The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

addiction and

  Adivasis and

  bhakti and

  in Brahmanas

  Buddhism and

  depicted at IVC

  in Dharma-shastras

  in Gupta Empire

  Hinduism and

  horse sacrifice and

  in Kabir’s preaching

  in Kama-sutra

  in Mahabharata

  Manu and

  in Mauryan Empire

  modern

  in Mughal Empire

  polyandry and

  promiscuity and

  Raj and

  Rama and

  rice powder designs of

  in Rig Veda

  Sanskrit and

  shakti and

  in shastras

  Sita as role model for

  suttee practice and

  Tantras and

  in Upanishads

  wall and floor paintings by

  widowhood and

  worship of Krishna and

  Woodroffe, John (Arthur Avalon)

  Wordsworth, William

  World’s Parliament of Religions

  Wotan

  Wright, Frank Lloyd

  Xena: Warrior Princess (television show)

  Xuan Zang

  Yadavaprakasha, Acharya

  Yajnavalkya (sage)

  Yajur Veda

  Yakshinis (tree spirits)

  Yakshis (tree spirits)

  Yama (god)

  Yashoda, wife of Nanda

  Yavakri (sage)

  Yavanis (women body guards)

  yoga

  Yogananda, Sri Paramahansa

  Yoga Sutras (Patanjali)

  Yogavasishtha

  Chudala story in

  Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

  Yoginis (Tantric female magicians)

  Yourcenar, Marguerite

  Yudhishthira, King

  dilemma of

  in heaven and hell

  horse sacrifice of

  Yugas

  Yukteswar, Sri

  Zadig (Voltaire)

  Zelazny, Roger

  Zeus

  Zimmer, Heinrich

  Zoroastrianism

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Wendy Doniger holds two doctorates, in Sanskrit and Indian studies, from Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and many books about Hinduism, and has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and at the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

  a To invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase.

  b Other readers, allergic to methodology, should skip straight to chapter 2.

  c The term “kitchen language” was, I think, first coined for Afrikaans. But the eleventh-century Indian lexicographer Acharya Yadavaprakasha does actually supply a number of otherwise unattested Sanskrit words for everyday cooking devices (ladles, pots, and so forth), evidence either that some Brahmins did speak Sanskrit at home or that Yadavaprakasha was showing off by inventing Sanskrit words for objects normally referred to only in the vernaculars. After all, even in the modern period, people called television dur-darshana, a made-up Sanskrit neologism for “far-seeing,” and it caught on, though dhumra-varttika (“smokestick”) for “cigarette” did not; people persisted in calling them cigarettes.

  d A. K. Ramanujan used to talk of his father’s speaking Sanskrit in the front room, his mother’s speaking Tamil in the kitchen in the back.

  e Apparently this was first said in Yiddish, by Max Weinrich, who referred to a dialect with an army and a navy (“A sprach is a dialekt mit a armee un a flot”).

  f All translations from the Sanskrit are my own unless otherwise noted, and I have usually condensed and/or excerpted them, as I have done with citations of other narratives translated from other languages, though I have added nothing that was not in the text.

  g South Asians continue to devise creative ways of addressing this dilemma. In Tibet in the summer of 2006, I met a Buddhist who said that he would eat yak, but not fish, on moral grounds. That is, if you kill a yak, you destroy one soul but feed many people, but you have to kill many fish, and destroy many souls, to feed the same number of people. It occurred to me that it is a good thing that Tibet does not border on whaling waters. This attitude varies by country; Sri Lankan Buddhists opt for fish over large animals.

  h As, for instance, in the cow protection riots.

  i This is not because they see the moon from a different angle; in the Southern Hemisphere this is true, but most of India and all of Japan are in the Northern Hemisphere. From the Northern Hemisphere the eyes are at eleven and one, and the mouth at six; the hare’s ears are at between twelve and two, his head at between ten and twelve, his nose pointing at between nine and eleven, and his tail at between four and six.

  j This last group represents in many ways the ideal scholars of Hinduism, people like (in my generation) A. K. Ramanujan, Sudhir Kakar, Ashis Nandy, Vasudha Narayanan, and V. Narayana Rao, and, in the younger generation, so many more.

  k This characterizes the “take a Hindu to dinner” approach of such institutions as the one I always think of as the Center for the Prevention of World Religions.

  l Wittgenstein would, I think, have appreciated a more recent double image that has been circulated on the Internet. Close up, it looks like Albert Einstein, but from five feet away, it is the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.

  m The author of the posting was Jitendra Bardwaj, of whom Wikipedia (which may or may not be accurate) says: “Jitendra Bardwaj (born 1937), an independent political campaigner in the United Kingdom, has contested five parliamentary by-elections in what began as an attempt to clear his name after he was convicted of assaulting a police officer outside the Houses of Parliament. As well as campaigning against what he believes is his personal mis-treatment by, and general flaws in, the British legal system, Bardwaj campaigns for the rights of ethnic minorities and for the introduction of Hindu yoga and meditation techniques in British schools.”

