The Wendy Doniger Controversy

When news of Penguin India pulping existing copies and promising to not print any more of Dr.Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus - An Alternative History” broke, my interest was suitably piqued about the book and its author. It was only a question of time before I picked it up at my university library, and read through its seven hundred odd pages.

The book is informative- so much so that it will take several blog articles to cover all the ideas I had after reading it. For now I want to make this post an informal FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for people who, like me, are curious about the book, and are considering picking it up to read. So here goes:

Q. What is the book about?

A. The book is called “The Hindus, an Alternative History”, and is about the history of the Hindu religion from pre-Vedic times (pre 2000 BC) to the modern era. It is a sweeping history that does not focus on dates and events as much as it chooses to view the religion through the lens of the voices of the dominant as well as the marginalised in India. What that means is that Dr.Doniger attempts to not write a dry and pedantic version of Hinduism that we read in history textbooks in school that are focussed on kingdoms and political alliances, but a more nuanced and inquisitive text aimed at peeling away the outer veneer of facts to see the underlying social and theocratic currents that caused them, particularly in the common man..

Q. Is it any good?

A. The book is worth a read. It is a balanced, sensitive and even loving portrayal of Hinduism. It is well researched- Dr.Doniger is a well regarded expert in the field- and well written - avoiding jargon (apart from sanskrit words that most indians will be familiar with) and pedantism, instead opting for a conversational, sometimes quirky tone of voice. I had assumed that reading 692 pages of a text about history would be boring, but I was wrong. The book is divided into 25 chapters, each dealing roughly with a block of time in history, arranged chronologically. Although the chapters do not neatly dove-tail into one another, there is a very good sense of continuity overall, given the diversity of topics covered.

Q.Who should read the book?

A. In my opinion, every Indian who has grown up in India, or has an Indian heritage should read this book. It presents the entire history of a religion, indeed even the nation, in a single broad sweep, while taking pains to create context early , and maintain it throughout the book. 

Q. Did the book make you feel uncomfortable?
A. I was very aware of all the emotions I was feeling even before reading the book. On the one hand, some very well written reviews on amazon gave this book a negative review, and I was bracing myself for a condescending take on Hindu history. This idea persisted even as I was reading the first chapter, where I wrote post-it notes on the margins that said "Reference?" in response to many assumptions that were made. For example, Pg 7 claims that Brahmin men were most probably bi-lingual, or Pg 9 where she says the term ‘ahimsa’ originally referred to the relationship between humans and lesser animals, not among humans. Or Pg 10 where she comically cites Indian climate "..with its enduring heat and unpredictable monsoons" as being the cause for violence ingrained in its history and justice system. However, these doubts vanish as soon as I realized that chapter 1 simply sets the tone of the work. The rest of the book cites sources precisely, and does not make any condescending comments. What little there is by way of personal feelings of the author are usually well justified and fairly tame. In fact I got the distinct impression that the author actually is much more fond of Hinduism than her many detractors.

Q. What was the most surprising thing you learnt about your own religion?
A.  I was surprised by virtually all of it- but particularly about the origin of Vaishnava and Shaiva traditions in Tamil Nadu and Kashmir. Having been a party many times to those drunken discussions among men(boys really) of a certain age in India, where the dirty laundry of different sects are washed in public hidden only by a thin veneer of respectability, and where impressions act as stand-in for facts, it comes as no surprise to me the extent of ignorance we hold about our own small sects we identify with. I remember clearly my two friends from undergrad, one of whom was a Vedanta Shaiva, the other who was a Vadakalai Vaishnava, nearly coming to blows about how one of their gurus should be respected by society.  It was comical to the audience, because here were two well dressed, upper middle class, highly educated indians, trying to argue about Hindu sects, with a rum-and-coke in one hand and their heads otherwise filled mostly with harmless college obsessions like Pink Floyd and the English Premier League. It does do immense harm to not have some standardized measure of origin stories to helps separate myth from history. Historical works like these can provide that perspective.

Q Will I be able to understand the book?

A. Its tone is conversational, and can be understood by most people who have had an english-language education. However, don’t expect a literary masterpiece, for that is not its focus. There are some turns of phrase, puns and irreverent lines that might throw one off, but the way to approach them is to keep in mind that this is an attempt to make a hard subject accessible to the layperson. 

Q. What did you like about the book?

A. It is a well conceived book. I like that Dr.Doniger has been courageous enough to pick and choose ideas, stories and events from the Hindu tradition and literature and to read them in the light of the broader scope of the entire religion and region. She admits this as her aim very early in the book. I was at first skeptical that it would work well. By the second chapter however, it was very clear that her attempt at religious synecdoche was working quite in sync with my own world view of Hinduism. Which is a roundabout way of saying that as a Hindu raised on most of the myths,histories and traditions, I agreed with the choice of examples and facts she chose to highlight .  

