Rajnarayan Basu and His “Science of Religion”: The Emergence of Religious Studies through Exchanges between Bengali and Christian Reformers, Orientalists, and Theosophists

This article explores the genealogy of the “science of religion” developed by the Bengali intellectual Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899). One of my central aims is to demonstrate that a “science of religion,” or Religionswissenschaft in the sense of Friedrich Max Müller, has emerged within a global context that was actively shaped by “non-Western” actors. To this end, I will focus on exchanges between the Indian reform movement of the Brahmo Samaj, Christian Unitarians, Transcendentalists, orientalist scholars, and members of the Theosophical Society. All these actors were concerned with the origin of religion, its modern meaning, and its function in shaping the future of society. Building on an analysis of the global exchanges revolving around these issues, special attention is paid to the inherent tensions between religious universalism and a nationalist insistence on “true religion,” which directly pertains to contested demarcations between reform and revival, or modernity and tradition.

Strange Apathy

This chapter challenges the critical consensus that Helen Hunt Jackson fashioned her Indian reform novel Ramona (1884) after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, insofar as sympathy for her indigenous protagonists promises to bring them into the fold of personhood. As Jackson well knew, designating American Indians as persons was fully consistent with policies designed to dissolve tribal affiliations. By recovering Jackson’s stated interest in modeling her novel on the story of a hunted deer, and by drawing on theories of depression as a political emotion, the chapter rejects accounts of Ramona’s “sentimentality” while insisting that the novel’s aesthetic strategies are deeply affective. Specifically, it draws on Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life” to support a claim that Ramona lingers with animal-like desperation and depression to register the loss of tribal forms of political life and to trouble bureaucratic visions of efficiently managed populations.

Carlos Montezuma and the Emergence of American Indian Activism

Carlos Montezuma was one of the most influential Indians of his day and a prominent leader among the Red Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born to Yavapai parents in central Arizona, he was kidnapped by O’odham (Pima) raiders at a young age, and sold soon after into the Indian slave trade that for centuries had engulfed the US-Mexico borderlands. Educated primarily at public schools in Illinois, Montezuma eventually went on to be the first Native American graduate of the University of Illinois (1884) and one of the first Native American doctors (Chicago Medical College, 1889). Montezuma was a lifelong friend of Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and he firmly believed in the importance of Indian education. He insisted that educated Indians like himself must serve as examples of what Indians were capable of achieving if given the opportunities. He became deeply involved in the pan-Indian reform movements of the day and was one of the founding members of the Society of American Indians. Montezuma had a rocky relationship with the group, however, because many in the organization found his calls for the immediate abolition of the Indian Bureau and an end to the reservation system difficult to accept. From 1916 to 1922, he published his own journal, Wassaja, in which he relentlessly assailed the Indian Bureau, the reservations, and anyone who stood in the way of Indian “progress.” But Montezuma’s most important work was as an advocate for his own people, the Yavapais of Fort McDowell, Arizona, and other Arizona Indian groups. He spent the final decade of his life working to protect their water, land, and culture, and eventually returned to his Arizona homelands to die, in 1923. Although he was largely forgotten by historians and scholars in the decades after his death, Carlos Montezuma is now correctly remembered as one of the most important figures in Native American history during the Progressive Era.

Helen Hunt Jackson, Amelia Stone Quinton, and the Mission Indians of California

Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of an 1883 government report and a book on the condition of California’s Mission Indians as well as the novel Ramona, came late to the cause of Indian reform. Others, including Amelia Stone Quinton, had earlier founded organizations such as the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) to pressure Congress for reform and to engage directly in assisting Native American peoples. Correspondence between Jackson and Quinton illuminate their different methods of and proposals for Indian reform, yet it was Jackson’s published work, based on research and direct observation, that inspired many WNIA members.