Enabling encounters: the case of Nilakanth-Nehemiah Goreh, Brahmin convert.

Young, Richard Fox

In the preface of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, author Anne Fadiman, a self-described "cultural broker," sets forth her reasons for writing the book. I find them more broadly relevant than she perhaps anticipated. They are intriguingly descriptive of the creative possibilities awaiting people who situate themselves between cultures, societies, and religions: "I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. ... There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one." (1) The mission history of nineteenth-century India, indisputably full of frictions and incongruities, suggests exactly that-standing at the point of tangency between Hinduism and Christianity could be transformative and sometimes was. One individual for whom this was true was the now out-of-vogue Indian Christian theologian Nilakanth-Nehemiah Goreh (1825-85) of Benares (more commonly Varanasi or Kasi), whose conversion urges us, even at this distance in time, to rethink where the edges between Hinduism and Christianity might actually lie.

On the Edges in Benares

In mid-nineteenth century Benares, which was far from the metropolitan centers of colonial India where Christian missionary endeavors had by this time attained a public notoriety, the edges between Hinduism and Christianity were hardly noticeable. One census put the number of Christians in the city at 390, most of them orphans, mestizo drummers of the East India Company regiments, and outsiders from elsewhere in India-even though by this time missionaries from the London Missionary Society, Church Missionary Society (CMS), and Baptist Missionary Society were active in the city. For a sample of the Good News they proclaimed, consider a tract from the archives of Princeton Theological Seminary, printed by the Presbyterians in Allahabad for distribution in Benares: "Beloved friends! Reflect on this, that all people deserve to suffer in hell, for all have sinned and provoked God's wrath." A bleak proclamation indeed! John 3:16, the classic escape clause for substitutionary-atonement theology, comes next, followed by the Ten Commandments, lest anyone mistake the Christian dharma (moral order, religion) for an easy way out. And then a gratuitous slap on the face of Hindu Benares, gloved in the cadences of Sanskrit: "Fools who afflict themselves with the pains of asceticism, who worship idols of clay, metal, and wood, cannot attain salvation."

When the missionaries presented Christianity in this manner, it comes as no surprise that there was "no sign of active theoretical interest" from the learned communities of Benares, or that representatives of Sanskritic Hinduism, the pandits, were cool toward it and made "no attempt to ... enter into a 'dialogue." (2) This was certainly so; still, one wonders why. Fortunately, we have from Benares a range of helpful contemporane ous evidence. First, at the high end, the Indian corollary to an "ivory tower" intellectual, I adduce Vitthal Shastri, a Maratha pandit who taught Hindu philosophy at the Benares Sanskrit College, which had been established with British patronage in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The missionaries, he explained, "mistake our silence. When a reply which we think nonsense, or not applicable, is offered to us, we think that to retire silently and civilly from such useless discussion is more meritorious than to continue it. But our silence is not a sign of our admission of defeat, which the Missionaries think to be so." (3)

I shall return to Vitthal Shastri later, for the most interesting cross-cultural intellectual activity taking place in Benares involved the Sanskrit College. For a sense of what was happening in the more public spheres of Benares, however, I turn to Pratapnarayan Mishra (1856-94), the editor of a local Hindi periodical. In an essay entitled "The Useless Efforts of the Missionaries," Pratapnarayan tells of having silenced a missionary by challenging him to compare the Bible with the Ramayana. Chagrined at having his ignorance of the sacred text exposed, the missionary beat a hurried retreat. What makes the anecdote especially noteworthy is that Pratapnarayan claims to be an admirer of Jesus, whose teachings he praises as "nectar for the soul of man." (4)

Like Vitthal Shastri, there may have been other moderates who experienced more than a mere flicker of "active theoretical interest" in Christianity, even though the evidence is yet to be found that would attest to it; likewise, there may have been other activists like Pratapnarayan Mishra who responded to "the foreign challenge," even though a single instance of intervention only underscores how courteous most people were, most of the time. Relations with the missionaries were rarely adversarial; the worst the missionaries complained of was the occasional verbal taunt or well-aimed brickbat from Hindu hecklers and rabblerousers, who were few. In Benares, a countervailing force for the defense of Hinduism never emerged, the likes of which one finds around this time in the metropolitan centers of colonial India. It seems all the more noteworthy, therefore, that when resistance to Christianity began to manifest itself in the mid-1840s, it was a Maratha youth, a Chitpavan Brahmin by the name of Nilakanth Goreh, barely nineteen years old, and from a backwater princely state in Bundelkhand, acting alone, who took the lead. Nilakanth did so by taking to the ghats, chowks, and bazaars where William Smith (1806-75) of the CMS was sure to be found, eager to talk up the Gospel.

