)
Wendy Doniger makes two interesting confessions at the start of this book - a compilation of 63 selected essays, condensed into 43 chapters and distributed under seven broad segments to ensure ease of reading and thematic integrity. These are essays that she wrote on Hinduism in her long, distinguished career as an Indologist and published in different journals across the globe.
Her first confession is personal. She says she was trained as a Sanskritist, but she was not a "real Sanskritist", who, she says, were so unfriendly that they would leave a room when she entered it.
The second confession concerns her earlier book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. She says that the book was essentially meant for an American audience and, therefore, she was utterly surprised by the large number of Hindus who read it, some of them so "confrontationally" that she was appalled.
Doniger's views on Sanskritists are no exaggeration and, hopefully, should provoke some debate in the country, which possesses so many of them. As she correctly notes, Sanskritists are "cold-blooded pedants interested in verbs and nouns". Modern India has plenty of them - missing the spirit of a truly modern and flexible language for the fussiness of its grammar and thereby depriving oneself of the pleasures of great literature and philosophy that Sanskrit could spawn. A language that was an outcome of a reformist drive is now a prisoner of those who are opposed to change and reform. That Doniger was a victim of such pedantic Sanskritists even in some universities of the West comes as a surprise. It only underlines the crisis that endangers one of the world's oldest languages that produced the Vedas and the Upanishads.
Her second confession is startling because it reveals her naivety about the modern Hindu. This comes as a bigger surprise even for a Doniger fan like this author and the naivety is in stark contrast to her intelligent analysis and easy-flowing narration of Hindu mythologies and religious texts with subtlety, understanding and precision that are rare in most modern-day writers in this genre. Her earlier book on the Hindus had filled a gap that had existed for years - a document that could simply explain and background basic Hindu concepts, myths and ideas from ancient to modern times. Some Hindus might have approached the book confrontationally, but a much larger number of Indian readers expectedly lapped the book up for its intrinsic merit as primary reading material on Hinduism. It was clear that, contrary to Doniger's belief, many Hindus did not know many things about their own religion or were not averse to learning them from an "American woman".
Fortunately, such naivety has had a hugely positive outcome. It has led to the birth of the current volume - On Hinduism. The essays in it, originally written many years ago, are rewritten and repackaged to form part of the thematically structured seven sections in the book. In doing so, she has kept in mind that the book is primarily for an Indian audience. Thus, the different chapters seek to answer all the basic questions a Hindu might ask about her religion - about polytheism, monotheism, birth and death, tolerance, reincarnation, myths of creation, laws on gender, desire and gaining control over it, the place of animals in Hindu religion and the eternal conflict between reality and illusion. You may quarrel with Doniger over the way she defines tolerance or question her assertion that there are no Indian words that correctly connote religious tolerance, but the coverage and treatment of issues and themes about which a Hindu is naturally curious is impressive.
At another level, this book is an evolutionary journey for Doniger. In The Hindus: An Alternative History, she took pains to make the myths and concepts accessible for the Western reader. But in On Hinduism, Doniger is more relaxed and expanding on her favourite ideas and themes with the knowledge that she is addressing an audience that already has some idea about Nishkam Karmayoga or the role Krishna played at the battlefield of Kurukshetra, advising Arjuna about the relevance of action. Thus, she can easily wonder if Krishna in his dual role of both a god and Arjuna's sarathi (charioteer) is expounding the idea of gods being conscious of human fallibility. For those with a smattering of knowledge about Hindu mythologies or its main epics, On Hinduism will be a delight, since Doniger here is unrestrained by the need to reach out to an audience that might be at sea with the subject.
If there is one chapter that virtually completes Doniger's evolutionary journey and connects her personal voyage with her becoming what a true Sanskritist ideally ought to, it is the one at the end of the book in which she explains the concept of a Vaanaprasthi, one who is in the third stage of her life. Like a true Sanskritist (as opposed to the "real Sanskritists" she was confronted with in her academic life), she has given a more acceptable and comprehensive definition of Vaanaprastha, where she can take a detached view of life and work without worrying or aspiring for anything, for achievement no longer matters to her. This is what Krishna would call the state of a Sthitapragnya (an enlightened person) or even a Karmayogi (a doer without any desire for results). Doniger, it seems, has a new name for them - Vaanaprasthi!
ON HINDUISM
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 664
Price: Rs 999
