The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The first books genuinely translated from Sanskrit to English were Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Sir William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (in 1789), and then, in 1794, Jones’s Laws of Manu. The statue of Jones in St. Paul’s Church in London holds a volume of Manu in his hand, thus commemorating Manu in a Christian church, an honor accorded him by no Hindu temple, to my knowledge. As chief justice of the High Court of Calcutta, Jones had searched for something that the Hindu witnesses could be sworn in on that would put the fear of god(s) in them, since perjuries were rife. He tried the Ganges River, but when that failed to produce the desired effect, he sought expert counsel from the local learned men, who gave him Manu and inspired him to learn Sanskrit.78 Jones’s Manu translation became the basis of much of British law in India (including the disastrous treatment of suttee); the text became instrumental in the construction of a complex system of jurisprudence based on the British belief in a unified Hinduism, the privileging of the “classical” language, Sanskrit, over local languages, and the Protestant bias in favor of scripture. In the courts of the Raj (and later independent India), “general law” (based on British law) was supplemented by a “personal law” determined by one’s religious affiliation (such as Hindu law). “Hindu law,” or rather the British interpretation of Jones’s translation of Manu, was applied to nearly 80 percent of the population of colonial India in matters of marriage and divorce, legitimacy, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, and religious endowments.

  Yet Manu had never been used in precisely this way before; the British system completely bypassed the village governing units (called panchayats) that actually adjudicated in vernacular languages on the basis of case law built up over many centuries. This is not to say that the British invented Manu; it had been (primarily through its many commentaries) an important text both in local law and in the Brahmin imaginary, which still exerted a heavy influence on many Hindus. What the British did was to replace the multiplicity of legal voices and the centuries of case law with a single voice, that of Jones’s Manu. It was as if U.S. courts had suddenly abandoned case law to rule only by the Constitution.

  The translations of the Bhagavad Gita had equally long-lasting repercussions. Wilkins’s Gita had a preface by Warren Hastings,79 a brute of the first order, who was impeached (though acquitted) on his return to England, in 1793. Gandhi first read the Gita, in 1888-1889, in a later translation by Sir Edwin Arnold; the American transcendentalists too, led by Emerson and Thoreau, read and loved the Gita. Yet just as Manu was not the most important Hindu legal text, so too texts other than the Gita—both Sanskrit texts, like the Upanishads and the Puranas, and vernacular texts, such as the Tulsidas and Kampan Ramayanas, and, most of all, oral traditions—were what most Hindus actually used in their worship. The highly Anglicized Indian elite followed the British lead and gave the Gita a primacy it had not previously enjoyed, though like Manu, it had always been an important text. The fraction of Hinduism that appealed to Protestant evangelical tastes at all was firmly grounded in the renunciant path of Release and philosophical monism. The evangelists in India assumed that God had prepared for their arrival by inspiring the Hindus with a rough form of monotheism, the monism of the Upanishads;ke pukka monotheism, in their view, was available to Brahmins but not to the lower castes, who were fit only for polytheism.80

  Many highly placed Hindus so admired their colonizerskf that in a kind of colonial and religious Stockholm syndrome, they swallowed the Protestant line themselves and not only gained a new appreciation of those aspects of Hinduism that the British approved of (the Gita, the Upanishads, monism) but became ashamed of those aspects that the British scorned (much of the path of rebirth, polytheism, the earthy and erotic aspects) and even developed new forms of Hinduism, such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, heavily influenced by British Protestantism. Scholars have noted a pattern in which colonized people take on the mask that the colonizer creates in the image of the colonized, mimicking the colonizer’s perception of the colonized.81 This group of Indians became just what the Anglicists wanted, typified by Macaulay’s hope of developing in India “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect,”82 or, as Sumit Sarkar has paraphrased it, “brown in colour but white in thought and taste.”83 Such people are what present-day South Asians refer to as coconuts, the opposite of the U.S. term “Oreos” (and with more precise resonances; in Hindu rituals, coconuts are often offered to gods in place of human heads).

  It is one of the great ironies of the history of sexuality that the Victorian British, of all people, should have had control of India during one of the great ages of sexual and gender reform, the nineteenth century.84 When confronting the earthier aspects of Hinduism, such as the worship of the linga, the British were not amused.kg And some nineteenth-century Hindu movements internalized British Protestant—indeed Victorian—scorn for Hindu eroticism and polytheism. That attitude was simultaneously scornful and prurient: “Look how dirty and naughty these people are. Look! Look!”

