The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  hz It is also, by the way, an extraordinarily literal example of what Freud would have called upward displacement.

  ia Among people who find Tantra shameful, Buddhists say it’s Hindu, and Hindus say it’s Buddhist (or Tibetan), just as the French used to call syphilis the Spanish disease, the Spanish the Italian disease, and so forth.

  ib As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have argued. ‡ Imagine if the fundamentalists who run so many of the present governments of the world were replaced by Tantrics; now, there’s a theocracy for you, to boggle the mind. Or perhaps we should regard Bill Clinton as our first Tantric president.

  ic Further still from Tantra, but even more basic to Hinduism (more particularly, to Sankhya), are the five elements, or tattvas: earth, fire, water, wind, and space (to which some schools add a sixth, mind or soul).

  id This sort of reversal was imagined in an old joke about a Jesuit priest who, when his bishop forbade priests to smoke while meditating, dutifully agreed but argued that surely there would be no objection if he occasionally meditated while he was smoking.

  ie The terms may be a satire on their use to denote the universal aspect of Hinduism held “in common” by all Hindus in contrast with “one’s own” unique dharma.

  if Kula usually designates “family” in the sense of “good family”; Kulin Brahmins are high-caste Brahmins. To call Tantric groups Kaula is therefore already to mock caste strictures or to use “family” with the sort of irony with which it is used to designate the Mafia. Sometimes Kula refers to one particular branch of Tantrics, sometimes to Tantrics in general.

  ig The verse from the Rig Veda—3.62.10—that a pious Hindu recites at dawn and that begins “tat savitur varenyam.”

  ih The words are inscribed on a plaque near the place in Delhi where he was shot. There is much dispute as to whether he said “Ram Ram” or “Ram Rahim” when he died.

  ii The Sanskrit trick of using words with double meanings (“embracing,” or slesha) was also used in an inscription written for a Muslim ruler under the Delhi Sultanate in 1328 (establishing a garden as a refuge for all animals).

  ij In part because the Hindus didn’t usually call themselves Hindus.

  ik Slaves in ancient India had different rights and restrictions from slaves in Greece, Africa, or America.

  il Portuguese traders like Payez, Nuñez, and Diaz wrote extensively about the horse trade.

  im To use Thomas Kuhn’s term for a major change in scientific worldviews.

  in The Vayu Purana, chapter 36, for instance, includes no animal avatars, just six of the usual ten (Man-Lion, Dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krsna, and Kalkin) plus Narayana (another form of Vishnu) and three more humans: Dattatreya and Mandhata (with previous histories of their own) and Vyasa (author of the Mahabharata).

  io A case might well be made for including Kalki as an animal avatar, since he often appears as (though more often with) a white horse, but we will discuss him in the context of interreligious avatars.

  ip The pattern applies to Karna, Oedipus, Moses, Cyrus, and, as Alan Dundes has argued persuasively, Jesus. The animals are more prominent in the myths of Tarzan and Kipling’s Mowgli.

  iq There may be an echo here of the Mahabharata story in which the Ganges kills the first seven of her children, and only the eighth, Bhishma, is saved.

  ir Rukmini, Satyabhama, and Jambavati.

  is Outside the Minakshi temple in Madurai is a Vaishnava temple that has Balarama in place of the Buddha.

  it This is the first citation of the name Shambala, which was to become an important myth of a lost, magical city in the mountains.

  iu Hayagriva also becomes a Buddhist deity, but that is another story.

  iv OK, here is how Vishnu was accidentally beheaded: Vishnu had laughed while looking at Lakshmi’s face, and she feared that he thought she was ugly or that he had taken another, more beautiful co-wife. She cursed him to have his head fall off, thinking that having a co-wife would be more painful than being a widow. And so Vishnu’s head fell into the ocean.

  iw As they are, ultimately, in all aspects of Hinduism, however theological their terms of argument may be.

  ix As Ramananda cried out the name of Ram when Kabir tripped him.

  iy Local Kashmiri etymologies include Ka-shush (“to dry up water”), Kashyapa Mir (the lake of the sage Kashyapa) or Kashyapa Meru (Kashyapa’s Mount Meru). In English, it is a precious wool whose name means “nothing but money” (cashmere).

  iz In the Mahabharata (3.157.57-70), Bhima, the son of the god of the wind (Vayu), kills an ogre named Manimat, the ogre who (the followers of Madhva say) was to become Sankara in a later incarnation. According to later followers of Madhva, Madhva himself rewrote and completed this passage of the Mahabharata.

  ja Their renunciant branches also shared with other renunciant orders an emphasis on practices; where orthoprax Hinduism was concerned with regulating the behavior of lay people, renunciant orders (Hindu, Buddhist, or Jaina) focused on the correct practices of monks.

  jb Bhojadeva (in the eleventh century), Aghorashiva (in the twelfth), and Meykandadevar (in the thirteenth).

