A partial review of Wendy Doniger’s ‘Hindus – An Alternative History’

Professor Wendy Doniger is a controversial figure.

A towering personality in the field of Indology, Ms Doniger’s notoriety in academic circles stems from her insistence on translating, interpreting and comparing elements of Hindu mythology through contemporary lenses of gender, sexuality and identity. Much of the organized resistance to Ms Doniger flows from Rajeev Malhotra’s seminal analysis of the state of Indology studies in his essay ‘RISA Lila 1 – Wendy’s Child Syndrome’, published in Sulekha, in 2002. RISA stands for Religions In South Asia and is a unit within AAR, i.e., The American Academy of Religion, the official organization of academic scholars of Religious Studies in the Western world. Mr Malhotra forcefully argued that Hinduism studies in America are dominated by a cabal of academics led by Ms Doniger, suffers from deep set systemic biases, tends to psychoanalyze without context to present the ‘kinky’ side to Hinduism and worst of all, smacks of academic dishonesty in condemning academics who dare to differ from the strain of Hinduism being peddled by Ms Doniger and her cabal.

Predictably, Mr Malhotra’s essay kicked up a storm and the entire phalanx of academics who supported Mr Malhotra’s claims were dismissed as Hindutva sympathizers. On the positive, Encyclopedia Encarta recognized the validity of Sankrant Sanu’s exposure of systemic biases in Ms Doniger’s presentation of Hinduism and replaced her write up with a one by Prof Arvind Sharma. This apart, the development which could be said to be far more positive was a new found assertion of Indian Academics in analysis of writings on Hinduism, an effort which got ably reflected in the work ‘Invading the Sacred’ which conducted rigorous reviews of works by ‘Wendy’s children’ - Sarah Caldwell (Kali as the eroticized demon mother), Paul Courtright (Ganesh as a eunuch suffering from Oedipus complex), Jeffrey Kripal (Ramakrishna Paramhansa as a repressed homosexual) and the general inaccuracies in Hinduism research in American universities.

Of course, like any other good Samaritan, Ms Doniger was cloaked with the divine robe of a ‘martyr’ when an egg was hurled at her during one of her university talks, when the controversy was its peak. While the egg missed her, of course fortunately, this murderous assault on her person was sufficient for Ms Doniger to declare herself above debates completely!

With an impressive line up of memberships, awards and publications behind her, her opus ‘Hindus – An Alternative History’ was among the most awaited books in the field of religion in 2009. While I had formed an impression of Ms Doniger’s work through a perusal of her comments, interviews and nomenclature of her works like Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (Oxford University Press, 1973), Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, her translation of Kamasutra, among others, I certainly wanted to have a first hand experience of a book authored by Ms Doniger to check for myself if her notoriety is really deserved.

Let me first confess that my knowledge of our Vedas, Puranas and Epics is limited for I cannot even remotely claim to be a scholar. Secondly, I don’t know Sanskrit and my limited knowledge rests on translations and commentaries in Hindi and English alone. Hence, my appreciation or critique of Ms Doniger’s work solely rests on a logical analysis of patterns supported by my knowledge (even though limited) of our scriptures. Those interested in a scholarly review of her book are requested to read this, by Vishal Agarwal.

After going through the book in its entirety, I have no hesitation in accepting that Ms Doniger is a learned personality. At the same time, she is clearly driven by an agenda to present Hinduism as a decadent and oppressive religion without having any central theme at all. The problems with her ‘alternative’ history can be summarised in a few points. Since I neither have the inclination nor the means to go into a deep analysis, I will restrict myself to pointing out to a couple of errors under each ‘problem’. The broad deficit areas in this work are:

• Tendency to provide the most sexualized interpretation to a word or an event: Too many to recount. A few interesting ones are with regards to the tale of Svetketu. Mahabharata holds that in ancient times, women were free to intercourse with anyone even after marriage. However, when a young Svetketu got to know of this ‘freedom’ after witnessing his mother going with another man, he bought about a change in established sexual mores and made fidelity a bedrock of marriage. So far so good. However, not content with this ‘license’, Ms Doniger makes the other man take away Svetketu’s mother ‘forcefully’ – all under the benign gaze of the husband and the son. Obviously, consensual sex is not as exciting as rape for Ms Doniger. In yet another instance, she mentions Rishi Kutsa, cohabiting with Indra’s wife – Shachi, taking advantage of his strong facial resemblance with Indra. Our scriptures content themselves with merely stating that Shachi mistook Kutsa for Indra once following which the Rishi shaved off his hair. The scriptures must be wrong. If Ms Doniger says that this sex by deception happened, it must have happened.

• Blanket assertions which are not necessarily based on facts: Too many to recount. Funnily, she does not even have an idea of the length of the Mahabharata. She claims it as comprising of 75000 verses, 'rounded off' to 1 lakh! Whoa! She quotes Arthashastra numerous times and then goes on to state that temples started getting constructed in India only in the late Gupta age. Wonder whether she missed the entire guidelines devoted to managing temples, priests and the offerings, as given in this 4th Century BC work of Chanakya. Almost an entire sub-chapter in her book is devoted in Rama’s suspicions on Lakshman’s repressed desires for Sita. Source? Her interpretations of what might have been going in their minds! 

