https://archive.org/stream/TheHindusAnAlternativeHistoryWendyDoniger_201402/The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger_djvu.txt
The Hindus: An Alternative History
Wendy Doniger
Table of contents for The Hindus : an alternative history / Wendy Doniger.
Contents
Preface: The Man or the Rabbit in the Moon 1
1. Introduction: Working with Available Light 24
2. Time and Space in India: 50 Million BCE to 50,000 BCE 74
3. Civilization in the Indus Valley: 50 Million to 1500 BCE 95
4. Between the Ruins and the Text: 2000 to 1500 BCE 125
5. Humans, Animals, and Gods in the Rig Veda: 1500-1000 BCE 153
6. Sacrifice in the Brahmanas: 800-500 BCE 207
7. Renunciation in the Upanishads: 600-200 BCE 251
8. The Three (or is it Four?) Aims of Life in the Hindu Imaginary 304
9. Women and Ogresses in the Ramayana: 400 BCE to 200 CE 325
10. Violence in the Mahabharata: 300 BCE-300 CE 385
11. Dharma in the Mahabharata: 300 BCE-300 CE 429
12. Escape Clauses in the Shastras: 100 CE -400 CE 469
13. Bhakti in South India: 100 BCE - 900 CE 523
14. Goddesses and Gods in the Early Puranas: 300-600 CE 572
15. Sects and Sex in the Tantric Puranas and the Tantras: 650-900 630
16. Fusion and Rivalry under the Delhi Sultanate: 650-1500 CE 686
17. Avatar and Accidental Grace in the Later Puranas: 800-1500 CE 733
18. Philosophical Feuds in South India and Kashmir: 800-1300 CE 784
19. Dialogue and Tolerance under the Mughals: 1500-1700 CE 820
20. Hinduism under the Mughals: 1500-1700 CE 855
21. Caste, Class, and Conversion under the British Raj: 1600-1900 CE 887
22. Suttee and Reform in the Twilight of the Raj: 1800-1947 CE 942
23. Hindus in America: 1900- 979
24. The Past in the Present: 1950- 1006
25. Inconclusion: The Abuse of History 1065
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Appendices
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Maps
Note on Transliteration and Pronunciation
Index
Glossary of Names and Sanskrit Terms
Bibliography
Bibliographic Notes
=====
3.66
1,542 ratings233 reviews
From one of the world's foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its history
An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds.
Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century;
its central tenets—karma, dharma, to name just two—arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another.
Yet the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today.
Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes.
The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers—many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts—have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.
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GenresHistoryReligionIndiaNonfictionHinduismPhilosophyMythology
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800 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Literary awards
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (2009)
Original title
The Hindus: An Alternative History
This edition
Format
800 pages, Hardcover
Published
March 19, 2009 by Penguin Books
ISBN
9781594202056 (ISBN10: 1594202052)
Language
English
Ali Sheikh
Author 23 books38 followers
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July 26, 2016
Where Exactly Is India, Ms. Doniger?
Banned in Bangalore, the New York Times op-ed said. Why ban a book, no matter how offensive, the literati fumed. No one can truly ban a book in the Internet age, friends pointed out. Naturally, I bought a copy—and more to the point, read the book.
Before we proceed, let me say that I do not support banning any book (or even legally requiring a book to be withdrawn from circulation, as was the case with this book in India). But I do hold that every banned book isn’t necessarily a well-written, scholarly work. Indeed, a ban of any kind instantly confers an aura of hyper-legitimacy on the banned work, regardless of its intrinsic merit, and I believe that’s what happened with Ms. Doniger’s book. I contend that her book is biased and sloppy, and that’s what this review is all about.
Let’s start with the big picture. A well-written alternative history of anything, let alone Hinduism, generally has the effect of making the reader pause and think twice about what he may have held all along as the truth. From someone of Ms. Doniger’s stature, I was hoping to hear a serious insight or two that would make me go, "Gosh, I’ve known that story all my life, but why didn’t I look at things that way before?"
So, what major insights does the book offer? According to the author, the main aspects are diversity and pluralism in Hindu thought, treatment of women and lower castes, the erotic side of Hinduism, and the many tensions and conflicts within Hinduism.
That’s where my disappointment started—those are not major insights, nor do they add up to an alternative history. Let’s go item by item. Diversity and Pluralism? Caste system? Anyone with a passing interest in India knows about it. Treatment of women? I am not trying to minimize the importance of women, but what’s new here? Were the other ancient cultures any better? Conflict and tension within? Hardly surprising for a country of a billion people. Eroticism in ancient India? Oh please, who hasn’t heard of that? Yes, yes, Ms. Doniger adds a ton of detail, but my point is that things don’t become groundbreaking by adding detail. It’s as if someone wrote a very detailed book about the Mississippi river and Southern cuisine and called it "The Americans: An Alternative History."
All the detail opens up an even bigger disappointment. It appears that Ms. Doniger frequently cherry-picked the facts to suit her views, and on occasion, even twisted them to suit her narrative. I realize these are harsh accusations and the burden of proof lies on me, so please allow me to present enough examples to make my case (within the space limitations of an opinion piece).
Let’s begin with the epic Ramayana, with the king Dasharatha and his three wives. The youngest, the beautiful Kaikeyi, assists the king in a hard-fought battle. In return, the king grants her two wishes, to be claimed at any time of her choosing. Many years later, when the king is about to retire and Rama, his son from the eldest wife, is about to be crowned, Kaikeyi claims her two wishes: that her son Bharata be named king, and Rama be exiled to the forest for fourteen years. The king is torn between his promise to Kaikeyi and his obligation to name the eldest son as the next king, as convention dictated. When Rama hears of the king’s predicament, he abdicates his claim to the throne and leaves the city. This is a defining moment for Rama—the young man respects the king’s word (i.e., the law) enough to renounce his own claim to the throne and loves his father so much that he spares him the pain of having to enact the banishment. Indeed, this point in Rama’s life even foretells the rest of the story—that the young man would, in the years to come, make even bigger personal sacrifices for the sake of his ideals.
That’s the mainstream narrative. Let’s hear Ms. Doniger’s alternative narrative, in her own words. “The youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile.”
Now, was Kaikeyi beautiful? Yes. Was the king deeply enamored with her? Yes. Did Kaikeyi lock herself in a room and create a scene? Absolutely. Was the king called a fool and other names by his own sons? You bet. But there is far more to Rama’s exile than sexual blackmail. Ms. Doniger covers this topic in excellent detail (page 223 onwards), but it’s interesting that she doesn’t bring up the king’s longstanding promise. Before we draw conclusions, let’s move on to a different story from the same epic.
Ms. Doniger retells the story of the ogre Shurpanakha, who approaches Rama and professes her love for him. Rama tells her he is a married man and mocks her. In the end, Rama’s younger brother Lakshmana mutilates the ogre. To Ms. Doniger, this data point (to be fair, not the only data point) indicates Rama’s cruelty toward women. Ms. Doniger then contrasts this story with one from the Mahabharata, where an ogre named Hidimbi professes her love for Bheema and is accepted as his wife—again underscoring the author’s point about Rama’s cruelty. All of this might sound reasonable at first glance, but let’s look closer.
This is how the story goes in the epic. Shurpanakha approaches Rama when he is sitting next to his wife, Sita. When Rama mocks her, the ogre gets angry and charges at Sita. Rama holds the ogre back to save Sita and then orders his younger brother to mutilate the ogre. Rama even says, “That ogre almost killed Sita.” One would think these details are pertinent to the discussion, but strangely enough, Ms. Doniger doesn’t bring them up. Also, Rama was a committed monogamist, whereas Bheema was (at that point in the story) a single man. Aren’t we comparing apples to oranges here? Isn’t this just the kind of nuance one would expect a researcher to pick up?
To be fair to Ms. Doniger, there are many versions of the Ramayana (and sadly enough, some scholars have received a lot of undeserved flak for pointing this out). So, is it possible that she and I were reading different renditions of the same epic? I checked. Turns out we both got our details from the Valmiki Ramayana (also known as the original Sanskrit version). What’s going on here?