  n Orientalism also underlies the still-widespread misconception that everything in India is religious or “spiritual”; often when I mention “South Asian studies” to non-South Asianists, they mishear it as “salvation studies.”

  o One formulation of this assumption is post hoc, propter hoc (“after that, because of that”), a phrase that inspired an old British senior common room joke about blaming bad behavior upon drinking an excess of German wine (hock).

  p One must begin somewhere, even with the polluted H words, and without the disclaimer of scare quotes to barricade them, like a pair of hands held up for mercy.

  q This seems to me about as useful as the remark (which Aldous Huxley made in Those Barren Leaves) that the works of Homer were not written by Homer, but by someone else of the same name.

  r Though their women might have been grateful to have the daughter’s share in the father’s property that this progressive legislation granted to Hindu women.

  s This is the punch line of an old joke, a statement made by a man in response to well-meaning friends who warned him that the reason why he kept losing at poker, week after week, was that the people he played with cheated. It is a remark that could also have been made by Yudhishthira (in the Mahabharata ), who persisted in playing dice with, and always losing from, people whom he suspected to be cheating or at least knew to be much better players than he was.

  t In Harsha’s play Priyadarshika, in the senventh century CE, the woman playwright writes in Sanskrit, while the clown, who is not only male but a Brahmin, speaks Prakrit.

  u The term “twice born” (dvi-ja) also means a tooth or a bird, each of which undergoes second birth, from the gum or the egg respectively.

  v Shvan (“dog”) is the source of our “hound,” and paka (from the Sanskrit pak/c, “cook”) means ripe, cooked, or perfected and is related to the English term, borr
owed from Hindi, “pukka,” as in “pukka sahib,” “well-ripened/cooked/perfected Englishman.”

  w Pace Gayatri (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”) Spivak.

  x The situation is more complex in the shastras, which often connect both the horse and the cow with Vaishyas, since that is the class concerned with animal husbandry. But even those texts more often place the horse in the Kshatriya class, as it is used for warfare and royal ceremony rather than for work in the fields. And the cow is the animal given to Brahmins and protected by Brahmins, though frequently coveted and stolen by Kshatriyas.

  y Horses and hounds contrast not merely in class but also in philology. The Sanskrit word for a horse (ashva) could also be parsed to mean a nondog (a-shva). It doesn’t really work in the nominative forms by which Indians refer to Sanskrit nouns or in the roots, but it works in the combinatory forms, where ashvah loses its final h (as in ashva-medha, “horse sacrifice”) and shvan/shvaa loses its n or long a (as in the compound shva-paka, “dog cooker”).

  z Euro-Americans too made this equation, as in the nineteenth-century signs that often proclaimed, NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED.

  aa The two species are combined in the German term of insult, Schweinhund! (“pig-dog”).

  ab Sherlock Holmes once solved a mystery, the case of Silver Blaze, a racehorse, by using a vital clue of omission. When Inspector Gregory asked Holmes whether he had noted any point to which he would draw the inspector’s attention, Holmes replied, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” objected the puzzled inspector, the essential straight man for the Socratic sage. “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. The fact that the dog did not bark when someone entered the house at night was evidence, in this case evidence that the criminal was someone familiar to the dog.

  ac Contemporary Americans have a somewhat similar sense of the multiplicity of texts and versions of texts through their knowledge of remakes of movies and covers of musical performances.

  ad This was said at Harvard, when I was there in the sixties, and it seems to have been based on another Orientalist joke sometimes ascribed to Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb of Oxford and Harvard, that every Arabic word has its primary meaning, then its opposite, then something to do with a camel, and last, something obscene.

  ae Salt dissolved in water was an ancient Upanishadic metaphor for the complete merging of individual souls in the world soul (brahman).

  af Indeed, according to the OED, even the word “hodgepodge” (or “hotchpotch”) originally designated a good thing, the legal combination of diverse properties into a single entity to make possible an equitable division. The earliest attestation is a legal term from 1292.

  ag In the Cretaceous period. The dates are given differently in different sources. Here I am reminded of the old story about the lady who went to a lecture and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in five billion years, at which she fainted. When they asked her why she was so upset at an event that was five billion years away she heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought he said five million years.”

  ah The theory is still generally accepted. Kenneth Chang wrote in the New York Times, May 14, 2008, under the headline, DISASTER SET OFF BY COLLIDING LAND MASSES: “The earthquake in the Sichuan Province of China on Monday was a result of a continuing collision between India and Asia. India, once a giant island before crashing into the underside of Asia about 40 million to 50 million years ago, continues to slide north at a geologically quick pace of two inches a year. The tectonic stresses push up the Himalaya Mountains and generate scores of earthquakes from Afghanistan to China.”

