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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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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The Hindus: An Alternative History Paperback – Illustrated, 30 November 2010
by Wendy Doniger (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 477 ratings
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"Don't miss this equivalent of a brilliant graduate course froma feisty and exhilarating teacher."
-The Washington Post
An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth, The Hindus offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions. Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account. Many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated within a century; its central tenets arise at particular moments in Indian history and often differ according to gender or caste; and the differences between groups of Hindus far outnumber the commonalities. Yet the greatness of Hinduism lies precisely in many of these idiosyncratic qualities that continues to inspire debate today. This groundbreaking work elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds, the inner life and the social history of Hindus.
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"This is history as great entertainment! Unlike the usual, arid accounts of dynasties, Wendy Doniger's double vision of Hinduism is about women, merchants, lower castes, animals, spirits and , of course, Dead Male Brahmins. This lively, earthy account explains why ancient India is the world's richest storytelling culture." --Gurcharan Das, author India Unbound
"Wendy Doniger's enthralling and encyclopaedic book reveals her vision of a Hindu culture that is plural, varied, generous, and inclusive. Hinduism, in her view, is an intricate weave of the diverse localities and communities of Indian culture. This is a rich text that will encourage dialogue and conversation among a wide range of scholars." --Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
"With her vast erudition, insight, and graceful writing laced with gentle wit, there is no one better than Wendy Doniger to convey the richness, depth, and diversity of Hindu texts and traditions to international audiences. The Hindus is destined to become a classic that will be discussed and debated for many years to come." --Sudhir Kakar, author of Indian Identity
About the Author
Wendy Doniger holds doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts, including Penguin Classics editions of Hindu Myths and The Rig Veda, as well as many books about Hinduism. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.
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Publisher : Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (30 November 2010)
Language : English
84 in History of Hinduism
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Customer Reviews: 4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 477 ratings
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Harshit Kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book
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Jock Fives
3.0 out of 5 stars Smelling of incense
Reviewed in France on 20 July 2019
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The book arrived smelling heavily of incense which was amusing. However, I am divided as to content.Doniger's "history" is so subjective it is hard to evaluate. It is interesting and annoying and there are many gaps of convenience. That apart, the main problem is the style. The book is drowned in wordiness. If 20 words suffice Doniger will use 500. It is as if she was paid by the page not the content. For example on page 383, she writes a long and complex paragraph that could be resumed as "The Brahmins translated and transcribed the oral tradition to fit their own ends". Next time she could invest in a friendly editor and save the forests of the world.
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Dr. Lee D. Carlson
5.0 out of 5 stars An alternative history as well as a refreshing alternative to the West
Reviewed in the United States on 31 August 2015
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At least from the standpoint of the reviewer who before reading this work was for the most part unacquainted with the history of India, its study assisted to some degree in answering the following questions concerning Indian history and culture:
1. Why do many Western intellectuals who have an aversion for religion find themselves being sympathetic to Hinduism and Indian culture in general?
2. Why does the practice of Hinduism not instill the raising of large armies that cross borders to forcibly proselytize this religion on others who do not practice its tenets, such as commonly the case for Western religions such as Islam and Christianity?
3. Are Brahmins the rich, uppity individuals they are frequently imputed to be by those individuals (such as the reviewer) who have concentrated disdain for the caste system of India?
4. Indeed, what is really the origin of the caste system and are the members of each caste comfortable with their status or do they consider it burdensome and unfair?
5. What is really the origin of vegetarianism and what is the extent of bovine worship in India?
6. When historically did the concept of karma arise, and what motivated it as a belief structure in the minds of Hindus?
7. Does the Hindu religion have a proliferation of different sects as is the case for Western religions or is there a Hindu canon?
The author does a fine job of answering these questions in this sizeable but interesting (and entertaining) book. There is no doubt that the author has some bias in her approach to the reporting of Indian history, but she is aware of this bias and reveals her agenda early on in the book. This involves setting the record straight on the role of women and “Pariahs” in developing Hinduism, and in revealing to what extent Brahmins were always sycophants to the ruling classes in India. The author however does not pull any punches when it comes to the Brahmins, who she describes as “misogynists” and “class-bound.”