Normally, one would expect an alternative narrative to add nuance—as if to say, “There is more to the story than what you lay people know.” But Ms. Doniger manages to do the opposite—she takes a nuanced, compelling moment in the epic and reduces it to sexual blackmail or cruelty or sexual urges, whatever her current talking point is. Speaking of sexual urges, indeed there are no sex scenes in her book. But it can justifiably be called a veritable catalog of all the phalluses and vaginas that ever existed in ancient India, and there is no dearth of detail in Doniger’s book when it comes to private parts. She even cares to tell you whether any given phallus is erect or flaccid. Details, people!
But enough about men and women. Let’s move on to animals. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna burns up a large forest and many creatures die; the epic even describes the animals’ pain at some length. Somehow, Ms. Doniger finds this worthy of filing under the “Violence toward Animals” section. Was Arjuna supposed to first clear the forest of all the wild animals and only then set the forest on fire? Is that how other cultures cleared forests so they could grow crops and build cities? Has it occurred to Ms. Doniger the very fact that the narrator of the epic bothered to describe the animals’ pain (instead of just saying “Arjuna burned the forest”) indicates some sympathy toward animals in those times? Then the professor brings up—and this is a recurring talking point under the cruelty section—the line from Mahabharata that says, “fish eat fish.” Ms. Doniger calls it “Manu’s terror of piscine anarchy.” Oh, the humanity!
Yet there is no mention of what Bheeshma says in the Mahabharata (Book 13), over pages and pages of discourse, on the virtues of vegetarianism and kindness toward all animal life. Bheeshma calls “abstention from cruelty” the highest religion, highest form of self-control, highest gift, highest penance and puissance, highest friend, highest happiness and the highest form of truth. One would think this passage merits a mention when discussing cruelty towards animals in the Mahabharata, but it doesn’t get one.
Ms. Doniger uses the phrase “working with available light” when describing how she had approached her subject matter, which is very true when working with a complex topic such as Hinduism. But the problem is, she then proceeds to turn off many lights in the house and use a microscope to detail the bits she cares to see. She is of course free to do what she likes, but can someone please explain to me why the end result from such an approach qualifies as an “alternative” map of my home?
Still on the topic of animals, let’s discuss dogs, a subject Ms. Doniger covers in great detail. Even lay readers of the Mahabharata remember that in the end, Yudhishtira declined his chance to go to heaven unless the stray dog that had been loyal to him was also allowed in, and many Mahabharata enthusiasts may recall a different dog at the beginning that was unjustly beaten up. Ms. Doniger’s book mentions many other dogs as well, and for good measure, she even shares a weird story from contemporary India, 150 words long, quoted verbatim from an Indian newspaper, about a man marrying a dog.
What about Krishna’s words in the Bhagavad Gita, where he says wise people cast the same gaze on a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog and someone who might cook a dog? Ms. Doniger does mention those lines, but with an interesting twist. She prefaces those 24 words with “though” and reverts to her chosen narrative without even waiting for that thought to finish: “though the Gita insists that wise people cast the same gaze on a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, or a dog cooker, the Mahabharata generally upholds the basic prejudice against dogs.” Has it occurred to Ms. Doniger that, while men were beating up dogs, God was professing a kinder, more egalitarian approach? The whole man vs. God angle escapes her, and in the end we are left with a world where “man marries dog” gets 150 words and God’s words of compassion are limited to 24, topped with a though.
Ms. Doniger calls her book “a history, not the history, of the Hindus,” which is, of course, fine. Further, I do not hold the mainstream narrative to be beyond reproach, nor do I expect an alternative narrative to merely confirm the status quo. Alternative histories do very frequently upset the balance, and, frankly, that’s how progress is made. But my problem here is that Ms. Doniger seems to think the mainstream narrative is ipso facto a biased one, and that her alternative narrative is more compelling, never mind the facts and the counterevidence. She draws the graph first and then looks for data points. That’s a very interesting trend you’ve spotted there, Ms. Doniger, but what about all those big, ugly blots of truth that don’t fit your graph?
So much for stories from ancient India. For the benefit of any kind souls from the Western world who have been patiently reading through all this, let me throw in an example from relatively recent times that involves America. No doubt you've heard what the physicist Robert Oppenheimer said while reflecting on the first nuclear blast he had helped spawn. He quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Why would he quote Gita? The simplest explanation I can think of is that Oppenheimer was a well-read man, and he felt the passage was appropriate when describing the unprecedented firepower he had just witnessed. It’s not much different from Carl Sagan’s quoting Mahapurana in his book Cosmos, one would think. But no, there is more to it. Ms. Doniger’s take:
“Perhaps Oppenheimer’s inability to face his own shock and guilt directly, the full realization and acknowledgment of what he had helped create, led him to distance the experience by viewing it in terms of someone else’s myth of doomsday, as if to say: ‘This is some weird Hindu sort of doomsday, nothing we Judeo-Christian types ever imagined.’ He switched to Hinduism when he saw how awful the bomb was and that it was going to be used on the Japanese, not on the Nazis, as had been intended. Perhaps he moved subconsciously to Orientalism when he realized that it was “Orientals” (Japanese) who were going to suffer.”
There you have it. Weird Hindu doomsdays. Sex-crazed kings. Cruel gods. Men marrying dogs. Phalluses everywhere—some erect and some flaccid. Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have an alternative history of Hinduism. And yes, left uncontested, in all likelihood these are the “insights” a whole new generation of students and researchers might learn, internalize, and cite in future scholarly works.
So much for an alternative history. Now, how about some mundane, regular history stuff? Let’s go back to the Mahabharata, an epic that Ms. Doniger brings up dozens of times in her book (she even calls the Mahabharata “100 times more interesting” than the Iliad and the Odyssey). Let’s ask two questions: When did the main events of Mahabharata occur? And exactly how long is the epic?
Ms. Doniger mentions the years as: between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE, most likely 950 BCE, or around 3012 BCE, or maybe 1400 BCE. That narrows down the chronology quite a bit, doesn't it? Really, there is more to writing history (particularly the alternative kind) than looking up the reference books and throwing in all the numbers one could find. But in Ms. Doniger’s defense, she is not a historian per se (and she clearly tells us so), so let’s let this one slide by. I’d even say she does deserve some credit here for at least bothering to look up things. On the next topic, she fails to do even that.
Ms. Doniger says the Mahabharata is about 75,000 verses long. Then she helpfully adds, “sometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit." My goodness, 25,000 verses is some rounding error, don't you think? Most sources put it between 75,000 and 125,000. It took me all of two hours to find a very detailed account (not on the Internet though), compiled in the 11th century, putting the total at 100,500—and I’m not a researcher, not by a long shot. And yes, the exact number of verses is secondary to the big picture. What bothers me is the offhandedness with which Ms. Doniger brushes off 25,000 verses as a rounding issue. Why this half-baked research?
Oh well, maybe we expected too much from the bestselling book on Hinduism and it’s our fault. So, let’s try again, one last time. Where is India located?
Ms. Doniger states, very clearly, without any ambiguity, on page 11 (footnote): “Most of India… is in the Northern Hemisphere.”
I think I’ll stop here.
* * *
Full disclosure: I am a Goodreads author, but my book in no way competes with Ms. Doniger's books.
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Nandakishore Mridula
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March 1, 2016
(Before reading)
I need to read this book on priority. Hindus are shifting more and more to the right in India, which prompted Penguin to remove this from circulation and pulp the remaining copies. It is time that we fight against such intolerance, and save our country from becoming a theocracy!
(After reading)
I could understand why this book angers the Hindu right. It argues (rightly, IMO)that there is no monolithic "Hinduism" - no "Sanatana Dharma" (Eternal Law) as the conservatives claim.
America calls its culture the "Melting Pot", where various nationalities are fused together to form a single culture. In contrast, Canada calls itsel the "Salad Bowl" - where all cultures are mixed together, yet each keeps its own identity. In the case of India, the cultures fuse together, yet also maintain their identity.
In Kerala, we have a tasty curry called "Avial". It is made from bits and pieces of all kinds of vegetables and roots. Legend has it that Bhima invented this curry during his stint disguised as a cook in King Virata's palace. The Avial has its own distinct taste - but if you savour it slowly, you can distinguish the different vegetables.
Hinduism is the world's Avial.
Detailed review up on my blog.
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Michael Flick
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August 24, 2012
Immature.
