On Hinduism

681 Pages·2014·2.059 MB·English

by  Wendy Doniger

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© Wendy Doniger 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doniger, Wendy.
[Essays. Selections]
On Hinduism / Wendy Doniger.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-19-936007-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Hinduism. I. Title.
BL1210.D66 2014
294.5--dc23
2013038952
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Introduction: Foreword into the Past vii
A Chronology of Hinduism xviii
ON BEING HINDU
Hinduism by Any Other Name 3
Are Hindus Monotheists or Polytheists? 10
Three (or More) Forms of the Three (or More)-Fold Path
in Hinduism 21
The Concept of Heresy in Hinduism 36
Eating Karma 70
Medical and Mythical Constructions of the Body in Sanskrit Texts 78
Death and Rebirth in Hinduism 87
Forgetting and Re-awakening to Incarnation 107
Assume the Position: The Fight over the Body of Yoga 116
The Toleration of Intolerance in Hinduism 126
The Politics of Hinduism Tomorrow 142
GODS, HUMANS AND ANTI-GODS
Saguna and Nirguna Images of the Deity 151
You Can’t Get Here from There: The Logical Paradox of 157
Hindu Creation Myths
Together Apart: Changing Ethical Implications of 170
Hindu Cosmologies
God’s Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the 192
Representation of Shiva
Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification 207
and Mythical Demystification in Hinduism
The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: 233
The Kedara Khanda of the Skanda Purana
WOMEN AND OTHER GENDERS
Why Should a Brahmin Tell You Whom to Marry?: 259
A Deconstruction of the Laws of Manu
Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow 269
The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology 288
Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India 301
vi CONTENTS
The Third Nature: Gender Inversions in the Kamasutra 314
Bisexuality and Transsexuality Among the Hindu Gods 330
Transsexual Transformations of Subjectivity and 342
Memory in Hindu Mythology
KAMA AND OTHER SEDUCTIONS
The Control of Addiction in Ancient India 363
Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn’t All About Sex 371
The Mythology of the Kamasutra 381
From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism 396
in Contemporary India
HORSES AND OTHER ANIMALS
The Ambivalence of Ahimsa 409
Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial 426
than the Beasts
The Mythology of Horses in India 438
The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Shiva 452
Indra as the Stallion’s Wife 473
Dogs as Dalits in Indian Literature 488
Sacred Cows and Beefeaters 501
ILLUSION AND REALITY IN THE HINDU EPICS
Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, Art and Performance 509
Shadows of the Ramayana 523
Women in the Mahabharata 537
The History of Ekalavya 547
ON NOT BEING HINDU
‘I Have Scinde’: Orientalism and Guilt 559
Doniger O’Flaherty on Doniger 569
You Can’t Make an Omelette 572
The Forest-dweller 577
Appendix I: Limericks on Hinduism 579
Appendix II: Essays on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger 582
List of Abbreviations 590
Notes 591
Bibliography 627
Index 649
INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD INTO THE PAST
‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’
—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), chapter 5.
‘If I had to live my life again, I’d make all the same mistakes, only sooner.’
—Tallulah Bankhead
HOW I CAME TO STUDY HINDUISM
My heart always sinks when a stranger at a dinner party or a conference
asks me, brightly, ‘How did you [ever] get interested in the study of
India?’ as if this were some weird perversion that required an elaborate
explanation. But perhaps the moment has finally come to answer this
question properly, in the foreword to a book about India, and one of the
world’s great religions, that spans my entire academic life.
It all began when I was about twelve years old, and my mother gave me
a copy of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. It changed my life. At a time
when I was consumed by religious questions, Forster persuaded me
(wrongly, I now know) that everyone in India was constantly thinking and
talking about nothing but religion, and that they had the answers. I found
a copy of Robert Hume’s translation of the Upanishads, and was stunned
by their beauty and wisdom.
My mother also gave me Rumer Godden’s The River and Mooltiki, and
Aubrey Menen’s wicked satire on the Ramayana, and Kipling’s Just So
Stories and Jungle Book and, later, Kim. She was an amateur Orientalist in
her own way, and was crazy about Angkor Wat (which she pronounced,
in the Viennese manner, Angkor Vat); she cherished her copy of the great
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viii INTRODUCTION
four-volume work on the temples of Angkor published in 1930 by the
École Française de l’Extrème Orient. All her life she wanted to visit those
temples, and she finally did. When I went to live in India for a year, she
came to visit me and went on by herself to see Angkor despite the rumbles
