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

[Pawan Durani]

Also read

http://www.ivarta.com/columns/OL_040912.htm

Rgds



On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Monica Narula <monica at sarai.net> wrote:

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