That Hindus can engage in violent intolerance is brought out throughout the book, and readers who imagine Hindus via the Hollywood-Gandhi-Johnny Quest point of view will probably be surprised by this. But the breaking down of reader prejudices about Hindus is perhaps the best reason for studying this book, and those readers who decide to finish it will be amply rewarded for their discipline, even though it is not burdensome to study it, thanks to the rich and sometimes biting dialog throughout the book.
That being said, the author does not throw eggs at the reader or at Hindus, in spite of her having some thrown at her, as she alludes to early on in the book. But she does concentrate her attention on what she refers to as the “history of marginalized” Hindus, and not the “mainstream” ones. Her focus in this regard readily explains the subtitle of the book, and for those readers, such as the reviewer, who do not agree with the usual axiom that history = a history of kings and rulers, this approach is refreshing and one that should be emulated throughout the history profession.
But the preservation of history through writing (and coinage) is typically done by kings and rulers, who of course emphasize their own contributions (if they be called that), and not those of the culture at large. So where does an historian go, particularly one who is concentrating on a part of the world where the oral tradition is predominant, to find information on the “history of the marginalized”? The author elaborates on this question in some detail, and points to texts such as the Upanishads as her starting point. And of course, the storytelling and myths, which proliferate throughout Indian history, must be distinguished from the history itself. The study of the impact of ideas goes hand in hand with the history of the ideas, but the former is harder to prove than the latter, and care must be taken not to impute the motivations for taking certain actions solely because ideas were part of the Zeitgeist of the time.
The caste system was “regulated” by religion, the author argues, and if true this is not a surprise, since social hierarchies throughout history have been invented, manipulated, and “regulated” by religion. Kings, tyrants, and every form of despot have found religion convenient and useful for their ends, and they usually find willing supplicants to assist with their strategies and goals. In this respect, Hinduism has much in common with other religions, even though Western intellectuals typically impute to it a level of wisdom not found in Western religions.
There are many surprises in store in this book for the reader not familiar with Hindu history:
- The concept of reincarnation has its origins in the ancient Greeks, not the Hindus.
- People from Africa were the first to settle India.
- There is a flood myth in Hinduism, but it did does not have much intersection with the Biblical myth: only a fish to warn the “Indian Adam” Manu about a upcoming flood, and Manu builds a ship to save himself (all other creatures perished).
- Hinduism, at least in the Upanishads, has a kind of “triadic” metaphysics: three “qualities of matter”, and only the numbers one and two appear (there is a third called “plural” that stands for all those numbers above the number three).
- Loosely speaking, one may say that the “is-ought” problem of Western ethical philosophy is encapsulated in the Dharma, “which is the way things are and the way they ought to be.”
- Just as in the Old Testament of the Bible, absurdly long lifetimes of people were part of the Ramayana, and the cities that Rama ruled are an analog of Eden, where “no one died at the wrong time”, “no living creatures got sick”, and no violation of dharma occurred.
- India had its violent leaders, with Ashoka of northern India, characterized as both a brute and a repentant sinner after he viewed the carnage of march on Kalinga.
- Hindus are forbidden by dharma to have contact with dogs, the latter of which are compared in the Mahabharata to “upwardly mobile Pariahs”.
- The god Shiva is a gambler, according to the Artha-shastra texts, and also cheats at it (such lively gods deserve worship more than the Western ones).
- Alcoholism and various other vices are viewed in the Mahabharata, not as “diseases” but as coming “outside the individual”.
- Women are considered as “addictions” in the Dharma-Shastras, and should be “watched very carefully.”
- Lest the Western reader believe that the Hindus are always compliant to social hierarchies, the author points to the bhakti movement as protesting against “Brahmin exclusivity.”
- The somewhat lengthy discussion of the Tantra sheds light on the actual rituals that were practiced, and that some in the West consider abhorrent or unsanitary.
- Readers will gain a deep appreciation of the current tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and historically between Buddists, Jainas, and Hindus.
