------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remembering Aquino Braganca (b. 6 April 1924), who fought for freedom
of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. An online tribute
http://aquinobraganca.wordpress.com/ (includes many historical
references, some photographs and documents)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123862874506380449.html#
Bookshelf: A People and Their Karma
A militant Hindu once hurled an
egg at the author as she
lectured in London. He missed.
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
When I first picked up "The Hindus" -- a tome seemingly rich
with scholarship and, at 780 hardbound pages, as hefty as the
legendary demon Kumbhakarna -- I was struck most of all by
the author's name on its cover: Wendy Doniger.
A mist of apprehension spritzed my Hindu soul. Could this
lady (a professor at the University of Chicago) be the same
Wendy Doniger who wrote last year -- in one of the more batty
commentaries in an election season replete with unhinged
scrivenings -- that Sarah Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in
her pretense that she is a woman"? If so, could this author
really be trusted with a history of my people, the Hindus?
I should report that it is the same Wendy Doniger. But in the
book in question, Ms. Doniger has eschewed the pamphleteering
arts -- perhaps because there is no trace of the Palin tribe
in any Sanskrit yarn. She has, instead, concentrated her
prodigious learning on making modern sense of the texts and
tales of Hindu society, as well as of the rituals and symbols
of the Hindu people.
Let us be clear: Ms. Doniger's book is not a history of
Hinduism, still less an attempt to render the religion
comprehensible to all. It is not a work of theology either
but a loosely chronological cultural history of "the Hindus."
She begins, naturally, with an examination of their origins
in the Indus Valley (now, ironically, in Pakistan) and is
particularly illuminating on the relationship between humans,
animals and gods in the "Rig Veda," the most ancient Hindu
sacred text, from 1,500 B.C. In keeping with her promise to
deliver an "alternative history," she pays as much attention
to the role in ancient Hindu texts accorded to women,
pariahs, ogres and the like -- the beings on the margin, as
it were -- as she does to Brahmin and Kshatriya (warrior)
males, the more conventional power-players in the Hindu
tableau vivant.
A religion without a central church or pontiff -- and with no
predominant sacred place (à la Mecca) -- Hinduism has
spawned hundreds of competing devotional sects and
theological strains. Ms. Doniger does a deft job of tracing
their few unifying tenets -- those of karma (actions) and
dharma (righteousness) and a merit-based afterlife -- and of
holding these beliefs up to critical examination against the
obvious injustices of the caste system.
Her most beguiling chapters, though, are the ones in which
she examines the impact on the Hindus of India's numerous
foreign invaders -- from the earliest "Aryans" in the second
millennium B.C. to the imperial British, the last and perhaps
greatest external shapers of Hindu society.
---
The Hindus: An Alternative History
By Wendy Doniger
(The Penguin Press, 780 pages, $35)
---
Instructively, too -- at a time when the Indian elections are
almost upon us -- Ms. Doniger trains her light on the use and
abuse of Hindu mythology in modern Indian politics, what she
calls "the past in the present." It will come as no surprise
that she is as unloving of the Hindu Right as she is of the
Right in America, and with greater reason. Unlike India's
Hindu Right, the American Right does not seek to
disenfranchise citizens on the basis of religion.
India is a country, she writes, "where not only the future
but even the past is unpredictable." Here Ms. Doniger refers
to Hinduist attempts to interpret the past in ways that would
portray the Muslim presence in India as unfailingly injurious
to Hindus and devoid of any redeeming quality.
Her previous scholarship, one notes, has been
derided by "political" Hindus, a cadre notorious
for its intolerance of unconventional
interpretations of Hindu sacred texts. A militant
Hindu once hurled an egg at Ms. Doniger as she
lectured in London. Of this episode she writes: "He
missed his aim, in every way."
Tartness is a quality that Ms. Doniger has in abundance. The
male author of the "Kama Sutra," she says, "may have sympathy
for women but not true empathy; his interest in their
thoughts is exploitative, though no less accurate for all
that." Elsewhere she compares a "Mantra Against Your Wife's
Lover," from the "Brihadaranyaka Upanishad" -- a Sanskrit
philosophical text from 500 B.C. -- to "a Noel Coward drawing
room comedy."
A reader's enjoyment of Ms. Doniger's scholarship is enhanced
by the fact that she is a philologist and not a conventional
historian; as such, she is inclined to roam freely between
eras, focusing on the themes and symbols that take her fancy.
For instance, her meditation on the role of the
horse in Hindu society -- and the effect on the
Hindu psyche of this animal, on whose back all
invaders of India galloped into view -- is original
and eye-opening. She weaves together text and
argument from sources as diverse as Kipling's "Kim"
(Mahbub Ali, remember, Kim's friend and sometime
employer, is a horse-trader) and the Hindu epic
"Ramayana," in which a horse is sacrificed after
Rama, the protagonist god-king, returns from exile.
Arab invaders to India in the 13th century were appalled, Ms.
Doniger writes, to find that Hindu kings fed their horses a
mash of "peas or beans, flour, sugar, salt, molasses and, to
cap it all, ghee" -- that is, clarified butter, sky-high in
cholesterol.
Ghee, of course, is the most prized of Indian foods. It is
offered in rituals to the gods. To the medieval Hindu of
martial caste it was but natural that the horse -- prized
higher than anything else a warrior could wish for -- be fed
ghee as well. It was a very Hindu gesture: not so good for
the health; but soothing, indeed, for the soul.
--
Mr. Varadarajan, a professor at New York University's Stern
School of Business and a fellow at Stanford University's
Hoover Institution, is the opinions editor at Forbes.