I can't think of a better word to describe this book. It's often irreverent, disrespectful, flippant, snide, and glib.
It's a scholarly, rather than a popular, work: 690 pages of text with 1,991 endnotes and innumerable footnotes (well, I didn't count them, but there were a great many--I'd guess more than 200). The author does her own translations of Sanskrit texts as short prose paragraphs (and not many), from which it is difficult to imagine the poetic original or why anyone would pass it down for centuries. It's pretty much all trivialized--I guess the author thinks that's clever. Or cute. But to me it's just a lack of respect. The name of god isn't an an Abbot and Costello routine, the jeweled deer Rama pursues into the forest isn't a Tiffany's branch, Wilie Sutton doesn't explain why temples are razed, the word "cashmere" doesn't mean nothing but money, "God's Dog" isn't a palindrome in Sanskrit, Tantra isn't a wet dream, and many, many, many, many more inappropriate, inapt, cutesy passages.
And it's not only Hinduism that's patronized--the reader is as well ("dear reader").
Unheard voices is a central concern, and the author often listens for them. There's a lot of inference about women, largely repetitive, but much less about lower castes, people outside the caste system, and tribal peoples. Homosexuality gets 5 paragraphs (and a bad pun: "Shastras: Sex and Taxes").
I could go on and on, but why bother? I'm not sorry I read this--as I went along, I did a lot of reading outside the book and learned quite a bit. But it left a nasty taste and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
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Sam Schulman
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February 11, 2019
I am still reading this book, which has provoked both nonviolent and violent protests against it within the Hindu world, much to Wendy's dismay (see this http://hinduexistence.wordpress.com/2... and this http://www.hindujagruti.org/news/9664.... I am not a Hindu, and if you open the old girl's book you will see a chatty, discussion of Hinduism in an haut en bas style that you would be familiar with if it concerned itself with Christianity, for example, particularly in a feminist vein. But these people seem to take their religion seriously, unlike us wiser and more superior New Yorkers.
But start to read in Wendy's book, and you will learn much about Hinduism that you never knew - but you will also see the most incredible vulgarity of expression and manner - a vulgarity that is embarrassing to me as an American and a modern. There is no undergraduate joke that she can avoid, no accidental pun that she can resist passing by - and footnoting, often! She cannot resist explaining the concept of moksha (a kind of renunciation) in the life of a seeker of holiness: "For such a person, moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose.*" And then a footnote, for god's sake: "*To paraphrase Janis Joplin."
Perhaps I spoke this way in my classes in the 70s when I was a young assistant professor - I pray I didn't. But to think that this now rather elderly woman demeans herself, mystifies her young students and imposes this junk on her readers - all in the interest of showing her superiority and disdain for Hinduism - is disgusting and disquieting. Her cultured Hindu despisers don't know the half of it, as Raymond Chandler used to say to Lillian Hellman on the old "Dobie Gillis" show.
The Doniger enterprise to explain Hinduism as a whole - which should have been the capstone of her career - is undermined completely by the dead ends of pop culture and 20th century feminism, which serve only to degrade the subject - but to reveal their own uselessness as ways to understand the world.
To the Arya - I apologize for this person. She knows much, but she turns out to have nothing much to teach any of us, except to avoid her way of thinking.
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Ulogan85
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April 18, 2012
The Hindus by Wendy Doniger is one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune to read. As an Indian-American with an inherent love for academia, I picked up this book with high hopes, especially after I noticed it had won a few awards. Oh, how I wish I hadn't.
It's true that Doniger has conducted a great deal of research, but I find her thinking, her writing, and her interpretations extremely ignorant and insulting. She lacks an understanding of the culture or the many subtleties within the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and she jumps to immediate hard-core western feminist conclusions rather than trying to work within the contexts of history, culture, and the world today. Collecting facts is no good without a wise, smart interpretation-- something she lacks. Her interpretation only reveals a lack of understanding for the people of India, their culture, and their history. Her writing is immature and offensive-- I am hard-pressed to believe that a respected authority wrote this book. I was so disgusted, I couldn't finish it.
It is such a shame-- I feel that so many other western authors have had the ability to merge the best of the West with the best of the East. This author gives the Hindu culture no credit-- rather, she presumes to sit in judgment and mock. There are far better authors out there-- please avoid this one.
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Cold Cream 'n' Roses
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June 4, 2018
The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago is really not a history at all. In her book, Doniger retells Hindu stories and provides snarky interpretations. One story is about fusing the head of a Brahmin woman onto the body of a Dalit woman. Doniger provides several variants of the theme of transposed heads.
Best use of The Hindus:
As I read The Hindus: An Alternative History, I became aware of a pattern: it was as though several authors were writing as Wendy Doniger.
Chapter 18, Philosophical Feuds in South India and Kashmir: 800 to 1300 CE, follows the historical timeline, but is thematically out of place. This chapter discusses the influences that South Indian Shaivism and Kashmiri Shaivism had on each other. This topic could be the subject of its own book.
The whitewash of the plight of Hindus under Mughal rule in Chapters 19 and 20 should come as no surprise. Doniger dedicated her book to William Dalrymple, who romanticizes Mughal India. In her acknowledgements, Doniger singles out Dalrymple for giving her the inspiration to write this book.
On the other hand, Chapter 21, Class, Caste, and Conversion in the British Raj, is a sober, even somber exposition of the plight of Hindus and Hinduism under the Raj.
Chapter 23, Hindus in America, reads as though a high school student wrote it, as it skips through examples of how America pop culture has appropriated Hinduism. The chapter does not discuss the establishment of Vedanta centers (for example, St. Louis has had a dedicated building since the 1950s, and the presence of a swami since 1938), waves of Hindu migration to the U.S., acceptance in American society, or establishment of Hindu organizations and institutions, including temples. Although Doniger stridently defends her right as a non-Hindu to tell the story about Hindus and Hinduism, this is one chapter that a Hindu American should have written.
The changes in tone between chapters suggest that there were many writers. Doniger acknowledges the role of her students in contributing to individual chapters, but I suspect that there is more to it to that: namely, the time-honored tradition of having students doing the professor’s work and her taking credit for it. Call it Doniger's "transposed heads."
Doniger writes in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, “…the wild misconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely by making Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices” [page 653:], which, according to her, is the purpose of her book.
After completing The Hindus: An Alternative History, I doubt that Americans who read this book without prior introduction to Hinduism would come away with any admiration for Hinduism. It saddens me that one of the appeals of this book to American readers is the dropping of references to pop culture.
I recommend The Hindus: An Alternative History only to those readers who have had a prior introduction to Hinduism. This book requires critical evaluation. For introductory books on Hinduism, I recommend:
Understanding Hinduism from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
A Short Introduction To Hinduism by Klaus K. Klostermaier
Disclosure: Penguin gave me a complimentary copy of The Hindus. As you can see, it has affected my review not in the least!
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Edward
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March 11, 2013
I'm not done reading this book, and after months of attempts to get through it I've seriously contemplated abandoning it altogether. That is something that I rarely do, but I find this book to be incredibly tiring. The thing that annoys me the most, is the arrogant attitude of the author which comes across as almost being a parody of Feminist academics/ Women's Studies. As much as I had objections to Edward Said trashing Western scholarship on foreign cultures, this book really is Orientalist in the derogatory manner he popularized.
I'm used to people ridiculing and trivializing Christianity, to suggest that the idea of transubstantiation is an idea nobody believes in anymore, and talk about historical Jesus vs the "Christ myth" that was fabricated by power hungry apostles like Paul, etc. However, I was rather shocked that such standards would be applied to Hinduism, with the trivialization of its history and tenets with a rather unprofessional glibness that uses criticism that crushes more than provides insight. I give credit for it in not being hypocritical at least like many other academics have in being too deferential to other faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian realm. Not to mention the writing style is juvenile, filled with stale pop culture references, bad gags and rather insipid metaphors that even Edward Bulwer-Lytton would find corny.
I don't have a problem with scholarship that takes an unconventional approach and defies orthodoxy. However, the author should consider writing in a manner that fits her status as an academic.
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Jan-Maat
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ReadOctober 31, 2022
An incredible book; an impossible book
Perhaps not a book for you if you have zero knowledge about Hinduism, I imagine the more you bring to it the more you will get out of it.
