The Bhagavad Gita in the killing fields of the Mahabharata

When I wrote about "do the right thing," I was, of course, channeling a thought from the Bhagavad Gita.  In the conversation that I mentioned in that post, my old friend referred to the Gita and the larger story of the the Mahabharata, as from more than four- or five-thousand years ago.  The nerd that I am, well, even in that friendly conversation I had to hem and haw and dissent about the Mahabharata being way more recent than that.

To engage with a religious text without being blinded by faith is a feature of religious studies.  Religious studies is not merely for those who are religious. If only many more among us studied the religions of the world; but, I digress!

The context for the Gita is far from what an uninformed person might imagine.  It was in the context of one of the biggest battles ever in Hindu mythology.

The text is in the form of a conversation between the warrior Arjuna, who, on the eve of an apocalyptic battle, hesitates to kill his friends and family on the other side, and the incarnate god Krishna, who acts as Arjuna’s charioteer (a low-status job roughly equivalent to a bodyguard) and persuades him to do it.

What might one make of such a setting in which Krishna convinces Arjuna that his duty is to, ahem, kill his friends and uncles and cousins?  What would Gandhi do?

Confronted with Krishna’s exhortation to Arjuna to engage in a violent battle, Gandhi argued that by urging him to “fight,” Krishna meant simply that Arjuna should do his duty. “Fighting” was merely a metaphor for the inner struggle of human beings, and nonviolence was a corollary of nonattachment to the fruits of action; therefore, actions such as murder and lying are forbidden, because they cannot be performed without attachment.

To a true believer, the Mahabharata is not any mythology, and, therefore, the Gita is not anything metaphorical.  Gandhi appears to have waffled there, eh.

Wendy Doniger--yes, that Doniger--has authored an essay reviewing a "masterful new biography of the Gita" from which I excerpted the quotes.  She writes:

How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

Doniger sketches how this transformation happened.  I will leave it to the interested to read that argument in its entirety, which is a must-read especially for those interested in the political economy of India and "the role of the Gita in the rise of Hindutva in India today."

I have no doubt that the Gita has plenty of lessons for us mortals to think about in order to lead a good life.  I remember my great-uncle reciting, as he often did, the following verse:

At the source of that image is a translation of the verse:

One who has studied the Bhagavad Gita just a little,
drunk even a drop of Ganga water,
has worshipped Murari (Krishna) just once,
does not meet with Yama (lord of death).

This atheist cares not about worshiping Murari, is convinced that there won't be any encounter with Yama, and will not dare to drink a drop of the highly polluted Ganga water.  But, yes, I believe that I immensely gained from the Gita that I read, even if I understood nothing, way back during my angst-filled undergraduate years.

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #5

So, back to Wendy Doniger after that brief diversion to appreciate the world ;)

All we know is that the Indus Valley Civilization people vanished into thin air, and there were the people of the Vedas.

What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley?  Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC?

I would assume that one awesome, awesome prize awaits the person who successfully and convincingly answers those questions.

I wonder if it is also built into the old tradition not to get preoccupied with the origins. There is a Tamil saying that I often heard expressed back in the old country: "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராயக்கூடாது" (do not try to trace the origins of sages and rivers.)  Thus, there was no systematic effort to dig up the past?  And now we are stuck with the best guesses that we can possibly come up with in order to sort out what happened to the IVC people, and where the Vedic people came from?

Doniger walks us through the guesses:

The Aryans invaded India from Indo-Europe
The Caucasians strolled in from the Caucasus
The Vedic people originated in India
The Vedic people lived in the Indus Valley

I am tempted to write "no dice" but cannot because Doniger writes that the six-sided dice that we use now traces its origin back to, yep, you are thinking correctly:

Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of the cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.

Some gamblers they were, it seems. It is high time India and Pakistan collected royalties from the trillions and trillions that have been gambled since that invention ;)

Grabbing the evidence from the horse's mouth--yes, horses are evidence here--Doniger writes:

Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda.  

So, what's the answer?  Forget trying to solve the IVC/Vedic people puzzle.  Where and how did Hinduism originate?  There are at least five cultures that have made Hinduism "a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out of the scraps of other things."

(1) Stone age cultures in India long before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures are built.
(2) At some point, impossible to fit into the chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the "Original Inhabitants" of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. ...
Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6) the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers, who may or may not have been a part of the IVC, added pieces to the puzzle.