Q. Why was it made unavailable in India if it is not derogatory to Hinduism?

A. A case was brought forward by an obscure outfit called Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (SBAS)and a man named Dinanath Batra. Someone interviewed him on the internet after this, and when I looked it up, he seems to be your run-of-the-mill old, well meaning uncle, who thinks the as Hindus, we should read ‘good’ books about Hinduism- which of course means those that blindly glorify it. Anyway, he settled out of court with Penguin India after threatening to bring a case against them that the book threatened to hurt religious sentiments which is a punishable offense under the Indian Penal Code. Penguin withdrew and pulped remaining copies of the book, ostensibly to prevent violence against its staff. In many ways this is the saddest part of the story - what if Penguin had remained steadfast and allowed this outfit to go to court? I'm confident Penguin would have won the case. So what if the RSS or Shiv Sena or any other right wing organization had rioted- it would have only brought the issue of abject stupidity trumping free speech into much needed focus.

Q What do you think of the criticisms against the book?

A. One of the criticisms against her book has been that she picked the wrong ideas and deliberately made an attempt to discredit Hinduism. In particular she is accused of  "eroticisation and exoticisation of our sacred scripture". I disagree with this idea. This is like that old zen story about two buddhist monks who go to a river, one of whom carries a woman across on his shoulder to the shock of the other who believe the Buddist texts forbid monks to have contact with women. After a while when the outraged monk confronts the other with his 'sin', the other monk replies that he put down the woman a long time ago on the other bank, but it is his brother monk who is still carrying her in his head. The men and women of India who are constantly viewing everything through their sexual impulse will focus on the sexual part of the text. To me however, sex or eroticism does not form any substantial part of the text, and in those parts that it is, it is often celebrated.
The deeper problem with these kinds of criticisms is that there is a section of Indian society that is well educated, but not well versed in the science of critical thinking to understand what real scholarship means. Scholarship to them means that you are cloyingly in favor of an idea prior to reading or knowing anything about it. The western tradition of scholarship in the modern era  is exactly the opposite- you look at facts and attempt to understand them, while trying to be as objective as possible. The self-proclaimed  ‘anti-derogatory’ wing of these organizations don’t understand the difference between fact-based and faith-based lines of inquiry.

Some criticism rested on the fact that she was herself not a practicing Hindu, or that she was Jewish, or had a colonial mentality. All of these are plainly bigoted, and often brought up by people who either haven’t read the book, or by people who read the book after making up their mind they are going to hate it. Many online trolls in forums have a visceral hatred for the author. The tone of their comments makes me believe that it is the very same hard-liners who resist any attempts by women to achieve critical acclaim, that are hurling abuse at her.
 In fact one of the useful things about this book is that after reading it, it is easy to see how the people who are criticizing the book are the very same people who have held back progress in India. The combination of a culture that has destroyed a positive work ethic, and a caste system that actively resists any criticism of its creation, and sustenance of a mindless zombie intelligentsia, is so perfectly framed in the meta-discussion about whether the book is hurtful to Hinduism.

Some posts have criticized the tone of the book as not being weighty enough. This last one might be a valid criticism , but that is simply not the point of the book in my opinion. A tongue-in-cheek response to that criticism, which I enjoyed and agreed with very much is here.

Q. Did you have any criticisms of the book yourself?

A. I had very few criticisms of the book.That could be because of my approach that I didn't know much about Hinduism to begin with apart from the average well-educated India. So I went into it with an open mind and no great expectations.

In some cases, Dr.Doniger fails to cite her source of certain assumptions.  However these are so few and far between that I give her the benefit of doubt.

Another very minor criticism is the fact that as a scholar living far away from India, she may have had to search very hard for some reasons that underlie beliefs that we Hindus take for granted, and in the absence of any hard evidence been forced to stick to what was knowably accurate. Because of this she might have missed certain avenues of inquiry that most Indians would consider natural to investigate. An example of this is in the Chapter of the Ramayana, where she proposes that the monkeys and bears in the myth are imaginary and stand for subconscious desires. I think that it is farfetched - that the author Valmiki could delve so much into the subconscious seems to me to be a harder task than just recounting the images of a race of men who did not look like the north indian norm. Who know what kinds of cretinism the deficiencies in diet in jungles of south-central India can lead to ? Again, these are mere speculation on my part, and indeed these points do not in any way form the crux of what she is attempting to comment on. Another example is the link between Indus Valley cultures and Vedic religion. Dr.Doniger presents many theories, but stops short of picking one, which is understandable given the lack of definite proof. Yet if you show 10 Indians the famous Indus Valley seals, I am willing to bet that 9 of 10 of them will say it is an image of some proto-Shiva-like forest-deity. Dr.Doniger is aware of this fact, and cautions us against it time and again in the book in many contexts of 'cultural hindsight' where having been surrounded by certain images like Shiva for the most of our lives in India, it seems natural to relate the iconography to it, although this is not a watertight proof that the Vedic and Indic civilizations were related.  These are some ideas that struck me as interesting and worthy of further research for us Indians, and I believe a healthy area of disagreement, but for someone from outside the religion and country to put this all together, is actually a commendable task indeed.