For that reason alone it is a pity that it was withdrawn from publication in India, but this is where everything gets political.
I have wondered quite a bit how to review this book, soon after reading I read the now venerable A History of India by Romila Thapar and the second volume by Percival Spear, from these I learnt that in broad outlines there is nothing new or exceptional in what Doniger has to say in her history it is, or perhaps was, the standard one and remains the standard one outside of India. My friend H.Balikov asked what was alternative about the history, which was the promise of the subtitle, this was such a good question that I don't have an answer to it, except in negative ways. Firstly to observe that this history is not about the Hindus as in all the Hindus but about those who lived and live in the region of contemporary India or who emigrated to The USA in relatively recent times, admittedly in modern times there are not that many Hindus in south Asia outside of India (comparatively speaking), but historically Hindus and Hinduism that been extremely significant throughout the region; this I put to you, ladies and gentlemen & other honourable readers; is the first clue.
The second clue is that neither Hindu nor Hinduism is ever defined except in a negative sense: a Hindu is not a Jain, or a Buddhist, or a Jew, or Muslim, or a Christian although they may all co-exist and their beliefs may inter- penetrate, mix, cross fertilize, mutually enrich, challenge, and even, believe it or not, influence each other.
Implicitly then for Doniger Hinduism is a phenomenon existing in time and concentrated in certain but changing regions that is characterised by being indefinable, malleable, and adaptable. For Doniger Hinduism is a living exemplar of Ovid's epic,: vital and polyphonic. It can eat whole other peoples and traditions, absorb them, be transformed and yet claim to be the same while always changing. Well so what? You may well say, so isn't that true of all cultural traditions - at least the ones that are not dead? Yes, but her point is -I think- that this is the opposite of what a currently politically dominant currant in contemporary Hinduism says. Such views in Doniger's opinion are unHindu aHindu, non-Hindu, anti-Hindu ? .
The book itself is something like a sacrificed pawn in chess, it's withdrawal from publication in the face of complaints, shows the world a narrow-minded ideology which cannot abide criticism of itself, implicit or directly stated.
For the rest of us it is an incredibly rich journey through an aspect of the culture of India. It plainly comes from a writer with long experience in oral story telling as practised in institutes of higher education - a style that is marked by a delight in bad jokes and puns, not all of which will make you groan aloud. One that she particularly likes is the Zen diagram, which gives you a taste of her manner.
Thee are quite a few maps - when really one would have been quite enough - although the book does cover a long span of time, the rivers and the mountains didn't move around that much, sadly there are very few illustrations. The basic structure is chronological. The essential argument is that contemporary Hinduism is a confluence of many traditions, even relatively core elements such as which gods are the most important, or the nature of sacrifice have changed dramatically. Something that Doniger repeatedly gives credit to is the creativity of Hindu tradition, allowing practitioners escape from absolute obligations and to recycle ideas from other cultures.
It is an amazing book - though in part I have to think that after working through almost 700 pages or 1.299 kilos of paperback book. Well worth reading.
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Jon Stout
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June 23, 2009
More than one friend has said, “Write a lot about this book,” so the pressure is on. When I first saw the reviews for The Hindus An Alternative History, I jumped at the chance to read an opinionated, panoramic discussion of Hinduism, because I have had miscellaneous experiences and opinions of Hinduism ever since my Peace Corps days in Nepal, and I wanted to deepen and consolidate my knowledge.
Doniger acknowledges that hers is an “alternative” history, because it is written with a view to filling in the non-Brahman threads in Hindu history, particularly the contributions of women, as well as of lower and outside castes such as untouchables and pariahs. She also discusses the roles of Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Christians and others who have interacted with Hinduism. So Doniger’s history is a sort of counter-culture history. I thought there might be a gay and lesbian component of a counter-cultural history, as there is to other stretches of world history, but Doniger limits discussion of homosexuality to only four pages out of 700, so I guess that is a topic for an alternative “alternative history.”
Doniger’s discussion goes back to geologic prehistory, and then to the origin of Sanskrit as an Indo-European language. The discussion of the Indo-European speakers of ten thousand years ago, who are the ancestors of most cultures in Europe and the Middle East, seems ironic because the Indo-Europeans were a nomadic, horse-riding, cattle-rustling culture, seemingly like that of Genghis Kahn or Attila the Hun, and yet these progenitors in India developed into a society that stresses asceticism and non-violence as major values. A tiny piece of the evidence is the prevalence of horses in Hindu mythology, even though horses are not indigenous to India.
I was very attentive to the role of Buddhists in Hindu history, because I had read that Buddhism started as a kind of reform movement within Hinduism (around 400 BCE), and therefore could be thought of as a branch of Hinduism. This made sense to me in the same sense that Christianity is a historical offshoot of Judaism, and people speak of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” (though Harold Bloom, for one, would object). A Hindu friend once told me that Buddhism is “the export variety of Hinduism,” But I am also aware that Buddhism has traveled and undergone permutations throughout virtually all of Asia, quite independently of Hinduism.
Doniger clarifies the issue because she tracks Hinduism over time, from the Vedas to the Upanishads to the epics to the Puranas, and so on. The Buddha was contemporaneous with the Upanishads, and had knowledge of the Vedas, in fact reacted in some ways against their authority, so that Buddhism (as well as Jainism), if a branch, is a very, very early branch of Hinduism. But Buddhism and Jainism coexisted with Hinduism throughout centuries, and thus they all mutually criticized and influenced each other. Doniger speaks of some periods in which Buddhists, Jains, Shaivas (devotees of Shiva) and Vaishnavas (devotees of Vishnu) were the prevalent groups, much as Eisenhower once said that Catholics, Protestants and Jews were the three denominations of Americanism.
Doniger discusses how to define “Hinduism,” and points out that there are common sources, practices, beliefs, etc., but that for every generalization one can find opposing viewpoints, so that it is impossible to isolate specific sources or beliefs which define “Hinduism.” She concludes that we have to resort to a Zen diagram (a pun on Venn diagram) which is a Wittgensteinian “family,” that is, a group in which some members share resemblances, but no property is common to all. Her discussion (plus a little help from my friends) led me to understand, despite her opposing argument, that the Vedas are the source from which everything Hindu flows. This notwithstanding the fact that within Hinduism, anti-Vedic positions may be taken.
I am always struck when Hindu history grapples with a theme in a way comparable to how European literature handles the same theme, probably because both traditions are dealing with perennial problems. There are many examples in Doniger’s book, but one comes to mind. The Brahmanas (commentary on the Rig Veda) try to answer questions like “Who is the god whom we should honor with oblation?” by inventing a god whose name is “Who.”
“The creator asked the god Indra… ‘Who am I?,’ to which Indra replied. ‘Just who you said’ (i.e., ‘I am Who’), and that is how the creator got the name of Who.”
This seems a remarkable parallel to me of Yahweh’s saying, in the Torah, “I am that I am” in a way that echoes the Hebrew name of Yahweh. I won’t try to analyze what “I am Who” or “I am that I am” means, but both formulations seem to express the insight that what is, is God, and to call attention to the revelatory nature of self-awareness. Both formulations are deep in ways that call for traditions of mythology and histories of analysis.
I have long tried to get a visceral, personal sense of the Hindu gods and goddesses, which is sometimes difficult, because, for example, it is hard to wrap one’s mind around a Krishna who frolics with milkmaids and also is the destroyer of worlds. Doniger helps the process of understanding by using many snippets of the epic stories, ranging over many centuries, which show how the core of a story has been repeatedly reinterpreted to add layers or variations of meaning. An example would be the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, in which originally Rama questions her honor, but in later versions he never doubts her, and anyhow Sita has a shadow version of herself to do the hard part. The endless reinterpretations serve the purpose of addressing a social or conceptual problem, such as accommodating the viewpoint of women.
Doniger’s discussion of the British Raj fleshes out a lot which had been vague to me, such as the duration of British involvement in India, from Queen Elizabeth’s first charter of the East Indies Company in 1600 to Indian independence in 1947, more than three centuries. Doniger divides the Raj into three waves: First were “Conservatives and Orientalists… appreciative and tolerant,” who interfered minimally, while respecting, though romanticizing Hinduism. Second were “Evangelicals and Opportunists… scornful,” who tended to exploit India religiously and commercially. Third were “Unitarians and Anglicists… hostile,” who were judgmental and punitive in their attitudes.