of war (it was 1964), and when she was dying, thirty years later, she told
me that that had been the high point of her whole life. That old French
book remained a kind of icon to me throughout my youth; when my
mother died, it came to me, and it still holds for me the mystery and
glamour that it had then. I passed it on (together with my mother’s
politics) to my son, Michael Lester O’Flaherty (born in 1971), who began
his graduate study of the history of Southeast Asia at Cornell in 1995. And
I finally visited Angkor Wat, too, just this past January of 2012. But I’m
getting ahead of my story.
Barely into my teens, I discovered that I loved the glorious excess of
things Indian: I preferred Indian painting, with its infinite detail, to
Renaissance paintings; I preferred Indian temples, with their rococo
carvings, to the great cathedrals of Europe, let alone the sleek Bauhaus that
was admired in my day. I rebelled against the moderation and restraint of
what was called ‘good taste’—clothing of beige, mauve and basic black—
and delighted in the reds and purples and oranges and yellows of Rajasthani
silks and cottons. I liked Indian music, particularly the sarod, which
moaned like a human voice as it slid from note to note, far better than
Western music where every note had to fit into a rigid slot. My favourite
food was Indian food, which I liked eating with my hand(s); I had always
hated knives and forks. I watched Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955)
more times than I can now remember; it was the most beautiful film I had
ever seen.
But most of all, I loved Hindu mythology, the stories of the gods; I
particularly loved the way that the stories were told and retold, over and
over, each time differently. I had been, from very early childhood,
enchanted by stories about other worlds, fairies and gods, a fact that is
corroborated by a large portrait of me that my uncle, Harvey Haines,
painted (badly) when I was just five years old: I’m holding a fairy tale
castle, Disney-turreted and covered with swirls of oil paint patterned like
Florentine endpapers, and I’m reading a book that begins, ‘Once upon a
time ...’ In high school I continued to flee from what I had come to
regard as the excessive reality of the real world by studying Latin and, in
unofficial sessions with my devoted Latin teacher, Anita Lilenfeld (now
Seligson), ancient Greek. She casually mentioned to me that Sanskrit,
INTRODUCTION ix
closely related to Greek and Latin, was the language of ancient India,
which meant to me the language of A Passage to India (and, by extension,
Angkor Wat). By then I was thoroughly hooked, and I chose to go to
Radcliffe, rather than Swarthmore, largely because I could learn Sanskrit at
Harvard.
And so I began the study of Sanskrit as a seventeen-year-old freshman in
1958. Surely the long shadow of Angkor fell over me as I sat in the dusty
little room at the top of Widener library, studying Sanskrit with Daniel
H.H. Ingalls. He taught me not only Sanskrit but Indian literature, Indian
history, Indian religion, and something else, harder to define, something
about the pleasure of scholarship, the elegance of the written word, the
luxury of the world of the mind.
So I was trained as a Sanskritist. But I was not a real Sanskritist; real
Sanskritists (Ingalls was not at all typical) are cold-blooded pedants interested
only in verbs and nouns, and I was a hot-blooded ex-ballet dancer still
interested in stories. Real Sanskritists, on two continents, have been known
to turn and leave a room when I entered it. I looked elsewhere for my
intellectual nourishment. I roomed with an anthropologist, Alice Kasakoff,
whom the Radcliffe authorities had assigned to me on the very first day; in
those times of unspoken quotas, Jewish girls somehow just seemed to end
up with Jewish roommates. Alice introduced me to her colleagues (Vogt,
Kluckholn, the Whitings, Beidelman, Mayberry-Lewis) and instilled in
me an enduring admiration for anthropologists. I also, in the manner of
old-fashioned Sanskritists and ‘Orientalists’, studied Greek with Zeph
Stewart, Sterling Dow, John Finley and Adam Parry; English literature
with Reuben Brower, William Alfred and Harry Levin; and folklore with
Albert Lord.
And when I moved to England, in 1965, it was again the anthropologists
who supplied much of my intellectual nourishment—Evans-Pritchard and
Rodney Needham in Oxford, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Claude
Levi-Strauss in Cambridge, London and Paris. But I was also sustained by
the old Raj crowd (Penelope Chetwode Betjeman, Bill and Tim Archer,
Stuart Piggott), even while I worked on a second dissertation with Robin
Zaehner (who did know Sanskrit, but not as well as he knew Persian). In
1968, when Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (an anthropologist) wanted
to hire me to teach in the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he
was acting as Director, he found it impossible to sell me to the Sanskritists,
and instead winkled me into the History Department, where Bernard
Lewis welcomed me and protected me until I left England in 1975, for
Berkeley.