The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  American Hindus have tried to challenge and correct what they perceive, often correctly, to be the inaccuracies and exaggerations of Hinduism in American popular culture. In February 1999, when Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) aired its “The Way” episode, with guest appearances by both Krishna and Kali, complaints poured in about subjects ranging from the lesbian subtext of the show to the very fact that a television program could portray a Hindu deity as fictional at all. The episode was pulled, revised, and then reissued within six months, this time with a public announcement to appease those who had been offended.30

  It is useful to sort out three different sorts of Hindu objections to the American appropriation of Hinduism:

  1. Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrong.

  2. Even when they get Kali and Tantra right, they are wrong, because they have gotten hold of the Wrong Sort of Hinduism; they should have written about the Bhagavad Gita and Vedantic philosophy.

  3. Even when Americans write about the Gita, they are desecrating and exploiting Hinduism, because only Hindus have a right to talk about Hinduism.

  There is some truth, and some falsehood, in the first of these assertions, and mostly falsehood in the second and third.

  As for the first—that Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrongle—if we learn nothing else from the history of Hinduism, we learn that there is seemingly no limit to the variations that Hindus have rung on every aspect of their religion. Authenticity is therefore a difficult concept to apply to any representation of Hinduism, and some of the most outlandish aspects of California Tantra, for instance, closely mirror the antinomianism of medieval Indian Tantra. Yet Hindus throughout Indian history have made the subjective judgment that some (other) Hindus go too far, and it is hard to resist that judgment when confronting much of the Americanization of Hinduism, not to mention the more grotesque misconstructions made by people who have no commitment to any form of Hinduism but simply pick up pieces of the mythology or art and use them for purposes that are, at best, crassly commercial and, at worst, obscene. Hindus too are capable of desecrating Hinduism. In the Bollywood film God Only Knows (2004), in which characters speak a bastardized mix of Hindi and English, with (often inaccurate) English subtitles for the English as well as the Hindi, a fake guru goes up to a red fire hydrant with white trim, watches a dog urinate on it (recall the meaning of dogs in Hinduism), sits down beside it, and puts a garland on it, making it into a Shiva linga of the “self-created” genre; people immediately sit down and start worshiping it. I should think that many Hindus found this scene offensive.

  The second objection—that America has taken up the Wrong Sort of Hinduism—also has roots in history. We have seen that Hinduism in America began, in the nineteenth century, with a philosophical, colonially venerated (if not generated) Vedanta and Gita but was then supplemented, in the mid-twentieth century, by a second phase of Hinduism, a transgressive, counterculture- catalyzed Kali and Tantra, brokered by megagurus (like Rajneesh) whose broad appeal was built largely on their exotic teachings and charismatic presence. Now the pendulum is swinging back again in a third phase, as many Hindus nowadays wish to go back to that first appropriation, or, rather, to an even more ultra-conservative, often fundamentalist form of Hindu devotional monotheism(though socially they may be more liberal than their parents; women, for instance, play a far more important role in the management of temples in America than they would be allowed to have in most of India).

  The latest generation of Hindu immigrants to America have the same sort of traditional and conservative forms of practice and belief that the Indian immigrants in the sixties and seventies, indeed most immigrant communities, had, as well as the same goals: financial stability, education, acculturation, and the preservation of their traditions in some form.31 Now, however, they have the generational stability and financial backing to voice their opinions forcefully and publicly. Moreover, cut off as they are from the full range of Hindus and Hinduisms that they would experience in India, American-born Hindus are more susceptible to the narrow presentation of Hinduism offered by their relatives and friends.32

  Unfortunately, the features of Kali and Tantra that most American devotees embrace and celebrate are often precisely the aspects that the Hindu tradition has tried, for centuries, to tone down, domesticate, deny, or censor actively,33 the polytheistic, magical, fertile, erotic, and violent aspects. American intellectuals and devotees generally turn to Hinduism for theological systems, charismatic figures, and psychophysical practices unavailable in their own traditions, Jewish and Christian traditions that already have, heaven knows, far more boring, monotheistic, rationalizing fundamentalism, as well as violence, than anyone could possibly want.34 But this Wrong Sort of Hinduism that the generally middle-class and upper-class spokespersons of the present generation condemn has been, throughout the history of Hinduism, and remains every bit as real to many Hindus—particularly but not only only lower-class Hindus and villagers—as any other.