When Nilakanth took to the Benares streets to confront missionary Smith, it was not only because Smith's no-other-way-than-faith-in-Christ-the-avatar-of-God Hindustani preaching style irked him greatly. To Nilakanth, Benares was under spiritual siege, not by ordinary mortals but by the same destabilizing forces lurking in the cosmos that were always undermining dharma. Nilakanth articulated this perspective on Christianity in the idiom of antiquity, drawing on stories about fraudulent avatars who propagate fraudulent religions--Jainism and Buddhism are generally implied--by propounding fraudulent scriptures to deceive the witless and hapless and thereby establish adharma (moral disorder, religious anarchy). Missionary Smith well knew the biblical corollary, for he spoke of equipping himself with the "full armor of God" before going out to the streets: "[O]ur struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12). In short, a colossal--probably overdramatized--confrontation was in the making.

Saboteur or Seeker?

It may seem counterintuitive, but Nilakanth the saboteur was actually a seeker, and so the denouement of his confrontation with missionary Smith need not be delayed by withholding the fact that Nilakanth eventually apostatized and converted to Christianity, receiving at baptism the name "Nehemiah." However, once we take into account certain predictors of a future conversion experience, the hunch seems valid enough that events would take this course. The ties of Nilakanth's household to the prestige of declining princely families in rural Bundelkhand, Nilakanth's ties to an overprotective father at whose feet he precociously mastered Sanskrit, his ties to a tyrannical uncle so orthodox that Nilakanth could not mingle with students of the Sanskrit College, where the action most worth watching in Benares was then occurring--all these factors indicate an identity tightly bounded by family and community.

Obviously, Nilakanth might never have transcended such an identity had missionary Smith not gotten in the way, offering unsolicited critiques of other peoples' religion and envisioning for them a new identity grounded in a different reality, which necessarily placed the Christian dharma in tension with the Hindu dharma. In that tension, however, Nilakanth became more keenly aware that he could change his mind about life's fundamentals, that his identity need not be communally determined, and that he could choose a path for himself by himself. Missionary Smith did what missionaries do: he communicated choice. (5) And in the exercise of choice that missionary Smith enthusiastically encouraged, Nilakanth discovered the possibility of an individuated self, a possibility that Europe enhanced--inadvertently--by overrunning India.

Since in Nilakanth's case it can be said that conversion was also apostasy, a space on the edges between Hinduism and Christianity had been opened up by missionary Smith where Nilakanth could step back from both religions, the better to see them more clearly than if he had stood in the middle of either one. What Nilakanth saw at the point of tangency between Hinduism and Christianity were frictions and incongruities that would keep him preoccupied for many years. His conversion was not sudden but gradual, of the kind that involves cognitive issues, so for now I simply note that his transition to the identity missionary Smith envisioned for him was agonistic, disorienting, and frightfully wrenching.

Naturally, the experience of Nilakanth the apostate/convert will remain inaccessible. Fortunately, however, one can reconstruct from his various writings what Christianity looked like to him as a Hindu, and--conversely--what Hinduism looked like to him as a Christian. That corpus is essentially threefold: first, the preconversion Shastratattvavinirnaya (A verdict on the truth of the Scriptures) in Sanskrit, dating to 1844-45, (6) which I discussed at length in Resistant Hinduism and will therefore use the least; (7) second, the early postconversion Vedant mat ka bichar (An inquiry into Vedanta) in Hindi, dating to the very year of his conversion, 1848, although printed later; (8) and third, the late postconversion Shaddarshandarpan (A mirror of the six Hindu philosophical systems), also in Hindi, dating to 1860. (9) Ample scope is afforded by these three texts for a diachronic view over a twenty-year period, most of which transpired in Benares, where Nilakanth served the CMS as a catechist and appropriated the freedom to individuate himself and assert his identity, often in opposition to the one missionary Smith envisioned for him.