So, there, you have it.

Or, if you prefer a shorter answer: we have no freaking clue!

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #4

It looks like blogging on other topics might have to be put on hold for a while.

Doniger writes,

"Much of what we now call Hinduism may have had roots in cultures that thrived in South Asia long before the creation of textual evidence that we can decipher with any confidence. Remarkable cave paintings have been preserved from Mesolithic sites dating from c. 30,000 BCE in Bhimbetka, near present-day Bhopal, in the Vindhya Mountains in the province of Madhya Pradesh.

My first reaction was: did I sleep though the Indian history class in high school when they might have discussed this?  30,000 year old cave paintings that I hadn't even heard before?  This being in India, are those paintings well protected?  Have by now people already scribbled on them the equivalent of "sriram wuz here?"

India is filled with all kinds of mysteries!  One of them is the unresolved question of where and how did the Hinduism as we refer to originate:

There were other early settlements in India, notably the culture of Baluchistan, in the westernmost part of what is now Pakistan, dating to before 6000 BCE. But from about 2300 BCE the first urbanization took place, as great cities arose in the valley of the Indus River, 150 miles south of Baluchistan, also in Pakistan. The material remains of this culture, which we call the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of two great cities on the Indus, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), present a tantalizing treasure chest of often enigmatic images that hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be the keys to the roots of Hinduism.

Damn those people for not leaving behind clear records for us--maybe we need to outsource decoding this to Martians ;)

For the resemblances between some aspects of the IVC [Indus Valley Civilization] and later Hinduism are simply too stunning to ignore. As the Late Harappan culture declined, its survivors must have carried some of it into the Ganges-Yamuna basin. ... [The] process of urbanization moved gradually south from the Indus cities to the site of Kaushambi, near modern Allahabad in the Gangetic plain, and to the surrounding villages. ... The Indus Civilization may not have simply gone out like the flame of a candle or, at least, not before lighting another candle.
...
We can see the possible survival, in transformation, of a number of images. ... These patterns, and the rough outlines of other images that we have considered, perhaps even the stone lingas and the voluptuous women, may have gradually merged with the culture of the people of the Veda.

Which then leads us to the question of where these Vedic people came from. Who were they?  How did they relate to the IVC people? To the Dravidians?

Frustrating because the Vedic people left behind the sounds of knowledge (Vedas) but otherwise they cleaned up before they turned the house over. Not a scrap remains of their existence.

But, before that, what triggered the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization?  Interestingly enough, Scientific American has this today:

The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 BC. Now paleoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries.

The monsoon did not fail for merely a season or two: " the regular summer monsoons stopped for some 200 years."

Ouch!

If a lack of monsoons did spell the end of the Indus Valley civilization, says Hodell, “it is an example — and there are other examples of this — of how ancient societies have had to contend with climate. There are some lessons for us and our future, in which we will have to deal with anthropogenic climate change”.

Hmmm ...  Jared Diamond now gets another piece of evidence that adds to the thesis of Collapse.

Source

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
Source

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #2

Where does one begin the narrative on the Hindus, right?  Will be quite a challenge.  No wonder the book is as long as it is, and I am yet to move past the introductory chapter!

Meanwhile, a friend informs me that the saga continues:

Another book on Hinduism by American indologist Wendy Doniger has come under attack from the same Delhi-based group which had compelled the publishers of an earlier work by her to withdraw the title. 
Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (SBAS) demanded on Saturday that the Aleph Book Company stop sales and pulp all remaining copies of Doniger's book "On Hinduism", published in 2013. 

Which is why negotiating with terrorists is a bad idea--they get emboldened the moment you yield. 

Anyway, continuing on with "The Hindus" by Wendy #Doniger (the immediately previous post here):

The textbook of legal code (dharma) attributed to Manu (first century CE) does not use the word "Hindu" but does offer a geographical definition of the people to whom his dharma applies (a definition that, it is worth noting, uses animals to define humans):

From the eastern sea to the western sea [the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal], the area in between the two mountains [the Himalayas and the Vindhyas] is what wise men call the Land of the Aryas. Where the black antelope ranges by nature, that should be known as the country fir for sacrifices; and beyond it is the country of the barbarians. The twice-born [the upper classes and particularly the Brahmins] should make every effort to settle in these countries.

