A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares

A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares is an open letter by Nehemiah Goreh — born Nilakantha Goreh — one of nineteenth-century India’s most formidable Hindu scholars before his conversion. Addressed to the reformers of the Brahmo Samaj, it sets out, with a pandit’s rigor, why he came to hold the Christian faith to be true.

Goreh had once been a defender of orthodox Hinduism who wrote a Sanskrit treatise against Christianity. In this letter he turns that same trained, argumentative mind to the case for Christ, engaging the Brahmos — Hindu reformers who admired Jesus’s ethics while rejecting his divinity — on their own philosophical ground.

The result is less a memoir than a reasoned apologetic from inside Indian religious debate: a converted Brahmin explaining, to fellow Indian intellectuals, the steps by which he was persuaded. It is a primary document of the encounter between Hindu reform movements and Christianity in colonial Bengal.

Our edition is re-OCRed from the original page images rather than taken from the scan’s own text layer, which is poor: we more than halved the error rate and keyed the damaged page-feet by eye against the images. Goreh’s dated demonyms — Hindoo, Hindooism, Mahommedan — are updated to Hindu, Hinduism and Muslim, while Brahman, Brahmin and Brahmo are left alone; his Sanskrit and Marathi footnotes are set as pop-up notes. A note at the front says exactly what was changed and what the scan has lost.

This is a clean, modern reading edition of A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares, by Nehemiah (Nilakantha) Goreh. Goreh dated the letter Calcutta, August 1867; this text follows the second edition, printed at the Allahabad Mission Press for the North India Tract Society in 1868. The text is in the public domain.

A note on language. The letter uses the spellings that were standard in English in 1868 — "Hindoo" for a Hindu, "Hindooism" for Hinduism, "Mahommedan" and "Musalman" for a Muslim. Those forms are dated now, and they are not the words the communities concerned use of themselves. In this edition we have updated them to "Hindu", "Hinduism" and "Muslim" throughout the body of the text, so that a modern reader meets Goreh's argument in current language. Goreh's own usage was already mixed — the 1868 printing has "Hindu" and "Hinduism" in a number of places alongside the older forms — so this makes the text more consistent than we found it, not less.

What we have not changed is as important as what we have. Goreh's argument, his voice and his meaning are untouched: he was a Sanskrit pandit of Benares setting out, for fellow Indian intellectuals, why he had come to believe Christianity true, and none of that is softened. We have kept personal names and place names as written. We have kept the work's historical title, under which it has been known and cited since 1868. And we have deliberately left "Brahman", "Brahmin" and "Brahmo" alone: "Brahmo" is the Brahmo Samaj's own name for itself and is current, while "Brahman" in Goreh's pages means both the caste and, in Vedanta, the metaphysical absolute — one spelling doing two jobs, in a book that argues about both. Changing it mechanically would have rewritten his philosophy.

A note on the source. Only one scan of this book is known to exist, and the text layer distributed with it is poor: about one damaged word in thirty-two. We did not use it. We re-OCRed the page images ourselves at 400 dots per inch and corrected the result against those images, which brought the rate to roughly one word in four hundred. Every page of this scan warps at the foot, and the lines that shear there were read by eye rather than guessed. On three pages characters are missing from the image altogether; those are marked, not reconstructed.

Goreh footnotes several of his quotations with the Sanskrit or Marathi original. Those passages have been re-keyed from the page images and appear here as pop-up notes on the English he gives for them.

The free source is linked from this book's page, so any reader can check our edition against the original scan.

A note on the scan. The only surviving scan of this pamphlet is an annotated copy — a previous reader's ink runs across many lines — and on two pages the right-hand margin was cut off by the scanner, taking the last one to three characters of most lines with it. Those characters exist nowhere: the original photographs are clipped in the same way. Where the earlier text of this edition had them filled in with plausible guesses, we have gone back to the page images and restored only what can still be read, and one of those corrections reverses a sentence: Goreh writes that one cannot venture to translate a certain passage, and our earlier text had him saying that one can. The scan also renders the accented a as a d, which is why several Sanskrit titles appeared misspelled; they are given here as the book prints them. Everything changed is recorded in this edition's correction files.