[Reader-list] Pankaj Mishra on Wendy Doniger's The Hindus - An Alternative History

[Monica Narula]

Wendy Doniger's: The Hindus - An Alternative History

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.

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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Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net