Beheading Hindus

[Apollonius]

The withdrawal of 'The Hindus' - Times Literary Supplement, 21 February 2014
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1377433.ece

As we report in this week’s NB column (TLS, February 21, 2014), Penguin India’s decision to withdraw and pulp all remaining copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An alternative history has provoked outcry in the literary world. The move followed four years of legal wrangling in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the Hindu fundamentalist group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, which took exception to Doniger’s handling of Hindu mythology.

Leading the charge was Doniger’s Penguin India comrade Arundhati Roy, who accused the outfit of having meekly “caved in” despite the lack of “fatwa . . . ban . . . [or] even a court order”. More circumspect, however, was Doniger herself, who praised Penguin for taking her book on in the first place “knowing that it would stir anger in Hindutva ranks”. Most pertinent was the author’s parting shot, which reminded us of the true, subversive meaning of internet democracy: “I am glad that, in the age of the Internet, it is no longer possible to suppress a book. The Hindus is available on Kindle; and if legal means of publication fail, the Internet has other ways of keeping books in circulation”. ...

Beheading Hindus - David Arnold, Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 2009
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article758656.ece


And other, controversial aspects of Wendy Doniger’s history of a mythology


Review of:

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger (Penguin)

People lose their heads quite often in Hindu mythology. On a father’s whim, a son cuts off his mother’s head; demons are decapitated to expel the chaos-threatening poison lurking in their throats; the fidelity of wives and the faith of devotees are tested by beheading; and, in the rituals myth sustains, animals lose their heads to satisfy sacrificial imperatives. But, as Wendy Doniger reassures us in her courageous and scholarly book, in Hindu myth “beheading is seldom fatal”. Nor is it without meaning and purpose, for decapitation proves a means of achieving a creative fusion between apparently incongruous parts. Heads are restored, but they are also misplaced. Doniger recounts a South Indian tale in which the wife of a sage is sentenced to death by her husband. At the moment of execution, the Brahmin wife, from the highest of castes, embraces a Pariah, a woman from the very lowest of castes, an “untouchable”, and in the confusion, both women lose their heads. The sage relents, pardons both women and restores their heads, but one woman now bears a Brahmin head on a Pariah body, the other a Pariah head on a Brahmin body. This story is full of the kinds of multiple meanings that flash throughout this fascinating book. In the anxious world of the “Brahmin imaginary”, it articulates high-caste fears about the “confusion of classes”, the miscegenation of types that constantly threatens in this mixed-up, decadent age. But the tale also hints at male violence (against women), feminine sympathy (here a cause of calamity) and the misguided authority of a man who, in seeking to restore order, is in fact responsible for creating even greater confusion. ...

[YMix]

There are... ummm... evaluation copies of this banned book available on the Internet.

[Nonc Hilaire]

The severing of the neck has implications beyond beheading. The Hebrew word nephesh means both neck and soul; soul being the connection between this world and the eternal. Considering the importance of the neck in standards of beauty, dress and making love I would expect beheading to have a rather rich mythological significance.

[kmich]

Banned in Bangalore - Wendy Doniger

CHICAGO — LAST month a retired Hindu schoolteacher named Dinanath Batra, who had brought a lawsuit against me and Penguin Books, India, succeeded in getting my book, “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn from publication in India. The book, the court agreed, was a violation of India’s blasphemy law, which makes it a crime to offend the sensibilities of a religious person.

Within hours I was receiving hundreds of emails from colleagues, students, readers, high school friends and even complete strangers — in the United States, India and beyond — commiserating with me in my dark hour. But their sympathy, while appreciated, was also wasted: I was in high spirits.

I have devoted my entire academic career, going back to the 1960s, to the interpretation of Hinduism and Indian society, and I have long been inured to the vilification of my books by a narrow band of narrow-minded Hindus.

Their voices had drowned out those of the broader, more liberal parts of Indian society; it reminded me of William Butler Yeats’s line: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

What is new, and heartening, this time is that the best are suddenly full of passionate intensity. The dormant liberal conscience of India was awakened by the stunning blow to freedom of speech that had been dealt by my publisher in giving in to the demands of the claimants, agreeing to take the book out of circulation and pulp all remaining copies.

I think the ugliness of the word “pulp” is what struck a nerve, conjuring up memories of “Fahrenheit 451” and Germany in the 1930s. The outrage had been pent up for many years, as other books, films, paintings and sculptures were forced out of circulation by a mounting wave of censorship.

My case was simply the last straw, in part because of its timing, just when many in India had begun to view with horror the likelihood that the elections in May will put into power Narendra Modi, a member of the ultra-right wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

If Mr. Batra’s intention was to keep people from reading the book, it certainly backfired: In India, not a single copy was destroyed (the publisher had only a few copies in stock, and those in bookstores quickly sold out), and e-books circulate freely. You cannot ban a book in the age of the Internet. Its sales rank on Amazon has been in single-digit heaven. “Banned in Boston” is a selling label.

Attention has now shifted, rightly, to the broader problems posed by the Indian blasphemy law. My case has helped highlight the extent to which Hindu fundamentalists (Hindutva-vadis, those who champion “Hindutva,” or “Hindu-ness”) now dominate the political discourse in India.

