Author: IndiaFacts Staff 
Publication: India Facts
Date: February 11, 2014
URL: http://www.indiafacts.co.in/decoding-wendy-donigers-hinduism-book-part-3/#sthash.aSC8PAZq.MxMKd2Bm.dpbs

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a scholarly critique of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History published in 2009. This book published by Penguin was withdrawn by the publisher in an out of court settlement owing to a case filed in a Delhi court by Shiksha Bachao Andolan and a group of individuals. Expectedly, the withdrawal has stirred up controversy. Those who regard her book as throwing new light and insights on Hinduism and Hindus have voiced strong opposition while those who aver that The Hindus is essentially a book that disparages Hindus and their religion maintain that their contention is factually accurate.

Hence this series.

This is originally a paper titled This Hindu and That Hindu in Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, written and presented by Shrinivas Tilak (an independent researcher based out of Montreal) for the WAVES conference in 2010.

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Toward the end of her latest work The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Professor Wendy Doniger explains the purpose of writing this book which, on surface, appears a very noble one: The wild misconceptions that most non-Hindus have of Hinduism need to be counteracted by demonstrating the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices. An American interlocutor like herself, she goes on, is the best person to build that bridge. Hence this book (pp 652-653). This noble goal however, comes toward the end of a long book and clashes with the goal she sets for herself in the preface to the book on page one: the main purpose of The Hindus is to provide a narrative account of “alternative people” who do not figure in the Brahmin-generated history—people who are alternative in the sense of otherness, people of other religions, or cultures, or castes, or species (animals). The talk and task of building a bridge to Hindus and Hinduism is therefore only an afterthought at best and one that remains undone.

The Hindus tells the story of Hinduism chronologically and historically but emphasizing the history of marginalized rather than mainstream Hindus. Doniger’s aim is to demonstrate (1) that Hindus throughout their long history have been enriched by the contributions of disenfranchised or marginalized sectors: women, the lower castes, and members of other religions; (2) that although there are a number of things that have been characteristic of many Hindus over the ages (the worship of several gods, reincarnation, karma), none has been true of all Hindus, and the shared factors are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to individuals belonging to one group or another; (3) that the greatness of Hinduism (its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness) lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny; and (4) that the history of tensions between the various Hinduisms, and between different sorts of Hindus, undergirds the violence of the contemporary Indian political and religious scene (pp. 14-15).

Behind the façade of providing an alternative history, the real agenda of The Hindus seems to be to drive a wedge between what Doniger calls the marginalized and the mainstream Hindus who she also calls as Subaltern Hindus and Sanskritic Hindus respectively. Since the former group is dear to Doniger’s heart, let us call this group ‘This Hindu’ and the latter group, which she loathes with all her heart, ‘That Hindu’ to indicate the chasm that she wishes to posit between the two groups. In her preliminary observations on Hindus and Hinduism in general Doniger maintains that the composite Hindu culture is made of (1) local or ‘little traditions’ as well as a pan-Indian or ‘great tradition;’ (2) oral as well as written traditions; (3) vernacular as well as Sanskrit traditions; and (4) non-textual as well as textual sources (p. 32).

The first elements of each of these pairs refer to the contribution made by ‘This Hindu’ while the second elements refer to contributions brought by ‘That Hindu’ to Hinduism. Doniger recognizes that these contrasting pairs did not translate into polarized groups of Hindus:

a single person would often have both halves in his or her head; a Brahmin would know the folk traditions, just as, in modern west, many people study paleography and then go to church and read Genesis. It is not the case that a puritanical Brahmin studies Manu’s dharma texts and a libertine merchant read the Kāma-sūtra. A typical Hindu, of either class, might well read dharma with learned men by day and the Kāma-sūtra with his mistress by night (pp. 32-33).

But after announcing these salubrious traits of Hinduism and Hindus in the introduction, Doniger proceeds to systematically turn these two integral expressions of Hinduism against each other over the next seven hundred pages or so. ‘This Hindu’ declares Doniger, magisterially, would constitute the major source and rallying point of her ‘alternate’ history of Hindus and Hinduism since he represents and generates all that is the best and finest in Hinduism while ‘That Hindu’ only brings disgrace to it.

