Skip to main content

Author Resigned to Ill Fate of Book

By JOHN WILLIAMS

New York Times Mon Feb 17, 2014

 

 

Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger said she wrote about how “Hinduism has dealt with pluralism.”

Rick Friedman/Corbis

 

 

After Penguin Books India recently decided to recall and pulp all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History” in the face of legal action, the book’s author, Wendy Doniger, was not surprised.

 

“I kept hoping we might win the lawsuit, but it was looking bad,” she said on Friday.

 

Ms. Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, expected the book to meet trouble in India. For the edition published there in 2010, she said, she and her editors worked “to take out things we thought might be particularly offensive to Hindus, to not thumb our nose at them.” The changes to the book, which came out in the United States in 2009, weren’t substantive, she said in an interview, “but we changed some of the wording and softened some things that would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

 

Penguin’s decision settled a case involving Section 295a of the Indian penal code, which outlaws acts “intended to outrage religious feelings.” The withdrawal of Ms. Doniger’s work comes against the backdrop of the looming general elections, in which the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., is expected to win significant gains over the Congress party.

Ms. Doniger noted that she wasn’t the only author to face scrutiny by Hindu fundamentalist groups. But “right now people are really worried about what’s happening in India,” she said, and that has spurred “this tremendous outpouring of indignation” about the fate of her book.

 

In “The Hindus,” Ms. Doniger wanted “to tell a story of Hinduism that’s been suppressed and was increasingly hard to find in the media and textbooks,” she said. “It’s not about philosophy, it’s not about meditation, it’s about stories, about animals and untouchables and women. It’s the way that Hinduism has dealt with pluralism.”

 

The novelist Hari Kunzru said in an email interview that Ms. Doniger’s work “emphasizes that Hinduism has never existed as a single pure orthodoxy.” Instead, he said, Ms. Doniger shows how “it emerges from many linked traditions and folk practices.”

 

Ms. Doniger said of her source material, “I didn’t make this stuff up,” adding, “The stories are very human, and the gods are very interesting, because they have emotions, and they get in trouble and commit adultery.”

Mr. Kunzru said Ms. Doniger’s opponents were “particularly exercised by her wish to reinstate sexuality at the center of Hinduism.” The original legal complaint, filed by Dinanath Batra of the group Shiksha Bachao Andolan, described a “hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light” and called Ms. Doniger’s approach to Hinduism “that of a woman hungry of sex.”

 

One example of the material for which Ms. Doniger has come under fire is her writing about the Shiva linga, a large stone image that appears in many Shiva temples and is worshiped with offerings of water and flowers. Ms. Doniger approaches the linga as an abstract symbol and as the sexual organ of the god Shiva. (As she writes in “The Hindus,” “sometimes a linga is just a linga — or, more often, both a linga and a cigar.&rdquo She compared its dual meaning to that of the cross in Christianity: “To say that the Shiva linga has nothing to do with the body of Shiva is the same as saying the cross has nothing to do with the passion of Christ, it only means God and love.”

Mr. Kunzru, who faced legal action after reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012, said he saw the fate of Ms. Doniger’s book in light of more than two decades of trouble for artistic expression in India, from the banning of Mr. Rushdie’s novel in 1988 to a controversy in 2011 over a biography of Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times. Mr. Kunzru said he did worry that if Narendra Modi, the B.J.P. candidate for prime minister, is elected in May, extremists would “feel empowered to attack” writers, artists and scholars.

 

“It’s very easy to claim offense and very hard to prove that someone else wasn’t offended,” he said. “There’s a competitive market for offense in India. Religious and political groups want to show they’re serious about defending their sectional interests, and the law makes it easy for people to grandstand, particularly at election time.”

 

In the wake of Penguin’s decision, authors including Arundhati Roy publicly criticized the publisher. Ms. Doniger expressed frustration with Penguin’s parent company, Bertelsmann, but stands by her publisher. “I’m so sorry that a great deal of the anger that this has happened has been directed against Penguin India,” she said. “They took the book on in the first place, and four years ago, there had already been demonstrations in New York, when I was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.”

