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

[Rahul Asthana]

Another perspective on the hardening of the Hindu identiity
http://sankrant.sulekha.com/blog/post/2003/02/need-i-belong-to-only-one-religion.htm


--- On Tue, 4/28/09, Monica Narula <monica at sarai.net> wrote:

> From: Monica Narula <monica at sarai.net>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Pankaj Mishra on Wendy Doniger's The Hindus - An Alternative History
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 6:32 PM
> 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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