It is imperative to counteract this false and mischievous dichotomy of ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ that is artificially and arbitrarily imposed by Doniger: ‘This Hindu’ is Subaltern, Secular, and Semitic (i.e. adhering to the values of individualism and difference valorized in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition). ‘That Hindu,’ by contrast, is Sanskritic, Saffronized, and Sati and cow-worshiping. Hindus must contest the assumptions implicit in the division that Doniger is keen to create and perpetuate between ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ because, if unchallenged, they may lead to a post-Hindu India that secessionists like Kancha Illaiah dream of. Hindus must convincingly demonstrate the continued existence (since the ancient Vedic times) of a two-way bridge of discourses between the Subaltern and Sanskritic Hindus through the modes and methods of reciprocal exchanges ranging from religion, science, philosophy, art, education, politics, marriage, vocation, economics, literature, drama, to dance. These are not separate entities but as the manifold ways in which the function of being Hindu and human expressed (and expresses) itself. Subaltern Hindus and Sanskritic Hindus do indeed betray distinctive characteristics and yet neither leaves the broader Hindu tent or umbrella. The decision to call a religious community a separate ‘sect’ is similar to the decision to call a linguistic community a dialect or a separate language. The decision where to draw the line is always subjective and hence more or less arbitrary and determined by considerations of social or economic status or other considerations.

This Hindu

 Doniger points out that countless terms have been coined to designate the lowest castes (whose members did not have an access to the ritual of initiation), the disposed, or underprivileged or marginalized groups, including the tribal peoples. Sanskrit texts refer to them as Chandalas, Chamars, Pulaksha, or Shva-pakas (dog cookers). Much later the British called them Untouchables, the Criminal Castes, the Scheduled castes, the Depressed Classes, and Outcastes. Gandhi called them Harijans. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, the members of these groups began to call themselves Dalits (using the Marathi/Hindi word for ‘oppressed’ or ‘broken’). Postcolonial scholars call them (and other low castes) Subalterns. Adivasis constitute another important oppressed group, the so-called the tribal peoples of India, on the margins both geographically and ideologically, sometimes constituting a low caste (such as the Nishadas), sometimes remaining outside the caste system altogether.

Doniger conveniently designates all these disenfranchised groups by the catchall term of Pariah (a Tamil word for the caste whose members beat leather-topped drums; see p. 38). Doniger holds Hindu women, Pariahs, and non-Hindu minorities on par and informs us that whatever she writes about one also applies to the others (p. 39). “The Subaltern Hindu,” claims Doniger, rejected both hierarchy and violence whilst the expressed motivation promoting the bhakti movements mostly included women and Dalits within their ranks, and advocated a theology of love (pp.40-41).

This Hindu: the glory of Hinduism
 
The broader intellectual pluralism of the Vedas regards the world, or the deity, or truth itself as plural; the Vedas tackle the problem of ontology from several (plural) different angles, branching off from an ancient and still ongoing argument about the way the world is, about whether it is basically uniform or basically multiform.

“Rig Veda 10.121,” continues Doniger, “shows a tolerance, a celebration of plurality, even in asking unanswerable questions about the beginnings of all things” (pp. 128-129). Mahatma Gandhi captured this unifying essence when he suggested that the chief value of Hinduism lies in holding that all life is one (Organ 1970: 90-91). For this reason Doniger considers Gandhi to be the epitome of ‘This Hindu’ who embodied a truly tolerant individual pluralism as indeed do most rank-and-file Hindus. She traces it back to “the myths, to the paths charted by individuals like King Janashruti and Yudhisthira and in recorded history by Ashoka, Harsha, or Akbar or Mahadevyyakka or Kabir.” Gandhi took the inclusiveness and imagination of Hinduism for granted and contrasted it against the attitudes of Brahmins [representing ‘That Hindu’], whose ‘prejudices’ against both Dalits and Muslims Gandhi protested throughout his life (p. 688). The boast that Hinduism is tolerant and inclusive is not false. It is a true truism; however contradicted it may be by recurrent epidemics of intolerance and exclusion (p. 688).