  jc The Shri Vaishnavas identify a number of scenes in the Valmiki Ramayana as paradigmatic exemplars of surrender; these include the moments when Lakshmana accompanies Rama to the forest, when Bharata receives Rama’s sandals, when the ocean allows Rama to cross over to Lanka, and, especially, the moment when Ravana’s brother Vibhishana surrenders politically to Rama.

  jd George Gamow did the same thing for the speed of light and the quantum factor, in Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland.

  je The idea that mental constructs are all that we have, and all that is real, is approximated, in our world, by the film The Matrix and, to a lesser extent, by Total Recall.

  jf Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead claims to fill in certain gaps that Shakespeare left in Hamlet.

  jg Gadhi is also the patronymic of Vishvamitra, the king who wanted to become a Brahmin and cursed other sages to become Pariahs. Though this may not be the same man, the name does have that narrative resonance.

  jh Support for the hypothesis that throughout the world, alcoholism runs in families, through genes and DNA or through the chain reaction of generations.

  ji This is the mosque that was later said to have usurped the site of a Rama temple and was torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992.

  jj Perhaps because this was the doctrine of some bhakti sects.

  jk Neither of these towns should be confused with the present-day city of Islamabad, capital of Pakistan.

  jl Bhang is a preparation of cannabis used in India that does not contain the flowering tops and so is not very strong. It can be smoked or drunk and is used in some Hindu rituals.

  jm Unlike the dog in the Mahabharata, who was afraid of a leopard.

  jn The Kama-sutra (1.5.4-21) offers a similar set of justifications for adultery.

  jo Most Hindus did not proselytize, but some Vedantic movements and some bhakti sects did.

  jp I have retold the friar’s first-person testimony in the third person.

  jq I use the word with the understanding that it denotes the fusion of a number of religious elements, none of which is in any way a pure essence.

  jr “God’s Dog,” a short palindrome, could be expanded into another: “Dog as a devil deified lived as

  a god.”

  js The Punjab still has good grazing; Indian breeders insist, testily, that Pakistan, at the time of partition, got the best grazing land.

  jt Fast-forward: The stallion’s name lives on in a line of Chetak motorscooters produced by India’s Bajaj Auto Ltd.

  ju History does not record whether or not Dildar Begum resisted the temptation to say, “I told you so, but you never listened to your mother.”

  jv Muslims generally buried their dead, instead of burning them as Hindus did.

  jw One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

  jx This is a persistent myth. S
hashi Tharoor (in India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, chapter 1) remarks that “on at least two occasions, the British ordered the thumbs of whole communities of Indian weavers chopped off so that they could not compete with the products of Lancashire.”

  jy This incident is often wrongly said to have occurred a century later, during the 1857 uprising.

  jz The Anglicans and Dissenters who came to India from Britain in the 1780s, and the Baptists to Orissa in the 1820s, were comparative latecomers. Syrian Christians had been in Kerala since the second century CE, Portuguese Catholics in Goa since the 1600s, and the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili in Tamil country since 1605. The Portuguese promoted Roman Catholic missionary activity from their small coastal settlements in southern India, around Goa, but their Hindu converts were few and generally of low caste. The Danish Protestant settlements in Tranquebar in Tamil Nadu and Serampore in Bengal operated small but not particularly influential missions.

  ka Sir John William Kaye, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India.

  kb Riding bareback requires, and allows, the rider to sit into the horse and fuse with his movements. The sculptor, Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey, also depicted the Duke of Wellington, in London, without saddle and stirrups.

  kc Those concentric oceans are indeed a part of Hindu cosmology.

  kd Nandy glosses klibatvam as “male sexual effeminacy.”

  ke Many centuries earlier, the early church fathers had attempted in a similar way to justify the stunning resemblances between the Gospel story and the myths of the pagans that they so despised, such as the ancient Greek myth of a god who dies and rises from the dead. Clement of Alexandria initiated “The Thesis of Demonic Imitation,” later advanced by Tertullian and Justin, which argued that the demons, in order to deceive and mislead the human race, took the offensive and suggested to the Greek poets the plots of the Greek myths, in the hope that this would make the story of Christ appear to be a fable of the same sort, when it came (“Oh, never mind, it’s just another one of those dying and rising gods again”) and so be ignored.

  kf Hindu admiration for the British took many forms. In 1963, I once went to great trouble and expense to visit a famous temple to a tiger god in the jungles of Bengal; when I finally got there, I found in the shrine a red faced sahib with a rifle, the god who was able to kill tigers.

  kg As Queen Victoria is said to have said. One can imagine that, on first hearing the tale of the interruption of the sexual play of Shiva and Parvati, for instance, the average Victorian Orientalist would have remarked, as a Victorian matron was said to have remarked on emerging from a performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, “How strangely different from the home life of our dear Queen.”

  kh That a man of great political power might have intended this subtext is suggested by a remark by President William Jefferson Clinton that Newsweek (September 21, 1998, 27) chose to reproduce as an enormous headline: I HAVE SINNED. Several South Asianist colleagues of mine have told me that they too thought at that moment of Sir Charles Napier.