The British deservedly take some potshots from the author, and she includes some commentary on Hindus in the United States. The reader may walk away with the impression that those currently in the United States are faring well, but it remains to be seen whether Hinduism, even as the rich tapestry of ideas and practices that the author describes it in the book, will evolve as quickly as the Western religions under the onslaught of science and secularism. But if Hinduism survives pretty much in its current form, there is not much for those hostile to religion to fret about. Its history and the conduct of its practitioners lend credence to the idea that polytheism has a much calmer effect on the human psyche. It seems that when there are many gods and they sometimes fight amongst themselves, their worshippers act in the opposite manner. There seems to be no provocation from these gods for their worshippers to act violently. There seems to be no incentive for these worshippers to cross borders and engage in forced conversion.
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Chinmoy Banerjee
5.0 out of 5 stars A learned, wide-ranging, challenging, and critically astute book.
Reviewed in Canada on 19 April 2014
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Wendy Doniger's book is at once deeply engaged with textual details, historical sweep, theoretical concerns, and contemporary politics. She is scholarly, persuasive in her interpretations, especially bringing to light the suppressed presence of women, tribals, and untouchables, and witty, providing great reading pleasure and knowledge. Despite its obvious love of and dedication to the civilization of India, it is understandable that the Hindu fanatics would want to ban this excellent book and have successfully pressured Penguin to withdraw it. The book offers the challenge of substantial scholarship to their attempt to put Hinduism in a strait-jacket.
8 people found this helpful
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Pradeep Sharma
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful and thought provoking
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2014
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I bought this book because it was recalled from the Indian market and, being a Hindu, the title attracted me. The author clearly loves her subject and has dedicated a lifetime researching it (I can't imagine there are many Americans with such an indepth knowledge of Sanskrit - more than most Indians, even the educated ones!).
The content is very interesting and well organised. Simply, a very good read. Whilst I didn't necessarily agree with all the author's interpretations, I don't question her absolute right and authority in making them.
The book brings a fresh angle to a complex and much interpreted subject and therefore provides many interesting insights and perspectives. Above all, it makes it clear that there is no ONE Hinduism or tradition of Hindu thought. As such, there is no one person or body of people who can claim all of Hinduism as their own. Those who have sought the banning of this book have done themselves and the Hindu tradition no favours at all. The very strength of the Hindu tradition has been its tolerance of different ideas and its ability to assimilate them from many sources. Shame on you narrow-minded "Hindus"! And shame on Penguin India for giving in to them.
This book won't be enough on its own to understand Hinduism and its philosophies, but that is not the objective of the book. I believe, as the title suggests, it is intended to be an alternative and thought-provoking work. It certainly achieves that.
A final word on writing style. The book is very clearly written, though I recommend having a good English dictionary to hand for the occasional words that are not in common use (probably not a problem for specialists in the field). At the opposite end of the spectrum, I found it refreshing how the author compared habits from India thousands of years ago with examples of modern American life (yes, the ubiquitous MacDonalds hamburger gets a mention!). A very down to earth approach.
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The Hindus: An Alternative History
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Author Wendy Doniger
Publication date 2009
Media type Print
Pages 800
The Hindus: An Alternative History is a book by American Indologist Wendy Doniger which the author describes as an "alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell".[1] The book was initially published by Viking Penguin in 2009 and later in India by Penguin's Indian subsidiary, Penguin India.