That Hindu: a blot upon Hinduism
 
According to Doniger, Hindu diversity inspires pride in some, anxiety in others. In particular, it provokes anxiety in those Hindus who are called Hindu nationalists or the Hindu right, or right-wing Hindus, or the Hindutva (Hinduness) faction, or more approximately, Hindu fundamentalists; they are against Muslims, Christians, and the wrong sort of Hindus (i.e. Subaltern Hindus). Their most powerful political organ is the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), with its militant branch, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). Doniger sees her book as an alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell (p. 14). “The Sanskritic Hindu” embedded violence in many forms of bhakti that he appropriated for himself. In more recent times, in the name of bhakti to Ram ‘The Sanskritic Hindu’ conspired with militant Hindu nationalists to tear down the Babri Mosque” (see pp. 689-690).

Doniger metaphorizes the high caste Hindu males as ‘top’ dogs that have oppressed and repressed everybody else in India since the ancient Vedic times. In Doniger’s reckoning, in the traditional history of India (a product of Brahmin imagination), religious minorities and social outcastes are reduced to a status of a ‘scape-dog’ (p. 145) (these include Muslims who ruled India for most of the last millennium). Doniger stigmatizes ‘That Hindu’ as superstitious, socially retrograde and obscurantist because he (allegedly) uses, among other things, suttee [Sati] as the banner of Hindutva to oppress not only women but Muslims and dissidents (p. 618). For Doniger, the cow is a central issue for the Hindutva faction, whose influence upon all branches of Indian life amounts to what some Indian academics and media personnel have called Saffronization (on the model of Sanskritization). “But are cows sacred in India?” asks Doniger “or is the idea of a ‘sacred cow an Irish bull (the old British chauvinist term for an ox-y-moron)? Sacred means a lot more than not to be killed and is, in any case, a Christian term that can be, at best, vaguely and inadequately applied in India” (p. 658).

Doniger claims that violence was embedded in Vedic sacrifice of cattle and horses. She situates the ritual violence in the social violence that it expressed, supported, and required, the theft of other people’s cattle and horses (p. 103). The Vedantic reverence for non-violence flowered in Gandhi; the Vedic reverence for violence flowered in the slaughters that followed Partition (p. 627). She finds instances in Indian history, where individuals have turned this tide of violence even against the current of zeitgeist. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar, and Mahatma Gandhi in our times initiated highly original programs of religious tolerance and curbing violence, going in the teeth of the practices of their times. Aurangzeb, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, and M. S. Golwalkar, on the other hand, turned on the tide of violence (p. 21). Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973), who was a leader of the Hindu organization known as the RSS claims Doniger, reflects a different sort of cultural schizophrenia from the creative dichotomies that have typified so much of Hinduism. He used the justifiable Hindu pride in religious tolerance to justify intolerance (p. 687).

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Decoding Wendy Doniger’s Hinduism book: 2

Bridge of discourse between ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’
 Hindus need to be wary of the intractable opposition between “This Hindu and “That Hindu” that is falsely posited and perpetrated by Orientalists like Doniger. It is true that there have always been marginalized people in India; marginalized in the sense that they have been dispossessed and exploited. But Hindus also devised ways of building bridges between the two and reintegrating them into ‘We Hindus’ based on the value of harmony (samanvaya and bandhutā) and the instrument of transformation (sādhana and samskāra) leading toward an ideal Hindu. The distinct lifestyles of ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ may pose problems for scholars like Doniger in their attempts to understand and write about Hinduism, but they are Hinduism’s glory as a cultural phenomenon. Pluralism and diversity are deeply ingrained in polylithic Hinduism, the Ellis Island of religions as Doniger calls it when she is in her benign mood (pp.43-44). The lines between different beliefs and practices exhibited by ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ are permeable membranes. True, the little traditions and the great tradition were (and are today) divided among themselves on many central issues throughout India’s history. But the bridge of eclectic and internal pluralism leaves the lines of communication open between them. A pivotal example of such pluralism may be found in the Manusmŗti, which argues, within a single chapter, passionately against, and then firmly for, the eating of meat (5:26-56)(see Doniger pp. 43-44).

Doniger’s flawed methodology and skewed critique

 Doniger claims that she is a ‘recovering Orientalist’ (p. 34-35). Orientalism stands for the body of knowledge that the European powers began to generate from the seventeenth century onwards with a view to consolidate the economic, military, and political gains they had started making in Asia and Africa. The colonial administrators in British India sowed divisions among the people of India concerning their cultures, religions, and societies by abrogating exegetical control over their traditional systems of knowledge. The discipline of Indology, which is a modern product of Orientalism, provides a clear instance of how (even today) a scholar like Doniger can arbitrarily appropriate the power and the authority to represent Hindus and write their history.