  This brings us to the third objection, which is that even when Americans do get Hinduism right, they desecrate and exploit it when they write about it, merely by virtue of being Americans rather than Hindus. This string of assumptions provides a kind of corollary to the first option (that Americans get it wrong). The same words about Hinduism that might be acceptable in the mouth of a Hindu would not be acceptable coming from an American, just as African Americans can use the n word in ways that no white person would dare do, and Jews can tell anti-Semitic jokes that they would be very angry indeed to hear from goyim. On the other hand, for Hindus caught up in identity politics, both in America and in India, a Hindu who makes a “wrong” interpretation of Hinduism is even more offensive (because a traitor to his or her own people) than a non-Hindu making the same interpretation.lf You’re damned if you aren’t and damned if you are.

  As an American who writes about Hinduism, I am clearly opposed to this third objection, the exclusion of non-Hindus from the study of Hinduism, for reasons that I have already stated. I appreciate the hypersensitivity to exploitation and powerlessnesslg that is the inevitable aftermath of colonialism, but I believe that one cannot exploit texts and stories in the same way that one exploits people (or textiles or land or precious gems)—or horses.

  The beautiful Marwari horses (and the closely related Kathiawars), with their uniquely curved ears, were bred under the Mughals. After independence, thousands of Marwari horses were shot, castrated, or consigned to hard labor as draft animals. Since only Kshatriyas could own or ride them, Marwaris, like so many horses in Indian history, had become a hated symbol of feudalism and oppressive social divisions. But eventually the Indigenous Horse Society of India and the Marwar Horse Society were established and took measures to define the breed and preserve it, making it available to middle-class, as well as royal, breeders.

  Without leaving India, the Marwari horses became American movie stars, and they provide a rule-of-ear clue to determine whether a Hollywood film about India was shot in Rajasthan or in the deserts of Lone Pine, California (two hundred miles north of L.A.), for if the horses in the film have those curved ears, the film was shot in India. But Marwari horses now live also in the United States, where there has been, since 2000, a Marwari stud in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, reversing the age-old current of the importing of horses into India.35 There is an element of colonial manipulation here, for Euro-American ideas of breeding, and standards of equine beauty, influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris in India, and if, as seems possible, the best ones are exported, for extravagant prices, to America, the breed in India will be diminished.

  I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitute a world of unlimited good, an infinitely expansible source of meaning. An American who retells a Hindu story does not diminish that story within the Hindu world, even to the arguable extent that taking a Hindu statue from Chennai to New York, or an Indian horse from Kathiawar to C
happaquiddick, diminishes the heritage of India. On the contrary, I believe that the wild misconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely by making Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices, and an American interlocutor is often the best person to build that bridge. Hence this book.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

  1950 -

  One day, sitting in the Adi-Dravida street, I tackled a group of older

  Pallars on the subjects of death, duty, destiny and rebirth of the soul.

  In my inadequate Tamil, I asked them where they thought the soul

  went after death. . . . The group collapsed in merriment—perhaps as

  much at my speech as at the question. Wiping his eyes, the old man

  replied, “Mother, we don’t know! Do you know? Have you been

  there?” I said, “No, but Brahmans say that if people do their duty

  well in this life, their souls will be born next time in a higher caste.”

  “Brahmans say!” scoffed another elder, “Brahmans say anything.

  Their heads go round and round!”