In other words there was a full range of interactions between British and Indians, ranging from love and respect to cruelty and exploitation. Doniger observes that Edward Said, the theorist of “Orientalism,” was surprisingly ambivalent about Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. While Kipling assumed the structures of British colonialism and implicitly endorsed them, nevertheless his obvious love for India, and the integrity of his vision, could still charm. Doniger says that, ironically “Gandhi referred to the British as ‘those who loved me.’ The British also loved India for the right reasons, reasons that jump off of every page of Kim: the beauty of the land, the richness and intensity of human interactions, the infinite variety of religious forms.”
Doniger defends her own right to interpret Hinduism, “I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitute a world of unlimited good, and an infinitely expansible source of meaning.” Her work erases, in my mind, the distinction between “western” and “eastern,” and places Hinduism squarely within a context which belongs to all of us.
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Divya Singh
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February 15, 2014
This book is a result of incomplete research and the fact that it contains several unjustified judgments from someone with a distant perspective and incomplete understanding of Hindu culture, makes it a bad choice academic and teaching purposes. In the least of its understanding, this book is misleading and at times giving false information.
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Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes.
The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers—many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts—have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.
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GenresHistoryReligionIndiaNonfictionHinduismPhilosophyMythology
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800 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Literary awards
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (2009)
Original title
The Hindus: An Alternative History
This edition
Format
800 pages, Hardcover
Published
March 19, 2009 by Penguin Books
ISBN
9781594202056 (ISBN10: 1594202052)
Language
English
Ali Sheikh
Author 23 books38 followers
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July 26, 2016
Where Exactly Is India, Ms. Doniger?
Banned in Bangalore, the New York Times op-ed said. Why ban a book, no matter how offensive, the literati fumed. No one can truly ban a book in the Internet age, friends pointed out. Naturally, I bought a copy—and more to the point, read the book.
Before we proceed, let me say that I do not support banning any book (or even legally requiring a book to be withdrawn from circulation, as was the case with this book in India). But I do hold that every banned book isn’t necessarily a well-written, scholarly work. Indeed, a ban of any kind instantly confers an aura of hyper-legitimacy on the banned work, regardless of its intrinsic merit, and I believe that’s what happened with Ms. Doniger’s book. I contend that her book is biased and sloppy, and that’s what this review is all about.
Let’s start with the big picture. A well-written alternative history of anything, let alone Hinduism, generally has the effect of making the reader pause and think twice about what he may have held all along as the truth. From someone of Ms. Doniger’s stature, I was hoping to hear a serious insight or two that would make me go, "Gosh, I’ve known that story all my life, but why didn’t I look at things that way before?"
So, what major insights does the book offer? According to the author, the main aspects are diversity and pluralism in Hindu thought, treatment of women and lower castes, the erotic side of Hinduism, and the many tensions and conflicts within Hinduism.
That’s where my disappointment started—those are not major insights, nor do they add up to an alternative history. Let’s go item by item. Diversity and Pluralism? Caste system? Anyone with a passing interest in India knows about it. Treatment of women? I am not trying to minimize the importance of women, but what’s new here? Were the other ancient cultures any better? Conflict and tension within? Hardly surprising for a country of a billion people. Eroticism in ancient India? Oh please, who hasn’t heard of that? Yes, yes, Ms. Doniger adds a ton of detail, but my point is that things don’t become groundbreaking by adding detail. It’s as if someone wrote a very detailed book about the Mississippi river and Southern cuisine and called it "The Americans: An Alternative History."
All the detail opens up an even bigger disappointment. It appears that Ms. Doniger frequently cherry-picked the facts to suit her views, and on occasion, even twisted them to suit her narrative. I realize these are harsh accusations and the burden of proof lies on me, so please allow me to present enough examples to make my case (within the space limitations of an opinion piece).
Let’s begin with the epic Ramayana, with the king Dasharatha and his three wives. The youngest, the beautiful Kaikeyi, assists the king in a hard-fought battle. In return, the king grants her two wishes, to be claimed at any time of her choosing. Many years later, when the king is about to retire and Rama, his son from the eldest wife, is about to be crowned, Kaikeyi claims her two wishes: that her son Bharata be named king, and Rama be exiled to the forest for fourteen years. The king is torn between his promise to Kaikeyi and his obligation to name the eldest son as the next king, as convention dictated. When Rama hears of the king’s predicament, he abdicates his claim to the throne and leaves the city. This is a defining moment for Rama—the young man respects the king’s word (i.e., the law) enough to renounce his own claim to the throne and loves his father so much that he spares him the pain of having to enact the banishment. Indeed, this point in Rama’s life even foretells the rest of the story—that the young man would, in the years to come, make even bigger personal sacrifices for the sake of his ideals.
That’s the mainstream narrative. Let’s hear Ms. Doniger’s alternative narrative, in her own words. “The youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile.”
Now, was Kaikeyi beautiful? Yes. Was the king deeply enamored with her? Yes. Did Kaikeyi lock herself in a room and create a scene? Absolutely. Was the king called a fool and other names by his own sons? You bet. But there is far more to Rama’s exile than sexual blackmail. Ms. Doniger covers this topic in excellent detail (page 223 onwards), but it’s interesting that she doesn’t bring up the king’s longstanding promise. Before we draw conclusions, let’s move on to a different story from the same epic.
Ms. Doniger retells the story of the ogre Shurpanakha, who approaches Rama and professes her love for him. Rama tells her he is a married man and mocks her. In the end, Rama’s younger brother Lakshmana mutilates the ogre. To Ms. Doniger, this data point (to be fair, not the only data point) indicates Rama’s cruelty toward women. Ms. Doniger then contrasts this story with one from the Mahabharata, where an ogre named Hidimbi professes her love for Bheema and is accepted as his wife—again underscoring the author’s point about Rama’s cruelty. All of this might sound reasonable at first glance, but let’s look closer.
This is how the story goes in the epic. Shurpanakha approaches Rama when he is sitting next to his wife, Sita. When Rama mocks her, the ogre gets angry and charges at Sita. Rama holds the ogre back to save Sita and then orders his younger brother to mutilate the ogre. Rama even says, “That ogre almost killed Sita.” One would think these details are pertinent to the discussion, but strangely enough, Ms. Doniger doesn’t bring them up. Also, Rama was a committed monogamist, whereas Bheema was (at that point in the story) a single man. Aren’t we comparing apples to oranges here? Isn’t this just the kind of nuance one would expect a researcher to pick up?
To be fair to Ms. Doniger, there are many versions of the Ramayana (and sadly enough, some scholars have received a lot of undeserved flak for pointing this out). So, is it possible that she and I were reading different renditions of the same epic? I checked. Turns out we both got our details from the Valmiki Ramayana (also known as the original Sanskrit version). What’s going on here?
Normally, one would expect an alternative narrative to add nuance—as if to say, “There is more to the story than what you lay people know.” But Ms. Doniger manages to do the opposite—she takes a nuanced, compelling moment in the epic and reduces it to sexual blackmail or cruelty or sexual urges, whatever her current talking point is. Speaking of sexual urges, indeed there are no sex scenes in her book. But it can justifiably be called a veritable catalog of all the phalluses and vaginas that ever existed in ancient India, and there is no dearth of detail in Doniger’s book when it comes to private parts. She even cares to tell you whether any given phallus is erect or flaccid. Details, people!
But enough about men and women. Let’s move on to animals. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna burns up a large forest and many creatures die; the epic even describes the animals’ pain at some length. Somehow, Ms. Doniger finds this worthy of filing under the “Violence toward Animals” section. Was Arjuna supposed to first clear the forest of all the wild animals and only then set the forest on fire? Is that how other cultures cleared forests so they could grow crops and build cities? Has it occurred to Ms. Doniger the very fact that the narrator of the epic bothered to describe the animals’ pain (instead of just saying “Arjuna burned the forest”) indicates some sympathy toward animals in those times? Then the professor brings up—and this is a recurring talking point under the cruelty section—the line from Mahabharata that says, “fish eat fish.” Ms. Doniger calls it “Manu’s terror of piscine anarchy.” Oh, the humanity!
