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318 of 365 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Abundance of pettiness, May 25, 2009
This review is from: The Hindus: An Alternative History (Hardcover)
As someone who has grown up in an academic environment, I would like to think of myself as catholic in my outlook; but this book by Wendy Doniger was just off.
To start with I maintain two gold standards of writers from the west
writing on India. The first is Heinrich Zimmer who wrote 'Myths and
Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization' which I have gone back to
repeatedly over the past 20 years. The other is the works of William
Dalrymple and the work of his that I cherish the most is one titled
'White Mughals'.
The former is a scholar who has sought to deeply understand Indian culture and the myths it has evolved and the latter is a fine writer first and foremost with a keen eye and love for all things Indian.
But what really makes their writings classic that wants me to go back
to them repeatedly is their generosity of spirit and largeness of
heart. They do not shy away from the warts, but you know what is
driving them to research and write their material is a genuine desire
to understand and the joy of discovery.
That brings me to Ms Doniger. When I came upon the book after reading a review of it in the NY Times, I rubbed my hands in glee. Ah, here is a book I thought to myself, that is going to present new and important insights, from a seasoned philologist, that is going to enhance
one's knowledge of Indian culture in new and important ways (good or bad - no matter).
What Wendy Doniger does do is that she applies all the tools and techniques and filters of 20th and 21st century social and cultural analysis to bear upon circa 500 BC India and then proceeds to sit in judgment. But it turns out that no wart is unworthy of examination and it is warts that are examined!
As an example, I opened the chapter on the Upanishads with a degree of anticipation hoping that a sociological context to the content of the Upanishads is going to present new insights. To one's great disappointment there is nothing on the sheer poetry of the verse or the metaphysics therein. Rather the good professor takes one or two of the Upanishads and
proceeds to see male chauvinism and cruelty at every turn.
Really, that's what she got out of the Upanishads? For example how about the Ananda Valli Kanda of the Taittiriya Upanishad - which defines
happiness. Not a word on that. How about the psychological complexity unveiled in the Mandukya Upanishad? Not a word on that. As someone who has lapped up all sorts of commentaries on the Upanishads for many years now (all takes welcome), this one was astonishing primarily for its wholly missing the point!
Doniger's pettiness contrasts with the generosity of spirit I have
mentioned above. Two examples here. She has comments to make on the
Ramayana and the Mahabharatha. She writes, introducing them,
'considered by some as epics'. Really? Only some people consider these epics? I am all open and eager for scholarly analysis of any subject matter - but throw us a bone here (more on dogs later...!) - give the Indians their epics!
Another example in the same vein. She reference Shankara later in the
book and while describing him as the founder of the Shankara Matts
/Schools. She in paretheses writes 'is said to have founded'. Again,
really? If the Professor doubts that Shankara founded the Matts, I am
very interested in knowing about this! Even if it is vague conjecture, tell me more - I fully agree that Indian history can be vague, so please throw some light. But instead of exploring the justifiable debate or controversy that exists, she just has a throw away line, for apparently no reason.
The attitude that comes through is one of hostility, contempt and
shoddy writing. And the dogs. There are several hundred references to Indian
view of dogs. Whats with that? I am a pet owner myself and
love my dog. But this was so discordant that I was just not getting it.
There is also a chapter on Hindus in America. This section is so superficial that it is laughable. It feels like the author has browsed a couple of websites and found that enough to channel her points of view.
A final note on sex. A three thousand year old mature civilization has seen a lot in its ebbs and flows and the land of the Kama Sutra is
going to have its share of views. But Doniger sees hostile,
vituperative sexual mores at every turn, even when such an
interpretation is not warranted.
A metaphor I want to use for Wendy Doniger is the following. When I
was a kid, visiting my grandmother in Hyderabad, India, I would love
going to the 'sugar cane stand'. There the sugar cane wallah would
take the sugar cane stems and crush them through two rollers and
collect the juice into a cup. On a sunny summer day it was the best
drink ever. Then all the crushed pith would go into a rubbish pile on
the ground.
Heinrich Zimmer and William Dalrymple get to the sugar cane juice.
Wendy Doniger rakes about in the sugar cane pith with no concept of
what the juice is all about.
Does this mean that I do not recommend you read this book. Not at all. I am not one to shy away from a variety of perspectives or debate. So please do pick it up from the library and give it a glance. Just don't expect to walk away from it with new insights other than the fact that the author has an agenda and Indian culture happens to serve it in this case.
