On Hinduism

Title: On Hinduism

Author: Wendy Doniger

Publisher: Aleph Book Company 2013 (First)

ISBN: 9789382277071

Pages: 660

Wendy Doniger dropped a bombshell on Indian intellectual circles with her 2009 book ‘The Hindus – An Alternative History’. Blowing up the sexuality and inconsistencies present in any ancient religious text out of all proportions, Doniger published the book as if to offer an alternative history against the established wisdom of the times. Widespread condemnation of the abominable references to Hinduism’s most revered characters ensued in India and abroad. That volume was banned in India and the publishers destroyed all copies in the country. Doniger claims that this book, which came out in 2013, is written with the Indian audience in mind, whereas the previous text was for an American scholarly readership. The writer argues that she didn’t expect Hindus would read it and thought that they wouldn’t take information on their religion from an American woman. In this regard, this book is an apology in place of the censure contained in the previous one. Whereas the earlier book was a structured one – whatever charges one may bring up against the content – this book is simply a collection of essays the author had composed over the years on Hinduism. 63 out of the 140 essays on the author’s thoughts on Hinduism are included in this book. The chapters were thus written beforehand over a span of decades and this breaks the chain of continuity running across the chapters. On the other hand, readers get a golden opportunity to sample the varied sources of stories they had only a brief exposure to, from other publications. Interested readers can find my earlier review of ‘The Hindus – an Alternative History’ here.

What differentiates Hinduism from other modern world religions is its polytheism and primacy of tolerance to differing creeds. Doniger develops both ideas in some detail. The religion’s most sacred book is the Rig Veda, which is also the oldest extant work of literature of any kind in India. The Veda is polytheistic, but with a monistic hue. Numerous gods are mentioned and praised in it, but the devotees could select among the pantheon and pray to a particular god at a time suited to his present need. Each god was considered to be supreme as far as the devotee is concerned. Even with so many gods on call, so to say, the substance that pervades the universe is thought to be divine and inherently unitary, which is called brahma (not to be confused with the creator god). This vague monism discernible in the Rig Veda was sharpened by the systematized monism of Vedanta. Doniger claims that a polytheistic religion is inherently tolerant as compared to a monistic one. At the same time, a monistic religion is more tolerant than a monotheistic one! But there is also an undeniably intolerant strain in Hinduism, which the author attributes to the intellectual and philosophical ascendancy of the monistic ideals of Vedanta. If only Hinduism, or any religion for that matter, was rather simple for such easy categorizations! The book also states that what western intellectuals have thought the Hindus have done has given rise to the idea of Hindu tolerance, without much evidence on the ground. The Hindu fundamentalists are aping Protestant evangelical strategies. In spite of all these, we see many people following the benevolent practices and rituals of other religions like Islam or Christianity, though Doniger chides them with the sarcastic remark that those syncretists keep the feasts of both religions and the fasts of neither! The Hindu pluralist world was not orthodox, but primarily orthopraxy, as it didn’t insist on doctrine (doxis) as long as ritual and social behaviour (praxis) satisfied the standards of the particular group.

The book is just a collection of essays written over a period of several years and has not much interconnection between the themes of succeeding chapters. There is an interesting observation made by Doniger in one of these articles. Any discussion on Hindu society invariably touches upon Manu Smriti, the dharmashastra attributed to a pseudonym author. This book is at the heart of the controversy between upper and lower castes in contemporary India. The lower castes put all blame for their historical backwardness at the doors of Manu on account of the repressive measures suggested in his law book against them. However, Doniger raises doubt on the primacy of Manu Smriti in Indian jurisprudence of the ancients. The goal of Manu’s laws, like Hindu culture, is not consistency, but totality. There are several instances of doctrinal inconsistency in it. There are nine commentaries on Manu, but none of them was used as a legal system. Rural panchayats decided legal disputes based on local custom and rules of precedence. The current prominence of Manu is ascribed to the British. The administrators of British India, beginning with Warren Hastings, wanted to use Manu as the basis of a legal system, though he himself doesn’t claim so, and adds that Manu lives on in the darker shadows of Hinduism. Doniger puts undue stress in developing the varied concepts of sexuality that can be expected in a book as ancient as the puranas. Some of the titles are selected with gross insensitivity to the sentiments of the targeted audience like ‘Bisexuality and trans-sexuality among the Hindu gods’. Passages from the Kama Sutra which are sexually explicit are reproduced in the book. Narrative imagination has produced many examples of gender transformation in the puranic stories that are in fact to be taken as just a myth, but the author does extensive pedantry on the stories and brings out exaggerated philosophical analyses. The coverage is also narrow and boring at times. What are we to make of titles like ‘Changing ethical implications of Hindu cosmologies’ and ‘The Scrapbook of undeserved salvation – the Kedara Khanda of Skanda Purana’?

