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On Hinduism PDF

681 Pages·2014·2.059 MB·English
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1 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Wendy Doniger 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. 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 vii 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.

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