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The modern State witness religion-its beliefs and practices, its leaders and institutions–as a potential or a actual threat to its expansion. The reverse is equally true. Religious leaders, worried about the emergence of the modern state and about the changing political order, develop strategies to defend their domains from state encroachment. Each side is concerned to defend its authority and legitimacy. Indeed, religion–state relations are not stagnant. The tussle is sometimes subdued and at other times explicit, but both sides are continually alert to one another and to change in the larger environment of the society. The British Colonial State penetrated Hindu religious institutions, both temples and maths (monasteries), deeply and systematically in Madras Presidency. This penetration was considered as neither unknown at the time nor unintentional. The state’s relationship to the temple was formalized early in the Nineteenth Century and was a constant feature of the Twentieth Century and a half of imperial rule. In form and intensity the state’s activity varied over the years. The Madras Government consistently felt that a measure of control was essential both for the state’s security and income, and for society’s welfare.

The colonial historians were not much concentrated in the aspect of the States� control over the Hindu religious institutions. It was viewed that by the mid Nineteenth Century the British Government had given up most policies which involved it directly with Hindu institutions, primarily due to the pressure from Christian Evangelicals in England and by the bitter experience of the Indian Mutiny. This view was advanced so many times in so many different contexts. It was also the standard interpretation of British colonial rule in India. In 1843, for example, a government committee took it as an established fact that “By 5^th September 1843 the government parted with all control over religious institutions.�^[1]

In this regard, David Washbrook, a Cambridge Scholar writes thus “British attitudes towards religion and social life led to a further reduction of state influence. Formally by 1863, but in practice as early as 1840, the British had severed the relationship of their government to the institutions of religion and so had relinquished control of the vast economic and emotional resources of the temples.^[2]

Indeed there was enormous pressure in the Nineteenth Century to withdraw the State’s intervention in Hindu religious institutions.. A powerful coalition in England exerted unrelenting pressure on Parliament and the East India Company. Thus “withdrawal� became an ideology of great force. This pressure exerted in Madras Government also. The response of the Local Government was unenthusiastic. It seemed like a mixture of resistance, relucant accommodation and deception. In some, cases, the intensity of control was modified. In others, the control was simply shifted to other agencies or buried in hidden institutional arrangements.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

G.O. No. 5634, Public Health Department, 12 May 1943, pp. 2-3;. Daniel Potts, E., ‘Missionaries and the Beginnings of the Secular State in India� in Donovan Williams and Daniel Potts, E., (eds.), Indian History in Honour of Cuthbert Collins Davies, Asia Publishing House, New York, 1973, pp. 112-117.

[2]:

David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: the Madras Presidency 1870-1920, Cambridge, 1976, p.331.