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129 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
History or HerStory?, February 3, 2010
This review is from: The Hindus: An Alternative History (Hardcover)
I have read the book from cover to cover, and am afraid
that it has literally hundreds of factual errors that will
be noticed by anyone who has even a mediocre knowledge of
Indian history. Just to give a FEW examples:
I. In the Map titled "India From 600 CE to 1600 CE" at the
beginning of the book, at least four sites (Janakpur,
Nagarkot, Mandu, Haldighati) are marked literally hundreds
of miles from their correct geographical location.
II. In the chapter XIX titled "Dialogue and Tolerance Under
the Mughals", the errors would shame even a Graduate student
of Medieval Indian history. E.g.
1) Doniger (on the title page of the chapter) says that Emperor Humayun ruled from 1530 - 1556
AD. Actually, he ruled from 1530-1540 and for a few months
in 1556 AD. He lived in exile in the intervening years as he
was deposed by Emperor Sher Shah Suri (who in turn was followed by several rulers before Humayun returned from Iran).
2) On page 532, she claims that Emperor Akbar moved his
capital from Fatehpur Sikri to Delhi in 1586. In reality, he moved it to Lahore and then to Agra. And she has got the year wrong too!
3)On page 534, she claims that Emperor Akbar was saved by
Hindus from a Muslim rival. In reality, it was his father
Humayun who was saved by the Hindu King of Umerkot. Unless, she wants to term every instance of Hindus fighting in the Moghul army as a life saving event for Akbar.
4) On page 536, she claims that Mumtaz Mahal (whose tomb is
the famous Taj Mahal) died during the birth of her 13th
child. The correct fact is that she died during the birth of her 14th child.
5) On page 537, she claims that Emperor Aurangzeb started
persecuting Hindus, Sikhs and Shiite Muslims in 1687.
Actually, he started doing this several decades earlier,
destroying numerous Hindu temples while he was the Governor
of South India (even when he was a Prince, and before he became the ruler in 1658 AD) and
getting the Sikh teacher Guru Tegh Bahadur beheaded (for his
refusal to convert to Islam) more than a decade earlier.
6) On pages 537-538, she claims that the Sikh teacher
Govind Singh was assassinated in 1708 while 'attending
Emperor Aurangzeb'. In reality, Emperor Aurangzeb had died a
year earlier in 1707 and Govind Singh was assassinated
during the reign of his successor Emperor Bahadur Shah I.
7) On page 539, the author implies that 'Jahandah Shah'
(sic!) became the ruler after Emperor Aurangzeb. In reality,
Aurangzeb was succeeded by his son (and the father of
Jahandar Shah, not Jahandah Shah) Emperor Bahadur Shah I.
You can find such historically untenable statements page
after page in her book. I have given a few examples from just
1 chapter because this review to you is not the appropriate
medium to point out the errors in all chapters and pages of the book.
To cap it all, she claims on page 446 that there is a
controversy as to whether Mahatma Gandhi uttered 'Ram Ram'
or 'Ram Rahim' when he fell to his assassin's bullets. In
reality, the controversy is totally artificial (and largely
non-existent) and is mainly encountered in agenda driven
atheist or crackpot websites. His last words are said to have been "Hey
Ram" and the same are inscribed on his 'Samadhi' (his
memorial) in New Delhi. His followers sometimes say that he
uttered 'Ram Ram'. Or her laughable claim (page 194n) that
Gandhi's commentary on the Gita (a sacred Hindu scripture)
was titled 'Asakti Yoga' (=The Science of Deep attachment -
she even explains the word ungrammatically!) when in fact
the title of Gandhi's work was 'Anasakti Yoga' (= Science of
Non-Attachment). Surely this cannot pass for an 'alternative
history' because this is just bogus fiction.
Let me not even go into the racist and hateful tone of her chapters when she actually deals with Hinduism. Her claims that she loves the Hindu culture is like a Pedophile claiming that he 'loves' children.
