Another Incarnation
By PANKAJ MISHRA (NYT) reviews an interesting book that I must read.
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THE HINDUS
An Alternative History
By Wendy Doniger
779 pp. The Penguin Press. $35
Visiting India in 1921, E. M. Forster witnessed the eight-day celebration of Lord Krishna’s birthday. This first encounter with devotional ecstasy left the Bloomsbury aesthete baffled. “There is no dignity, no taste, no form,†he complained in a letter home. Recoiling from Hindu India, Forster was relieved to enter the relatively rational world of Islam. Describing the muezzin’s call at the Taj Mahal, he wrote, “I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons.â€
Forster, who later used his appalled fascination with India’s polytheistic muddle to superb effect in his novel “A Passage to India,†was only one in a long line of Britons who felt their notions of order and morality challenged by Indian religious and cultural practices. The British Army captain who discovered the erotic temples of Khajuraho in the early 19th century was outraged by how “extremely indecent and offensive†depictions of fornicating couples profaned a “place of worship.†Lord Macaulay thundered against the worship, still widespread in India today, of the Shiva lingam. Even Karl Marx inveighed against how man, “the sovereign of nature,†had degraded himself in India by worshipping Hanuman, the monkey god.
Repelled by such pagan blasphemies, the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call “Hinduism,†complete with a mainstream classical tradition consisting entirely of Sanskrit philosophical texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. In fact, most Indians in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to Brahmins. For centuries, they remained unaware of the hymns of the four Vedas or the idealist monism of the Upanishads that the German Romantics, American Transcendentalists and other early Indophiles solemnly supposed to be the very essence of Indian civilization. (Smoking chillums and chanting “Om,†the Beats were closer to the mark.)
As Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, explains in her staggeringly comprehensive book, the British Indologists who sought to tame India’s chaotic polytheisms had a “Protestant bias in favor of scripture.†In “privileging†Sanskrit over local languages, she writes, they created what has proved to be an enduring impression of a “unified Hinduism.†And they found keen collaborators among upper-caste Indian scholars and translators. This British-Brahmin version of Hinduism — one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries — has continued to find many takers among semi-Westernized Hindus suffering from an inferiority complex vis-à -vis the apparently more successful and organized religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
The Hindu nationalists of today, who long for India to become a muscular international power, stand in a direct line of 19th-century Indian reform movements devoted to purifying and reviving a Hinduism perceived as having grown too fragmented and weak. These mostly upper-caste and middle-class nationalists have accelerated the modernization and homogenization of “Hinduism.â€
Still, the nontextual, syncretic religious and philosophical traditions of India that escaped the attention of British scholars flourish even today. Popular devotional cults, shrines, festivals, rites and legends that vary across India still form the worldview of a majority of Indians. Goddesses, as Doniger writes, “continue to evolve.†Bollywood produced the most popular one of my North Indian childhood: Santoshi Mata, who seemed to fulfill the materialistic wishes of newly urbanized Hindus. Far from being a slave to mindless superstition, popular religious legend conveys a darkly ambiguous view of human action. Revered as heroes in one region, the characters of the great epics “Ramayana†and “Mahabharata†can be regarded as villains in another. Demons and gods are dialectically interrelated in a complex cosmic order that would make little sense to the theologians of the so-called war on terror.
Doniger sets herself the ambitious task of writing “a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in Sanskrit.†As she puts it, “It’s not all about Brahmins, Sanskrit, the Gita.†It’s also not about perfidious Muslims who destroyed innumerable Hindu temples and forcibly converted millions of Indians to Islam. Doniger, who cannot but be aware of the political historiography of Hindu nationalists, the most powerful interpreters of Indian religions in both India and abroad today, also wishes to provide an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.â€
She writes at length about the devotional “bhakti†tradition, an ecstatic and radically egalitarian form of Hindu religiosity which, though possessing royal and literary lineage, was “also a folk and oral phenomenon,†accommodating women, low-caste men and illiterates. She explores, contra Marx, the role of monkeys as the “human unconscious†in the “Ramayana,†the bible of muscular Hinduism, while casting a sympathetic eye on its chief ogre, Ravana. And she examines the mythology and ritual of Tantra, the most misunderstood of Indian traditions.
