriage, was taken away. Property passed to her husband.

Protest

Catholics protested both laws. They argued that a man could now marry a woman in order to collect her property and then, if he wished, simply leave her. And they argued that the new British law which made no provision for illegitimate children would produce an illegitimate class of beggars with no parental ties. For the Governor, Sir Henry Macleod, these laws were necessary to protect property. The laws as they had been, he declared, were not hard enough on illegitimate children. His remark that what was needed if Trinidad was to be prosperous were English landowners, English customs and English laws was hardly likely to appease a Catholic population, petrified at the implication of all three.

Modifying the Catholic family

While it is true that Hindus and Muslims — as well as Shouter Baptists and Shango — would be discriminated against by the 1843 ordinance, discrimination was first of all against Catholics and their concept of family and parental responsibility. In practical terms the law destroyed both the respectability and the inheritance of the many coloured offspring that were the result of White/Coloured or White/Black liaisons. Another proposed law would have completed this.

That law proposed to circumscribe the conditions under which a priest could perform a marriage and to prescribe a jail sentence if he did not conform to the conditions. This was aimed at both deathbed and semi-secret marriages, at the time prevalent even among Whites but particularly prevalent where what could be called public norms of class and colour could be held to be broken. This provoked a Catholic outcry not only because of the provisions of the law itself, but because it was considered as the State intervening in the rights of the priesthood and therefore limiting the free exercise of the Catholic religion. The punitive phrase had to be withdrawn and others modified, but these three laws served to end the structure of the Catholic family. They also served to draw a clearer race-line between White and Coloured.

None of this is in Jamadar. In all the Maha Sabha howling of discriminatory marriage laws, this is never mentioned. Therein lies one of the problems of ethno-history. The problems of inheritance that Hindus and Muslims would face, were not created for them but for Catholics. Unless this is said, bitterness is whipped up on very selective — when not false — information.

Catholic fears

Over the early period of Indian “industrial residence” as it was curiously called — the industrial having to do not with industries but with industrious work —Catholics were preoccupied with the fear that Catholic Trinidad was becoming Catholic Ireland.

There was the overwhelming presence of the Anglican Bishop of Barbados, the division of Trinidad into Anglican parishes even when there were few Anglicans in the parish, there was the difference in stipends paid to the Anglican clergy compared to that paid to the Catholic clergy, there was the British dissatisfaction that the Vatican had chosen a bishop directly rather than passing through the British government and there was the Anglicisation of the clergy.

This, in French and Spanish speaking Trinidad as in Irish speaking Ireland, was the key to anglicise language and customs.

Not a Quebec

It is nor surprising that the major Catholic policy was directed towards ensuring that a poor White Catholic population did not emerge as it had in Quebec. It is this policy that would skew Catholic understanding of social problems, would render the Church blind to the far worse situation of its Black Catholics and unready to missionise Indians. Morton had an open field. It was in education that this would be best illustrated.

And that for next week.