Proscription of books is undemocratic
On november 12,2003,Wendy Doniger was delivering a lecture in London,chaired by William Dalrymple.A gathering of around 200 people .In an unguarded moment,a man threw an egg at her.It missed the target.Next day a mail from a woman took objection to a passage cited by Wendy from Valmiki Ramayana.In Ramayana,Wendy had said,Sita,wife of Rama has accused her brother in law,Lakshmana of wanting her for himself.The sexual thrust of Wendy's paper was unwarranted,owner of the mail,objected.
Wendy's book,The Hindus:An Alternative History has been withdrawn from the Indian market by the publisher,Penguin India.This follows an out of court settlement the publisher had with a Delhi outfit,Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi.They had gone to Court,alleging distortion of history and denigration of Hindu sentiments.It is an unknown outfit of an 84 year old retired head master,Dinanath Batra.In a case under IPC 295 A,it is a conviction of three years in prison,if religious sentiments are hurt.
Wendy is a U S based Indologist(born 1940),teaching history of religions in University of Chicago Divinity School.Born to non observant Jewish parents,she graduated in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Radcliffe college in 1962.From Harvard,she took PhD with the dissertation,Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of Siva.She got D Phil in Oriental Studies from Oxford.The thesis wasThe Origin of Heresy in Hindu Mythology.Her books include,Hindu Myths:A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit.She has translated 108 hymns from the Rigveda.
Disagreement to Wendy began a few years ago.Rajiv Malhotra,in a critique of her, objected to using psycho analytical concepts to interpret non-western subjects.She is not a psycho analyst,but a Philologist.
What is the objection to her book on Hinduism?In the Conclusion of the book,Wendy endorses most Hindus embodied truly tolerant Pluralism.The Bhakthi movement included women and dalits.Then she cautions:"we must curb optimism by recalling the violence embedded in many forms of Bhakthi,and by noting that it was in the name of bhakthi to Ram that the militant Hindu nationalists tore down the Babri mosque.We must look before we leap into history,look at the present and imagine a better future."
I need not elaborate.
In the long preface,Wendy has elaborated how different the book is from other books on Hinduism.She has used the term,Alternative,to describe how much the marginalised sections of the Hindu society,the women and the oppressed have contributed to Hinduism.She claims,she has not tried to reverse or misrepresent the hierarchies.In the olden ages,Sankrit texts were vetted by male Brahmins.There were Brahmins who whispered into the ears of the kings;but there were dirt poor brahmins who begged for their daily bread.There were creative thinkers among them.There were non Sanskrit sources in the vernacular,Prakrit.There are moments that forged bridges between factions;there was mixing of classes.
Wendy ,in her book has focussed on actions;Nonviolence,Vegetarianism,the tension between the householder task and renunciation.The addiction and control of sensuality.She feels,this focus gives continuity in the midst of the flux.It is a narrative of religion within the narrative of the history.As a Linga,set in Yoni.Like a Hindu statue on a Plinth.In Hinduism,she says,each idea was a reaction.Hinduism is context sensitive;it responds immediately,not only in economic and political contexts,but inside Budhism or Islam.It represents Kings as Gods and Gods as Kings.It seldom drew a sharp line between the secular and religious power.
Wendy thinks her book is not about maps and chaps.It rests on the shoulders of pygmies as well as giants.The history of Hinduism,to her mind,abounds in periods of creative assimilation,interaction and in violent outbursts of violent intolerence.In the ambivalent attitude to non violence,she infers,Hindus are no different from the rest.Poet and folklorist A K Ramanujan has said that he was troubled by this dualism in his father.His father was holding together astrology and astronomy in his brain at the same time.He never cared about this double vision.There is a dark shape visible on the moon.The Euro-Americans see the face of a man.Jews a man,but Cain.Others a woman,a moose(Eurasian Elk),buffalo or frog.But Hindus see a rabbit;in the 1930's some saw the figure of Gandhi.Budhists say Budha was a rabbit in one of his earlier births,who vowed to give flesh to any beggar,inorder to protect him from having to break the moral law by taking animal life.Indra,the Hindu king of Gods,took the form of a Brahmin and went to the rabbit.The rabbit offered himself.It shook its body thrice for insects to escape death and jumped into the magical fire conjured up by Indra.Indra,impressed by the action of the Rabbit,painted the rabbit on the moon!