  There was a rebound Orientalism in the Hindu reaction to the Protestants, as upper-caste Hindus scurried to get the low-caste temple dancers and prostitutes (Devadasis) out of the temples and swept the village sects and stories out of sight, in shame, in shadow. These right-hand Hindus hastened to put Hindu eroticism into a kind of purdah, behind a veil formed of the Gita and Indian philosophy and the more Protestant than thou nineteenth-century Hindu reform movements. Some Hindus took pride in every aspect of Hinduism that appealed to Europeans such as Schelling and Goethe and Hegel and to Americans such as Emerson and Thoreau, holding up those parts of their tradition like cover-up Mother Hubbard gowns as if to say, “We are not the filthy savages some of you think we are.” This sanitized brand of Hinduism is now often labeled sanatana dharma, “perpetual, eternal and universal” Hinduism, although that term was previously used in a very different sense, to designate the moral code that applied to everyone, in contrast with the particular moral code for each particular caste. British legislation of all aspects of Hinduism, including sexual aspects, owed as much to Calvin as to Manu. It was a deadly one-two punch. But British prudery was not “simply an exotic attitude forced on an innately sensual subcontinent. The sexual economics of empire were no less complex than any other form of colonial exchange.”85 For some of the British played an important role in revalidating Indian eroticism against the puritanical tradition of the Hindus themselves, translating the Gita-Govinda and tracking down and preserving Kama-sutra manuscripts in decaying libraries (the first translation of the Kama-sutra into English appeared in 1883).86 Nor are the British alone to blame for the sanitizing of Tantrism or the quasi-Tantric aspects of Hinduism. Long before the British presence in India, from at least the time of Abhinavagupta in the eleventh century, Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina, and Christian critics X-rated Tantrics in India, and later some orthodox Muslims objected too. The British just made it all worse, so that thenceforth sexuality in India was subjected to the triple whammy of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian Puritanism.

  THE TRANSPOSED HEADS, EUROPEAN STYLE

  While the British provided the impetus for changes in Hindu law, society, and religion, Hindu art and literature made their impact on Europe. Some forty years after the “Ezour Veda” captivated Voltaire, the myth of the transposed heads of the Brahmin woman and the Pariah woman inspired Goethe (who also went mad for Shakuntala). Working apparently from Richard Iken’s translation of a Persian version of a Tamil version of the story,87 in 1797 Goethe wrote a poem, “The Pariah,” which can be summarized as follows (from the moment when the Brahmin woman has lost her magic chastity):

  GOETHE’S “THE PARIAH”

  She appeared before her husband, who seized his sword and dragged her to the hill of death. [He beheaded her.] His son stood before him and said, “You may be able to kill your wife, but not my mother. A wife is able to follow her beloved spouse through the flames, and a
faithful son can also follow his beloved mother.” His father said, “Hurry! Join her head to her body, touch her with the sword, and she will come back to you, alive.” The son hastened and found the bodies of two women, lying crosswise, and their heads. He seized his mother’s head and put it on the nearest headless body. He blessed it with the sword, and it arose, and his mother’s dear lips spoke words fraught with horror: “My son, you were too hasty! There is your mother’s body, and next to it the impious head of a fallen, condemned woman. Now I am grafted to her body forever, and will live among the gods, wise in thought, wild in action, full of mad, raging lust from the bosom down. As a Brahmin woman, with my head in heaven, I will live as a Pariah on earth. And whoever, Brahmin or Pariah, is overwhelmed by sorrow, his soul wildly riven, will know me if he looks to heaven.88

  Note the reference to the possibility of suttee (which got into just about everything that any European wrote about India for several centuries, though here it is also the suttee of a son for his mother) and the judgment that the Brahmin woman is wise and loving, while the Pariah woman is wild in action, mad, and raging in lust. Yet the poem concludes that heaven watches over both Brahmin and Pariah, especially when their souls are “riven” as the women in the story are riven. The word “Pariah,” originally found in ancient Tamil literature, referring to a particular low caste, then entered German and English in its broader sense. In 1818 the Irish clergyman and dramatist Charles Robert Maturin called all women “These Pariahs of humanity,” and in 1823, Michael Beer’s play Der Pariah likened the Jews to the Pariahs. Goethe’s poem became a best seller (and inspired several imitations) in Germany.

  The myth of the transposed heads was also picked up in France and, eventually, England and America, undergoing several gender transformations along the way. In 1928, Marguerite Yourcenar published a story in French entitled “Kali Décapitée,” republished in 1938 in English (“Kali Beheaded”).89 In her retelling, the goddess Kali’s amorous escapades with Pariahs lead the gods to decapitate her; eventually they join her head to the body of a prostitute who has been killed for having troubled the meditations of a young Brahmin. The woman thus formed is a creature who becomes “the seducer of children, the inciter of old men, and the ruthless mistress of the young.” In the English edition, Yourcenar explains that she rewrote the ending, “to better emphasize certain metaphysical concepts from which this legend is inseparable, and without which, told in a Western manner, it is nothing but a vague erotic tale placed in an Indian setting.”90 This is a very different story indeed, combining Hindu ideas of caste rebellion (Brahmin women sleeping with Pariahs and disturbing male Brahmins) with misogynist European ideas about feminist rebellion (seducing children, exciting old men).