  Kathleen Gough, in 1960, writing about the Pallars,

  a caste of Adi-Dravidas (“Original Dravidians”),

  a South Indian term for formerly Untouchable

  castes known elsewhere as Dalits1

  The subtitle of this chapter might be “Whatever Happened to . . . the Veda, the Ramayana?” Where the previous chapter traced the historical background of the political situation of Hindus in contemporary America, this chapter considers the relevance of history to the political situation of Hindus in present-day India. It demonstrates how alive the past is in present-day India, how contemporary events rebound off the wall of the past. We have noted, throughout, the intertextual links, the way that stories told in the Vedas and Brahmanas are retold, with variations, in the Mahabharata, and the Puranas, and vernacular traditions. The heads of the Brahmins “go round and round” as the meanings of the ancient texts are ignored, or inverted, or, in some cases, followed to the letter. And the diversity of Hinduism extends also to the diversity of the ways in which the past is used in the present.

  I’ve taken the contemporary instances not in any logical order but following the chronological order of the historical periods described in some (though not all) of the previous chapters, beginning with the Vedas; in all other ways, they are in a random sequence. There is no consistent direction in which events from the ancient past exert their intense influence on the present moment. In some cases there is a transformation; the ancient myth or ritual takes on entirely new meanings or even new forms in the present. In other cases the past clings to its ancient, sometimes now incomprehensible or clearly irrelevant form and resists any change. Women and Dalits gain new powers but are still in many cases shackled to ancient, repressive forms, just as Hinduism in the contemporary period simultaneously reaches out to a new inclusiveness and new possibilities of equality for those who were oppressed in the past, while Hindu nationalists grow in their power to oppose that very inclusiveness. The new myths of women and Dalits may be unearthings or reworkings of ancient tales that were never preserved or entirely new creations, born of the events of our time.

  THE RIG VEDA REVISITED AND REVISIONED

  BLOODLESS SACRIFICES

  The Veda lives on in revisions of the sacrifice. Although a living animal was suffocated in the Vedic sacrifice, in some cases rice cakes were already substituted for the animal victim. The irony is that now throughout India generally only the lower castes perform animal sacrifices (as the Vedic people did), while Brahmins perform vegetarian versions of Vedic sacrifices, often not just for the reasons that we have noted but also precisely in order to distinguish their sacrifices from the village buffalo sacrifice or chicken offered to the goddess—rites, associated with “carnivorous low castes,” that they regard as “popular” and “barbaric.”2 Privately performed sacrifices may include real animals, while publicly sponsored sacrifices are less likely to do so.3 But the flesh-eating Vedic god may still cast his shadow on the vegetarian sacrifice; the whole coconuts that the deity fancies bear a suspicious resemblance to human heads (a resemblance that is sometimes explicitly mentioned in the accompanying liturgy and in myths about human sacrifice).

  The Brahmin priest often sacrifices a goat made of dough and papier-mâché, as Madhva advised his followers to do, and several ritual texts allow.4 In Kerala, Nambuduri Brahmins use rice wrapped in a banana leaf.5 Often the rice cakes that are used in place of the goat are wrapped in leaves, tied to little leashes, and carefully “suffocated” before they are offered. At some soma sacrifices, pots of ghee are substituted for the animals. A Vedic ritual in Maharashtra in 1992 was largely transformed into a puja, with a strongly Arya Samaj flavor; the sponsor was the guru, taking darshan before the image of the god, but a famous Muslim sitar player performed the music.6 And when a Vedic sacrifice was performed in London in 1996, there was not even a vegetable substitute for the sacrificial beast; the beasts were “entirely imagined.” The priest didn’t walk around the imaginary victims or tie them to a (real or imaginary) stake, as one would do with a live animal, but he did mime suffocating them and sprinkled water where they should have been. In place of the omentum (which the sacrificier usually smells but does not eat), they used the large wheat rolls called rotis.7 The transformation of a real ritual into an imagined ritual echoes a process that we have noted in the history of Tantra.