Ludwig Wittgenstein,the Austrian-British philosopher said that in the image of duck-rabbit,it was rather a smug rabbit or a droopy duck;but it could not be both at once!But,Wendy feels, a non Hindu should strive to see both rabbit and man.Wittgenstein,in his Philosophical Investigations,used the image to describe two types of seeing:seeing that;seeing as.Remember the Mirror/Reflection simile in Indian philosophy.
After delineating her premise thus,in the preface,Wendy takes on the RSS and BJP:The Hindus are diverse in their attitude to diversity.Some are proud;some have anxiety.The right wing Hindu nationalists or fundamentalists have anxiety.They are against Muslims,Christians and the wrong Hindus.This book is so alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they may tell.
I NEED NOT ELABORATE.
She goes on to say,in Indian history,individuals have turned the tide of tolerance or violence even against the current of the Zeitgeist.Ashoka,Akbar and Gandhi did it for tolerance;Aurangazeb,Brigadier Reginald Dyer and MS GOLVALKAR turned the tide towards intolerance.
I NEED NOT ELABORATE.
Wendy Doniger,as we have seen,has taken the man-rabbit image as central to her book and played on the theme af ambivalence.She quotes E M Forster who said,Every Indian hole has atleast two exits.The example:Manu argues for and against meat in the same chapter in Manusmrithi.She refers to A K Ramanujan retelling the Jamadagni/Renuka myth.In Sanskrit she is Renuka.But in Tamil she is both Mariamma(brahmin) and Ellamma(pariah).The brahmin ascetic,Jamadagni,father of Parasurama,cursed his wife to death.At the moment of her execution,she embraced a pariah woman,Ellamma,for sympathy.In the fray,both lost their heads.Later when he pardoned,the heads of the women got transposed.Mariamma had Brahmin head and pariah body;Ellamma had Pariah head and Brahmin body.To Mariamma goats and cocks(not buffalo)were sacrificed;To Ellamma,only buffaloes.Here we see emancipation of the lower castes during the Bhakthi movement in South India.Wendy has mentioned this movement and ofcourse,Adi Sankara's crocodile,serpent and the rope.She has closed doors on the marginalised sections that appear in classical Sanskrit:for instance,the Jabala satyakama story.
I feel that both Wendy Doniger and the Hindu fundamentalists have missed the point.You may have by now seen the fact that there is an overemphasis on dualism,dwaita in her book,Hinduism:An Alternative History.Hence her oratory on the ambivalence.It was the practice of the Upanishad Gurus to place the contradictions before the pupil.Then the pupil was asked to select the right path himself.The Guru is only a tool or a medium.It can't be assessed as diverse attitudes to diversity.She it seems,has failed to understand the philosophy of Maya.Philology fails at the doorsteps of philosophy.
It is clear from the two stories she has mentioned in the book that she is ignorant of Advaita.In his 1939 novel,Finnegans Wake,Irish writer James Joyce has punned that Hindoo(the earlier British spelling for Hindu)is infact two Irish men,Hin-nessy and Doo-ley.Harvard Professor,Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to the Russian Novelist Vladimir Nabokov's bid for Chairmanship of the Russian Literature Department.Jakobson said:"I do respect very much the elephant.But would you give him the Chair of zoology?".