• Mutual contradictions: The book begins with quite a promise when she accepts Indological studies being wrongly interpreted on account of ‘false negatives’, i.e., absence of something somewhere does not necessarily mean that the thing is absent altogether. She accepts that while occasional beef consumption might have happened, cow slaughter was a social taboo right from the very early Vedic days. However, when commenting on the Hindutva movement, she approvingly quotes DN Jha and commends him for proving that the sacred cow is a recent myth. Likewise, she moves on to Ram Janmabhoomi and points to absence of any reference to the demolition of the temple in Goswami Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas and claims that this denotes that the demolition never happened. For that matter, Ramcharitmanas doesn’t mention Akbar or Surdas either. Surely, this means that both these characters are mythical and do not have any base in history?

• Exalting peripheral and contemporary works to the level of central mainstream works: Ms Doniger interprets the epics based on 20th century works. So, we have Nina Paley’s ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ being treated as a retelling of Ramayan, at par with Valmiki’s work. We have instances of works written as recent as those by Ashok Banker and Shashi Tharoor being quotes and analysed. An obscure work on Sita and Ram being siblings has been quoted so many times that one may be excused for believing that the mainstream belief of their being husband and wife belongs to the fringe 

• Out of context interpretation of events: She compares the treatment of crow in both Ramayan and Ramcharitmanas and claims that on account of the positive impact of Buddhism in India, Ramcharitmanas shows Rama as being compassionate to that lowliest of creature, the crow, while the same Rama had blinded the crow in one eye in Ramayan. However, she fails to mention that the crow blinded in one eye was Jayant, the wayward son of Indra, who had pecked and clawed at Sita till she bled on the foot. While Ram shot an arrow which followed Jayant round the universe so that he be killed, the compassionate Sita intervened for his life and Rama spared him with the arrow only plucking out one eye. Most importantly, she fails to mention that this incident is presented in both Valimik’s and Tulsidas’s versions of Ramayana. The other crow is Kakbhushundi and is present primarily in Ramcharitmanas. He is the narrator of the tale and has been blessed by Rama. In another instance, she berates Rama and Lakshmana for disfiguring Shurpnakha for merely expressing her desire to have sex with them while the ‘progressive’ Bhima married Hidimba when she had expressed such desire. The points about Shurpnakha attacking Sita to kill her, Rama and Lakshmana sparing her life, their being self constrained by the vow of ‘Ek patni vrata’, of Hidimba desiring to be the wife of Bhima and Kunti’s and Yudhishthira’s blessing of the marriage are all of course minor irritants in the tale.

• Selective quotations: She quotes the lesser known Bhavishya Purana to show how Gautam Buddha was sought to be integrated in Hinduism as a demon, i.e., making people forget the Vedic religion so that the Brahmins can salvage their souls later. She of course makes no mention of the fact that 7 other Puranas –Vishnu Purana, Bhagavata Purana, Garuda Purana, Agni Purana, Narada Purana, Linga Purana and Padma Purana, besides works like Gita Govinda and Harivansa, speak of Budhha as a divine manifestation of Lord Vishnu. How different does it make her from JNU variety of historians who implant obscurity on Ayodhya on account of its absence of its mention (though Saket is mentioned) in the lesser known Vishnu Smriti when other texts Vishnu Purana, Shrimad Bhagvat Purana and numerous other works exalt Ayodhya as among the most sacred of pilgrimages?

• Political theme: Apart from finding sex of the kinky variety in every word in every work on Hinduism, the predominant concern of Ms Doniger seems to  be centered around ensuring deepening fissures and divisions in the Hindu scoeity. Her insistence on projecting works as that of Brahmins, of Kshatriyas, of Shudras, of Dalits and of women, as belonging to mutually antagonistic schools leaves one deeply discomfited with her agenda. A perusal of her footnotes and indexes will reveal instances where she has quoted a single work numerous times but  has given an impression of those being distinct works by different author. Eg – 'A Dalit woman writer states… ' The next line talks of another dalit woman commenting on the same topic and the footnotes reveal both the references from the same book by a single woman author! While she has liberally referred from the likes of Ms Romila Thapar, DN Jha, KN Pannikkar and other Marxists, she has missed out on works from Jadunath Sarkar, RK Mukherjee, scholars like Neelkanth Shastri or any other historian from the objective school. For that matter, she finds Col Todd’s works on Rajputs problematic for it presents the Muslim-Rajput wars as those in between the foreign barbaric invaders and the native invaded. Forget about distant history – she attributes Mahatma Gandhi as having uttered ‘Ram-Rahim’ as he was dying!

