Kevin Baldeosingh
Wendy Doniger is one of the leading Western experts on Hinduism or, put another way, one of the world’s leading experts on Hinduism. This collection of essays is an excellent general introduction to her work, as well as a reflection of her immense knowledge of her subject.
While she is narrowly defined as a Sanskrit scholar, her erudition encompasses not only all the Hindu texts but also Hindu philosophy, Indian history and sociology. Her collection is divided into seven sections, starting with On Being Hindu to Illusion and Reality in the Hindu Epics to Women and Other Genders.
There’s even a quirky section titled Horses And Other Animals, which examines the mythology of horses and dogs as Dalits and sacred cows and beef-eaters.
In a society like ours, where 26 per cent of the populace is Hindu according to the 2011 census, Doniger’s book also illustrates how Hindu politics in India has influenced and continues to influence Hindu religio-political organisations in Trinidad.
She notes, for example, that “the movement known as Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”), while protesting that it is a reaction against European pressures, actually apes Protestant evangelical strategies, including fundamentalist agendas.
Its hatred is directed not only against Hindus of more diverse traditions...but also, ironically, against the very monotheisms (Islam and Christianity) that nurtured the Hindu insistence that Hinduism is monotheistic.”
She argues that Hindu fundamentalism is at odds with the religion’s broader traditions, and that it was the British influence which allowed this fundamentalism to begin flourishing.
“By positioning the Gita as the Hindu Bible, the British also validated the worship of Krishna/Vishnu as a form of monotheism...the Gita never had anything remotely approaching canonical status before this, though it had always been an important text,” she writes.
“Other texts—Sanskrit texts like the Upanishads and vernacular texts such as the Hindi and Tamil version of the Ramayana, and, most of all, oral traditions—were what most Hindus actually used in their worship.”
This split also exists in Trinidad, so the census actually counts Hindus in two separate groups.
“Many highly placed Hindus so admired their British rulers that, in a kind of colonial and religious Stockholm Syndrome, they swallowed the Protestant line themselves; inspiring the form of Hinduism called Santana Dharma,” writes Doniger.
This Raj-rooted split in itself has even more ancient roots, as Doniger points out that, “In the earliest preserved text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the people who referred to themselves as ‘we’, defined themselves in contrast with the ‘aliens’ or ‘slaves’ who spoke non-Indo-European languages, had dark skin and blunt features, and had been in possession of the Indian subcontinent before the Indo-Europeans (the ‘Aryans’) entered it from, most probably, Central Asia.”
Apart from her immense knowledge of all aspects of Hinduism, Doniger’s commitment to spreading her knowledge is obvious in every page (which is why her minutiae can be occasionally tiresome).
So, for anyone who wants to gain an understanding of this religion and its history, without the bias that corrupts so many treatises on religion, Doniger is definitely your woman.
BOOK INFO
On Hinduism
Wendy Doniger
Oxford University Press, 2014.
ASIN: B00IF7CWHE; 680 pages.