She doesn’t neglect high-table Hinduism. Her chapter on violence in the “Mahabharata†is particularly insightful, highlighting the tragic aspects of the great epic, and unraveling, in the process, the hoary cliché of Hindus as doctrinally pacifist. Both “dharma†and “karma†get their due. Those who tilt at organized religions today on behalf of a residual Enlightenment rationalism may be startled to learn that atheism and agnosticism have long traditions in Indian religions and philosophies.
Though the potted biographies of Mughal emperors seem superfluous in a long book, Doniger’s chapter on the centuries of Muslim rule over India helps dilute the lurid mythology of Hindu nationalists. Motivated by realpolitik rather than religious fundamentalism, the Mughals destroyed temples; they also built and patronized them. Not only is there “no evidence of massive coercive conversion†to Islam, but also so much of what we know as popular Hinduism — the currently popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna, the network of pilgrimages, ashrams and sects — acquired its distinctive form during Mughal rule.
Doniger’s winsomely eclectic range of reference — she enlists Philip Roth’s novel “I Married a Communist†for a description of the Hindu renunciant’s psychology — begins to seem too determinedly eccentric when she discusses Rudyard Kipling, a figure with no discernible influence on Indian religions, with greater interpretative vigor than she does Mohandas K. Gandhi, the most creative of modern devout Hindus. More puzzlingly, Doniger has little to say about the forms Indian cultures have assumed in Bali, Mauritius, Trinidad and Fiji, even as she describes at length the Internet-enabled liturgies of Hindus in America.
Yet it is impossible not to admire a book that strides so intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-ÂArab relations. During a lecture in London in 2003, Doniger escaped being hit by an egg thrown by a Hindu nationalist apparently angry at the “sexual thrust†of her interpretation of the “sacred†“Ramayana.†This book will no doubt further expose her to the fury of the modern-day Indian heirs of the British imperialists who invented “Hinduism.†Happily, it will also serve as a salutary antidote to the fanatics who perceive — correctly — the fluid existential identities and commodious metaphysic of practiced Indian religions as a threat to their project of a culturally homogenous and militant nation-state.
The following has been published in the Covert ( http://covert.co.in/ ) fortnightly (I would’ve provided a link, but it seems that the same URL is going to be used for the same author’s column in the next issue as well. So, please accept my apologies for the lengthy comment!):
Itihaas
THE DEMONISATION OF MUSLIMS
Akhilesh Mithal
READER ASKS THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
The RSS-BJP must be fulfilling some aspirations somewhere, as evident from their considerable following. How has this occurred?
Why do so many people believe such exaggerated stories of Muslim atrocity?
Why do so many non-Muslims believe that Muslims are different and inferior?
The answer lies in the adage “a lie repeated over and over again [a hundred times] becomes the truthâ€.
The world media is dominated by the Americans and the English. They demonise Muslims to serve what they perceive to be their own political and economic interests.
This has been going on for a thousand years. Triggered by the Arab-Gujarati-Malayali monopoly of the spice and cotton-piece-goods trade [perceived by Europeans as being in Muslim Arab hands], the Christians invaded West Asia in the 1st Crusade of 10th century. The hatred generated was so great that some Christians wrote home stating that they had “boiled and eaten adults and grilled and eaten infants and childrenâ€.
The Christian versus Muslim conflict, which started in the 10th century, continues till date, as the economic and political interests of the US and UK require controlling the oil rich states of West Asia.
No one notices that Muslims are the worst victims of this conflict. Their holiest land, the Hejaz, is not named Islamiya or even Muhammadiya — but Saudia after a British puppet. Saud was a Bedouin [tribal Arab] propped up by the British in the early 19th century to weaken the sultanate of Turkey. Osama bin Laden’s jihad [holy war against oppression] began as an anti-Saud family movement.
The support it gets from the US makes the Ibn Saud family invulnerable. This is one of the reasons why extremist Muslims have taken an anti-US stand.
HOW HAS INDIA got embroiled in this Christian versus Muslim conflict? The answer lies in its conditioning during 200 years of British rule. Traditionally, India has been above narrow religious sectarianism. Jahangir [1605-1627] once wrote that while it was difficult for a Sunni Muslim to survive in Iran, as it was for a Shia in Turkey, both sects flourished and lived together in India.