Even in these early years Nilakanth came into contact with other European Christians who broadened the horizons of his emerging self-identity. Before turning to those individuals, it must be emphasized that the early postconversion Nilakanth was virtually the mirror image of missionary Smith, who, to reinforce his new Christian's wavering commitments, had Nilakanth out on the thoroughfares of Benares in no time, proclaiming the no-other-way-than-faith-in-Christ-the-avatar-of-God message that had irked him so much initially. For an individual almost pathologically indecisive, the routine and rigor of CMS discipleship was genuinely reinforcing. The dark side, however, was that Nilakanth was plagued to his very deathbed by an unshakable regret that his conversion had not been like the apostle Paul's, which is to say, sudden, ecstatic, mystical, and once-for-all, according to the conventionalized account of it that, inspired by the Book of Acts, dominated in Evangelical circles. As a lad in Yorkshire, missionary Smith had experienced a conversion of that very kind.

Why exactly the Evangelical idiom of metanoia resonated so resoundingly with Nilakanth remains unclear, because the Verdict, his preconversion treatise on Hinduism and Christianity, talks of sin only abstractly as a problem of theodicy. But resonate it did, and the reason perhaps had to do with fear, the kind of fear that might have been instilled in him by the same bleak message that was conveyed by the Presbyterian tract mentioned earlier; later on, Nilakanth would write, "It was the doctrine of everlasting punishment which shook my soul from the very bottom" (10)--and, very probably, spurred him into taking the step he had long delayed. Once he took that step, the role of true-to-form Christian convert that he assumed was already being scripted for him by missionary Smith, whose biography of him, (11) fresh off the press almost before the waters of baptism had dried, plays upon the etymological meaning of the common synonym for a Brahmin--dwij or twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin who has undergone the sacred-thread initiation ritual)--to signify that Nilakanth had experienced a spiritual rebirth that conformed to the idealized Evangelical norm. Nilakanth, who anyway was learning to be a Christian by imitating the only available model, took to his role with avidity. That is why the section on Christianity in his first piece of postconversion writing, the Inquiry, couches itself in the idiom of sin and grace: "Scholar or fool, celebrity or unknown, householder or ascetic, all alike are in the grip of the disease of sin.... May the Supreme Lord, Savior of the World, bestow his grace upon you, so that you may escape the jaws of death and attain eternal life and the highest bliss." (12) The text goes on like this, and on, metabolizing Evangelical metanoia into a Hindi idiom for the Hindus of Benares. One finds the same trope in each of Nilakanth's postconversion writings, but other concerns--more authentically his and not missionary Smith's--start to surface around this same time.

From Foolishness to Wisdom

One very interesting concern reveals itself in Nilakanth's postconversion writings in the idiom he uses to describe his transition from Hinduism to Christianity, which for him was not from sin or darkness or death to grace or light or life but from ajnana (ignorance and foolishness) to jnana (knowledge and wisdom). This more culturally appropriate idiom, however, does not appear all at once. There was an intermediate stage in which the two vocabularies intermingled while Nilakanth disentangled himself from the Evangelical conversion paradigm and discovered his own. The hybridity of his idiom is especially evident in a longish, didactic tirade against Hindu asceticism and world-renunciation in the early postconversion Inquiry: "People who renounce the world [i.e., become samnyasis] become self-centered, and because they are of no use to anyone they stand before God as egregious sinners.... True renunciation is to detach oneself from the things of this world while remaining involved in worldly affairs, loving God above all else and being prepared to surrender everything, should God demand it." (13)

These lines exemplify one of the most spectacular somersaults Nilakanth felt compelled to perform in the early phase of his postconversion career as a Christian apologist. Only a few years earlier, in his preconversion Verdict, he had defended asceticism and world renunciation against the aspersions of John Muir (1810-82), whose work of anti-Hindu apologetics, the Examination of Religions, (14) had been presented to him by missionary Smith, thus eliciting from Nilakanth his own work of anti-Christian apologetics. A moderate Evangelical from Kilmarnock who had been educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh at the end of the Scottish Enlightenment, Muir had gone to Benares as the acting principal of the Sanskrit College, bringing in his baggage some of the Scottish school of common sense for local application. Michael Dodson has written of Muir that he "subscribed to a developmental hierarchy of civilization, in which Britain stood at the top, distinguished by its commercial prosperity, the operation of justice, and a religion supported by, and based in, science and rationality, rather than superstition." (15)