Doniger depends exclusively, by her own admission, on mythology, fiction, and relevant textual sources (mainly produced by ‘That Hindu’) for writing an ‘alternative’ history of the Hindus (p. 35). The fact that the texts keep shouting that women should not read Vedic texts suggests to her that women were capable of doing so and probably did so (p. 36).

“Excavating women’s voices in male texts must be made in the realization that there may be ventriloquism, which is a two-way street. There may be a ventriloquism of women’s voices in male minds. Even when a male Brahmin hand held the pen, as was usually the case no matter what the subject matter was, women’s ideas may have gotten into his head. A hermeneutic of suspicion, questioning the expressed motivations of the author, is therefore required” (p. 37).

As with women’s voices, Doniger is confident that scholars can ferret out voices of many low castes in the ancient texts. And, “once we have access to the oral and folk traditions, we can begin to write the alternative narrative with more confidence” (pp. 40-41).

Since Doniger does not follow the established canons of historiography, her book, The Hindus cannot be called a work of history; not even ‘alternative’ history. It is more like an ‘alternative’ to history! Indologist Kees Bolle has observed that Doniger’s approach lacks philosophical vigor that is highly visible in Hinduism. Since Doniger does not permit the reader along other lines than what she has thought out, Bolle detects here an unhealthy tendency to ‘psychologize’ or ‘personalize’ Hindu documents and data she is scrutinizing. Overall, he finds Doniger’s methodology lacking in ‘openness’ (Bolle 1984: 20-26). Doniger often describes her approach to study Hindu texts as a ‘toolbox’ approach. Depending upon a particular genre or the context in a text, she applies a specific method of analysis just as a workman reaches for a particular tool to fix a problem at hand. Doniger’s ‘toolbox’ is replete with feminist theory, Jungian psychology, literary theory, psychoanalysis, structuralism and other fancy tools. Perhaps a non-Hindu reader may understand the universal reality expressed in relevant Hindu myths using these approaches. But I doubt any average Hindu man or woman would. If you claim to understand the game of chess better and in a more original way, your claim must be so recognized and understood by those who know and play chess.

In The Hindus, the principal target of Doniger’s critique is ‘That Hindu’ representing millions of Hindus. The ‘tool’ she picks up to deal with ‘That Hindu’ happens to be the shotgun loaded with buckshot. The spray is wide enough that it will hit something but every hunter will tell you that any game killed in this manner is so full of [poisonous] lead that it is completely useless as food (adapted from Mylvaganam 2004). Below are some instances where her critique is off mark:

(1) Doniger presents the profiles of ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ as if they were isolated entities with clearly defined boundaries and eternally at war with each other. The fact is, as elsewhere in the world, culture in India is part of a process of change where tradition, belief, and practices were constantly redefined in light of cultural changes, intellectual trends, and personal and communal life experiences. The dynamics of cultural interaction in India has remained syncretistic, reacting to and absorbing elements from a variety of systems and philosophies (Berling 1980: preface xiii). Hinduism is a product of this unique heritage to which both ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ have contributed.

 (2) Doniger tacitly introduces a racial divide between ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu,’ which is patently false. The traditional principle of spatial organization of the people of India is neither racial nor casteist but cultural and territorial: (1) Panca Dravida and (2) Panca Gauda. The Panca Dravida area comprises the four Southern states of today’s India: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu plus Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Panca Gauda refers to the Northern states. Dravida in Sanskrit means ‘land of the hot sun.’ Hindus of South India who properly followed dharma were and are as much Ārya as Hindus of North India. In the Purāņas and in Sanskrit plays, the wife addresses her husband as ‘Ārya.’ Does it mean she was ‘Anāryā’? Modern historians and some Dalit leaders describe Rāma as Ārya and Rāvaņa, Anārya, which assertion is ridiculous since Vālmiki presents Rāvaņa as a Brahmin!