  In the combinatory form of Hinduism that remains a basic format in India to the present day, the two forms of sacrifice may be performed together. When a Vedic sacrifice was performed in India in 1955, and public protest prevented the sacrificers from slaughtering a goat, another sacrificer protested the revisionist ritual by offering the same sacrifice—with animal victims—on the outskirts of town.8 Sometimes, “as a concession to mass sentiments,” sacrifices using Vedic mantras and rituals are preceded by popular rituals to local deities.9 Sometimes the distinction is spatial rather than temporal: The deity in the center of the Hindu temple (an aspect of Shiva or Vishnu or a goddess) is often a strict vegetarian who accepts no blood offerings, only rice, or rice cakes, as well as fruits and flowers, while there may be another deity, outside the temple, to whom blood sacrifices are made. Sometimes the vegetarian deity in the inner shrine is a god, and the carnivorous deity outside is a goddess. Similarly, the shrines of goddesses with an identificatio brahminica are generally inside the village, while those of mother goddesses who lacked such connections are outside the village.10

  This arrangement in the structure of the temple translates into a spatial configuration—from outside to inside—what originated as a synchronic opposition (animal versus vegetable sacrifice) and developed into a historical, diachronic transition (vegetables replacing animals). In the outer markets of the temple, one can purchase an image of the deity, or a postcard of the temple, perhaps a cassette of the songs, bhajans, sung to the deity, but also entirely worldly things, cassettes of (pirated) versions of the Rolling Stones, sandals, saris, embroidered shawls, brass pots, statuettes of couples in Kama-sutra/ Khajuraho positions (thus once again uniting the sacred and the sensual), anything. The ideological conflict endures, in transformation, through both space and time. It also often endures in a linguistic bifurcation, as worshipers gather in the temple to hear someone read a Sanskrit text; some recite it with him; the storyteller or tour guide will then gloss it in the local language, Telugu or Bangla or whatever, and then explain it, perhaps discuss it with them. Then he will read another verse in Sanskrit, and so on. The rich mix of life on the outskirts of a temple is yet another example of the real periphery that the imaginary Brahmin center cannot hold.

  VEDIC ANIMALS IN THE NEWS

  SACRED COWS

  The Vedic idea of a nonviolent sacraifice also affects contemporary attitudes to cows.

  The cow is a central issue for the Hindutva faction, wh
ose influence upon all branches of Indian life is sometimes called Saffronization (on the model of Sanskritization), a term with strong echoes of the renunciant branch of Hinduism, whose members wear saffron- or ocher-colored robes. In recent years, some members of the Hindu right have argued, in contradiction of abundant historical evidence to the contrary, that the ancient Indians never ate beef until the Muslims brought this custom to India; they have persecuted Hinduslh who have defended the historical record on this point,11 and they have attempted to use the alleged sanctity of the cow to disenfranchise Muslims, some of whom eat beef and others of whom slaughter cows, both for the Muslim ritual of Bakr-Id and for the many Hindus who do eat beef. The belief that Hindu cows are sacred is supported by no less an authority than the OED, which defines the term as, primarily, designating “The cow as an object of veneration amongst Hindus,” and cites an 1891 reference from Rudyard Kipling’s father (a vet in India), already in the context of Hindu-Muslim conflict: “The Muhammedan . . . creed is in opposition to theirs [sc. the Hindus’] and there are rankling memories of a thousand insults to it wrought on the sacred cow.”12 The term became globalized as a metaphor, indeed a backhanded anti-Hindu ethnic slur. In U.S. journalism the term “sacred cow” came to mean “someone who must not be criticized,” and in American literature, “An idea, institution, etc., unreasonably held to be immune from questioning or criticism.” The term designates precisely the sort of fanaticism that characterizes the methods of those who, in the cow protection movement under the Raj and again in India today, have insisted that all cows are sacred.

  But are cows sacred in India? Or is the idea of a “sacred cow” an Irish bullli (the old British chauvinist term for an ox-y-moron)? People often perform puja to cows, and at many festivals they decorate cows and give them fruits and flowers, paint their horns beautifully, and place garlands around their necks. Cows are in many ways special animals. Certainly they are not publicly killed in India, for it is against the law to kill a cow in several Indian states and frowned on in others. Cows already in early Sanskrit texts came to symbolize Brahmins, since a Brahmin without a cow is less than a complete Brahmin, and killing a cow (except in a sacrifice) was equated with killing a Brahmin.13