This, indeed, is the bias that oozes out of the Examination, when Muir implies that India would never rise higher on the ladder of nations without renouncing world-renunciation, which is not only detrimental to its economic development but also religiously untrue (as in the monistic maxim of Advaita Vedanta, "I am Brahman," aham brahmasmi, which identifies the individual self with Brahman, the ground of being). The indictment of Brahmin gymnosophists (mendicant ascetics, portrayed as socially parasitic) is as old as antiquity, except that the ones being indicted in antiquity for being like the Brahmin gymnosophists were the Christians. One hears in Muir's idiom an echo of theological Orientalism--perhaps of Presbyterian Orientalism!--which, as such, belongs to what postcolonial scholars call the "discourse of domination." That is to say, Muir justified British colonialism by depicting Hinduism's traditions of jnana as too mystical, impractical, and effeminate to empower India to rise to the level reached by European--that is, Christian--civilization. In the lines extracted above Nilakanth unwittingly mimics this bias, but not for long, because the trope of world-affirmation versus world-renunciation vanishes from his follow-up postconversion writing, the more elaborate Mirror, even though the agenda otherwise remains the same. Nilakanth, who eventually renounced all financial support from Christian missionary agencies to live the life of a wandering Christian samnyasi, was becoming aware around this time that Western Christianity was not so hostile toward contemplative practices as he had been led to believe.

To see more clearly that Nilakanth was a subaltern neither of Evangelicalism nor of Orientalism, one must add to the list of Europeans with whom he interacted a third figure, James Robert Ballantyne (1813-64), a Scot from Kelso who superintended the Sanskrit College after Muir left. Although Ballantyne and Muir were similarly shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment, they differed in significant respects. Most important, Ballantyne was by no means a Presbyterian Orientalist. He was, in fact, openly anti-Calvinist and in frequent conflict with the likes of missionary Smith, whose ignorance of Hinduism irked him the way it used to irk Nilakanth. It was in interacting with Ballantyne that Nilakanth finally disentangled himself from the Evangelical conversion paradigm and found a more congenial idiom in ajnana and jnana. Thus he began to remake himself in the image of a Benares pandit, transformed by Christian wisdom and called by God to make that wisdom Indian wisdom. In responding to this call, Nitakanth's postconversion exegetical strategies for engaging Hinduism changed in substance but not in method.

The action most worth watching in Benares around this time was occurring at the Sanskrit College, for the project Ballantyne was busy implementing exemplified a new strategy quite different from missionary Smith's or Orientalist Muir's for eliciting a response to Europe and a "dialogue" with Christianity. Ballantyne's methodology was to invoke Indian antiquity to affect Europe's modernity, thus to poke and prod India toward the modernity that Europe represented in India by means of Anglo-Indian institutions such as the Sanskrit College. Since the project was essentially dialogic, Ballantyne saw it as hopeful for expanding the horizons both of India and of Europe. It was, of course, transparently--and unapologetically--biased toward Christianity.

The Ballantyne project unfolded progressively, commencing in 1848 with publications in Sanskrit on secular knowledge (logic, science, history) and culminating in 1860 with The Bible for Pandits, a work of exegesis that was intended to undo the damage inflicted on Christianity by the likes of missionary Smith. Chronologically, the Ballantyne project spans the period from Nilakanth's conversion (1848) to the second of his postconversion writings, the Mirror (1860). Although Nilakanth had a minor role in Ballantyne's project (Vitthal Shastri was the primary collaborator), his interest in it becomes evident only at the penultimate stage, when Ballantyne first addressed the subject of sacred knowledge in Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy. The school of Hindu philosophy that Ballantyne most explicitly engages in this text is Advaita Vedanta, the monistic nondualism of Shankara, for which he felt a deep affinity: "Theologically, the Vedantin, asserting that the Deity is nirguna, and the Christian, asserting that God is immaterial, are asserting the very same fact in terms of separate theories.... Instead of holding, as [the Vedantins] have been accused of holding, that God has no attributes in our sense of the term, they hold in fact, that He is all attribute,--sheer existence [sat], sheer thought [chit], sheer joy [ananda]." (16) In the entire Ballantyne corpus in Sanskrit, however, I have yet to find that he actually used "Brahman" as the name of God. On the contrary, God is always Parameshvara (Supreme Lord) and is said to be saguna, endowed with countless attributes besides sat, chit, and ananda, such as justice, goodness, and truth, (17) which signifies that the transformed Vedanta Ballantyne envisioned would not be monistic but theistic.

