Nivedita Menon launches an intriguing and productive experiment in her article, 'The Embarrassed Modern Hindu' written in response to De Roover’s 'Untangling the Knot'. The questions she asks about the imaginary sister of the frustrated US immigrant imagined by De Roover are ones that we should not side-step. But Menon does not go far enough with her questions about this girl of the 1950s.Would this girl be excited by the ‘alternative’ readings/histories of the stories she grew up with? Menon assumes she would. Why? Because she grew up in a household completely geared towards fulfilling her brother’s needs rather than hers.
Let us grant to Menon that it is very likely that she did grow up in such a house-hold. But would that make her see the stories of Surpanakha and Sita as ‘oppressed women’ to which she wishes to draw her brother’s attention? What makes this a poignant question is that it really isn’t as if we have to draw completely from our imagination in order to re-construct this sister Menon has posited. Our mothers/grandmothers (Menon’s own, as she herself indicates) are a fair representation of what these women thought/think of these texts and these characters. What do/did they draw from them? The ‘oppression’ inherent in ‘Hinduism’? Surely, it would be odd if they did so, and yet, read the book from beginning to end every year with great devotion, as does Menon’s own mother! What could have been simpler and more authentic for Menon to do in order to gain an insight into her imaginary girl of the 50s, but to ask her mother what she thought of Doniger’s book?
This is part of the problem De Roover points towards when he speaks of the frustration amongst some Indians about the way their culture is depicted. Why is it Menon draws only page numbers from her mother but not her understanding of these texts? The answer for feminists is always already given: that’s a generation of women who have been ‘conditioned’ by patriarchy. So patriarchy conditions women, but American Academia cannot.
Isn’t it training in an academic tradition very much drawn from the West that makes Menon silence her own mother’s views on these texts? She does exactly what she implies De Roover does, silence the imaginary girl born in the 50s once she has served the purpose of drawing sympathy away from her brother. What makes patriarchy oppressive and Western academia liberatory if we learn to silence the very sources of our stories— our mothers and grandmothers/ fathers and grandfathers? Our attitude is: “Oh they know the texts, but they just don’t understand how to read them!”. Yes, and we don’t know the texts but we always already know what to make of them! Sounds suspiciously like either arrogance or folly, or what is worse— both— one compounding the other.
If the real point of Doniger’s book is, as Menon says, that “other subject positions than that of the beleaguered upper caste, upper class man have always laid claim to Hinduism”, then this is a point as banal as it may be true. Surely a culture that generated thousands of re-tellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata does not need to learn this from Doniger. (Neither does it need to learn from Dinanath Batra what the ‘correct’ versions are!) The point, however, is that these are stories re-told by communities or individuals from their perspective. What Doniger does, is to turn these stories into the source of an ‘alternative history’ of the Hindus! Doniger does not write a work of fiction. And it is here that De Roover’s point for a more scientific approach to the study of India needs to be amplified.
There is a long, and very much mainstream body of scholarship which draws a history of ancient India through completely haphazard readings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. This body of scholarship is nothing but the continuation of a colonial ‘scholarly’ tradition driven towards proving one nonsensical theory or another (from the Aryan-Dravidian divide to the ‘corruption’ of ‘Hinduism’ in the post-Vedic age). While the theories have been rejected, the tradition of scholarship they spawned remains intact. In that sense, Doniger’s is no ‘alternative history’ at all! Whether highlighting a feminist/sexual/low-caste historical perspective, the point Doniger and other scholars writing in this vein ignore is akin to this: to say that the story of Eklavya shows the position of tribals/lower castes in ancient India is like saying that the rape rate in ancient Greece is mirrored in the number of women Zeus rapes in Greek mythology. Similarly, to say that Surpanakha is the measure for how women’s sexuality was suppressed is akin to saying that Greek women were taught to give undue emphasis to virginity since Daphne preferred to be turned into a laurel tree than be taken by Apollo. What sounds patently absurd to us in one case does not strike us as in the least incongruous in another. Clearly, this has more to do with what passes as the ‘serious’ study of India as against what would be entertained as scholarship about the West.
Once we understand the primarily unscientific nature of Doniger’s work, the debate around ‘free speech’ will automatically disappear. For instance, we may ‘tolerate’ publications by Christian institutions or individuals who seek to reject the theory of evolution. But we certainly don’t teach them at University! And nobody writing such books is likely to get tenured positions in Universities. So clearly, there are standards of scientific and unscientific scholarship that even Menon would readily uphold and not confuse them with an issue of ‘free speech’. It is just that in the case of India studies, these lines have simply not been drawn! That is why practically anybody gets away with anything in the name of ‘Hinduism’ studies. Not just Doniger, but even Batra gets away with any kind of ‘knowledge claim’ that Penguin simply cannot fight. After all, as Menon says, if everybody is entitled to ‘their version’, then on what basis can Penguin fight Batra for the counter claims he makes? Thus, if anything, De Roover’s call for setting standards for the scientific research of India can only ensure that we can go beyond the shoddy notions about India that both Doniger and Batra express.