It meant that a Zoologist won't ask the questions on zoology(I studied zoology;I never asked questions;I was interested only in Genetics!).When Wendy quotes it,it means Hindus won't ask the right questions on Hinduism and she is the right person to ask .I have no objection to her mention of Lakshmana's sexual preference in Valmiki Ramayana.In India,people have not generally read Valmiki Ramayana,they usually read Ramacharitamanas,Kambaramayana or Aadyatma Ramayana.In all this Rama is God.But in Valmiki Ramayana,he is a man,hapless at times.I have admired Lakshmana questioning his dad,Dasaratha when Rama was exiled to the forest.Rama tells his dad that he is driven by lust at the embrace of Kaikeyi,mother of Bharatha.Lakshmana was more positive to Sita than Rama.So it is possible to work a love triangle.When one sees such human stories of lust and despair,one should also not forget the fragrance of democracy in Valmiki Ramayana.When Bharatha meets brother Rama in the forest,Rama asks:Are you not honouring the Carvakas still?.
It is a wonderful moment in world literature.Carvakas had administered India for almost 900 years;they had preached Lokayata,the materialistic,atheist philosphy.The Marxism ancient India had developed.They were enemies of Rama.But Rama is reminding Bharatha that he should honour enemies.It is a democratic principle. The original Ramayana has such deep references,even environmental.Since Wendy has not gone deep,She fails to mention wonderful Indian books like Hinduism by K M Sen or Argumentative Indian by his son,Amartya Sen.She has fortunately mentioned D D Kosambi ,the Marxist historian who asked historians to ask not who was king,but who among the people who had a plough.Ofcourse,Balarama had a plough.Janaka got Sita when the earth was ploughed!Infact,No other historian has written the alternative history as Kosambi did.He was a Mathematician and a Sanskrit scholar too.
The most quoted person in the book is A K Ramanujan.An Essay of him,Three Hundred Ramayanas;Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation was withdrawn by the University of Delhi from the B A History syllabus in November,2011.The essay originally appeared in Paula Richman's Many Ramayanas.His contribution in translating medieval Sanskrit poetry and retelling ancient stories is tremendous.Michael Witzel'sThe Origins of the World's Mythologies(2012)was also withdrawn from Indian market.The book,Shivaji:The Hindu King in Islamic India (2004)by James Laine had the same fate.Laine had doubts about Shivaji's paternity.Salman Rushdie's novel,Satanic Verses (1988) is banned in several countries including his native India.
On november 12,2003,Wendy Doniger was delivering a lecture in London,chaired by William Dalrymple.A gathering of around 200 people .In an unguarded moment,a man threw an egg at her.It missed the target.Next day a mail from a woman took objection to a passage cited by Wendy from Valmiki Ramayana.In Ramayana,Wendy had said,Sita,wife of Rama has accused her brother in law,Lakshmana of wanting her for himself.The sexual thrust of Wendy's paper was unwarranted,owner of the mail,objected.
Wendy's book,The Hindus:An Alternative History has been withdrawn from the Indian market by the publisher,Penguin India.This follows an out of court settlement the publisher had with a Delhi outfit,Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi.They had gone to Court,alleging distortion of history and denigration of Hindu sentiments.It is an unknown outfit of an 84 year old retired head master,Dinanath Batra.In a case under IPC 295 A,it is a conviction of three years in prison,if religious sentiments are hurt.
 |
| Wendy & her book |
Wendy is a U S based Indologist(born 1940),teaching history of religions in University of Chicago Divinity School.Born to non observant Jewish parents,she graduated in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Radcliffe college in 1962.From Harvard,she took PhD with the dissertation,Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of Siva.She got D Phil in Oriental Studies from Oxford.The thesis wasThe Origin of Heresy in Hindu Mythology.Her books include,Hindu Myths:A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit.She has translated 108 hymns from the Rigveda.
Disagreement to Wendy began a few years ago.Rajiv Malhotra,in a critique of her, objected to using psycho analytical concepts to interpret non-western subjects.She is not a psycho analyst,but a Philologist.
What is the objection to her book on Hinduism?In the Conclusion of the book,Wendy endorses most Hindus embodied truly tolerant Pluralism.The Bhakthi movement included women and dalits.Then she cautions:"we must curb optimism by recalling the violence embedded in many forms of Bhakthi,and by noting that it was in the name of bhakthi to Ram that the militant Hindu nationalists tore down the Babri mosque.We must look before we leap into history,look at the present and imagine a better future."
I need not elaborate.
