Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #3

Three years ago, India's Supreme Court noted that India, too, is a land of immigrants and that about 92 percent of the population descended from immigrants from the northwest and the northeast.  India has been at interesting crossroads throughout--people and ideas came in from over the mountains and across the seas. Doniger writes that "India functioned, throughout history, less like Shangri-la than like Heathrow or O'Hare."

She builds on that imagery, and draws a parallel with that icon for immigrants to the US:

The proliferation of polythetic polytheisms may pose problems for the definition of Hinduism, but they are its glory as a cultural phenomenon. Pluralism and diversity are deeply ingrained in polylithic Hinduism, the Ellis Island of religions; the lines between different beliefs and practices and permeable membranes.  Not only can we see the Hindu traditions a divided among themselves on many central issues throughout history, but we can see what the arguments were on each point, often far more than two views on major questions. The texts wrestle with competing truths, rather than offer pat answers.

Not only are new people and new ideas coming in to stir things up, the Hindu traditions are divided amongst themselves with competing truths. Thus, when a new layer is added:.

The Parsis ("Persians"--i.e., Zorastrians) in several communities in India tell a positive story about social hybridity. They say that when the Parsis landed in India, the local Hindu raja sent them a full glass of milk, suggesting that the land was full. The Parsi leader added sugar and returned the glass, indicating that his people could mix among the Arabs and Hindus like sugar in milk, sweetening it but not overrunning it. The metaphor of sugar in milk suggests the extreme ideal of communal integration, in which individuals change the community by melting into it, flavoring it as a whole with their qualities (Zorastrianism, or sweetness).  The Parsis did not in fact dissolve into Islam and Hinduism; they remained Parsis and indeed were often caught in the crossfire during the riots that followed the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. This seems to me the more accurate way to view such cultural mixes: as a suspension of discrete particles rather than a melting pot.

Which is all the more why I find it so un-Indian like to protest against Wendy Doniger's book, and to compel the publisher to withdraw all the copies and pulp them.  To borrow from an Indian sport that was accidentally invented in England, this battle cry against a foreigner and her ideas is simply not cricket.

Doniger wraps up the first of the twenty-five chapters with this:

I would therefore argue for the recognition of the simultaneous presence of a number of pairs of opposites, throughout the history of the Hindus, the both/and view of community. The historiographic pendulum of reconciliation, never resting at the swing either to one side or the other, forces us to acknowledge the existence, perhaps even the authenticity, of the two extremes of various ideas, and also their falseness, as well as the fact that there is no pure moment at either end of the swing, and leave it at that

Perhaps such an interpretation reminds one of Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian.  I wonder if I picked up on the multiplicity of truths, even without my knowing, right from my young days and, to this day, am hell bent on ticking people off because I rarely ever subscribe to anything as the truth!  The earliest I remember when I felt my views on Hinduism challenged and, thereby, my view of the world itself, was during my preteen years and father had brought home from his magazine club the tabloid Blitz.  In that was an article about the Shiva Lingam being a phallic symbol.  A phallic symbol!  I talked about that with my cousin, who seemed to be aware of that interpretation but was not at all bothered by it.  Doniger does write about that, which is not really news anymore, but can easily upset the true believers who worship the lingam.  I am sure she will have more on these in the later chapters.

The Gudimallam Lingam, aka Lingodhbhava
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