Dr Sufiya Pathan teaches at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
Srini Kalyanaraman
Let us grant to Menon that it is very likely that she did grow up in such a house-hold. But would that make her see the stories of Surpanakha and Sita as ‘oppressed women’ to which she wishes to draw her brother’s attention? What makes this a poignant question is that it really isn’t as if we have to draw completely from our imagination in order to re-construct this sister Menon has posited. Our mothers/grandmothers (Menon’s own, as she herself indicates) are a fair representation of what these women thought/think of these texts and these characters. What do/did they draw from them? The ‘oppression’ inherent in ‘Hinduism’? Surely, it would be odd if they did so, and yet, read the book from beginning to end every year with great devotion, as does Menon’s own mother! What could have been simpler and more authentic for Menon to do in order to gain an insight into her imaginary girl of the 50s, but to ask her mother what she thought of Doniger’s book?
This is part of the problem De Roover points towards when he speaks of the frustration amongst some Indians about the way their culture is depicted. Why is it Menon draws only page numbers from her mother but not her understanding of these texts? The answer for feminists is always already given: that’s a generation of women who have been ‘conditioned’ by patriarchy. So patriarchy conditions women, but American Academia cannot.
Isn’t it training in an academic tradition very much drawn from the West that makes Menon silence her own mother’s views on these texts? She does exactly what she implies De Roover does, silence the imaginary girl born in the 50s once she has served the purpose of drawing sympathy away from her brother. What makes patriarchy oppressive and Western academia liberatory if we learn to silence the very sources of our stories— our mothers and grandmothers/ fathers and grandfathers? Our attitude is: “Oh they know the texts, but they just don’t understand how to read them!”. Yes, and we don’t know the texts but we always already know what to make of them! Sounds suspiciously like either arrogance or folly, or what is worse— both— one compounding the other.
If the real point of Doniger’s book is, as Menon says, that “other subject positions than that of the beleaguered upper caste, upper class man have always laid claim to Hinduism”, then this is a point as banal as it may be true. Surely a culture that generated thousands of re-tellings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata does not need to learn this from Doniger. (Neither does it need to learn from Dinanath Batra what the ‘correct’ versions are!) The point, however, is that these are stories re-told by communities or individuals from their perspective. What Doniger does, is to turn these stories into the source of an ‘alternative history’ of the Hindus! Doniger does not write a work of fiction. And it is here that De Roover’s point for a more scientific approach to the study of India needs to be amplified.
There is a long, and very much mainstream body of scholarship which draws a history of ancient India through completely haphazard readings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. This body of scholarship is nothing but the continuation of a colonial ‘scholarly’ tradition driven towards proving one nonsensical theory or another (from the Aryan-Dravidian divide to the ‘corruption’ of ‘Hinduism’ in the post-Vedic age). While the theories have been rejected, the tradition of scholarship they spawned remains intact. In that sense, Doniger’s is no ‘alternative history’ at all! Whether highlighting a feminist/sexual/low-caste historical perspective, the point Doniger and other scholars writing in this vein ignore is akin to this: to say that the story of Eklavya shows the position of tribals/lower castes in ancient India is like saying that the rape rate in ancient Greece is mirrored in the number of women Zeus rapes in Greek mythology. Similarly, to say that Surpanakha is the measure for how women’s sexuality was suppressed is akin to saying that Greek women were taught to give undue emphasis to virginity since Daphne preferred to be turned into a laurel tree than be taken by Apollo. What sounds patently absurd to us in one case does not strike us as in the least incongruous in another. Clearly, this has more to do with what passes as the ‘serious’ study of India as against what would be entertained as scholarship about the West.
Once we understand the primarily unscientific nature of Doniger’s work, the debate around ‘free speech’ will automatically disappear. For instance, we may ‘tolerate’ publications by Christian institutions or individuals who seek to reject the theory of evolution. But we certainly don’t teach them at University! And nobody writing such books is likely to get tenured positions in Universities. So clearly, there are standards of scientific and unscientific scholarship that even Menon would readily uphold and not confuse them with an issue of ‘free speech’. It is just that in the case of India studies, these lines have simply not been drawn! That is why practically anybody gets away with anything in the name of ‘Hinduism’ studies. Not just Doniger, but even Batra gets away with any kind of ‘knowledge claim’ that Penguin simply cannot fight. After all, as Menon says, if everybody is entitled to ‘their version’, then on what basis can Penguin fight Batra for the counter claims he makes? Thus, if anything, De Roover’s call for setting standards for the scientific research of India can only ensure that we can go beyond the shoddy notions about India that both Doniger and Batra express.