In the long preface,Wendy has elaborated how different the book is from other books on Hinduism.She has used the term,Alternative,to describe how much the marginalised sections of the Hindu society,the women and the oppressed have contributed to Hinduism.She claims,she has not tried to reverse or misrepresent the hierarchies.In the olden ages,Sankrit texts were vetted by male Brahmins.There were Brahmins who whispered into the ears of the kings;but there were dirt poor brahmins who begged for their daily bread.There were creative thinkers among them.There were non Sanskrit sources in the vernacular,Prakrit.There are moments that forged bridges between factions;there was mixing of classes.
Wendy ,in her book has focussed on actions;Nonviolence,Vegetarianism,the tension between the householder task and renunciation.The addiction and control of sensuality.She feels,this focus gives continuity in the midst of the flux.It is a narrative of religion within the narrative of the history.As a Linga,set in Yoni.Like a Hindu statue on a Plinth.In Hinduism,she says,each idea was a reaction.Hinduism is context sensitive;it responds immediately,not only in economic and political contexts,but inside Budhism or Islam.It represents Kings as Gods and Gods as Kings.It seldom drew a sharp line between the secular and religious power.
 |
| A K Ramanujan |
Wendy thinks her book is not about maps and chaps.It rests on the shoulders of pygmies as well as giants.The history of Hinduism,to her mind,abounds in periods of creative assimilation,interaction and in violent outbursts of violent intolerence.In the ambivalent attitude to non violence,she infers,Hindus are no different from the rest.Poet and folklorist A K Ramanujan has said that he was troubled by this dualism in his father.His father was holding together astrology and astronomy in his brain at the same time.He never cared about this double vision.There is a dark shape visible on the moon.The Euro-Americans see the face of a man.Jews a man,but Cain.Others a woman,a moose(Eurasian Elk),buffalo or frog.But Hindus see a rabbit;in the 1930's some saw the figure of Gandhi.Budhists say Budha was a rabbit in one of his earlier births,who vowed to give flesh to any beggar,inorder to protect him from having to break the moral law by taking animal life.Indra,the Hindu king of Gods,took the form of a Brahmin and went to the rabbit.The rabbit offered himself.It shook its body thrice for insects to escape death and jumped into the magical fire conjured up by Indra.Indra,impressed by the action of the Rabbit,painted the rabbit on the moon!
Ludwig Wittgenstein,the Austrian-British philosopher said that in the image of duck-rabbit,it was rather a smug rabbit or a droopy duck;but it could not be both at once!But,Wendy feels, a non Hindu should strive to see both rabbit and man.Wittgenstein,in his Philosophical Investigations,used the image to describe two types of seeing:seeing that;seeing as.Remember the Mirror/Reflection simile in Indian philosophy.
 |
| Wittgenstein's rabbit |
After delineating her premise thus,in the preface,Wendy takes on the RSS and BJP:The Hindus are diverse in their attitude to diversity.Some are proud;some have anxiety.The right wing Hindu nationalists or fundamentalists have anxiety.They are against Muslims,Christians and the wrong Hindus.This book is so alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they may tell.
I NEED NOT ELABORATE.
She goes on to say,in Indian history,individuals have turned the tide of tolerance or violence even against the current of the Zeitgeist.Ashoka,Akbar and Gandhi did it for tolerance;Aurangazeb,Brigadier Reginald Dyer and MS GOLVALKAR turned the tide towards intolerance.
I NEED NOT ELABORATE.
Wendy Doniger,as we have seen,has taken the man-rabbit image as central to her book and played on the theme af ambivalence.She quotes E M Forster who said,Every Indian hole has atleast two exits.The example:Manu argues for and against meat in the same chapter in Manusmrithi.She refers to A K Ramanujan retelling the Jamadagni/Renuka myth.In Sanskrit she is Renuka.But in Tamil she is both Mariamma(brahmin) and Ellamma(pariah).The brahmin ascetic,Jamadagni,father of Parasurama,cursed his wife to death.At the moment of her execution,she embraced a pariah woman,Ellamma,for sympathy.In the fray,both lost their heads.Later when he pardoned,the heads of the women got transposed.Mariamma had Brahmin head and pariah body;Ellamma had Pariah head and Brahmin body.To Mariamma goats and cocks(not buffalo)were sacrificed;To Ellamma,only buffaloes.Here we see emancipation of the lower castes during the Bhakthi movement in South India.Wendy has mentioned this movement and ofcourse,Adi Sankara's crocodile,serpent and the rope.She has closed doors on the marginalised sections that appear in classical Sanskrit:for instance,the Jabala satyakama story.