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42 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a Good Introduction to the Spirituality of Hinduism, November 16, 2009
This review is from: The Hindus: An Alternative History (Hardcover)
If you are drawn to read Wendy Doniger's The Hindus - as I was - because you see in Hinduism an example of a cultural-spiritual tradition that has managed to keep alive - right into modern times - a view of a sacred universe (sacred time, sacred geography, sacred cosmology, sacred social customs and social roles, sacred geometry and architecture, rites, rituals, and celebrations, etc.) and a robust set of experiential spiritual practices (puja, kirtan, yoga, meditation, etc.) then you are likely to be disappointed by this book. It is written, as far as I can tell, entirely from within the same western, modern, secular-academic point of view that has largely rejected a sacred vision of the cosmos and that has largely dismissed whatever tried-and-tested systems of spiritual practice we may once have had. Doniger conveys almost none of the spiritual vitality and seems not to recognize any of the practical spiritual knowledge that other writers and teachers show to be embedded in Hindu scriptures. If anything, she belittles these aspects of Hinduism in just that sort of way that modernized people as a group tend, unfortunately, to do, believing themselves to "know better" and to be more "sophisticated" than people who maintain their ancient traditions. So if you are looking for a view of Hinduism that will lead you beyond the limitations of the modern materialistic-mechanistic worldview, this is not the book for you.
Here is just one example: On page 176, Doniger quotes, from the Kaushitaki Upanishad, a description of the sort of experience one might encounter after bodily death that determines the trajectory of one's soul. This upanishad says that upon dying, one goes to the moon and must answer its question, and that answering correctly or incorrectly is what determines the soul's next steps. Now, obviously, from a modern, materialistic, rationalistic point of view, this is all silly, superstitious nonsense and so it would be very easy to dismiss it as such. But we should expect more than this kind of knee-jerk, superficial response from a person who holds herself up as a serious scholar. But rather than exploring what these strange (to modern, western ears) ideas and images might refer to in metaphysical terms (for example, I happen to know that there is a strong connection between the moon and the mental faculty in Hindu metaphysics; so this passage from the unpanishad could be a way of saying that the trajectory of the soul after death is dependent on the level of mental development one has attained during bodily life), Doniger takes the easy way out - the way that will find easy acceptance among her readers who hold modern, mechanistic rationalism to be the only valid viewpoint - and treats as silly the idea that "just one final postmortem exam...determines everything" (and then, in a telling footnote, likens this to a British school exam, clearly demonstrating how Doniger misconstrues and minimizes what may be another culture's rich spiritual wisdom by filtering it though her own referents while maintaining a distant, scholarly, and disdainful stance.) If it ever occurred to Doniger that the people who authored Hindu scriptures were simply far more open to a broader range of (non-physical) experiences than herself (and, by extension, most westernized, modernized people) she never hints at this possibility in her writing. In my opinion, this is a major fault.
For similar reasons, if you are drawn to this book primarily because of its subtitle "An Alternative History," and are hoping for insight into more primal forms of Hindu spirituality - before the sanitized, homogenized, overly rationalized form of "Hinduism" as so many of us know it today emerged under the influence of Christianity and western colonialism - then you too are likely to be disappointed. True, Doniger does bring out various strands of the Hindu tradition that are often overlooked, but again, not in a way that demonstrates their spiritual vitality. Her aim seems to be to support the modernist agenda that wants to say, "Look - since there are so many seemingly contradictory strands within this religious system, it's all obviously just a bunch of made-up hooey and has no real truth." In other words, Doniger presents the "alternative" Hindu tradition as mainly a complicated tangle of "myths" - in the negative sense of that word - that are best left to scholars like herself to figure out and that have no value other than providing a historical record of various peoples' literary imaginings. I got the feeling that to Doniger, Hinduism is nothing but a huge body of literature waiting to be analyzed.
Really, what this book is about, more than anything else, is Wendy Doniger and her particular interests. Hinduism almost recedes into the background, seemingly serving merely as a stimulus for her to talk about what matters most to her (mainly: women, oppressed groups of people, and animals). Nothing wrong with those interests at all; but the way in which Doniger talks about Hinduism does not seem to come from Hinduism itself. I feel that she has imposed her interests upon Hinduism in an unnatural - and therefore misleading - way. (Also, if you do not share her strong interest in these things, you may find her continual focus on them tedious.)
On the positive side, I did get out of this book an even stronger sense of just how diverse a tradition Hinduism is and how it evolved over time. Many people will present Hinduism from one particular point of view (polytheistic, monotheistic, dualistic, non-dualistic, Vedic, Vedantic, yogic, tantric, philosophical, ritualistic, brahminical, populist, Shaiva, Vaishnava, etc.) as if any one of these points of view is the "true," "authentic," "original," or most comprehensive form of Hinduism. But while Doniger does present a fairly broad spectrum of Hinduism, she does so, as stated above, while missing the inner heart of it all: the spirituality.
In other words, in my opinion, she misses the point.
Anyone out there have any recommendations for an overview of Hinduism?
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