Tunku Varadarajan reviews Wendy Doniger’s new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History:
A religion without a central church or pontiff—and with no predominant sacred place (à la Mecca)—Hinduism has spawned hundreds of competing devotional sects and theological strains. Ms. Doniger does a deft job of tracing their few unifying tenets—those of karma (actions) and dharma (righteousness) and a merit-based afterlife—and of holding these beliefs up to critical examination against the obvious injustices of the caste system. Her most beguiling chapters, though, are the ones in which she examines the impact on the Hindus of India’s numerous foreign invaders—from the earliest “Aryans” in the second millennium B.C. to the imperial British, the last and perhaps greatest external shapers of Hindu society.
Instructively, too—at a time when the Indian elections are almost upon us—Ms. Doniger trains her light on the use and abuse of Hindu mythology in modern Indian politics, what she calls “the past in the present.” It will come as no surprise that she is as unloving of the Hindu Right as she is of the Right in America, and with greater reason. Unlike India’s Hindu Right, the American Right does not seek to disenfranchise citizens on the basis of religion.
India is a country, she writes, “where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable.” Here Ms. Doniger refers to Hinduist attempts to interpret the past in ways that would portray the Muslim presence in India as unfailingly injurious to Hindus and devoid of any redeeming quality. Her previous scholarship, one notes, has been derided by “political” Hindus, a cadre notorious for its intolerance of unconventional interpretations of Hindu sacred texts. A militant Hindu once hurled an egg at Ms. Doniger as she lectured in London. Of this episode she writes: “He missed his aim, in every way.”
Read the full review in the Wall Street Journal.