 (3) Doniger’s stress on difference and individualism originates in her Judeo-Christian [Islamic one might add!] baggage. These Semitic religions function as great dividers, setting son against father, daughter against mother, until a man’s foes are those of his own household. In India it is called a samaya (agreement, compact, and contract). Doniger has difficulty in understanding the integrative aspects of Hindu culture because whereas in the West the national state and politics are the chief agents of integration, in India (she claims) the people tend to be united by myth, metaphysics, and art. Doniger dwells on the stress on individualism and difference implicit in the ‘little tradition’ that allegedly separates it from the ‘great tradition.’ But in the process she misses the common theme interpenetrating the ‘little’ and the ‘great’ traditions in Hinduism and Hindu culture.

 (4) Another of Doniger’s tacit assumptions is that the Subaltern, non-Sanskritic culture somehow necessarily expresses only the Subaltern (i.e. avarņa) consciousness. In this line of interpretation she seems to follow the Italian political scientist Gramsci who claimed that the “vernaculars are written down when the people regain importance” (1991: 168). Unfortunately this is untrue for India as Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has argued (1996). Doniger (like Professor Jayant Lele) shares in the widely held belief that the emergence of regional languages in India was due to the efforts of devotees (bhaktas) who mostly came from the Subaltern, marginalized, and avarņa castes. This is a contestable assertion. In Karnataka, for example, old Kannada literature was courtly, suffused with Sanskrit, and unintelligible to those ignorant of Sanskrit. In the north some of the earliest regional-language texts were composed by courtly Muslims (e.g. verses of Mas’ud Sa’d Salman, ca. 1100, of the Yamini Kingdom of Lahore; see (Pollock 1996: 244-245). The relationships between language, literature, and social power or status cannot be analyzed by any simple formula transferred from Europe, as Doniger (and Lele) tend to do in their critique of ‘That Hindu’ or Hindutva. Like Lele, Doniger sets up for herself the task of challenging and dismantling the homogenizations and hegemony that the Sangh Parivar (read ‘That Hindu’) has supposedly fabricated. She seeks to unmask the pretensions about a Hindu history that is viewed as a linear syncretic process. She thereby hopes to place the necessary weapons of critique back in the hands of those Subaltern Hindus from whom the Brahmins had violently stolen them (see Lele 1995: xxi).

 (5) Doniger begins her final, concluding chapter with a quotation taken from a small tract on Hindu nationalism allegedly written by Golwalkar as evidence of how ‘That Hindu’ abuses India’s history for his own narrow and bigoted ends. This same quotation has been ‘milked’ to exhaustion in dozens of so-called scholarly monographs by Western and Indian academics, historians, and Indologists who conveniently create a ‘straw-man’ out of Golwalkar as an iconic Hindu fanatic. Like most other scholars, Doniger demonizes Golwalkar and his thought as intolerant on the basis of just one paragraph from a pamphlet We, Our Nationhood Defined(pp. 48-49). This is unhistorical, besides being incompetent and biased scholarship considering the fact that Golwalkar only translated that work into Hindi originally written in Marathi by Balarao Savarkar, the younger brother of Vinayak D. Savarkar. It does not necessarily mean that Golwalkar, as the translator, endorsed or espoused all the ideas presented by Balarao Savarkar. Furthermore, Golwalkar was active in India’s public life thirty-five years after the pamphlet came out and his works run to thousands of printed pages collected in twelve volumes. One would expect a more nuanced assessment of Golwalkar from “one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world” as claimed in the blurb of The Hindus. Those interested in an ‘alternative’ perspective on Golwalkar may consult Tilak (2008).

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Decoding Wendy Doniger’s Hinduism book: Part 3

We Hindus

In the light of foregoing, it is incumbent upon contemporary Hindus and Hindu scholars to regain the initiative and using indigenous historiography and cognitive categories and to institute a framework to generate (in multiple volumes) a genuine and authentic history of the Hindus from an insider’s perspective. Only then can we successfully remove the wild misconceptions that non-Hindus have spawned about Hindus and Hinduism.