The British came to India with minds distorted by anti-Muslim conditioning. They called Muslims “Moors†after the Arab-Berber conquerors of Spain in the 8th century.
The Christian British could not understand how Indians could live in peace and harmony despite being Hindu and Muslim. They could not understand how Hindus could tolerate Muslim rule without manifest resentment and organised resistance.
Sir Henry Elliot scoured Persian texts to gather evidence of Muslim atrocity against Hindus and published them under the title The History of India As Told By Its own Historians.
As history was written by court poets out to glorify their royal patrons, hyperbole was the accepted genre. Despite losing in battle the defeated king remained a hero in the texts composed by the court poets. As for those who emerged victorious, the court poets endowed them with divine powers. Thus Mahmoud of Ghazni was given the same horoscope as that of the Prophet Muhammad. His sacking of Somnath was made out to be fulfilling the job of destroying the idols that had sullied the Holy Ka’aba with their presence. It was said that the icon of the Goddess Manaat escaped to Gujarat and was worshipped by the locals as Somnath. Mahmoud destroyed the idol and accomplished “cleansing†the world of the icons of the Ka’aba.
Indians were aware of the excesses normal for the court poets and took all this hyperbole in their stride and continued to live in peace and harmony. This did not suit British interests and they rewrote Indian history with a communally fractured point of view. All local leaders [Hindu] who fought the central power [the Sultans or Mughal emperors] were made into heroes who battled for Hindus against Muslims. Thus Rana Pratap of Mewar and his horse Chetak became Hindu iconic figures, although at the major battle of Haldighati, the Mewar van was led by Muslim Pathans thirsting to recover the realm from the Mughals to whom they had lost it at Panipat in 1526. Their graves can still be seen at Haldighati. The Mughal forces were led by Kunwar Man Singh of Amber who was a favourite general of Emperor Akbar who was married to his aunt.
There are no battles in Indian history where a purely Muslim army has fought a purely Hindu army.
THE POET BHUSHAN could aver: Shiva jo na hota to sunnat hoti sabki — if there was no Shivaji [Bhonsle], everyone would have been a circumcised [Muslim].
His brother, a poet in Aurangzeb’s court, could simultaneously proclaim that when Aurangzeb climbs on to his war charger, the earth trembles, as the serpent on which it rests — the Sheshnag — recoils in shock at the power generated.
The fact that Mirza Raja Jaisingh of Amber defeated Shivaji in battle after battle and wrested all his forts on behalf of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, was known to all contemporaries and no one took Bhushan seriously in his lifetime.
The long-headed Mirza Raja suggested to the Mughal the need to befriend and employ Marathas to conquer the Deccan as his ancestors had befriended the Rajputs in Central India. Shivaji was dispatched to Agra in the company of Kunwar Ramsingh — son and heir of Jaisingh. Aurangzeb failed to give adequate rank [7,000] to Shivaji and tried to foist him off with a mere 5,000. As he stood in formal serried ranks in the Diwane-aam-o-khaas Shivaji saw that in the 7,000 row stood Jaswantsingh of Marwar who had suffered defeat at his hands in battle. Shivaji said, “This backside I have seen also in battle.†He feigned illness to leave the august assembly and an eternally offended emperor.
Shivaji’s son Shambhaji sheltered the Mughal prince Muhammad Akbar when he fled, defeated by the imperial forces after proclaiming himself emperor in revolt against his father, Aurangzeb Alamgir. Prince Muhammad Akbar was helped to escape to Iran by the Marathas and Rajputs threatened by Aurangzeb. His son and daughter were sheltered by Durga Das Rathor of Marwar. When Ajitsingh was reinstated in his patrimony — the realm of Marwar — his protector, the noble Durga Das Rathor presented himself at Aurangzeb’s court and handed over the children of Prince Muhammad Akbar. He received a rank [mansab] of 3,000 and was appointed a governor in Gujarat.
The other reason for the popularity of the extremists is the neglect of culture by the Indian National Congress and the bogus claim made by the Sangh Parivar that they are real Hindus. We shall return to this subject in a future column [¼]
Akhilesh Mithal is a Dilliwala
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