At first blush,, it might seem like Manu was the biggest ignoramus that ever lived. But, in jumping into that conclusion, we forget to contextualize his observations.  It was 2,000 years ago, when humans had very little idea of the planet, and its physical and human geography.  It is, therefore, quite an impressive achievement that Manu was familiar with the geography that he describes.  If we laugh at his idiocy now, imagine how generations two centuries from now will find our own idiocy to be a tragic farce!

However, those few sentences also underscore the rising importance of the upper classes, and the Brahmins in particular. A social dynamic that has immensely messed up India forever.

The narratives about India and Hinduism often completely ignore the non-Sanskrit stories. I grew up in a Tamil language environment--the oldest living language with a rich literature past.  A language that is not derived from Sanskrit, and which uses a script that is not god's own, Devanagiri, that Sanskrit uses.  Thus, the world outside rarely has any clue about the Tamil and Dravidian stories--of Hinduism and otherwise.  How did that happen?

Sanskrit is the model for most North Indian languages (and the source of much of their grammar and some of their vocabulary), , as Tamil is for the Dravidian languages of the south (such as Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.) ... Not only did southern ideas go north, and vice versa, and not only did Tamil flow into Sanskrit and Sanskrit into Tamil, but Tamil went north and Sanskrit south.
...
The British used texts as a way of disregarding actual Hindu practices and justifying their own imperial project with textual citations. And the Orientalist orientation to texts is the orientation toward Brahmins (and Sanskrit, and writing.) More recently, scholars have begun to pay more attention to ritual, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, the records of foreign visitors, and, in the modern period, ethnography, revealing new aspects of a lived religion that is very differently represented in texts.

There was a great deal of non-Sanskrit, non-Vedic, Hinduism that I was familiar with right from when I was a kid.  At grandmothers' villages, there were village deities that had nothing to do with the Vedic gods.  There was the "maadan"--spirits. The "god" who protected the population from the dreaded smallpox was non-Vedic. The favorite god of many Tamils, "Murugan," is almost exclusively worshipped in the Dravidian south.

The "kodai" festival at Pattamadai was a village celebration in non-Vedic ways. My father's cousin sister has a favorite story about this.  Girls could go to those celebrations up until they hit puberty.  But, rarely were kids--boys and girls--taken to those because of the "strange" practices there.  This aunt of mine nagged her father enough--she was the youngest of four--that he took her to the festival. One strange thing after another. And finally they sit down for the feast. A guy proceeds to cut himself on his elbow and blood gushes out.  He then moves from one plantain-leaf-plate to another and places a drop of his blood on each.  The aunt said she almost fainted.  This was less than fifty years ago!

I have always considered it a tragedy that the old country did not spend time and energy understanding such old faiths, which were also part of Hinduism.  Instead, it all became a Brahminical, Sanskrit, version of a very complex and diverse religion.  I am sure Doniger will get to such discussions as well.

At the temple out in the wilderness where our "family temple" is located

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #1

I started reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus." As I noted in this earlier post, the trigger was the news about how the Hindutva elements pressured the publisher, Penguin, to withdraw all the copies and pulp them and not sell the book in any form in India.

I am doing this not to merely piss off the Hindutva idiots--that is merely a wonderful bonus. I figured that this whole brouhaha is a neat opportunity to read a scholarly book, about a religion and tradition in which I grew up, though it has been decades since I gave up on any religion--not only Hinduism.

If the first few pages are any indication, then this will be a joy to read. The language is so light and reader-friendly even as she presents some serious materials.  And a great deal of humor too!

I plan to provide quotes from Doniger on a regular basis, and add my own comments as well. Here is the first of what might be a long series.

Hindus may approach their scriptures as a part of their piety or as scholars who study Hinduism as they would study any other human phenomenon, or both simultaneously. ... But there are also advantages in a more academic approach, such as a religious studies approach, to which the religion of the scholar in question is irrelevant. ...Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about. ...I sympathize with the many American and British Hindus who have been raised in a particular tradition, generally the philosophical neo-Vedantic tradition, and therefore are genuinely shocked to hear, from an American woman, about aspects of their own tradition that are not only entirely new to them but often offensive by virtue of their violence or sexuality. But it is precisely for the sake of such Hindus, and for their children, as well as for non-Hindus who know nothing about Hinduism, that I feel it important to write about the lesser known aspects of the tradition, particularly those aspects that revisionists have purposely erased from contemporary versions of the texts. .... And so I intend to go on celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus that I have loved for about fifty years and counting.(excerpted from pages 13-16)