Legend has it (namely, the shastri legend, from the honorific title Christians later gave him (18)) that Nilakanth was an authority on the whole range of Indian philosophy before his conversion. More accurately, he was a Vaishnava whose affinities for the bhakti (devotional theism) of the Bhagavata Purana exceeded his fondness for philosophical abstraction, although his bhakti was tinctured with Vedanta, for that was the norm. Frankly, I find it puzzling--and not a little disappointing--that Nilakanth defined himself in opposition to Ballantyne, for Ballantyne was engaging Vedanta in a way that was original and perhaps even essentially right, but react he did, and in reacting, Nilakanth found the theological voice that was most authentically his, even though this voice is not the one I would most like to hear. For him, there was no convergence between Vedanta and Christianity, and for Ballantyne's mediation between the two, Nilakanth felt considerable disdain. He therefore refashioned the Inquiry, his early postconversion work of apologetics, into the Mirror to restore to the Vedanta the concrete particularity and otherness that Ballantyne had drained from it. The text of the Mirror is too complex to summarize briefly, but three strands of argument in it deserve attention. Properly understood, they may help to rehabilitate the image of Nilakanth, which has suffered in recent years, considering that so much Christian thinking has been invested in the quest for a fundamental rapport with the Vedanta.

Reparticularizing Vedanta

First, if Brahman is the only actually existing reality, then relationality becomes problematic. Time and again, Nilakanth admonishes the Vedantins to follow their hearts instead of their heads, for he knows, because he was himself a sectarian Hindu who accommodated bhakti to the Vedanta, that intellectual monism rests uneasily on a foundation of intuitive theism. One can go at least part way with him in this respect. (19)

But to go with Nilakanth into his second major argument is virtually impossible without a technical knowledge of Indian philosophy. He draws not from Scottish commonsense philosophy but rather from the anti-Vedantic arguments of Vijfiana Bhikshu's theistic Samkhya (late sixteenth century) to argue that Advaita invalidates each element essential to it by presupposing a cognizing self (jivatman) and a timeless power different from the transempirical Brahman (namely, maya, which conjures the appearance of empirical multiplicity). In short, duality is implied, though not admitted.

The third argument seeks to demonstrate the logical absurdity of Advaita monism on a number of particulars. Note here that in Nilakanth's preconversion persona as the author of the Verdict, his work of Hindu apologetics, he had declared Advaita off-limits to rational inquiry because Brahman can be declared only by the Veda, revelationally, and to appreciate the revelatory truths of the Veda one must have faith, which is divinely given. Instead of faith, from Nilakanth the Christian one hears a great deal about reason and about humankind's innate powers of intelligence, which Vedanta deadens and Christianity revivifies. Revitalization of the intellect is for Nilakanth very much what the Good News is all about. The idiom of his argument is less alien and more culturally appropriate than it might seem, however, since Nilakanth draws upon the theological anthropology of Hinduism, which holds that reason differentiates human beings from all other forms of life. But the argument stops there, with the Vedanta in pieces and Christianity intact, only because Nilakanth now declares Christianity off-limits to rational inquiry: God can be declared only by the Bible, revelationally, and to appreciate the truths of the Bible one must have faith, a divine gift.

The circle thus becomes complete. A latent substratum of Vedanta, evident in the subordination of reason to revelation, remetabolized for Christian purposes, emerges and enables Nilakanth to speak in his own voice instead of Ballantyne's, whose Benares project engaged the sacred knowledge of Hinduism and Christianity with the exhortation, "Let professing scriptures be examined!" (20) At this point the subordination of Christian revelation to reason was precisely what Nilakanth rejected. If the bias in this seems stunningly obvious--one standard for Christianity, another for Vedanta--it was an acceptable bias in the tradition of Indian philosophical disputation called vada-vitanda. On this point, B. K. Matilal observes: "It is quite feasible for a debater (or skeptic) to conduct an honest (nontricky) form of debate consisting only in refutation. Such a debate ... can be undertaken by a genuine seeker after truth." (21) The Mirror is classic vada-vitanda, but because of my need to condense it, it seems more relentless and less civil than it really is. More than anything else, the Mirror reflects Nilakanth's own image.