The book was criticized in India, and in February 2014 it was the subject of litigation in India for "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community". As a result of the lawsuit, the book was withdrawn from the Indian market by its Indian publisher, prompting widespread concerns about the state of free speech in India. Twenty months later, the book returned to the Indian market under a different publisher, Speaking Tiger Books.[2]
Overview
The book, published in 2009 by Viking/Penguin, was explicitly intended as an alternative history of Hinduism, the mainstream history being (in the author's view) written from male Brahminical and white Orientalist perspectives. Doniger instead portrays the history of Hinduism from the point of view of women, dogs, horses and outcastes in a "playful, iconoclastic, and inherently controversial" style.[3]
Reception
According to the Hindustan Times, The Hindus was a No. 1 bestseller in its non-fiction category in the week of October 15, 2009.[4] Two scholarly reviews in the Social Scientist and the Journal of the American Oriental Society, though praising Doniger for her textual scholarship, criticized factual errors in her coverage of British colonialists in India and her lack of focus.[5][6]
In the popular press, the book has received many positive reviews, for example from the Library Journal,[7] the Times Literary Supplement,[8] the New York Review of Books,[9] the New York Times,[1] and The Hindu.[10][11]
In January 2010, the National Book Critics Circle named The Hindus as a finalist for its 2009 book awards.[12] The Hindu American Foundation protested this decision, alleging inaccuracies and bias in the book.[13]
Court case in India
While scholarly and popular reviews were by and large positive, it quickly drew much ire in the Indian blogosphere and the internet more generally, following what Taylor calls "a decade of bad blood, flaming, and hurtful personal attacks" following the publication of Kali's Child and several other controversial works.[3]
The book was criticised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi (Hindi: शिक्षा बचाओ आंदोलन समिति, "Committee for Struggle to Save Education"), founded by Dinanath Batra, arguing that the work was "riddled with heresies"[14] and that the contents are offensive to Hindus.[15] In 2011 he filed a lawsuit under Section 295A of Indian Penal Code, which forbids deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community,[16] and in February 2014, it was the subject of litigation in India.[17] The book was withdrawn from the Indian market by its Indian publisher,[18][19] Penguin India, who agreed to destroy all the existing copies within six months commencing from February 2014.[16]
There was a Streisand effect on the sales of the book and its sales effectively increased. Some bookstores continued to secretly sell the book, wrapped in brown paper.[20]
The publishers blamed the "British vintage Section 295A of IPC" for withdrawal of the books and felt that it was difficult to maintain international standards of free speech in light of this section.[21] The decision to withdraw the book was widely criticised and certain thinkers felt that Penguin should have defended the case effectively and upheld freedom of expression.[15][18] Widespread concerns were raised about the state of free speech in India.[14][22][23]
According to plaintiff attorney Monika Arora, she merely asked the publisher Penguin to fix errors in the book.[24] Arora says the withdrawal of the book by Penguin India and subsequent republishing under a different publisher was a scheme to avoid addressing factual errors in court.[24]
See also
Censorship by religion
Censorship in India
Censorship in South Asia
Freedom of speech
Religious intolerance
Notes
Pankaj Mishra, "'Another Incarnation',", in New York Times, April 24, 2009
B Mahesh (8 December 2010). "Doniger's Hindus returns, 20 months after its withdrawal". Pune Mirror. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
Taylor, McComas (2011), "Mythology Wars: The Indian Diaspora, Wendy's Children and the Struggle for the Hindu Past" (PDF), Asian Studies Review, 35 (2): 149–168, doi:10.1080/10357823.2011.575206, S2CID 145317607
"Top authors this week Archived 2010-08-12 at the Wayback Machine" Hindustan Times Indo-Asian News Service New Delhi, October 15, 2009
Shrimali 2010, p. 80.
Rocher 2012, p. 303.
James F. DeRoche, Library Journal, 2009-02-15
David Arnold. "Beheading Hindus And other alternative aspects of Wendy Doniger's history of a mythology", Times Literary Supplement, July 29, 2009
David Dean Shulman, 'A Passion for Hindu Myths,' in New York Review of Books, Nov 19, 2009, pp. 51–53.
A R Venkatachalapathy, "Understanding Hinduism" The Hindu March 30, 2010
Raman, V.V. "Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: an alternative history." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries Aug. 2009: 2338. Academic OneFile. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
[1] "National Book Critics Circle Finalists Are Announced" New York Times January 23, 2010
"NBCCLetter". Hindu American Foundation (HAF).
Flood, Alison (February 13, 2014). "Penguin's withdrawal of The Hindus causes international outcry". The Guardian. Retrieved February 18, 2014.
Soutik, Biswas (14 February 2014). "Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: Penguin India defends decision to recall book". BBC News India. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
Kapur, Ratna (15 February 2014). "Totalising history, silencing dissent". The Hindu. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
"Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860, Section 295A". Vakilno1.com. Retrieved February 18, 2014.
