`The Hindus’ is controversial, courageous

(RNS) In English, a widow burned alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband is called a “suttee.” In Sanskrit, she is a “sati” or “good woman.” All over India are sati stones that commemorate these deaths, the earliest dated definitively to the year 510. “These women were not a homogenous group of mindless […]

(RNS) In English, a widow burned alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband is called a “suttee.” In Sanskrit, she is a “sati” or “good woman.” All over India are sati stones that commemorate these deaths, the earliest dated definitively to the year 510.

“These women were not a homogenous group of mindless victims or soulless fanatics,” writes Wendy Doniger, “but individuals who made various choices for various reasons and had many voices and cannot be sorted into two tidy groups of those who jumped and those who were pushed.


“Some were murdered for land or money or family honor; some sacrificed themselves for religious reasons; some committed suicide out of guilt, despair, or terror. Some resisted, and ran away, and lived to tell the tale; some tried to resist and failed.”

Doniger is fearless in her embrace of complexity throughout her brilliant book, “The Hindus: An Alternative History.” Her career as a leading scholar — with a doctorate in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard University and another in Oriental studies from Oxford University — is also marked by the controversy she stirs, as a Westerner writing and speaking about sacred Eastern traditions.

In 2002, a man threw an egg at her during a lecture in London that touched on the sensuality in the “Ramayana,” one of the central Hindu epics.

Unapologetic, Doniger insists on “the richness of the texts as the source of information about the sorts of things that some people nowadays assume you need nontextual sources for: women, the lower classes, the way people actually lived.”

She is also scrupulous — carefully noting, for instance, that most of the dharma (religious law) does not mention suttee, “concentrating instead on ascetic widowhood; several condemn it in no uncertain terms; and a few late commentaries argue for it.”

In Hindu traditions, contesting threads run side by side for centuries, and ample room exists for diverse arguments. Doniger, a professor of religious history at the University of Chicago, clearly finds this pluralism exhilarating, and her delight in the vividness of the stories she cites is infectious.

Organized chronologically, from 50,000 B.C. to 2008, the book is that exceedingly rare combination: a scholarly tour de force and a joy to read. Doniger is keen to the uses of history, noting that “many a `fact’ turns out, on closer inspection, to be an argument.”


She emphasizes the centrality of animals. In the epic “Mahabharata,” for instance, they exist as both themselves and as way of working out nonviolent principles against our violent natures — characterized among Hindus as “fish eat fish,” instead of “dog eat dog.”

The dog itself is condemned as unclean, a symbol of the lowest caste, and yet in the “Mahabharata,” the man called Yudhishthira refuses to go to heaven without the stray dog that has attached itself to him — creating a tension that the text leaves unresolved.

Extensive glossaries, maps, art and indexes help the general reader, and Doniger has a winning, open way of puzzling alongside: She is fond of inserting “hindsight alert!” She is also given to wordplay and casual asides, which will grate on some.

But importantly, Doniger brings a teacher’s gift of drawing on the culturally familiar. In this way, St. Paul and Zorba the Greek speak to Hindu texts, and Woody Allen, James Joyce and George Orwell help illustrate Indian ideas. This capaciousness gives the odd sense of a thick, old-school book with a hyperlinked sensibility.

Vedic literature is not the easiest topic, but Doniger makes astute use of Sanskrit scholars like Sheldon Pollock of Columbia University. Readers who resent her presumption — let alone her cheek — have already posted many angry comments in the blogosphere.

For me, “The Hindus” was an intellectual treat — a way to dent all that I didn’t learn in school. I’d like to believe that Sherman Lee, who helped create the superb Asian art collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, would have been thrilled, too.


(Karen R. Long writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

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