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

Should education help students learn that life is more than merely making a living?

The effects of the economic uptick, however slow that might be, are visible on college campus.  Student enrollment has decreased. Classrooms seem to be vacant more often than not, and finding a parking spot is considerably easier than getting an A in my class.

Typically, the post-recessionary economic growth is bad news for most of the higher education industry--the vast numbers of community colleges and universities like mine have to deal with the budgetary implications of enrollment declines. Further, the demographic future doesn't suggest huge increases in student growth either--families having fewer kids translates to fewer college-going future adults.  All these in an environment of decreasing taxpayer support.

Which means we will soon revisit the budget-balancing decisions that public higher educational institutions will have to make. Yet again, like in the past, the discussions will then come down to the easiest of metrics of numbers of students in classes, and academic programs that fail this test will be put on the proverbial chopping block.  Thus, the personnel in the humanities, the social sciences, and the creative arts will be forced to defend the existence of the programs and its people.

This tenuous existence of intellectual pursuits that are not about vocations per se is such a vivid contrast to the future that John Adams imagined in one his many letters to his beloved Abigail.  Adams wrote, "I must study politics and war, so that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Adams imagined a prosperous and peaceful future America, where the youth will be able to pursue interests and live a life as opposed to being preoccupied with making a living, which is equally important. We are an incredibly prosperous country now, perhaps way beyond Adams' wildest imaginations. Yet, our focus on higher education will apparently be on how to make a living, and we will systematically downsize and discredit the education that is about how to live!  To make this worse, "how to make a living" has been so much debased that we have come to see the youth as nothing more than human automatons in the economy.

Of course, the higher education industry itself is also at fault. Over the decades, especially during the "false" enrollment gains that resulted from people unable to find jobs in a recessionary environment, campuses spent multiple millions on fancy buildings, and even more millions on sports, as if building monuments and entertaining the population were the mission in higher education.  If only they had instead strengthened the implementation of education that would help students learn how to make a living and how to live!

At least in "Groundhog Day" the protagonist, Phil Connors, arrives at the correct answer after living through the same day over and over. But, it is certainly odd that an industry with highly educated people opts for the wrong answers again and again, and it is particularly worrisome when it feels like the movie is coming to an end.  After all, as the late Herbert Stein observed, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

thanks for the movies, Harold Ramis

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!