'The Hindus,' by Wendy Doniger

'The Hindus,' by Wendy Doniger

Sandip Roy, Special to The Chronicle

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Hindus

An Alternative History

By Wendy Doniger

(Penguin; 779 pages; $35)

In Hindu households all over India, women use rice powder to make beautifully intricate designs on courtyards before religious ceremonies. The patterns are then smudged into oblivion by the bare feet of worshipers. A casual observer might think the designs are lost, but in reality the feet of the family are carrying the motifs into the house from the courtyard. "The material traces of ritual art must vanish in order that mental traces may remain intact forever," writes Wendy Doniger in her opus on Hinduism, "The Hindus: An Alternative History."

Chronicling the history of Hinduism is like reconstructing those rice powder patterns. Unwieldy, ancient, with some 890 million practitioners, Hinduism has a rich tradition of texts but just as much history that falls in the cracks between the texts. Despite many elaborate temples of public worship, it's a private household religion. Its sacred texts come from an oral tradition. Gods in one branch are footnotes in another. It is not centered on a Jesus or Buddha.

The title of Doniger's book ("An Alternative History") is problematic. It suggests the Hinduism she is chronicling is a shadow version of some other more mainstream narrative. But as she points out, Hinduism has always been a religion of many strands, "an ancient Wikipedia" bearing the fingerprints of many authors. The West knows it best for the philosophy in the Bhagavad Gita, but as Doniger shows, the Gita was not the most important book in the canon. It was just the book Indian elite in British India thought would be most acceptable to puritanical Protestant Westerners.

The Gita is described as the sanatana or unchanging eternal Hinduism. But the religion is ever-changing. The same story gets retold many times, but the emphasis changes as the storyteller's values change. A king who is a cad in one story gets a makeover in another version. Gods get promoted and demoted. The Buddha becomes an avatar of Lord Vishnu. Doniger is able to contextualize these shifts, showing how history changed the topography of the Hindu pantheon. She brings the voices of women and lower castes in from the margins to show how they influenced the development of the religion. Witty and erudite, she has written a people's history of Hinduism.

It's a touchy exercise, especially when conducted by a Westerner. Doniger has had eggs thrown at her for daring to bring up Hindu texts that have shown heroes to have feet of clay. Sita is now idealized as the ultimate dutiful wife of Lord Rama from the epic Ramayana. But the Ramayana could also be read as Sita walking out on Rama in the end when she returns to her earth mother - "an extraordinary move for a Hindu wife." In a more contemporary retelling, Sita promises one of the ogresses who befriends her in captivity that she would be reborn as Queen Victoria!

Doniger is able to take some key threads - the role of women, animals (cows, dogs, horses), nonviolence - and follow the evolution of attitudes toward them. Hinduism became notorious for the ritual of suttee, in which a wife burned herself (or was burned) on the husband's funeral pyre. But Hinduism also boasted heroines like Draupadi, with her five husbands. Or Jabala, who is asked by her son Satyakama who his father was. "My dear, I don't know the line of your male ancestors," she tells him. "When I was young, I got around a lot, as I was working, and I got you. But my name is Jabala and your name is Satyakama (Lover of Truth)." This is from the Chandyoga Upanishad (c. 600 B.C.)!

But Doniger also cautions modern-day feminists from reading too much into stories of nonconformists like Jabala. Hindu goddesses tend to be, as folklorist A.K. Ramanujan described them, either goddesses of the breast (wives to gods) or goddesses of the tooth (fierce demon killers), but goddess worship has not translated into political or economic power for women. The goddesses might ride lions and do things otherwise forbidden, yet as Doniger wryly comments, "in taking the mythology of goddesses as a social charter, the goddess feminists are batting on a sticky wicca."

Doniger will no doubt raise the ire of many purists - any discussion of whether the Vedic people ate cows always unleashes a firestorm of protest. (The sacred cow notwithstanding, there are few temples to cows.) But there is room for that debate in Hinduism. Hinduism has always been a syncretic religion, absorbing its invaders. That in modern times has been read as a weakness, a sort of passive femininity. Hindu nationalists want a more masculine, definitive religion with a single party line. But they have their work cut out in a religion with a deity like Ardhanarishvara, half man (Shiva), half woman (Shakti) and fully divine.

Sandip Roy is host of the New America Media radio show "New America Now" on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco. E-mail him at .