  The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943) knew both the Goethe poem and a different Sanskrit version of the story, in which two men, rather than two women, are decapitated, and the woman, who is the wife of one and the brother of the other, switches the heads when she restores them to life.91 Zimmer brought the Sanskrit story to the attention of Thomas Mann, who, in 1940, wrote a novella (The Transposed Heads) in which the woman, who is married to one of the men and in love with the other, accidentally, or not so accidentally, switches the heads.92 And in 1954, Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote an opera based on the Thomas Mann novel, also entitled The Transposed Heads. The notes for the 1984 ABC Classics CD of the opera say, “The original source is in the Bhagavad Gita,” a lovely leftover from the colonial heyday of the Gita, when it was regarded as the source of everything Indian. Ms. Glanville-Hicks herself said, “Many of the themes are taken freely and in some cases directly from Hindu folk sources,” and she also described the heroine’s inadvertent transposition of her lovers’ heads as “the greatest Freudian slip of all time.”

  HOW SIR CHARLES SIND93

  The best pun in the history of Raj, one that reveals a number of rather serious aspects of colonialism, is attributed to General Sir Charles James Napier.

  Napier was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujarat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. Mountstuart Elphinstone (formerly Governor of Bombay) likened the British in Sind after the defeat in Afghanistan to “A bully who had been kicked in the streets and went home to beat his wife.”94 The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous,”95 a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Bombay Times accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad.96 The successful annexation of Sind made Napier’s name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils”97 and was knighted. In 1851 he quarreled with Dalhousie (the Governor-General) and left India.

  In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title “Foreign Affairs”:

  PECCAVI

  It is a common idea that the most laconic military despatch ever issued was that sent by Caesar to the Horse-Guards at Rome, containing the three memorable words, “Veni, vidi, vici” [“I came, I saw, I conquered”], and, perhaps, until our own day, no like instance of brevity has been found. The despatch of Sir Charles Napier, after the capture of Scinde, to Lord Ellenborough, both for brevity and truth, is, however, far beyond it. The despatch consisted of one emphatic word—“Peccavi,” “I have Scinde” (sinned).

  The joke here (well, it’s a British joke) depends upon the translation of the Latin word peccavi, which is the first person singular of the past tense, active voice, of the verb pecco, peccare (“to sin”), from which are derived our English words “impeccable” (someone who never sins) and “peccadillo” (a small sin). Thus the double meaning is “I have sinned” (that is, “I have committed a moral error”) and “I have Scinde” (that is, “I have gained possession of a place called Scinde”). Got it?

  The story caught on. In a play published in 1852, a character named Sir Peter Prolix recites, at a dinner party, the following doggerel:

  What exclaim’d the gallant Napier,

  Proudly flourishing his rapier

  To the army and the navy,

  When he conquered Scinde?—“Peccavi!”98

  The story has been told and retold in history books ever since. A 1990 biography of Sir Charles actually entitled I Have Sind cites it three times,99 and the Encyclopaedia Britannica online (2008) says that Napier “is said to have sent a dispatch consisting of one word, ‘Peccavi’ (Latin: ‘I have sinned’—i.e., ‘I have Sind’).”

  But all evidence indicates that Sir Charles Napier never dispatched such a message. The passage about Caesar and Napier is not from the Times of London but from the comic journal Punch (1844, v. 6, 209), whose editors evidently made it up and also represented him as confessing that he had sinned in that his actions had raised such a storm of criticism in England.100 The authors of the Punch item may have been inspired by another apocryphal historical anecdote, which was linked with the peccavi story as early as 1875 and was in circulation for some time before that; it tells us that someone who had witnessed the defeat of the Spanish Armada announced it with one word: “Cantharides,” the Latin and pharmaceutical name of the allegedly aphrodisiac drug known as the Spanish fly.101 (Another British joke.) So it is not Napier’s text, but it is a British text—a lie but a text—with a history of its own; it is a kind of nineteenth-century urban legend, a myth. Salman Rushdie retold the story in Shame, referring to his “looking-glass” Pakistan as “Peccavistan,” though he calls the story apocryphal, bilingual, and fictional.102 The shift from the text of history to the hypertext of journalism is significant; the idea of the sin was initially a writer’s idea, not a general’s. With this in mind, let us unpack the myth a bit more.

  Besides the two meanings I’v
e mentioned (“I have conquered a part of India” and “I have committed a moral error”), there is a third, which we discover if we heed the good advice of Marshall McLuhan, who taught us that the medium is the message, for the medium in this case is Latin. That third message signifies something like “Let’s say it in Latin, which we Oxbridge types, English upper classes, know, and the natives do not, though they know English, which we taught them.” Stephen Jay Gould, who takes the anecdote as history, remarks: “In an age when all gentlemen studied Latin, and could scarcely rise in government service without a boost from the old boys of similar background in appropriate public schools, Napier never doubted that his superiors . . . would properly translate his message and pun: I have sinned.”103 And when Priscilla Hayter Napier told the story (as history, not myth) she remarked, “Possibly this was when he sent his celebrated message—‘Peccavi,’ which, in the Latin every educated man had then at his command, means ‘I have sinned.’ ”104 Latin here functions as a code that the bearers of the message will not understand. Yet even Punch, which invented the story, glossed it in English, realizing that some of its readers might not have been educated in good schools and therefore might not know Latin.