  ki George Treveleyan, in1865 (Cawnpore, 36), wrote: “That hateful word . . . made its first appearance in decent society during the years which immediately preceded the mutiny.”

  kj If we are still in the market for arcane bilingual language jokes, Kipling may well have known that Kim (short for Kimball) is the interrogative pronoun “what?” in Sanskrit, just as Ka is “who?” The statement “What is Kim?” is therefore just that, a statement rather than a question, and a tautology to boot: What? is What?

  kk Catherine Weinberger-Thomas.

  kl Mala Sen.

  km Lata Mani.

  kn Gayatri Spivak’s phrase.

  ko The two wives of Pandu in the Mahabharata, for example, could not both commit suttee, for one had to remain alive to care for the children.

  kp One commentary (Apararka on Yajnyavalkya, probably around 1100 CE) says that a widow may burn herself on her husband’s pyre if she is impelled by her own deep grief, but she must not be forced.

  kq G. B. Shaw remarked, nastily, of Wagner’s wife, Cosima, “She is enough to reconcile me to the custom of suttee.”

  kr Fast-forward: The present-day Hindutva movement has reactivated the process of reconversion.

  ks Fast-forward: In 1940, in Caxton Hall, in London, an Indian shot to death, in delayed and displaced retribution, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab, who had stood by Major Dyer in 1919.

  kt Gandhi himself resisted the term “passive,” arguing that satya-graha was an active measure.

  ku This is not the place to review the history of Partition, but a few basic points might be useful: The former colony was divided into two countries, India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. This was done because many Muslims believed that their interests would not be protected in a majority Hindu country, however secular the government. Hindus and Sikhs moved from what became Pakistan to India, and Muslims from India to Pakistan, a displacement of between ten and twelve million people. Several hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims lost their lives; entire trains pulled into stations across the border filled only with corpses. An untold number of women were raped.

  kv The folklore motif “gold from shit” is known from Indian folktales as far away as Kangra, in the foot-hills of the Himalayas, and was noted by Freud.

  kw The others included halving the land revenue, protecting Indian cloth, releasing political prisoners, and abolishing the salt tax, this last being the one that Gandhi decided to make a major issue.

  kx In 1995, Nupur Basu made an eleven-minute film about this antialcohol campaign in Dobbagunta, titled Dry Days in Dobbagunta, about the events in the early 1990s.

  ky Popularly said to be derived from the initial letters of the phrase “port outward, starboard home,” with reference to the more comfortable (because cooler) and more expensive side for accommodation on ships traveling between Britain and India.

  kz “Perfected” or “fully developed,” from the Sanskrit verb pach, “to cook or ripen.” ‡ The drink, made of five [panch] ingredients.

  la Dr. Bowers reports: “After the first session of the Parliament of Religions, I went with Vivekananda to the restaurant in the basement of the Art Institute, and I said to him, ‘What shall I get you to eat?’ His reply was, ‘Give me beef!’ ” (Outlook, July 17, 1897).

  lb Kipling did not appear in the 1950 movie of Kim, in which Errol Flynn played Mahbub Ali and Paul Lukas played the Tibetan monk.

  lc Kali’s role in the 1965 Beatles film was just the beginning. The cover of the Beatles’ 1966 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band featured, among many others, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Yukteswar, Sri Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda. George Harrison met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in England, and in 1968 the Beatles traveled to India, where they met with the maharishi in Rishikesh in a widely reported and famously photographed visit. (Life magazine decided that 1968 was the “Year of the Guru.”) In 1969, Harrison met with A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada at John Lennon’s estate in Tittenhurst Park and performed his “Hare Krishna Mantra” with the devotees of the London Radha-Krishna Temple.

  ld The title of a Showtime TV series.

  le The title of a recent book attacking American scholars of Hinduism, Invading the Sacred, may be seen as a delayed riposte to the title of an earlier book protesting the Hinduization of America: Wendell Thomas, Hinduism Invades America (New York: Beacon Press, 1931).

  lf I have in mind, in India, Romila Thapar, the historian of India, and the filmmaker Mira Nair and, in America, Vasudha Narayanan and A. K. Ramanujan, scholars of Hinduism, all of whom have been attacked by the Hindutva faction.

  lg A patent example of this ressentiment is the opening paragraph of Rajiv Malhotra’s article “Wendy’s Children,” posted on the Internet in September 2002, which enormously exaggerates my influence in the academic field of the study of Hinduism. I somet
imes use that passage as a brief paragraph to give to people who ask for something with which to introduce me at public events, where hype is often called for.

  lh D. N. Jha, the author of The Myth of the Holy Cow, which marshaled abundant proof that Hindus did eat beef in the ancient period, was so violently attacked, physically as well as in the press, that he had to have a police escort twenty-four hours a day for several years after his book was published in India.

  li The OED defines “Irish bull” as “A self-contradictory proposition; in mod. use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker. Now often with epithet Irish; but the word had been long in use before it came to be associated with Irishmen.”

  lj One learns early in this game never to say “never” about anything in India; sooner or later you discover that everything exists, though you yourself may not yet have come upon it.