A Sanskrit lexicon (Śabdakalpadruma) defines Hindu to be any one who categorically rejects all that is inferior and crude (hīnam duşyati iti hinduh; hinasti doşān sa hinduh). But the Hindu does not stop at merely finding faults, flaws, or deficiencies with oneself and/or with others. Hinduism calls upon him/her to remove all the faults (doşas) and seek perfection (samsiddhi) through sādhanaand the cultivation of samskāras. The ideal of perfection may not be attained, though it ever calls forth abiding effort. Perfecting man, not perfected man, therefore, should properly be called as the telos of Hinduism. It does not demand that man/woman be perfect in order to be a Hindu. The emphasis is more on the ameliorative direction of one’s life, individually and generally. In the Bhagavadgītā (5:10) Śrī Kŗşņa explains to Arjuna that anyone who performs prescribed actions without attachment to their fruits is not touched by blemishes just like the lotus that rises above the muddy waters and remains untouched by the mud. The pure, sinless lotus flower that manages to raise itself above all murky conditions (doşas) has subsequently become a standard of comparison for anyone who aspires to rise to the ideals set by Hinduism.

The individual’s aim of perfection is the same as the group’s aim of culture—the realization of the Universal Self and the Universal Community. Perfection is to individual as culture (samskŗti) is to the group: a process of becoming as well as a state of being. The individual seeks perfecting as society seeks ‘culturing’ (see Organ 1970: 171-172). Samskŗti is derived by adding the prefix sam to the root kŗ (to do) connoting an activity which renders an aspirant fit to accomplish something worthy. The Vedas extol collective life (sambhūti) which is deemed to be enduring and lasting. The Ŗgveda advises that one should strive to become eternal by serving the people (prajāya amŗtatvam asyāma). Civilization evolves when a people or a community performs series of creative actions and processes in a united spirit (samskŗti iti eki bhūya kŗtih) leading from one’s state of nature (prakŗti) to refinement (samskŗti). Translated into English, they may be identified as five ‘F’ words = food (anna); festivals (utsava); crafts and fine arts (including films)(kāla); fiction (literary works, kathā); and finance (artha).

Hindu term of self reference for such a perfecting being is Ārya. Hinduism therefore is known from within the tradition as Ārya– or Sanātana dharma. It is useful to remember in this context that Ārya (a noble being) is an ethical term without any racial connotation.Sanskritist and Indologist Madhav Deshpande cites an ancient Jain text (Pannavasutta ca. 100 BCE), which contains a long section describing the Jain conceptions of Aryan and non-Aryan (mleccha). It classifies Aryans into two kinds: exalted Aryans (iddhipattāriya; pace Doniger’s ‘That Hindu’) and non-exalted Aryans, i.e. average Aryans (aniddhipattāriya; pace Doniger’s ‘This Hindu’). The ‘average Aryans’ in turn are classified into nine different categories: Aryan by region (kşetrārya); by birth (jātyārya); by clan (kulārya); by function (karmārya); by profession (śilpārya); by language (bhāşārya); by wisdom (jñānārya); by realization (darśanārya); by conduct (caritrārya)(see Deshpande 1993: 10). This classification implicitly recognizes that whoever Aryan is; he/she is so (or can become Aryan) by taking to appropriate profession or learning the proper language and so on (i.e. by undergoing proper samskāras). In other words, unlike Doniger’s dichotomy, the distinction drawn between an exalted and non-exalted Aryan and an Aryan and a non-Aryan is not absolute and the status of the Ārya is not by birth alone. The process of aryanization is a dynamic and interactive one.

Historically, the Hindu quest for perfection (self and communitarian) is reflected and is discernible through dharma, samskŗti,itihāsa, and paramparā or the four petals of Hinduism (Hindupadma). Since ancient times Hindus have lived in small, autonomous communities held together by a common ethical code (dharma), by memories of a recorded common past (itihāsa), and by shared historical, political, social, and cultural experiences (samskŗti). This cumulative heritage (paramparā) continued to be transmitted to succeeding generations before Hindus were overwhelmed militarily by invaders beginning in the second millennium disrupting somewhat that flow. Both ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu’ would concur with this broad, ethical, and non-sectarian ideal of Hinduism.