 

Last week, the circle released a statement expressing its “concern and disappointment” over the “deplorable” decision to take “The Hindus” out of the market.

 

Asked if she could sympathize at all with those offended by her work, Ms. Doniger said: “In general, I don’t like people saying nasty things about other people’s religion, but this is something else. This is fundamentalism, which says that parts of its own religion are bad. In a sense, I’m defending their religion, and they’re attacking it.”

 

Ms. Doniger said she had no plans officially to protest the decision in India. She expressed gratitude for the “good run” the book had there. Its fortunes in the United States have been bolstered by the recent controversy, which sent the book shooting toward the top of Amazon’s best-seller ranks.

Ms. Doniger’s latest book, “On Hinduism,” a collection of essays, is in its second printing in India and will be published in the United States in March by Oxford University Press. She is also the editor of a forthcoming Norton anthology of primary Hindu writings, due out in November, and for which she’s “anticipating trouble.”

 

“It’s not me, I’m collecting these texts,” she said. “It’s the texts these people won’t like. I’ve made a point of putting in a lot of them, so people will see Hinduism is both the thing Batra and company say it is and what I say it is.”

Attachments

Images (1)
  • Wendy Doniger

Replies sorted oldest to newest

India is a strange place. They boast about the different religions they embraced upon the continent. They boast about Sonia Gandhi, They boast about Manmohan Singh being a Sikkh and their Prime Minister. Yet, EVERY DAY, hindus kill christians in the most horrific ways.

 

On hinduism, I doan what the woman wrote. But it is documented fact, that that religion was imported on the land by the Aryans who invaded the civilizations of the Indus. Before their arrival, the ppl lived as tribes worshipping tribal gods. The Brahmins would travel from the Indus carrying the sacred books teaching of the pantheon of gods and their sacred thread associations which imposed class/caste on the tribes.   

S
Originally Posted by Nehru:

Asia and the Middle East have too many hypocrites. I do not see how a Book can cause so much controversy. Read it if you want or leave it on the book shelf, it is that simple.

 Have you ever traveled to those  part of the world, Asia and the middle East? They live by their set of rules and the west need to respect that.

 

Chief

India is the largest democracy and the most corrupted nation on earth. We need to put a fatwa on those who insult Hinduism. All my family and relatives were Hindus before they converted to Christian and Muslim.

FM
Originally Posted by Cobra:

India is the largest democracy and the most corrupted nation on earth. We need to put a fatwa on those who insult Hinduism. All my family and relatives were Hindus before they converted to Christian and Muslim.

 

I agree!

FM

I find Hinduism to be very difficult to understand because I never follow the teachings. My grandfather, James Pooran was a Christian and my grandmother, Budya Samaroo-Pooran was a Brahmin Hindu. My mother live and dies as a Hindu because she never converted. I respect Hinduism because it's one of the oldest religion remains a billion plus strong today.

FM
Originally Posted by Cobra:

I find Hinduism to be very difficult to understand because I never follow the teachings. My grandfather, James Pooran was a Christian and my grandmother, Budya Samaroo-Pooran was a Brahmin Hindu. My mother live and dies as a Hindu because she never converted. I respect Hinduism because it's one of the oldest religion remains a billion plus strong today.

 

I take it not a drop of dougla blood

FM

Bro, I have nothing against dougla and the choices people make today. My grandparents & my grand mousa, Lutch time was simply respect and honor. You would last a minute speaking to them like you speak today. You might have to pick up your teeth on the ground.

FM
Originally Posted by Cobra:

Bro, I have nothing against dougla and the choices people make today. My grandparents & my grand mousa, Lutch time was simply respect and honor. You would last a minute speaking to them like you speak today. You might have to pick up your teeth on the ground.

 

Wasn't Lutchman a white dougla?