  ai The belief that the continents were at one time joined in the geologic past was first set forth in detail in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who coined the term “continental shift” to describe it.

  aj A haunting image of such a continental split occurs in the film Underground (1995) when at the end Yugoslavia breaks off and sails away, while people continuing to sing and dance and eat at a wedding are unaware that the little piece of land they are on is sailing away from the mainland, foreshadowing the violent partition of the country, as tragic as the partition of India in 1947.

  ak For instance, once upon a time all the mountains had wings, but they flew around, bumping into things and generally wreaking havoc. To ground them, Indra cut off their wings, but the god of the wind hid one mountain, Mainaka, in the ocean so that he alone kept his wings.

  al The word for doomsday, or time, or death—Kala—is, like the word for the fourth throw of the dice, derived from the verb kal, “to count.” The goddess Kali too derives her name from Kala. Kali as in Kali Age is spelled with a short a and i, whereas the goddess Kali has two long vowels. In the hope of distinguishing them, I will always refer to the latter as the goddess Kali.

  am In Burnt Norton.

  an Kumbhakonan is one of them; the name is said to derive from the pot (kumbha) in which Shiva, not Vishnu, floated the survivors to safety. The mountain is also said to be in Kashmir.

  ao Compare the standard map outline of India and the map of Mount Meru and the Plum-tree Continent on page 60.

  ap You can see most of them on the Web site Harappa.com.

  aq The rebuttal to the argument that it is not a language at all is that in some inscriptions the letters all are squeezed together to fit the line at the end, implying that it was written in one direction. If the sequence matters, it’s a language.

  ar The Rorschach test, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is “a projective method of psychological testing in which a person is asked to describe what he sees in 10 inkblots, of which some are black or gray and others have patches of colour. The test was introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach.”

  as It is also possible that fowl were domesticated in several different places.

  at The spell-check on my Mac tried to correct “pipal” to “papal” throughout, revealing a hitherto unsuspected Eurocentric, indeed philo-Catholic virus deeply programmed into my computer, Microsoft Orientalism.

  au After the Kurosawa film in which several different people present entirely different accounts of the same murder.

  av As I make it out, it goes: ma [mahisha, buffalo]-kha [khadga, rhino]-na [nara, man]-sha [sharabha, elephant]-na [nara, man].

  aw A tongue-in-cheek example of the misinterpretation of plumbing devices, unsupported by texts, as religious objects is David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries (1979), in which visitors to Earth in 3850, after all civilization has been destroyed, produce a hilarious series of misunderstandings of the material items found in a bathroom: the toilet the Sacred Urn, the toilet seat the Sacred Collar, the toilet paper the Sacred Parchment, a drain plug on a chain the Sacred Pendant. (The television is the Great Altar.) In June 1956, Horace Miner had perpetrated a similar joke in “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which American Anthropologist printed as a serious article, failing to notice that “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward.

  ax Marshall was dying to excavate beneath the stupa but was shackled by the archaeological survey rules. He seriously contemplated (and may actually have tried) lining up all the workmen on the stupa, on the pretext of taking their photograph, in the hope that their weight would bring it down. Personal communication from the Honorable Penelope Chetwode (later Lady Betjeman), to whom Marshall confessed this episode when he was courting her, years later. Wantage, England, 1969.

  ay Bishop Walton, in his Introduction to the London Polyglot Bible, in 1672, first noted the connection of Greek and Latin. A Persian grammarian in Delhi in 1720 discovered the Greek and Sanskrit connection. Sir William Jones, in 1788, wrote about common elements in Greek, Roman, and ancient Indian religion and postulated a historical connection. Yet F. Max Müller, who popularized the theory in the nineteenth century, is often given most of the credit.

  az The Nazis also grotesquely distorted,
and inverted, both the form and the meaning of the ancient Indian symbol of the swastika, whose Sanskrit name simply meant “a good thing.” The swastika has a radically different meaning in Europe and America from the meaning that it had, and still has, inside India. Once we know its Indian origins, we see the swastika with double vision, as we see the duck-rabbit, or the rabbit/man in the moon: It is Vedic and Nazi, recondite and demagogic, at the same time.

  ba Though the word may mean “mouthless”—i.e., without [our] language.

  bb Daniel H. H. Ingalls, in a talk recorded on film in 1980, remarked that the main thing that kept the authors of the Mahabharata from writing it down was the lack of inexpensive writing materials; you could hardly carve it all in rock, and they had not yet discovered the art of writing on palm leaves. This too would have applied to the Veda, but the Mahabharata was eventually written down at a time when the Veda was not.

  bc Gandharvas (whose name is cognate with centaur) are semiequine figures, sometimes depicted in anthropomorphic form (in which case they might well ride horses), sometimes as horse headed or horse torsoed (in which, presumably, they would not).

  bd The Brahmanas tell us a bit more about the rituals, but the detailed instructions only come much later, in the texts called prayogas.