Barry, Ellen (14 February 2014). "Indian Publisher Withdraws Book, Stoking Fears of Nationalist Pressure". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
Wendy Doniger book 'to be recalled' by Penguin India, BBC, India news, 11 February 2014
Praveen, S.R. (16 February 2014). "Streisand effect on Doniger's book". The Hindu. Retrieved 16 February 2014.
Joshua, Anita (14 February 2014). "No Country for free speech, says Penguin". The Hindu. Retrieved 14 February 2014.
Tobar, Hector (February 13, 2014). "'The Hindus' pulled by Penguin Books India, prompting outrage". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 18, 2014.
Shainin, Jonathan (February 14, 2014). "Why Free Speech Loses in India". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 18, 2014.
Supreme Court Lawyer Monika Arora Explains Lawsuit Against Wendy’s Book July 19, 2016.
References
Gilmartin, David (2011). "Wendy Doniger, the Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin), 2009. 779 pages. $35". Indian Historical Review. 37 (2): 338–345. doi:10.1177/037698361003700215. S2CID 145306543.
Kolff, D. H. A. (2011). "Wendy Doniger, the Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin), 2009. 779 pages. Rs 999". Indian Historical Review. 37 (2): 333–338. doi:10.1177/037698361003700214. S2CID 144502043.
Rocher, Ludo (April–June 2012). "Review: The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 132 (2): 302–304. doi:10.7817/jameroriesoci.132.2.0302. JSTOR 10.7817/jameroriesoci.132.2.0302.
Shome, S. (2012). "Book Reviews: The Hindus: An Alternative History". South Asia Research. 32: 77–79. doi:10.1177/026272801203200107. S2CID 146885979.
Shrimali, K.M. (2010). "The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger". Social Scientist. 38 (7/8): 66–81. JSTOR 27866725.
Categories: 2009 non-fiction books21st-century Indian booksBooks by Wendy DonigerBook censorship in IndiaEnglish-language booksIndian non-fiction booksIndologyViking Press booksCensored booksReligious controversies in IndiaHinduism-related mass media and entertainment controversiesReligious controversies in literatureWorks subject to a lawsuit
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Another Incarnation
By Pankaj Mishra
NYT, April 24, 2009
Visiting India in 1921, E. M. Forster witnessed the eight-day celebration of Lord Krishna’s birthday. This first encounter with devotional ecstasy left the Bloomsbury aesthete baffled. “There is no dignity, no taste, no form,” he complained in a letter home. Recoiling from Hindu India, Forster was relieved to enter the relatively rational world of Islam. Describing the muezzin’s call at the Taj Mahal, he wrote, “I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons.”
Forster, who later used his appalled fascination with India’s polytheistic muddle to superb effect in his novel “A Passage to India,” was only one in a long line of Britons who felt their notions of order and morality challenged by Indian religious and cultural practices. The British Army captain who discovered the erotic temples of Khajuraho in the early 19th century was outraged by how “extremely indecent and offensive” depictions of fornicating couples profaned a “place of worship.” Lord Macaulay thundered against the worship, still widespread in India today, of the Shiva lingam. Even Karl Marx inveighed against how man, “the sovereign of nature,” had degraded himself in India by worshipping Hanuman, the monkey god.
Repelled by such pagan blasphemies, the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call “Hinduism,” complete with a mainstream classical tradition consisting entirely of Sanskrit philosophical texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads.
In fact, most Indians in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to Brahmins. For centuries, they remained unaware of the hymns of the four Vedas or the idealist monism of the Upanishads that the German Romantics, American Transcendentalists and other early Indophiles solemnly supposed to be the very essence of Indian civilization. (Smoking chillums and chanting “Om,” the Beats were closer to the mark.)
As Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, explains in her staggeringly comprehensive book, the British Indologists who sought to tame India’s chaotic polytheisms had a “Protestant bias in favor of scripture.”
In “privileging” Sanskrit over local languages, she writes, they created what has proved to be an enduring impression of a “unified Hinduism.” And they found keen collaborators among upper-caste Indian scholars and translators.