Two aspects of ancient India that finds exceeding interest from Doniger are Kamasutra and (non)-vegetarianism. Truly, the author attests Kama Sutra to be the only sophisticated text produced by India. This is the only work that elicits favourable response from her, who also claims that this text embarrasses Hindus to no end. Richard Francis Burton published the first translation of it in 1883, at a time when Hindus were disheartened at the scorn of Protestant proselytizers and wanted to keep the Kama Sutra under the Upanishadic rug. What Burton did to Kama Sutra was what Max Muller earlier did to the Rig Veda and Upanishads. But here, a crucial Indian contribution goes overlooked. Burton used Forster Arbuthnot’s text, which in essence relied upon the work of Bhagavanlal Indrajit and Shivram Bhide. The attribution came out unintentionally, when Arbuthnot claimed that the text was translated by two Indians to get the censors off his back. Indians always put forward the Upanishadic speculations over any non-religious text and for them, it was the fall of Kama and the rise of Karma as noted in the Upanishads.

Though most of the Hindus eat meat except beef today, the author argues that flesh-eating was much more common in the past. People ate flesh, including that of sacrificial animals. Contrary to popular belief, it was the rise of Buddhism and Jainism that was instrumental in the slow transition to vegetarianism, at least for the upper castes. These religions promoted ahimsa (non-violence). Ashoka’s inscriptions shed some light on this, but what he did have in mind was avihimsa (absence of desire to kill). Ashoka continued the system of capital punishment and torture of criminals. Moreover, killing animals for the royal kitchen continued with reduced numbers. Manu Smriti is ambivalent on non-vegetarianism. It says that “The eater who eats creatures with the breath of life who are to be eaten does nothing bad, even if he does it day after day; for the Creator himself created creatures with the breath of life, some to be eaten and some to be eaters” (p. 421, Manu 5:28-30). His comment against meat eating is “You can never get meat without violence to creatures with the breath of life, and the killing of creatures with the breath of life does not get you to heaven; therefore you should not eat meat” (p.422, Manu 5:48-53). The references against meat-eating are more prominent in Manu’s law book that has three pro- and twenty-five anti-meat verses. There are some instances cited in the book which shows the cow was also eaten. “The Brahmanas say that a bull or cow should be killed when a guest arrives, a cow should be sacrificed to Mitra and Varuna, and a sterile cow to the Maruts, and that twenty-one sterile cows should be sacrificed in the horse sacrifice. The grammarian Panini, who may have lived as early as the fifth or sixth century BCE, glossed the word go-ghna (literally, cow killer), as one for whom a cow is killed, that is, a guest” (p. 502).

The book is a huge one, but with a fine collection of notes, bibliography and index. The narration veers totally off track at some points, particularly when the author argues that the finer details of Mahmud of Ghazni’s sacking of Somanatha and what he did to the idol kept there are just mythologizing. This tramples upon the hurt feelings of the victim rather than readjusting a medieval wrong in the glow of the enlightenment of a future era. Doniger also inadvertently promotes a commercial product manufactured by Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala in Kerala with her offhand comment that the organization manufactures Chyavanaprasha with scrupulous care and attention as if the other companies are not that attentive to the quality of their products.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star