Q. What did you learn about Hinduism that you did not know earlier?

A.  I learnt some things that I didn’t know- some of it was the mythology, some of it history. I also learnt how much we 'dont know' about our own civilization. For example we still dont know what the connection was between the Indus valley civilization, the Vedic religion, and modern Hinduism, which can be called ‘Brahminical’ hinduisms is. I also was not sure prior to reading this what the specific ways in which South Indian Hinduism was different from North Indian Hinduism ( a system of two way accretion that took time due to distance and influenced by local religions) and how Bhakti , Tantra, Buddhism and several ‘left hand’ sects like the aghoras, kapalikas etc fit into the Hindu frame of reference. Certainly my history texts from high school covered all of these facts pretty accurately, but being presented with the reasoning behind our guesses about the origins of these theories enhanced the knowledge I had of them.

Hindu mythology is fun, and some stories that I knew from my own upbringing and that fount of Indian historical literature, amar chitra katha- were given a name and a place in history. This is because the book enables us to arrange these against the chronology of ‘semi-canonical’ texts (although hinduism does not have a closed canon like other religions) like the Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads, Aranyakas, Sutras, Shastras, Puranas (in that order). Ironically, the Puranas, which means ‘old’, is in fact the latest retelling of the stories of older Hinduism, which reinterpreted the Vedic ways to suit the existing political philosophical narratives at the tim.

Being a sucker for Indian mythology, I was delighted to see some stories were entirely new to me, like the story of Mankanaka the dancing yogi.  Some others I identified as obscure ones my grandmother told me when I was very young and which I had assumed were her own invention and not part of hindu literature. An example of this is the story of Kannappar the tribal devotee, from the south indian nayanmar bhakti tradition, which had a great impact on me when my grandmother told it to me when I was about 10 years old. This was surprising to me because this was the first time I had heard of a non-vedic, non traditional story from my own family.

In terms of the characters in the Hindu tradition- it does well to remind ourselves of the iconoclastic and rebellious nature of many indians that have preceded us- both mythical and historic figures- and who are unashamedly taken to be role models. It gives me lots of hope that we always were and always will be, a culture that knows a good guy when we see one. An example of this is found in some versions of the myths of shiva where he mocks the vedic establishment. An even better example is that of the outstanding poet Kabir who cuts across caste and gender barriers and created some pretty cool poetry at a time when these things were anathema to talk about in any part of the world. Another early mythical example are the sages Shvetaketu who openly proclaimed that he ate meat and that he couldn’t care less what everyone else thought of him, and Vishwamitra who creates a parallel universe for Trisanku in defiance of everything the religion stood for at the time. These latter stories are well known, but is good to remind ourselves when we debate those ‘traditional’ Indians who cite the puranas and manu’s dharma shastras as justification of the caste system and mistreatment of certain sections of society, that the rebel who fights them today, is in good historical and mythical company.

I alsoI got some sense of where to put all these facts-old and new- in my own head. I am attempting to find answers to problems that face India today. I hesitate to bring this out into the open even when talking to other Indians in India, even my own family - for example, why do we have such a poor work ethic, why are women treated so badly here, why do we get angry when we hear points of view different from ours, why is our justice system so dysfunctional ? The list goes on. I believe we have to ask these questions to move out of denial phase, and only then we can overcome them. Any facts of Indian history and literature that reveal the truth enough so that sufficiently intelligent readers and well wishers of India can connect the dots to what we need to do now, is something we should encourage everyone to read, not ban and bury like Penguin did for this book.

Q. What is the most important way this book has changed Hinduism for you?
A. The book is like a lens that makes blurred things clearer, so in that sense, nothing has changed so much as become sharper in focus. I feel more inclined to read other fact-based books so I can reconstruct Hinduism in my own head, for my own use, rather than to pick a side to agree or disagree with.
One other thing I learned was more meta- Dr.Doniger approaches the subjects of the Artha-Shastra or Manu's Dharma Shastra calmly and without fuss, reads them in the light of their substance and their historical underpinnings and makes no judgement about then. That sets a good example for me to follow in my dealings with faith-based Hindus while I usually have a very viscerally negative reaction to these two texts, that codified the oppression of others.

BOTTOM LINE: This is a good read if you read it with an open mind. This book is not comprehensive- no single book about Hinduism can be. For me, being a Hindu, what this book creates is a factual and theoretical framework against which I can compare my own experiences-  to fill in the gaps, and gain a better understanding of where we stand. If nothing else, the historical information in the end chapters, where myths give way to more concrete historical facts, is a good reminder of the things you may already know.