This British-Brahmin version of Hinduism — one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries — has continued to find many takers among semi-Westernized Hindus suffering from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the apparently more successful and organized religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
The Hindu nationalists of today, who long for India to become a muscular international power, stand in a direct line of 19th-century Indian reform movements devoted to purifying and reviving a Hinduism perceived as having grown too fragmented and weak. These mostly upper-caste and middle-class nationalists have accelerated the modernization and homogenization of “Hinduism.”
Still, the nontextual, syncretic religious and philosophical traditions of India that escaped the attention of British scholars flourish even today. Popular devotional cults, shrines, festivals, rites and legends that vary across India still form the worldview of a majority of Indians. Goddesses, as Doniger writes, “continue to evolve.” Bollywood produced the most popular one of my North Indian childhood: Santoshi Mata, who seemed to fulfill the materialistic wishes of newly urbanized Hindus. Far from being a slave to mindless superstition, popular religious legend conveys a darkly ambiguous view of human action. Revered as heroes in one region, the characters of the great epics “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata” can be regarded as villains in another. Demons and gods are dialectically interrelated in a complex cosmic order that would make little sense to the theologians of the so-called war on terror.
Doniger sets herself the ambitious task of writing “a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in Sanskrit.”
As she puts it, “It’s not all about Brahmins, Sanskrit, the Gita.” It’s also not about perfidious Muslims who destroyed innumerable Hindu temples and forcibly converted millions of Indians to Islam. Doniger, who cannot but be aware of the political historiography of Hindu nationalists, the most powerful interpreters of Indian religions in both India and abroad today, also wishes to provide an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.”
She writes at length about the devotional “bhakti” tradition, an ecstatic and radically egalitarian form of Hindu religiosity which, though possessing royal and literary lineage, was “also a folk and oral phenomenon,” accommodating women, low-caste men and illiterates. She explores, contra Marx, the role of monkeys as the “human unconscious” in the “Ramayana,” the bible of muscular Hinduism, while casting a sympathetic eye on its chief ogre, Ravana. And she examines the mythology and ritual of Tantra, the most misunderstood of Indian traditions.
She doesn’t neglect high-table Hinduism. Her chapter on violence in the “Mahabharata” is particularly insightful, highlighting the tragic aspects of the great epic, and unraveling, in the process, the hoary cliché of Hindus as doctrinally pacifist. Both “dharma” and “karma” get their due. Those who tilt at organized religions today on behalf of a residual Enlightenment rationalism may be startled to learn that atheism and agnosticism have long traditions in Indian religions and philosophies.
Though the potted biographies of Mughal emperors seem superfluous in a long book, Doniger’s chapter on the centuries of Muslim rule over India helps dilute the lurid mythology of Hindu nationalists. Motivated by realpolitik rather than religious fundamentalism, the Mughals destroyed temples; they also built and patronized them. Not only is there “no evidence of massive coercive conversion” to Islam, but also so much of what we know as popular Hinduism — the currently popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna, the network of pilgrimages, ashrams and sects — acquired its distinctive form during Mughal rule.
Doniger’s winsomely eclectic range of reference — she enlists Philip Roth’s novel “I Married a Communist” for a description of the Hindu renunciant’s psychology — begins to seem too determinedly eccentric when she discusses Rudyard Kipling, a figure with no discernible influence on Indian religions, with greater interpretative vigor than she does Mohandas K. Gandhi, the most creative of modern devout Hindus. More puzzlingly, Doniger has little to say about the forms Indian cultures have assumed in Bali, Mauritius, Trinidad and Fiji, even as she describes at length the Internet-enabled liturgies of Hindus in America.
Yet it is impossible not to admire a book that strides so intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-Arab relations. During a lecture in London in 2003, Doniger escaped being hit by an egg thrown by a Hindu nationalist apparently angry at the “sexual thrust” of her interpretation of the “sacred” “Ramayana.” This book will no doubt further expose her to the fury of the modern-day Indian heirs of the British imperialists who invented “Hinduism.” Happily, it will also serve as a salutary antidote to the fanatics who perceive — correctly — the fluid existential identities and commodious metaphysic of practiced Indian religions as a threat to their project of a culturally homogenous and militant nation-state.
THE HINDUS An Alternative History
By Wendy Doniger
779 pp. The Penguin Press. $35
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World” and “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.”
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