FM
Originally Posted by Cobra:

Lutchman was my step grandfather after my real grandfather who was a chemist, dies in San Fernando, Trinidad. Lutchman has no religious or moral values.

 

Wasn't he half white though?

FM
Originally Posted by JoKer:
Originally Posted by Cobra:

Lutchman was my step grandfather after my real grandfather who was a chemist, dies in San Fernando, Trinidad. Lutchman has no religious or moral values.

 

Wasn't he half white though?

I have no idea. What I know he had a lot of criminal in his side of the family. One of his sister children are all talented in singing, and also talented to drink rum.

FM
Originally Posted by JoKer:

HEY, you bastard....did you juss say my great grandpa had no "moral and religious values"? I ought to knock you out at the next reunion

I was speaking of my step grandfather, Latchman, bro. Go back and re-read.

FM
Originally Posted by Chief:
Originally Posted by Nehru:

Asia and the Middle East have too many hypocrites. I do not see how a Book can cause so much controversy. Read it if you want or leave it on the book shelf, it is that simple.

 Have you ever traveled to those  part of the world, Asia and the middle East? They live by their set of rules and the west need to respect that.

 

 

Well said Chief.

FM
Originally Posted by Chief:
Originally Posted by Nehru:

Asia and the Middle East have too many hypocrites. I do not see how a Book can cause so much controversy. Read it if you want or leave it on the book shelf, it is that simple.

 Have you ever traveled to those  part of the world, Asia and the middle East? They live by their set of rules and the west need to respect that.

 

What a silly idea! This lady is a professor and her task is to interrogate and distill the essence of whatever is her specialty. She is a historian so is doing what historians do, present a view of history.

 

Further, you are of the Abrahamic religious tradition that proselytize by habit and edict. You cannot be as you are without being opinionated in telling your view of the world. You cannot respect a persons religious views if you intend to tell them of a better one.

 

This book is also a good book on the religion. Unlike those hypocrite who picks on her as concerned with sex; the religion it self abounds with sex. It is the only one that has no taboos about the subject.

 

FM
Originally Posted by Cobra:

India is the largest democracy and the most corrupted nation on earth. We need to put a fatwa on those who insult Hinduism. All my family and relatives were Hindus before they converted to Christian and Muslim.

India reeks with problem and despite what the Hindutva crowd say, much of its problems stems from its religion poorly applied.  And one cannot insult Hinduism. It is first an umbrella term that includes the atheistic jains and Bhuddists to the Sikhs and followers of sanathan dharma. The jains takes no offense to anything.

FM

Based on reviews of Wendy Doniger's book, I am open minded and welcome her deep interest in Hinduism. Ms Doniger has researched, written and published a few books on Hinduism as practised in India through the ages.

I just bought "The Hindus: An Alternative History" from Amazon.

Fundamentalists will always have a problem with modern assessment and interpretation of religious texts, rituals, traditions, etc.

The Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] is a strong political force with heavy clout. I understand why Penguin is recalling this book, especially as general elections are on the horizon.

I have read a number of books on Hinduism by Indian and Western writers and my understanding of my religion has been enriched beyond measure.

FM

The Battle over Hindu History

For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the ancient poem called the Ramayana, Rama was born), though there is no evidence whatsoever that there has been ever a temple on that spot or that Rama was born there.

On December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the right-wing Hindu party called the BJP whipped a crowd of 200,000 into a frenzy. Shouting “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attacked Babur’s mosque with sledgehammers. In the riots that followed, over a thousand people lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India. On the site today, nothing but vandalized ruins remains, and, in a dark corner of the large, empty space, a small shrine with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama, where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory ritual. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is a temple, however makeshift, there now.

People are being killed in India today because of misreadings of the history of the Hindus. In all religions, myths that pass for history–not just casual misinformation, the stock in trade of the internet, but politically-driven, aggressive distortions of the past–can be deadly, and in India they incite violence not only against Muslims but against women, Christians, and the lower castes.

