WE'RE THEIR HINDOOS:

Beyond belief: the conflict between religion and free speech (Ian Jack, January 1, 2005, The Guardian)

Some years ago I tried to write a book, an important part of which was to tell the life of a Baptist missionary in early 19th-century India. This man, William Carey, a cobbler from Northamptonshire, has many quite wonderful achievements to his name. He was a linguist, a printer, a botanist, and energetic in all these departments of the material world: India and early western understanding of it owe him a great deal. And yet he came to India and persisted in it, suffering hardship and disease, for very different reasons.

Aged 18, according to one of his Victorian biographers, "to his spiritual intelligence there was given the Word of God ... it converted the hypocritical Pharisee into the evangelical preacher; it turned the vicious peasant into the most self-denying saint; it sent the village shoemaker far off to the Hindoos."

In fact (and like David Livingstone), he made remarkably few converts. One can see the folly of his enterprise in the description of his debates with the brahmins. Brahminism had to be false because the Flood had wiped out brahmins. We were all the descendants of Noah, who was not a brahmin. In attempting to persuade brahmins to swap their own supple and complex cosmology for his own rudimentary one - and that without any earthly benefit to brahmins and at the cost of ostracism in their own community - he was barking up a whole forest of wrong trees.

This was fun to describe. Much more difficult to evoke, and eventually to me impossible, were the beliefs that lay at the centre of Carey's life and personality. What did notions such as Saviour, soul, redemption, and God mean to Carey? A lot, obviously. To me, very little. My eyes would skip over such words on the page. It may be always the case, as Janet Malcolm remarks, that all a biographer has to work with is the "husk" of a dead personality: what he leaves behind in the form of letters and the memories of others. But when that personality is so infused with a faith in things unseen - unseeable - by the writer, the task requires a leap of imagination or empathy which was beyond me. I might as well have been trying to enter the minds of the Islamists who seized the aircraft controls on 9/11.

Religious belief is now almost never seriously discussed among the kind of people I know and the same is true, I suspect, for most readers of this newspaper.

Which is why they're so confused by America and even their own P.M..

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2005 1:16 PM