Carry on, Wendy

In her latest book 'Against Dharma', Wendy Doniger is deliberately provocative and at worst just plain silly

“If you offend me by saying something nasty about my religion, I will kill you.”

“If you offend me by saying something nasty about my religion, I will engage you in a debate.”

Some faithful offer you the first option. Hindus offer you the second option, even the most rabid of them. Or used to.

This prevents the critiquing of some religions while encouraging an overdose of the analysis of Hinduism. But not everyone who shows off his knowledge of “Hinduism” understands the spirit of its core philosophy, which rejects the notion of any belief system having a monopoly on a person’s life.

Wendy Donniger, who has immersed herself in Hindu texts, appears to belong to the class of people who don’t get this. A near-perfect example of her not getting it can be found in her latest book Against Dharma. 

I will not presume to “review” it because I simply don’t know enough to take her on the letter of her book. But on the spirit of it, well, as an atheist who has grown up and lives in a modern, non-obscurantist Hindu family I can see that at best she is being deliberately provocative and at worst just plain silly.  

If it is the former it will help the sales of her book; if it is the latter, well, she should carry on writing for our amusement. Having read three of her earlier books, including one on the Kama Sutra, I can say with complete confidence that she never bores you. You may find her mildly irritating at times but the one-liner, gag-a-minute aspect is never far away.

So carry on, Wendy. You make our scriptures a lot of fun. 

The problem with texts

That said, it is not very clever to dwell too much on the texts to explain a belief system. These texts may be sacred but they are also ancient. Many or most of them have also been compiled higgledy-piggledy over several hundred years, which means different bits were put in under different contexts. 

For example, no one really knows when the Bhagwad Gita became a part of the Mahabharat stories. The Hadiths — all the wise things that the Prophet had said — were being compiled for 400 years after his death. And there is a New Testament as opposed to the Old one, not to mention other different versions of the Bible.

If I were to sit down and point out various things in these Books, as Ms Doniger has done, and draw generalisable conclusions, or what seem like them, I daresay I, too, could get a PhD and several books to my credit. It would be purely a matter of commitment and dedication to the subject, if not necessarily comprehension. 

So to try and extract a unified and inter-temporally valid meaning from these words of contemporary wisdom makes no sense at all. Indeed, that’s what explains the contradictions, which is mostly what critics dwell on, while the admirers focus on the nice bits, one at a time. 

The politics of texts

All these revered texts have one thing in common, however: Every one of them assigns a subordinate position to women and an exalted one to men. So to pick the Hindu texts out for doing this — Ms Doniger is good at that — is asking to be dismissed as being trivial.

Perhaps her next book should be about a comparative fun book on the commonality of views in all texts about the position of women. And in case she has already written one, my apologies.  

Indeed, now that we are in the 21st century, some philanthropist might consider funding a project in which all these texts are re-written by women. Or, a group of learned women could do it on their own. The democratic rescripting of the scriptures should be hugely educative to men.

Last but not least, there is politics of religion. There has never been a better way of debunking the whole 

by demolishing the part. 

In logic it is called the fallacy of composition when it is assumed that what is true of the part is true of 

the whole.  

This is especially true of all ancient sacred texts. You can choose all the silly things that have been included in them — silly by today’s standards, that is — and draw a highly damaging picture.  

But what good does that do?