Dr Sufiya Pathan teaches at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
Srini Kalyanaraman
Just brilliant, Sufia. Yes, go beyond Sepoy syndrome. Modern Hindu are free people. Thanks, Sufia Pathan for articulating every Hindu's yearning for dharma-dhamma which governs his or her life. It is about freedom. Let not the scholars mess with free people. Thanks. Kalyanaraman
- Jakob De Roover · India Platform at Universiteit GentA great article by Sufiya Pathan on the Doniger affair, written in reply to Nivedita Menon.
- Jaya Kanoria · Modern High School for GirlsSufiya, kudos to you for the article! Succinctly and most sensibly argued. Clearly Bunan Mikael isn't cramping your pen at all. Thank you for remembering me.
14/D-24 MAR 02, 2014 02:21 AM | The essence of scientific work is being able to withstand scrutiny aimed at demolishing them (recall Popper's view of science), in order to stand the test of time. Dishonest academics like Wendy and her sycophants in Academia cannot shield their nonsense parading itself as valid history from criticism and then expect it to remain unchallenged. These myriand indian sepoys who are working extra hard these days to give Wendy credentials that she neither has nor deserves with respect to studies on India. Thanks to Dr. Sufiya Pathan for saying it as it is. It would be surprising if Nivedita Menon has the brains or the intellectual integrity to defend herself now that her dishonesty has been exposed. |
13/D-23 MAR 02, 2014 02:15 AM | ""The history of ideas, even if not a source of 'hard history,' is a very precious thing to have. This is part of chapter 1, titled "Working with available light," where she discusses at length sources of history in India...So saying that her work is unscientific is a little uncharitable, to say the least." Uncharitable my foot. What is this nonsense. History is meant to be an attributable collection of thoughts categorized in time and space, at the very least verifiable sources that can be debated upon, especially if the meanings are not clearly understood, or are interpreted differently by different scholars. Wendy's pretense of "available light" does not withstand scrutiny especially given her (and her "indology" cronies) deliberate refusal to even consider other scholarly work that refutes her theories, and then defend her own "ideas of history". Wendy cannot just pull out "ideas of history" from her rear end, refuse to acknowledge valid criticism and then pretend that she is working with "available light". Wendy Doniger and her cronies cannot just come up their own "ideas of history" and pretend that is the same as correctly analyzing known history that is intimately tied to the people who are derivative of such history. Just spraying noxious fumes about "precious history of ideas" without exactly identifying verfiable sources of such "ideas of history" is known by another name: fiction. These retards who hold a benign view of Wendy's "scholarship" should try applying similar standards to studying the history of other religions and then see how far they get..they won't get to the next street corner, metaphorically speaking. |
12/D-231 MAR 01, 2014 11:32 PM | To be fair to Wendy Doniger, she does talk about using stories as historical sources right at the beginning of her book, in the section titled "Myth, History and Symbolism," wherein she also says, "The history of ideas, even if not a source of 'hard history,' is a very precious thing to have. This is part of chapter 1, titled "Working with available light," where she discusses at length sources of history in India...So saying that her work is unscientific is a little uncharitable, to say the least. |
11/D-153 MAR 01, 2014 04:38 PM | Great article. Also lovely to see that the best and most sensible take over this Doniger affair coming from a Muslim woman writer :). It is high time that some scientific approach and common sense is injected into cultural studies in the universities, especially for cultural studies of non-European societies. Colonialism is over but intellectual laziness is not over yet. |
10/D-141 MAR 01, 2014 03:32 PM | An apt response to Menon who in the process of trying to give voice to the Hindu boy’s sister unassumingly ended up silencing her mother. It is easy to theorise and discuss the plight of the ‘other’, the ‘subaltern’. It is even easier to pick out almost any written work and point out the unfairness of not looking at it from the feminine perspective but there are limits to how far one can go. Menon’s response to De Roover makes one wonder if feminism is one of the most easily available and safest option a critic can resort to. Pathan’s response in such a scenario becomes important if it has to escape being branded as an anti-feminist or patriarchal response which this response does, mostly owing to the fact that Pathan is a woman as well. The examples of Eklavya and Surpanakha’s stories were among the high points of the article. However the lines that followed them were what this response actually seems to be wanting to point at, which unfortunately looks overshadowed by the remaining arguments being made about free speech and such- "What sounds patently absurd to us in one case does not strike us as in the least incongruous in another. Clearly, this has more to do with what passes as the ‘serious’ study of India as against what would be entertained as scholarship about the West." |
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