Yet there is no mention of what Bheeshma says in the Mahabharata (Book 13), over pages and pages of discourse, on the virtues of vegetarianism and kindness toward all animal life. Bheeshma calls “abstention from cruelty” the highest religion, highest form of self-control, highest gift, highest penance and puissance, highest friend, highest happiness and the highest form of truth. One would think this passage merits a mention when discussing cruelty towards animals in the Mahabharata, but it doesn’t get one.
Ms. Doniger uses the phrase “working with available light” when describing how she had approached her subject matter, which is very true when working with a complex topic such as Hinduism. But the problem is, she then proceeds to turn off many lights in the house and use a microscope to detail the bits she cares to see. She is of course free to do what she likes, but can someone please explain to me why the end result from such an approach qualifies as an “alternative” map of my home?
Still on the topic of animals, let’s discuss dogs, a subject Ms. Doniger covers in great detail. Even lay readers of the Mahabharata remember that in the end, Yudhishtira declined his chance to go to heaven unless the stray dog that had been loyal to him was also allowed in, and many Mahabharata enthusiasts may recall a different dog at the beginning that was unjustly beaten up. Ms. Doniger’s book mentions many other dogs as well, and for good measure, she even shares a weird story from contemporary India, 150 words long, quoted verbatim from an Indian newspaper, about a man marrying a dog.
What about Krishna’s words in the Bhagavad Gita, where he says wise people cast the same gaze on a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog and someone who might cook a dog? Ms. Doniger does mention those lines, but with an interesting twist. She prefaces those 24 words with “though” and reverts to her chosen narrative without even waiting for that thought to finish: “though the Gita insists that wise people cast the same gaze on a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, or a dog cooker, the Mahabharata generally upholds the basic prejudice against dogs.” Has it occurred to Ms. Doniger that, while men were beating up dogs, God was professing a kinder, more egalitarian approach? The whole man vs. God angle escapes her, and in the end we are left with a world where “man marries dog” gets 150 words and God’s words of compassion are limited to 24, topped with a though.
Ms. Doniger calls her book “a history, not the history, of the Hindus,” which is, of course, fine. Further, I do not hold the mainstream narrative to be beyond reproach, nor do I expect an alternative narrative to merely confirm the status quo. Alternative histories do very frequently upset the balance, and, frankly, that’s how progress is made. But my problem here is that Ms. Doniger seems to think the mainstream narrative is ipso facto a biased one, and that her alternative narrative is more compelling, never mind the facts and the counterevidence. She draws the graph first and then looks for data points. That’s a very interesting trend you’ve spotted there, Ms. Doniger, but what about all those big, ugly blots of truth that don’t fit your graph?
So much for stories from ancient India. For the benefit of any kind souls from the Western world who have been patiently reading through all this, let me throw in an example from relatively recent times that involves America. No doubt you've heard what the physicist Robert Oppenheimer said while reflecting on the first nuclear blast he had helped spawn. He quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Why would he quote Gita? The simplest explanation I can think of is that Oppenheimer was a well-read man, and he felt the passage was appropriate when describing the unprecedented firepower he had just witnessed. It’s not much different from Carl Sagan’s quoting Mahapurana in his book Cosmos, one would think. But no, there is more to it. Ms. Doniger’s take:
“Perhaps Oppenheimer’s inability to face his own shock and guilt directly, the full realization and acknowledgment of what he had helped create, led him to distance the experience by viewing it in terms of someone else’s myth of doomsday, as if to say: ‘This is some weird Hindu sort of doomsday, nothing we Judeo-Christian types ever imagined.’ He switched to Hinduism when he saw how awful the bomb was and that it was going to be used on the Japanese, not on the Nazis, as had been intended. Perhaps he moved subconsciously to Orientalism when he realized that it was “Orientals” (Japanese) who were going to suffer.”
There you have it. Weird Hindu doomsdays. Sex-crazed kings. Cruel gods. Men marrying dogs. Phalluses everywhere—some erect and some flaccid. Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have an alternative history of Hinduism. And yes, left uncontested, in all likelihood these are the “insights” a whole new generation of students and researchers might learn, internalize, and cite in future scholarly works.
So much for an alternative history. Now, how about some mundane, regular history stuff? Let’s go back to the Mahabharata, an epic that Ms. Doniger brings up dozens of times in her book (she even calls the Mahabharata “100 times more interesting” than the Iliad and the Odyssey). Let’s ask two questions: When did the main events of Mahabharata occur? And exactly how long is the epic?
Ms. Doniger mentions the years as: between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE, most likely 950 BCE, or around 3012 BCE, or maybe 1400 BCE. That narrows down the chronology quite a bit, doesn't it? Really, there is more to writing history (particularly the alternative kind) than looking up the reference books and throwing in all the numbers one could find. But in Ms. Doniger’s defense, she is not a historian per se (and she clearly tells us so), so let’s let this one slide by. I’d even say she does deserve some credit here for at least bothering to look up things. On the next topic, she fails to do even that.
Ms. Doniger says the Mahabharata is about 75,000 verses long. Then she helpfully adds, “sometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit." My goodness, 25,000 verses is some rounding error, don't you think? Most sources put it between 75,000 and 125,000. It took me all of two hours to find a very detailed account (not on the Internet though), compiled in the 11th century, putting the total at 100,500—and I’m not a researcher, not by a long shot. And yes, the exact number of verses is secondary to the big picture. What bothers me is the offhandedness with which Ms. Doniger brushes off 25,000 verses as a rounding issue. Why this half-baked research?
Oh well, maybe we expected too much from the bestselling book on Hinduism and it’s our fault. So, let’s try again, one last time. Where is India located?
Ms. Doniger states, very clearly, without any ambiguity, on page 11 (footnote): “Most of India… is in the Northern Hemisphere.”
I think I’ll stop here.
* * *
Full disclosure: I am a Goodreads author, but my book in no way competes with Ms. Doniger's books.
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Nandakishore Mridula
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March 1, 2016
(Before reading)
I need to read this book on priority. Hindus are shifting more and more to the right in India, which prompted Penguin to remove this from circulation and pulp the remaining copies. It is time that we fight against such intolerance, and save our country from becoming a theocracy!
(After reading)
I could understand why this book angers the Hindu right. It argues (rightly, IMO)that there is no monolithic "Hinduism" - no "Sanatana Dharma" (Eternal Law) as the conservatives claim.
America calls its culture the "Melting Pot", where various nationalities are fused together to form a single culture. In contrast, Canada calls itsel the "Salad Bowl" - where all cultures are mixed together, yet each keeps its own identity. In the case of India, the cultures fuse together, yet also maintain their identity.
In Kerala, we have a tasty curry called "Avial". It is made from bits and pieces of all kinds of vegetables and roots. Legend has it that Bhima invented this curry during his stint disguised as a cook in King Virata's palace. The Avial has its own distinct taste - but if you savour it slowly, you can distinguish the different vegetables.
Hinduism is the world's Avial.
Detailed review up on my blog.
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Michael Flick
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August 24, 2012
Immature.
I can't think of a better word to describe this book. It's often irreverent, disrespectful, flippant, snide, and glib.
It's a scholarly, rather than a popular, work: 690 pages of text with 1,991 endnotes and innumerable footnotes (well, I didn't count them, but there were a great many--I'd guess more than 200). The author does her own translations of Sanskrit texts as short prose paragraphs (and not many), from which it is difficult to imagine the poetic original or why anyone would pass it down for centuries. It's pretty much all trivialized--I guess the author thinks that's clever. Or cute. But to me it's just a lack of respect. The name of god isn't an an Abbot and Costello routine, the jeweled deer Rama pursues into the forest isn't a Tiffany's branch, Wilie Sutton doesn't explain why temples are razed, the word "cashmere" doesn't mean nothing but money, "God's Dog" isn't a palindrome in Sanskrit, Tantra isn't a wet dream, and many, many, many, many more inappropriate, inapt, cutesy passages.
And it's not only Hinduism that's patronized--the reader is as well ("dear reader").
Unheard voices is a central concern, and the author often listens for them. There's a lot of inference about women, largely repetitive, but much less about lower castes, people outside the caste system, and tribal peoples. Homosexuality gets 5 paragraphs (and a bad pun: "Shastras: Sex and Taxes").