Two objections to the book cited in the lawsuit reveal something about the Hindutva mentality. First, the suit objects “that the aforesaid book is written with Christian Missionary Zeal.” This caused great hilarity among my friends and family, since I grew up in a Jewish family in Great Neck, N.Y.

But when I foolishly decided to set the matter straight — “Hey,” I wrote to an accuser, “I’m Jewish” — I was hit with a barrage of poisonous anti-Semitism. One correspondent wrote: “Hi. I recently came across your book on hindus. Where you try to humiliate us. I don’t know much about jews. Based on your work, I think jews are evil. So Hitler was probably correct in killing all jews in Germany. Bye.”

It’s hard to have a religious dialogue with someone who begins the conversation like that. I was doing better in my role as a Christian missionary. But there is a bitter irony in this mischaracterization of my religion, since Christian missionaries are actually a part of the problem.

The Victorian Protestant British scorned Hinduism’s polytheism, erotic sculptures, spirited mockery of its own gods and earthy mythology as filthy paganism. They also preferred the texts created and perpetuated by a small, upper-caste male elite, and regarded as beneath contempt the vast oral and vernacular literatures enriched and animated by the voices of women and lower castes. It is this latter, “alternative” Hinduism that my book celebrates throughout Indian history.

Many of the Hindu elite who worked closely with the British caught the prejudices of their masters. In the 19th century, those Hindus lifted up other aspects of Hinduism — its philosophy, its tradition of meditation — that were more palatable to European tastes and made them into a new, sanitized brand of Hinduism, often referred to as Sanatana Dharma, “the Eternal Law.”

That’s the Hinduism that Hindutva-vadis are defending, while they deny the one that the Christian missionaries hated and that I love and write about — the pluralistic, open-ended, endlessly imaginative, often satirical Hinduism. The Hindutva-vadis are the ones who are attacking Hinduism; I am defending it against them.

The Victorian factor also accounts for the Hindutva antipathy to sex. (Here it is not irrelevant that India recently passed a law criminalizing homosexuality.) The lawsuit objects that my “focus in approaching Hindu Scriptures has been sexual in orientation.” In my defense, I can tell you there is a lot of sex in Hinduism, and therefore a lot of puritanism in Hindutva; where there are lions, there are jackals. The poems and songs that imagine the god as lover, like the exquisite statues of goddesses, are a vital part of the religion of those Hindus who did not cave under the pressure of colonial scorn.

But I must apologize for what may amount to false advertising on my behalf by Mr. Batra, who pronounced my book “filthy and dirty.” Readers who bought a copy in hope of finding such passages will be, I fear, disappointed. “The Hindus” isn’t about sex at all. It’s about religion, which is much hotter than sex.

[Apollonius]

India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade - Wendy Doniger, New York Review of Books, 8 May 2014
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... insrc=hpss

...
It Can Happen Here: The Textbook Controversy

The fight in India has emigrated to the United States, for the Hindutva movement now dominates the political discourse in the American diaspora as well as in India. Out of a mounting sense of political entitlement and a heightened consciousness of the American phenomenon of identity politics, a small but growing group of Hindus in the American diaspora is raising objections to the work of a number of American scholars writing and teaching about Hinduism.

The situation in the US is not the same as the situation in India, for many obvious reasons, nor are the American protesters simply responding directly to events in India. Still, there is a strong, if indirect, connection between the rise of the Hindutva movement in India and in America. When books published by American scholars—including Jeffrey Kripal, Paul Courtright, James Laine—were attacked in India, and the Indian editions were suppressed, the books remained in print in America, but the offending scholars received death threats here.

America has also seen unsuccessful Hindu attempts to censor books in a manner alarmingly similar to the way that Batra has attacked books and censored textbooks in India. In 2000, two of the leading historians of ancient India, Romila Thapar and Michael Witzel, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about Hindu attempts to alter school textbooks in the US:

Initially, the goals of these pressure groups seem benign, and even righteous. They aim to rectify culturally biased and insensitive depictions of India and Hinduism, and they would like Hinduism to be treated with the same respect as
Christianity, Judaism and Islam.8

These concerns are entirely justified. Time and again, when I give a public lecture in the United States, no matter what I talk about, the first question from the American audience is: “What about the caste system?” Most textbooks, too, dwell upon, and exaggerate, the human abuses in the caste system and pay insufficient attention to the rest of Hinduism. But some of the Hindu interest groups have demanded that textbooks not mention the caste system at all, which can be as bad a distortion as the overemphasis on it. And this is not all that is at stake, as Thapar and Witzel went on to point out:

If such reasonable changes comprised the full extent of the desired amendments, there would be no controversy. There are, however, other agendas being pushed that are oddly familiar: the first Indian civilization is 1,900 million years old, the Ramayana and Mahabharata are historical texts to be understood literally, and ancient Hindu scriptures contain precise calculations of the speed of light and exact distances between planets in the solar system.