It is unfortunate that Prof Doniger enjoys the respect she does in hallowed portals of Indic studies. One would expect that a person studying a religion other than one’s own, that too as a scholar, would be attracted by the positives of that religion, without of course, allowing that appreciation to cloud one’s scholarly judgment. However, Ms Doinger’s interest in Hinduism seems to stem from intentions more ignoble. What makes the likes of Ms Doniger more damaging is the reality that her (alongwith her cabal’s) interpretation of Hinduism is slowly but steadily displacing the mainstream understanding of Hinduism as we know, from academic shelves and from belonging to the fringe, her interpretations run the risk of becoming mainstream. Just imagine someone not exposed to epics and puranas forming an understanding of Hinduism basis the works of Ms Doniger. Will that person be in wrong if his/her impression of Hinduism is of an oppressive religion which is not even a religion but a hodge-podge of libertine behavior and shallow rituals? It is very well to point out that the Shiv Linga is what is seems like – a phallic representation. At the same time, the import of that manifestation cannot be left out to the eroticized alone. It will be like pointing out that the Christian worship of the Cross is merely adoration and veneration of a human corpse hung on a crucifix.

Solutions galore on Ayodhya?

A darshan of Ramlalla at the makeshift temple at Ayodhya early this week was an event which I had been looking forward to ever since I had become aware of the struggle for construction of the temple at Ayodhya. While a complete identification with the zeal of Kar Sevaks of those decades is beyond me, I could only wonder on how could lakhs of Kar Sevaks manage to cram themselves in those narrow alleys of Ayodhya and attack the disputed shrine in midst of that heavy security bandobast! No wonder that the aggrieved community holds the PV Narasimha Rao responsible for the events of December 6, 1992.

The struggle for liberation of the shrine or construction of the Ram temple, depending on the way you look at it, has been an old one with 1949, 1986 and 1992, in the modern era, being watershed years. People involved with the issue were looking forward to the judgement of Lucknow High Court, if for nothing, as at least a step forward. Hence, the Supreme Court decision to defer the HC judgment has come as quite a dampener. It is inexplicable that the Honorable SC has decided to defer the judgement when by no stretch of imagination, could a decision on a 60 year old litigation process be seen as hasty or ill-thought. Likewise, the fear of adverse impact on Law & Order is inexcusable as even a fig leaf to cover governance shortcomings. More so, when the Courts adjudicate on the basis on facts and the law, governance being beyond their sphere of activities!

It is quite fashionable to oft-quote that the citizens of Ayodhya were and are aloof from the temple movement or that there is no sympathy of the construction of the temple any longer. Such assertions ignore the facts that most Kar Sevaks were lodged in houses of residents time and again and that the demolition of the disputed structure resulted in Diwali being celebrated at Ayodhya. Yet again, believing that support for the temple has waned would be mistaking trees for the woods. While there is no doubt that support for the parties who led the temple movement has waned considerably and all of them are bereft of any credibility on the issue, the average person on street, in fields and in kitchens, does not desire that the temple be replaced by a mosque or some hospital.

A look on the intransigence of the leaders, who represent the Muslim populace on matters on faith, makes one wonder whether these leaders are only interested in furthering their own careers or whether more ominously, their rigidity has something to do with the religious beliefs they profess. The controversy over the proposed Islamic Centre near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center has only served to harden the negative perception about Islamists. The proponents of the Mosque have done no service to their ostensible aim of promoting an understanding of Islam among others by their bull headed insistence on having the centre at that precise spot, something which is an anathema to a vast majority of Americans. In the case of Ayodhya, the dispute is in between a regular mosque and the Hindu efforts to reclaim the right to worship God where he was born in human form. Even if we dignify attempts to question the historicity and divinity of Rama, the point beyond doubt is that the spot where the makeshift temple stands today is considered especially sacred by vast multitudes of Hindus while the mosque in question held no such significance for Muslims.

Just imagine the wonders it would do to the standing of Muslim community in India if they voluntarily forego their claim to the mosque. Not only would such an act deflate anti Muslim propaganda of the more rabid Nationalists, it will completely take the wind off demands for restoration of the shrines at Mathura and Kashi. However, not only have these leaders failed to rise to the occasion, their fanatical supporters in the governance and chattering classes have only served to act as an hindrance to any potential settlement of the issue. Don’t they realise that the act of ‘giving away’ the site would only result in even more pampering of the ‘oppressed’ and ‘marginalized’ Muslims and rather than only a few Nadias and Degangas, they will be allowed free run of the entire country, on strength of their ‘sacrifice’? The ‘secular’ champions of all causes Islamic may take care to go back to the Hubli Idgah case and do well remember that the laws don’t follow secular theology all the time and Islamic claims can be thrown out by the courts. Another favorite ‘solution’ offered by these champions is the construction of both the temple and mosque side by side. This is not going to resolve the problem – Kashi and Mathura are a living testimony to the same. Suggesting building a school / hospital or a urinal (aka Mahesh Bhatt) is trivializing the issue, not even worth a serious debate.

The phase of struggle for the temple, witnessed in the previous century got entwined with the larger Indian yearning for a change from the effete Governments of the day and propelled the BJP to the centre-stage. Sadly, while the ruler changed, the regime did not and we continued to have more of the same in various forms.

I do not know if the makeshift temple would ever be replaced by a magnificent temple dedicated to Shri Ram on the site, the liberation of which has been the cause for countless martyrs over the centuries. Perhaps the temple has to wait, either for Muslim magnanimity or for another sustained phase of struggle for there cannot be any solution to the issue other than temple at that spot!