I could go on and on, but why bother? I'm not sorry I read this--as I went along, I did a lot of reading outside the book and learned quite a bit. But it left a nasty taste and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
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Sam Schulman
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February 11, 2019
I am still reading this book, which has provoked both nonviolent and violent protests against it within the Hindu world, much to Wendy's dismay (see this http://hinduexistence.wordpress.com/2... and this http://www.hindujagruti.org/news/9664.... I am not a Hindu, and if you open the old girl's book you will see a chatty, discussion of Hinduism in an haut en bas style that you would be familiar with if it concerned itself with Christianity, for example, particularly in a feminist vein. But these people seem to take their religion seriously, unlike us wiser and more superior New Yorkers.
But start to read in Wendy's book, and you will learn much about Hinduism that you never knew - but you will also see the most incredible vulgarity of expression and manner - a vulgarity that is embarrassing to me as an American and a modern. There is no undergraduate joke that she can avoid, no accidental pun that she can resist passing by - and footnoting, often! She cannot resist explaining the concept of moksha (a kind of renunciation) in the life of a seeker of holiness: "For such a person, moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose.*" And then a footnote, for god's sake: "*To paraphrase Janis Joplin."
Perhaps I spoke this way in my classes in the 70s when I was a young assistant professor - I pray I didn't. But to think that this now rather elderly woman demeans herself, mystifies her young students and imposes this junk on her readers - all in the interest of showing her superiority and disdain for Hinduism - is disgusting and disquieting. Her cultured Hindu despisers don't know the half of it, as Raymond Chandler used to say to Lillian Hellman on the old "Dobie Gillis" show.
The Doniger enterprise to explain Hinduism as a whole - which should have been the capstone of her career - is undermined completely by the dead ends of pop culture and 20th century feminism, which serve only to degrade the subject - but to reveal their own uselessness as ways to understand the world.
To the Arya - I apologize for this person. She knows much, but she turns out to have nothing much to teach any of us, except to avoid her way of thinking.
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Ulogan85
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April 18, 2012
The Hindus by Wendy Doniger is one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune to read. As an Indian-American with an inherent love for academia, I picked up this book with high hopes, especially after I noticed it had won a few awards. Oh, how I wish I hadn't.
It's true that Doniger has conducted a great deal of research, but I find her thinking, her writing, and her interpretations extremely ignorant and insulting. She lacks an understanding of the culture or the many subtleties within the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and she jumps to immediate hard-core western feminist conclusions rather than trying to work within the contexts of history, culture, and the world today. Collecting facts is no good without a wise, smart interpretation-- something she lacks. Her interpretation only reveals a lack of understanding for the people of India, their culture, and their history. Her writing is immature and offensive-- I am hard-pressed to believe that a respected authority wrote this book. I was so disgusted, I couldn't finish it.
It is such a shame-- I feel that so many other western authors have had the ability to merge the best of the West with the best of the East. This author gives the Hindu culture no credit-- rather, she presumes to sit in judgment and mock. There are far better authors out there-- please avoid this one.
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Cold Cream 'n' Roses
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June 4, 2018
The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago is really not a history at all. In her book, Doniger retells Hindu stories and provides snarky interpretations. One story is about fusing the head of a Brahmin woman onto the body of a Dalit woman. Doniger provides several variants of the theme of transposed heads.
Best use of The Hindus:
As I read The Hindus: An Alternative History, I became aware of a pattern: it was as though several authors were writing as Wendy Doniger.
Chapter 18, Philosophical Feuds in South India and Kashmir: 800 to 1300 CE, follows the historical timeline, but is thematically out of place. This chapter discusses the influences that South Indian Shaivism and Kashmiri Shaivism had on each other. This topic could be the subject of its own book.
The whitewash of the plight of Hindus under Mughal rule in Chapters 19 and 20 should come as no surprise. Doniger dedicated her book to William Dalrymple, who romanticizes Mughal India. In her acknowledgements, Doniger singles out Dalrymple for giving her the inspiration to write this book.
On the other hand, Chapter 21, Class, Caste, and Conversion in the British Raj, is a sober, even somber exposition of the plight of Hindus and Hinduism under the Raj.
Chapter 23, Hindus in America, reads as though a high school student wrote it, as it skips through examples of how America pop culture has appropriated Hinduism. The chapter does not discuss the establishment of Vedanta centers (for example, St. Louis has had a dedicated building since the 1950s, and the presence of a swami since 1938), waves of Hindu migration to the U.S., acceptance in American society, or establishment of Hindu organizations and institutions, including temples. Although Doniger stridently defends her right as a non-Hindu to tell the story about Hindus and Hinduism, this is one chapter that a Hindu American should have written.
The changes in tone between chapters suggest that there were many writers. Doniger acknowledges the role of her students in contributing to individual chapters, but I suspect that there is more to it to that: namely, the time-honored tradition of having students doing the professor’s work and her taking credit for it. Call it Doniger's "transposed heads."
Doniger writes in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, “…the wild misconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely by making Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices” [page 653:], which, according to her, is the purpose of her book.
After completing The Hindus: An Alternative History, I doubt that Americans who read this book without prior introduction to Hinduism would come away with any admiration for Hinduism. It saddens me that one of the appeals of this book to American readers is the dropping of references to pop culture.
I recommend The Hindus: An Alternative History only to those readers who have had a prior introduction to Hinduism. This book requires critical evaluation. For introductory books on Hinduism, I recommend:
Understanding Hinduism from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
A Short Introduction To Hinduism by Klaus K. Klostermaier
Disclosure: Penguin gave me a complimentary copy of The Hindus. As you can see, it has affected my review not in the least!
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Edward
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March 11, 2013
I'm not done reading this book, and after months of attempts to get through it I've seriously contemplated abandoning it altogether. That is something that I rarely do, but I find this book to be incredibly tiring. The thing that annoys me the most, is the arrogant attitude of the author which comes across as almost being a parody of Feminist academics/ Women's Studies. As much as I had objections to Edward Said trashing Western scholarship on foreign cultures, this book really is Orientalist in the derogatory manner he popularized.
I'm used to people ridiculing and trivializing Christianity, to suggest that the idea of transubstantiation is an idea nobody believes in anymore, and talk about historical Jesus vs the "Christ myth" that was fabricated by power hungry apostles like Paul, etc. However, I was rather shocked that such standards would be applied to Hinduism, with the trivialization of its history and tenets with a rather unprofessional glibness that uses criticism that crushes more than provides insight. I give credit for it in not being hypocritical at least like many other academics have in being too deferential to other faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian realm. Not to mention the writing style is juvenile, filled with stale pop culture references, bad gags and rather insipid metaphors that even Edward Bulwer-Lytton would find corny.
I don't have a problem with scholarship that takes an unconventional approach and defies orthodoxy. However, the author should consider writing in a manner that fits her status as an academic.
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Jan-Maat
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ReadOctober 31, 2022
An incredible book; an impossible book
Perhaps not a book for you if you have zero knowledge about Hinduism, I imagine the more you bring to it the more you will get out of it.
For that reason alone it is a pity that it was withdrawn from publication in India, but this is where everything gets political.
I have wondered quite a bit how to review this book, soon after reading I read the now venerable A History of India by Romila Thapar and the second volume by Percival Spear, from these I learnt that in broad outlines there is nothing new or exceptional in what Doniger has to say in her history it is, or perhaps was, the standard one and remains the standard one outside of India. My friend H.Balikov asked what was alternative about the history, which was the promise of the subtitle, this was such a good question that I don't have an answer to it, except in negative ways. Firstly to observe that this history is not about the Hindus as in all the Hindus but about those who lived and live in the region of contemporary India or who emigrated to The USA in relatively recent times, admittedly in modern times there are not that many Hindus in south Asia outside of India (comparatively speaking), but historically Hindus and Hinduism that been extremely significant throughout the region; this I put to you, ladies and gentlemen & other honourable readers; is the first clue.
The second clue is that neither Hindu nor Hinduism is ever defined except in a negative sense: a Hindu is not a Jain, or a Buddhist, or a Jew, or Muslim, or a Christian although they may all co-exist and their beliefs may inter- penetrate, mix, cross fertilize, mutually enrich, challenge, and even, believe it or not, influence each other.