Myth has been called “the smoke of history,” and there is a desperate need for a history of the Hindus that distinguishes between the fire, the documented evidence, and the smoke; for mythic narratives become fires when they drive historical events rather than respond to them. Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat, sparked a revolution in India in 1857. We are what we imagine, as much as what we do.

Hindus in America, too, care how their history is taught to their children in American schools, and the voices of Hindu action groups ring out on the internet. Some of these groups, justifiably incensed by the disproportionate emphasis on the horrors of the caste system in American textbooks, and by the grotesque misrepresentation of Hindu deities in American commercialism, ricochet to the other extreme and demand that all references to the caste system be expunged from all American textbooks.

And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it’s a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “The Hindus believe. . . ,” is talking nonsense.

My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English–imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people. But the texts tell us not just who was the ruler but who got enough to eat and who did not. And so my narrative is alternative in its inclusion of alternative people. How does one include the marginal as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story? The ancient texts, usually dismissed as the work of Brahmin males, in fact reveal a great deal about the lower castes, often very sympathetic to them and sometimes coded as narratives about dogs, standing for the people now generally called Dalits, formerly called Untouchables. The argument, for instance, that Dalits should be allowed to enter temples, an argument still violently disputed in parts of India today, can already be found, masked, in ancient stories about faithful dogs who should be allowed to enter heaven. So too, though Feminists often argue that Hindu women were entirely silenced, women’s voices–their ideas and attitudes and, above all, their stories–were often heard and recorded by the men who wrote down the texts.

Foreigners, too, made contributions to Hinduism from the very beginning. Once upon a time–about 50 million years ago –a triangular plate of land, moving fast (for a continent), broke off from Madagascar (a large island lying off the southeastern coast of Africa), and sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to became the Indian subcontinent. Or so the people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them? Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in around 50,000 BCE. And so from the very start India was a place made up of land and people from somewhere else. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India (and just about everyone else).

The magnificent civilization of the Indus Valley (in present-day Pakistan) traded with Sumer, Crete, and Mesopotamian, before it came to a mysterious end in about 2000 BCE. At just about the same time, in the nearby Punjab, a very different culture entered India from the Northwest and created the great corpus of texts called the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism. Other invaders– Greeks, Turks, Arabs, and British–made valuable contributions to the complex fabric of Hinduism.

We can trace certain important ideas throughout the centuries of this unbroken tradition. For example: A profound psychological understanding of addiction to material objects is evident throughout the history of Hinduism. Addiction was the concern not merely of kings or scholars but of ordinary people, like the proto-hippy and the gambler who are depicted in the Vedas (see excerpt). One reaction to this perceived danger was to control addiction through asceticism or renunciation. And so began an ongoing battle between a great tradition that always celebrated sensuality (think: elephants encrusted with rubies, temples that make rococo look like Danish modern, the Kama-sutra) and another that feared the excesses of the flesh and practiced meditation (think: Gandhi).

Some of the British, especially in the early colonial period, admired and celebrated the sensuality of Hinduism. Others, particularly but not only the later Protestant missionaries, despised what they regarded as Hindu excesses. Unfortunately, many educated Hindus took their cues from the second sort of Brit and became ashamed of the sensuous aspects of their own religion, aping the Victorians (who were, after all, very Victorian), becoming more Protestant than thou. It is not fair to blame the British for the Puritanical strain in Hinduism; it began much earlier. But they certainly made it a lot worse. And cultural influences of this sort, as much as the grand ideas, are part of what makes the history of the Hindus so fascinating.

Read an excerpt from “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, which is being published today.

 

 

 

 

 
FM

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.
[From "The Hindus: An Alternative History"]

 

FM
Originally Posted by JoKer:

HEY, you bastard....did you juss say my great grandpa had no "moral and religious values"? I ought to knock you out at the next reunion

I was speaking of my step grandfather, Latchman, bro. Go back and re-read.

FM

Add Reply

×
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×
×