I feel that both Wendy Doniger and the Hindu fundamentalists have missed the point.You may have by now seen the fact that there is an overemphasis on dualism,dwaita in her book,Hinduism:An Alternative History.Hence her oratory on the ambivalence.It was the practice of the Upanishad Gurus to place the contradictions before the pupil.Then the pupil was asked to select the right path himself.The Guru is only a tool or a medium.It can't be assessed as diverse attitudes to diversity.She it seems,has failed to understand the philosophy of Maya.Philology fails at the doorsteps of philosophy.
It is clear from the two stories she has mentioned in the book that she is ignorant of Advaita.In his 1939 novel,Finnegans Wake,Irish writer James Joyce has punned that Hindoo(the earlier British spelling for Hindu)is infact two Irish men,Hin-nessy and Doo-ley.Harvard Professor,Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to the Russian Novelist Vladimir Nabokov's bid for Chairmanship of the Russian Literature Department.Jakobson said:"I do respect very much the elephant.But would you give him the Chair of zoology?".
It meant that a Zoologist won't ask the questions on zoology(I studied zoology;I never asked questions;I was interested only in Genetics!).When Wendy quotes it,it means Hindus won't ask the right questions on Hinduism and she is the right person to ask .I have no objection to her mention of Lakshmana's sexual preference in Valmiki Ramayana.In India,people have not generally read Valmiki Ramayana,they usually read Ramacharitamanas,Kambaramayana or Aadyatma Ramayana.In all this Rama is God.But in Valmiki Ramayana,he is a man,hapless at times.I have admired Lakshmana questioning his dad,Dasaratha when Rama was exiled to the forest.Rama tells his dad that he is driven by lust at the embrace of Kaikeyi,mother of Bharatha.Lakshmana was more positive to Sita than Rama.So it is possible to work a love triangle.When one sees such human stories of lust and despair,one should also not forget the fragrance of democracy in Valmiki Ramayana.When Bharatha meets brother Rama in the forest,Rama asks:Are you not honouring the Carvakas still?.
It is a wonderful moment in world literature.Carvakas had administered India for almost 900 years;they had preached Lokayata,the materialistic,atheist philosphy.The Marxism ancient India had developed.They were enemies of Rama.But Rama is reminding Bharatha that he should honour enemies.It is a democratic principle. The original Ramayana has such deep references,even environmental.Since Wendy has not gone deep,She fails to mention wonderful Indian books like Hinduism by K M Sen or Argumentative Indian by his son,Amartya Sen.She has fortunately mentioned D D Kosambi ,the Marxist historian who asked historians to ask not who was king,but who among the people who had a plough.Ofcourse,Balarama had a plough.Janaka got Sita when the earth was ploughed!Infact,No other historian has written the alternative history as Kosambi did.He was a Mathematician and a Sanskrit scholar too.
The most quoted person in the book is A K Ramanujan.An Essay of him,Three Hundred Ramayanas;Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation was withdrawn by the University of Delhi from the B A History syllabus in November,2011.The essay originally appeared in Paula Richman's Many Ramayanas.His contribution in translating medieval Sanskrit poetry and retelling ancient stories is tremendous.Michael Witzel'sThe Origins of the World's Mythologies(2012)was also withdrawn from Indian market.The book,Shivaji:The Hindu King in Islamic India (2004)by James Laine had the same fate.Laine had doubts about Shivaji's paternity.Salman Rushdie's novel,Satanic Verses (1988) is banned in several countries including his native India.