Who, though, would speak in such a voice nowadays, when so much Christian thinking is being invested in the search for a fundamental rapport with the Vedanta? The question Max Muller raised after meeting Nilakanth in Oxford in 1877--by which time Nilakanth had transformed himself into an Anglo-Catholic and was about to become a Christian samnyasi--still seems relevant: "Men such as Dr. Henry Brown were Christian Platonists at Cambridge; why then should there be no Christian Vedantists, such as Nehemiah Goreh [could have been] in the beginning of his career?" (22) There is no denying that Nilakanth seems an obsolete figure in Indian Christian theology and that his postconversion works of Christian apologetics seem a retrograde model for engaging Vedanta today. Even now, however, the otherness of Nilakanth Goreh poses serious challenges for Hindus and Christians who endeavor to understand the transformative power that comes from being on the edges between Hinduism and Christianity.

Notes

(1.) Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1997), p. viii. This article is a condensed version of one of the lectures given by Richard Fox Young at Cambridge University as the Henry Martyn Lecturer for 2002.

(2.) On Hindu-Christian interaction in the prior period, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1988), p. 437.

(3.) Quoted in James Robert Ballantyne, The Bible for Pandits: The First Three Chapters of Genesis Diffusely and Unreservedly Commented, in Sanskrit and English (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860), p. xli.

(4.) Quoted in Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 112.

(5.) For this way of formulating the missionary endeavor, see Kenelm Burridge, In the Way (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990), pp. 3-34, from which I draw heavily for idiom in this paragraph.

(6.) Nilakantha Goreh, Shastratattvavinirnaya (A verdict on the truth of the Scriptures), ed. S. L. Katre (Ujjain: Scindia Oriental Institute, 1951).

(7.) Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: Univ. of Vienna, Indological Institute, 1981).

(8.) Nehemiah Nilakantha Shastri Goreh, Vedant mat ka bichar (An inquiry into Vedanta) (Allahabad: North India Christian Tract & Book Society, 1904).

(9.) Nehemiah Nilakantha Shastri Goreh, Shaddarshandarpan (A mirror of the six Hindu philosophical systems) (Calcutta: Calcutta Christian Tract & Book Society, 1860).

(10). Nehemiah Nilakantha Shastri Goreh, A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1867), p. 53.

(11.) W. Smith, Dwij: The Conversion of a Brahman to the Faith of Christ (London: James Nisbet, 1850).

(12.) Goreh, Inquiry, pp. 44-45, 56.

(13.) Ibid., pp. 32, 53.

(14). John Muir, Examination of Religions (Calcutta: Bishop's College Press, 1839).

(15.) Michael Dodson, "Re-presented for the Pandits: James Ballantyne, 'Useful Knowledge,' and Sanskrit Scholarship in Benares College in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 2 (2002): 271.

(16.) James Robert Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy (London: James Madden, 1859), pp. 45-46.

(17.) Ballantyne, Bible for Pandits, p. ixiii.

(18.) Shastri is one of the lesser titles bestowed on Hindu scholars for their mastery of certain genres of Sanskrit literature. Though well-read in many respects, Nilakanth's attainments were too modest to merit this or any other distinction, for which, in any event, he disqualified himself by apostatizing from Hinduism. His preferred form of self-reference was pandit, a term broadly applied to anyone who had received a classical education. It was Nilakanth's missionary "handlers" who invented the shastri legend to claim for him a prestige he never enjoyed among his peers.

(19.) For an Indologically informed theological appraisal of Vedanta with respect to the problem of relationality, see S. Mark Heim, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).

(20.) James Robert Ballantyne, A Synopsis of Science (Mirzapore: Orphan School Press, 1856), p. 151.

(21.) Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Character of Logic in India (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998), p. 55.

(22.) Max Muller, Auld Lang Syne, 2d series, My Indian Friends (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899), pp. 70-71.

Richard Fox Young is the Timby Associate Professor of the History of Religions, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.