A comparative study of world civilizations made by foreign historians and impressions about ancient Indian society recorded by numerous foreign visitors to India indicates that society and civilization of ancient India had reached higher levels than many other world cultures of the time. One of the possible reasons for this development is that the level of sophistication had percolated to all levels of society thanks to the work of community leaders who had inculcatedsamskāras in their populace. This is why we find great saints and cultural heroes rising from each community (janajāti): from barbers, leather workers to Brahmins even though Doniger would restrict them to the ‘This Hindu’ group. Manusmŗti observes that their heroic deeds and spiritual and literary achievements are recorded in the oral tradition in songs, ballads, and stories (5: 149). Thanks to this long tradition, every community inherits subtle impressions (anuvāmśika samskāras) which are twofold: metaphysical and empirical manifesting themselves in all persons (see Manusmŗti 6: 25).

Concluding remarks

Doniger’s The Hindus forces us to rethink and represent Hindus and their history using their own cognitive categories. In the context of India, a Hindu becomes ‘This’ or ‘That’ only from a particular angle of vision. In reality, they are two strands within Hinduism, seen in a particular way. In other words, it is useful to view Hinduness not as a thing or essence but a style (or rather, a family of styles). There is one single Hindu identity but with multiple faces. Again, ‘This’ or ‘That’ can no longer be seen as static. We will begin to see that most social and cultural developments in India’s long history are reflected in each of these two attitudes. ‘This’ and ‘That Hindu’ did not remain merely passive receivers of these developments, but instead were active participants in creating the composite Hindu identity.

However Doniger may hate Brahmins (male Brahmins in particular), she is forced to acknowledge “that in the myths, there were Brahmins among the ogres, and there are references to human Brahmins whose ancestors were said to be ogres.  In actual life, too, there were Shudra Brahmins, mleccha Brahmins, Chandala Brahmins, and Nishada Brahmins. Some were very close indeed to the folk sources that they incorporated into the Puranas”(p. 384). Indeed, the ‘Shudra Brahmin’ collapses the chasm between the Subaltern and the Sanskritic Hindu that Doniger has dug. The Freudian and Marxist agendas tell us to look for the subtext, the hidden transcript, the censored text. Their assumption is that a subtext may be less respectable and more self-serving; yet it may be more honest and more real than the surface text. Beneath Doniger’s chasm, therefore, one might find another layer, an admiration of India, a desire to learn from India, perhaps even a genuine desire to give India something in return for providing her a career and a livelihood.

French Indologist Louis Renou criticized Western Sanskritists, Indologists, theosophists, anthroposophists, and teachers of yoga for their piecemeal approaches to Hinduism (comparable to Doniger’s ‘toolbox approach’) and concluded, “If Hinduism ever has a future as an integral part of a broad, generally acceptable spiritual movement beyond the borders of the country that gave it birth, this future will be created only by direct reflection from genuinely Indian forms of thought and spirit conceived and expressed by Indians” (cited in Organ 1970: 90). Armed with the power of samanvaya, which facilitates a wider sense of identity, a sense of coherence in a shared global context and of inclusion in a common framework and horizon, Hindus can live up to Renou’s hope. Thanks to the heritage of samanvaya, ‘This’ and ‘That Hindu’ did not [and do not] function like an island in India or in diaspora. Each has been constituted socially and imagined culturally in relation to as well as ‘against’ its other. The reference points of the social identity of ‘This’ and ‘That Hindu’ are inclusive as well as exclusive [Doniger stresses only the latter] in their own unique ways. ‘This’ and ‘That Hindu’ have equally conformed (and contributed to) shaping each other’s ethos.

Doniger fails to realize that unlike the Muslim or Christian distinctiveness, Hindu distinctiveness (coming across as ‘This’ and ‘That’) does not rest on rituals or practices in which people are marked as different and counted in or out from each other. Hindu distinctiveness is not constituted or confirmed by clearly demarcated and symbolized boundaries. James Laidlaw puts it succinctly ‘it is a distinctive way of being indistinct’ (Laidlaw 1995: 94). Doniger herself acknowledges that, “the integrative power of Sanskrit also spills over in other domains of culture: It is no accident, she states, that India is the land that developed the technique of interweaving two colors of silk threads so that the fabric is what they call peacock’s neck, blue if you hold it one way, green another (or sometimes pink or yellow or purple), and, if you hold it right, both at once” (pp. 11-12). ‘This Hindu’ and ‘That Hindu,’ indeed, are two colors of silk threads making up the Hindu fabric. If you hold that fabric right, you see them both at once.

Concluded

References:

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