An intellectual, religious studies, approach is about questioning and understanding, and not to simply treat the texts as the words from god.  Of course, that is bound to be upsetting to the true believers--I am reminded of my grandmothers whose typical comeback was "you don't ask why" to questions I had. .  And more so when the analysis and interpretations are being done by a person who grew up in a different faith, in a different country, and who is a woman.  Three strikes and you are out ;)  

I love the way Doniger writes about scholars striking "the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about."  That is such a shame.  And all the more heartening and refreshing to note how Doniger goes where the analysis takes her.  

And most of it all, I can certainly relate to her comment about "celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus that I have loved for about fifty years and counting."  While in Doniger's case the fifty years and counting was from the time she became intellectually, and emotionally, invested in Sanskrit and India, in my case it has been from birth.  I suppose I will echo her thoughts if I write similar phrases about the United States.

Can't wait to get through the entire book--690 pages of text alone, excluding the notes, bibliography, and index, which makes it a weighty tome at 779 pages!  

If no incoming fire, you are bombing the wrong place

It all started with a tweet. A short one in my Twitter feed.

This is a bad sign... Penguin withdrawing/pulping Wendy Doniger's book "The Hindus" from India. http://t.co/G1boBxlHaD
— Meera Subramanian (@Meeratweets) February 11, 2014

I haven't read that book, but remembered that it created a controversy in India and that there was pushback from nationalistic and Hindutva groups.

So, I then did a quick search to see if the author might have said anything about it.  There was nothing, but I came across a recent interview with her, which I watched. I then tweeted a response:

@Meeratweets Hey, bad sign indeed :( thanks to your tweet, I ended up watching this interview with #Doniger http://t.co/CZg1GH1Brs
— sriram khe (@congoboy) February 11, 2014

Apparently this was not a case of a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing the sound it did, or did not, make:

@congoboy @Meeratweets Stupidest fuck, if some1 calls ur mother a Monkey, witout knowing shes a Human, what'd u do?!http://t.co/F77J07P7ol …
— Teja (@teja_am) February 11, 2014

It always amazes me that those who want to deny the freedom of expression and inquiry often do that with discourteous language too.  Not that I care for their courtesy while shutting me up!

Some random Twitter user is not going to scare me.  As a first step, I let "Teja" know that this "Stupidest fuck" read the tweet by ... well, I retweeted it!

The WSJ reports on this decision by Penguin:

One of India’s largest publishing houses has agreed to withdraw and pulp all copies of a 2009 book written by a leading scholar of Hinduism that reinterprets the history of the ancient religion. Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd complied with an agreement drawn up by a court in Delhi on Monday to recall and withdraw all copies of “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and cease to publish or sell it in India. 

In that same report, the WSJ reminds us that this is not the first instance of a book being banned in India. What a shame!

The paper also notes this:

A review of the book, published in the Journal in 2009 said that Ms. Doniger had succeeded in “making modern sense of the texts and tales of Hindu society, as well as of the rituals and symbols of the Hindu people.” 

At the end of it all, I figured that the best thing I can do is to buy a copy of this banned book, and read it over the next couple of months. "Teja" and his buddies will be delighted that their work has catalyzed me into buying the very book they have successfully banned in India.

As for the title of this post, I heard something along those very words in an NPR segment--I wish I remembered when it was for me to zoom into it and attribute the source.

Update: I should have known that some of the commentators I pay attention to will have something to say ... here is Shikha Dalmia:

[Her] aim in writing the book was to save Hinduism from misinterpretations of both hostile alien interlocutors and nativist Hindutva boosters.
Here is a flavor of the book from a review by Daily Beast columnist Tunku Vardarajan, former Newsweek international editor:

A religion without a central church or pontiff — and with no predominant sacred place (a 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.

Am all the happier that I purchased the book. The paperback. I prefer the old style, when it comes to books.  As Dalmia notes:

The silver lining in all this, as Doniger told England-based Salil Tripathi last night, is that in the age of Internet, Penguin can’t actually ban the book. “Anyone with a computer can get the Kindle edition from Penguin, NY, and it’s probably cheaper, too.”
So go for it dear readers. It’s for a good cause.

Yes, buy it.