A colleague sent me an
1877 newspaper article (really more an
editorial) -- titled "
Native Honesty" -- clipped from editor E. C. Kemp's
The Bengal Times -- from page 4 of the February 21, 1877, edition, to be exact, linked in the quote below. Now though I deign to deem myself a bit of a
Renaissance man and a
jack-of-all-trades, I am not especially an
Indologist. But I am a
Pandeist, and those who know me do well by me to send along mentions of
Pandeism as it is written about, whether in philosophical scholarship or lay publications. And this was decidedly one of the latter.
The crux of the sent piece was
criticism of certain White colonists, for the perceived
sin of treating Indian people as, well,
people. As equals to be entrusted with civic responsibilities, the article stating:
"We must tell them and their disciples plainly that their professed love of the Native is a hollow sham. Their white-pandeism is merely a speculation to secure patronage."
And how this single
bizarre phrase from an old
colonial newspaper does open a
window into the troubled
mindset of
empire. Much of the article is what one might expect from the colonial British press, building up a haughty froth of indignation and group-projection over a lone Bengali clerk accused of embezzling public funds, as if no White man had ever done such a thing. And so, naturally, the writer here doesn't come around to referring to Pandeism in any precise theological sense. There's no sense here of the 18th or 19th century European philosophical models that reconciled
Pantheism with
Deism, concluding that our Creator became our Universe and ceased to exist as a conscious entity. Nor is there any discussion of religious
metaphysics or reasoned
belief systems.
But neither is the choice of the word Pandeism clearly accidental. It appears as a term of ridicule for European liberals, missionaries, and reformers who were (in the eyes of the writer) excessively sympathetic to the Indian population. These "white-pandeists" are accused of promoting a naïve
Universalism, flattening the clear (and, for the writer, necessary) distinctions between the race of the rulers and the race of the ruled. What they are being mocked for is seeing divinity -- or equality -- in everybody.
The insult takes on another layer when remembering how many scholars have argued that
Hinduism itself exhibits strong pandeistic qualities. Hindu thought, especially as expressed in its
Advaita Vedanta and monistic strains, often presents the divine as both immanent and transcendent. All is Brahman, and Brahman is all. The Atman (soul) is one with the divine essence, and our Universe is not separate from its Creator, but a manifestation of that very essence. As such, Hinduism has been interpreted by some modern theologians and comparative philosophers as pandeistic in character, which brings us to the possibility that this phrase, this "white-pandeism," was not simply a vague and loose insult, but a cryptic or veiled reference to Hinduism itself. The writer may have been accusing sympathetic Europeans of adopting a dangerously Hindu-like worldview, of slipping into an Eastern way of thinking that erases the cultural and spiritual superiority presumed by the colonial order. We see this more overtly two decades later. In 1897, Rev. Henry Grattan Guinness, a British Protestant evangelist writing for
The Medical Missionary, made a similarly cutting remark in his "
First Impressions of India," declaring of the country:
"God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored.... Her pandeism is a pandemonium."
Here again, pandeism referred to is not the rationally derived European view of the philosophy, but simply Hinduism, viewed more explicitly through a missionary's hostile lens. Guinness collapses a sophisticated metaphysical system into a spiritual free-for-all, a "pandemonium" of idol worship and moral confusion. His tone is not just dismissive but apocalyptic: to accept this worldview is to welcome chaos. And so, in both instances, Pandeism becomes a catch-all term for an Indian worldview the colonial mind simply cannot fathom. It stands for a theology which dares to see its Creator in all things, including people whom empire insists are lesser. Whether as the earlier article's white-pandeism (a jab towards Europeans who show too much compassion) or the latter's pandemonium-pandeism (a caricature of Hindu monism), the term is invoked to mark the boundary between a presumedly more civilized monotheistic model and the spiritualized Other.
But there is irony in these condemnations. If these writers feared Pandeism for its universalism, it was because they knew how deeply subversive it could be. To believe that our Creator is at all within the colonized person -- or worse,
is the colonized person -- is to posit
erasure of the
justification for colonial
hierarchy entirely. It is to undermine the
moral architecture of empire. And so, from slightly different angles, both the 1877 editorial and the 1897 sermon strike at the same core
anxiety: that the lines drawn by
history and
conquest are ultimately illusory. That the divine might know no race, no rank, no empire. That everything, indeed, might be sacred.