Implicitly then for Doniger Hinduism is a phenomenon existing in time and concentrated in certain but changing regions that is characterised by being indefinable, malleable, and adaptable. For Doniger Hinduism is a living exemplar of Ovid's epic,: vital and polyphonic. It can eat whole other peoples and traditions, absorb them, be transformed and yet claim to be the same while always changing. Well so what? You may well say, so isn't that true of all cultural traditions - at least the ones that are not dead? Yes, but her point is -I think- that this is the opposite of what a currently politically dominant currant in contemporary Hinduism says. Such views in Doniger's opinion are unHindu aHindu, non-Hindu, anti-Hindu ? .
The book itself is something like a sacrificed pawn in chess, it's withdrawal from publication in the face of complaints, shows the world a narrow-minded ideology which cannot abide criticism of itself, implicit or directly stated.
For the rest of us it is an incredibly rich journey through an aspect of the culture of India. It plainly comes from a writer with long experience in oral story telling as practised in institutes of higher education - a style that is marked by a delight in bad jokes and puns, not all of which will make you groan aloud. One that she particularly likes is the Zen diagram, which gives you a taste of her manner.
Thee are quite a few maps - when really one would have been quite enough - although the book does cover a long span of time, the rivers and the mountains didn't move around that much, sadly there are very few illustrations. The basic structure is chronological. The essential argument is that contemporary Hinduism is a confluence of many traditions, even relatively core elements such as which gods are the most important, or the nature of sacrifice have changed dramatically. Something that Doniger repeatedly gives credit to is the creativity of Hindu tradition, allowing practitioners escape from absolute obligations and to recycle ideas from other cultures.
It is an amazing book - though in part I have to think that after working through almost 700 pages or 1.299 kilos of paperback book. Well worth reading.
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Jon Stout
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June 23, 2009
More than one friend has said, “Write a lot about this book,” so the pressure is on. When I first saw the reviews for The Hindus An Alternative History, I jumped at the chance to read an opinionated, panoramic discussion of Hinduism, because I have had miscellaneous experiences and opinions of Hinduism ever since my Peace Corps days in Nepal, and I wanted to deepen and consolidate my knowledge.
Doniger acknowledges that hers is an “alternative” history, because it is written with a view to filling in the non-Brahman threads in Hindu history, particularly the contributions of women, as well as of lower and outside castes such as untouchables and pariahs. She also discusses the roles of Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Christians and others who have interacted with Hinduism. So Doniger’s history is a sort of counter-culture history. I thought there might be a gay and lesbian component of a counter-cultural history, as there is to other stretches of world history, but Doniger limits discussion of homosexuality to only four pages out of 700, so I guess that is a topic for an alternative “alternative history.”
Doniger’s discussion goes back to geologic prehistory, and then to the origin of Sanskrit as an Indo-European language. The discussion of the Indo-European speakers of ten thousand years ago, who are the ancestors of most cultures in Europe and the Middle East, seems ironic because the Indo-Europeans were a nomadic, horse-riding, cattle-rustling culture, seemingly like that of Genghis Kahn or Attila the Hun, and yet these progenitors in India developed into a society that stresses asceticism and non-violence as major values. A tiny piece of the evidence is the prevalence of horses in Hindu mythology, even though horses are not indigenous to India.
I was very attentive to the role of Buddhists in Hindu history, because I had read that Buddhism started as a kind of reform movement within Hinduism (around 400 BCE), and therefore could be thought of as a branch of Hinduism. This made sense to me in the same sense that Christianity is a historical offshoot of Judaism, and people speak of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” (though Harold Bloom, for one, would object). A Hindu friend once told me that Buddhism is “the export variety of Hinduism,” But I am also aware that Buddhism has traveled and undergone permutations throughout virtually all of Asia, quite independently of Hinduism.
Doniger clarifies the issue because she tracks Hinduism over time, from the Vedas to the Upanishads to the epics to the Puranas, and so on. The Buddha was contemporaneous with the Upanishads, and had knowledge of the Vedas, in fact reacted in some ways against their authority, so that Buddhism (as well as Jainism), if a branch, is a very, very early branch of Hinduism. But Buddhism and Jainism coexisted with Hinduism throughout centuries, and thus they all mutually criticized and influenced each other. Doniger speaks of some periods in which Buddhists, Jains, Shaivas (devotees of Shiva) and Vaishnavas (devotees of Vishnu) were the prevalent groups, much as Eisenhower once said that Catholics, Protestants and Jews were the three denominations of Americanism.
Doniger discusses how to define “Hinduism,” and points out that there are common sources, practices, beliefs, etc., but that for every generalization one can find opposing viewpoints, so that it is impossible to isolate specific sources or beliefs which define “Hinduism.” She concludes that we have to resort to a Zen diagram (a pun on Venn diagram) which is a Wittgensteinian “family,” that is, a group in which some members share resemblances, but no property is common to all. Her discussion (plus a little help from my friends) led me to understand, despite her opposing argument, that the Vedas are the source from which everything Hindu flows. This notwithstanding the fact that within Hinduism, anti-Vedic positions may be taken.
I am always struck when Hindu history grapples with a theme in a way comparable to how European literature handles the same theme, probably because both traditions are dealing with perennial problems. There are many examples in Doniger’s book, but one comes to mind. The Brahmanas (commentary on the Rig Veda) try to answer questions like “Who is the god whom we should honor with oblation?” by inventing a god whose name is “Who.”
“The creator asked the god Indra… ‘Who am I?,’ to which Indra replied. ‘Just who you said’ (i.e., ‘I am Who’), and that is how the creator got the name of Who.”
This seems a remarkable parallel to me of Yahweh’s saying, in the Torah, “I am that I am” in a way that echoes the Hebrew name of Yahweh. I won’t try to analyze what “I am Who” or “I am that I am” means, but both formulations seem to express the insight that what is, is God, and to call attention to the revelatory nature of self-awareness. Both formulations are deep in ways that call for traditions of mythology and histories of analysis.
I have long tried to get a visceral, personal sense of the Hindu gods and goddesses, which is sometimes difficult, because, for example, it is hard to wrap one’s mind around a Krishna who frolics with milkmaids and also is the destroyer of worlds. Doniger helps the process of understanding by using many snippets of the epic stories, ranging over many centuries, which show how the core of a story has been repeatedly reinterpreted to add layers or variations of meaning. An example would be the abduction of Sita in the Ramayana, in which originally Rama questions her honor, but in later versions he never doubts her, and anyhow Sita has a shadow version of herself to do the hard part. The endless reinterpretations serve the purpose of addressing a social or conceptual problem, such as accommodating the viewpoint of women.
Doniger’s discussion of the British Raj fleshes out a lot which had been vague to me, such as the duration of British involvement in India, from Queen Elizabeth’s first charter of the East Indies Company in 1600 to Indian independence in 1947, more than three centuries. Doniger divides the Raj into three waves: First were “Conservatives and Orientalists… appreciative and tolerant,” who interfered minimally, while respecting, though romanticizing Hinduism. Second were “Evangelicals and Opportunists… scornful,” who tended to exploit India religiously and commercially. Third were “Unitarians and Anglicists… hostile,” who were judgmental and punitive in their attitudes.
In other words there was a full range of interactions between British and Indians, ranging from love and respect to cruelty and exploitation. Doniger observes that Edward Said, the theorist of “Orientalism,” was surprisingly ambivalent about Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. While Kipling assumed the structures of British colonialism and implicitly endorsed them, nevertheless his obvious love for India, and the integrity of his vision, could still charm. Doniger says that, ironically “Gandhi referred to the British as ‘those who loved me.’ The British also loved India for the right reasons, reasons that jump off of every page of Kim: the beauty of the land, the richness and intensity of human interactions, the infinite variety of religious forms.”
Doniger defends her own right to interpret Hinduism, “I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitute a world of unlimited good, and an infinitely expansible source of meaning.” Her work erases, in my mind, the distinction between “western” and “eastern,” and places Hinduism squarely within a context which belongs to all of us.
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Divya Singh
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February 15, 2014
This book is a result of incomplete research and the fact that it contains several unjustified judgments from someone with a distant perspective and incomplete understanding of Hindu culture, makes it a bad choice academic and teaching purposes. In the least of its understanding, this book is misleading and at times giving false information.
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