In 2005, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation met with an ad hoc committee that included a consortium of California Department of Education staff and persuaded them to approve a number of changes in the way that school textbooks presented Hinduism. The changes involved such matters as pushing back the dates of major milestones in Indian history and erasing or minimizing features of Hinduism that could be perceived as negative, such as the caste system, the social category of untouchables (dalits), and the status of women. A great many prominent historians and scholars of South Asia protested against this, urging the board not to allow the religious chauvinism of some Hindus to become the policy of the state of California.9

Eventually, the scholars won; most of the proposed changes were not made. In February 2009, the Federal District Court of California ruled resoundingly against the Hindu interest groups that had brought a subsequent suit. Here I should also note that many Hindu Americans testified against the proposed changes, siding with the scholars10; the range of opinions among Hindus in the American diaspora is as diverse as it is among Hindus in India.

But serious damage had been done. Charles Burress, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, commented:

Even though the board resisted many of the changes sought by activist groups this time, the conflict could still impact future textbooks with publishers being tempted to soften the content on their own initiative, said Stanford University professor of education Sam Wineburg.

“Publishers will tread on this territory ever more lightly,” Wineburg said…. “The result,” said Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, “is textbook editors censor themselves. They fall all over themselves to try to cater to one pressure group.”

This sort of bullying and the resultant self-censorship have indeed caused many scholars, especially young scholars still without the armor of tenure, not only to bite their tongues and hold back their true judgments on many sensitive issues, but even to refrain from tackling such topics at all—until, they tell themselves, they get tenure. But the sad truth is that generally by the time they do get tenure they have forgotten what it was that they wanted to say.

And the brush fire is spreading. Hindu parents of children in American schools, supported by messages from India, have brought concerted action against several school districts, objecting to the treatment of Hinduism in textbooks and insisting that they be altered to include such patently incorrect statements as that Sati (suttee)—the burning of women on their husbands’ funeral pyres—is a Muslim practice imported into India, or that the caste system is just a suggestion without any real effect.11 As one case is settled, another crops up somewhere else.


Who Speaks for Hinduism?

Members of the Hindu community in America have also made a concerted effort to limit the academic study and teaching of Hinduism to people who are themselves Hindus. This stems in part from their resentment of non-Hindu scholars who are seen as dominating the field inappropriately, shutting out Hindus. That claim is not true. Hindus are on the faculty of many religion departments all over the country; Hindus as well as non-Hindus teach Hinduism in American schools.

But the claim that only Hindus should teach about Hinduism betrays the same misunderstanding of the nature of secular education, of the academic discipline of religious studies, that colors Batra’s contentions. Growing up in a tradition does not necessarily produce the knowledge and understanding required of a scholar of religion. There is an essential difference between preaching and teaching, between teaching religion (which the parents or, more often nowadays, grandparents of many American Hindus may do) and teaching about religion (which Hindu or non-Hindu instructors in school may do).

Comparative religion—such as the study of Hinduism by someone who may not be Hindu, always an implicitly comparative enterprise—is not the same thing as interreligious dialogue, in which only Hindus can publicly speak for Hinduism. Both approaches—comparative religion and interreligious dialogue—are valuable, but they have very different goals and limitations. Of course there is always bias, from inside or outside the religion. But writing and teaching in the academic study of religion should never depend upon the faith of the writer or teacher. Otherwise it’s interreligious dialogue all the way down, and the equally valuable work of comparative religion is lost.


The Threat in India

Scholars in America must therefore deal with problems quite different from those that threaten scholars in India, but for that very reason they have a vital role to play in combating the threat to intellectual freedom posed by people like Batra. His lawsuit against my book also asks the court to

pass a decree of mandatory injunction directing the defendant no. 2 and 3 [the publishers] to issue appropriate instructions and guidelines ensuring that such objectionable books containing defamatory and derogatory passages should not be published in future.

Furthermore, he said, the court should act so that “she [me] may also be restrained from dissemanting [sic] misleading and fictitious facts.” Presumably he wants me to show future drafts of my books to him to be vetted; the schoolmaster would have me hold out my hand to receive the blows of his ruler. Dream on.

But Batra has also stated, in The New York Times, his intention in future to vet all of the books written for India’s children:

He dreams of creating a panel to review textbooks for the first 12 grades of India’s government schools. Asked how many he would like to replace, he waved a hand: All of them.

“Alternate books will come out,” he said. “We shall give them guidelines.”12
He has done it before and would do it again. Wherever he finds literature that he perceives to be not in line with the “cultural and spiritual heritage” of India, literature that “is found to disrespect the sentiments or distort facts, we will agitate at the State level and pursue legal action.”13

Indeed, he has already gone after another book of mine, On Hinduism, originally published by the Aleph Book Company in Delhi and available worldwide (except in India) from Oxford University Press. Even if, as I hope, Batra’s attacks on books are ultimately stopped, and the books are restored to bookstores, the trouble that he has made may well discourage courageous publishing in India, for the very same reasons that, as the San Francisco Chronicle reporter feared, the thwarted Hindu attacks on American textbooks might discourage American publishers: to avoid a potentially depressing and expensive fuss. ...