Books, Lies and Videotape: Wendy Doniger’s Misrepresentations about Hindu History
By F Feb. 17, 2014 9 Comments
I am a big fan of public funding for various things – public education, public television, and public radio. And I am usually impressed with the way National Public Radio((NPR) presents news, providing a multifaceted and balanced perspective on the news – the underlying dharma or justice of presenting more than one perspective is very much in line with the pluralism that is inherent in the way that I live my day to day life. No one way is necessarily “The Right Way.” Yet I was horrified to find that NPR did the exact opposite when interviewing University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger about her controversial book.
Robert Siegel recently interviewed Doniger on All Things Considered, because Penguin Books India has agreed to recall and destroy all copies of her book The Hindus: An Alternative History. Doniger, an academician whose scholarship has long been cause for concern and controversy over the years and had particularly aggravated those within the Hindu community for her misrepresentations, innuendos, and plain mistakes. In the interview she glosses over the inaccuracies, and focuses on how she offended the feelings of the Hindu community, and is almost gleeful that her book sales have risen due to continued controversy. Penguin too was more concerned about “the protection of creative freedoms in India” – something that should be relevant to a work of fiction, not the book in point.
A few years ago, I went looking for Doniger’s book in the local bookstore right after it came out, because an interfaith colleague asked me disturbing questions based on what he had read. I also knew that Doniger’s scholarship and that of her students has permeated academia, and their misrepresentations trickle down to what is taught about Hinduism. I had been concerned about how Hinduism was portrayed in my daughter’s middle school text books; I was even more appalled at the sections I read in The Hindus. Even today, I shudder, thinking of her invalidation of simple faith, as embodied by the story of Draupadi.
Draupadi is one of the central characters of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The stories in this epic have been told for hundreds of years, by grandmother to grandchild and through plays, movies, comic books, all to explain that even in the most drastic of situations, one should let go of fear and have faith that God will protect you. In the specific episode that Doniger references, Draupadi’s husband, the king Yudhishthara is gambling. He is playing a game of dice and not winning – as in most stories, there are the bad guys and the good guys, and the bad guys weighted the dice. He loses all his kingdom and then some. Draupadi is also part of the losses, and she is dragged into the court where all the men are: Someone (a bad guy) begins to pull her sari off – the multi-yard garment that is even today worn by women in India. Even as she is terrified and ashamed, Draupadi initially holds on to her sari so that she is not disrobed, but suddenly throws both hands up in surrender and puts her faith in God. She cries out for help to Krishna, the avatar (manifestation of God) in the Mahabharata. Krishna is elsewhere, but miraculously, the bad guy is unable to come to the end of the sari, and faints in exhaustion before he can even lay a finger on Draupadi. This story of simple devotion – keep your faith in God, no matter what is happening to you – is etched in my mind and many others through a scene in the 1950s Telugu film classic, Maya Bazaar. Doniger however, speaks of the “gambler’s wife” who is raped, desecrating more than my memory.
After reading excerpts of this book and several others in the same mold, I made sure to have a conversation with my kids about what they would learn and what their experience might be vis a vis Hinduism as they went through high school and college. They needed to know that work like Doniger’s creates stereotypes and can even generate Hinduphobia that is difficult to dispel. On Stormfront.org (the white nationalist, supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum that was the Internet’s first major hate site), Doniger is praised as a White Nationalist soldier from the left, “because using authoritative works by Professors always convinces most students“ to hate on Asians – hate that might someday be directed at my kids. I told them aboutAditi Banerjee, who decided to co-edit Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in North America, because of the Hinduphobia she faced. Hinduism is a pursuit for Truth, and I encourage my kids to seek it – and we should encourage anyone who wants to learn about Hinduism not to look for an alternative, either.
One way to learn about Hinduism is to visit the Hindu American Foundation’sHinduism 101 page. As an advocacy organization promoting human dignity, mutual respect and pluralism, we (disclaimer, I sit on the Foundation’s Board) have sought academicians and religious scholars to help create material for someone seeking basic understanding about Hindus and Hindu practices. The materials on the site – along with other recommendations like the Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism, the Chinmaya Mission’s Q & A about Hinduism, India Unveiled by Robert Arnet, and A Survey of Hinduism by Klaus Klostermaier – seek to capture the diversity of Hinduism, focusing on the wide range practices and beliefs under the Hindu umbrella.
While defending Doniger’s right to be published, we have long spoken out about her work, with a distinctly American Hindu voice. My fellow Board member and co-founder, Aseem Shukla,questioned the book’s accuracy not too long after it was published. A recent addition to our staff, the Director of Education and Curriculum Reform, Dr. Murali Balaji, recently put the censorship issue front and center in the Huffington Post. A former journalist and academician, he easily explains the nuances of the issue: preventing people from reading the book also prevents them also from seeing for themselves how it misrepresents a living tradition. Hopefully the furor over the publisher’s decision to withdraw the book dies down, and NPR and others refer to our official statement to hear another side of the story.
About Padma Kuppa
Padma Kuppa is a Hindu American and community activist working for social justiceand understanding. She is a co-founder of both the Troy-area Interfaith Group and the Bharatiya Temple of Metropolitan Detroit's Outreach Committee, an Advisory Board Member of WISDOM, a metro-Detroit women’s interfaith organization. Padma focuses on inter-religious cooperation as an Executive Council member of the Hindu American Foundation. Views expressed here are those of Padma Kuppa and do not necessarily represent those of any organization of which she is a part.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/seekingshanti/2014/02/books-lies-and-videotape-wendy-donigers-misrepresentations-about-hindu-history/
Monday, April 27, 2009
To Read or Not to Read
Reviewing the Reviews - THE HINDUS: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger
In Passages From India By Michael Dirda, a book review that appeared in the Washington Post on March 19, 2009, it says, “In tracing the evolution of Hinduism, the author has a specialized focus unsuited to readers seeking an introduction to the subject.”
In Another Incarnation by Pankaj Misra, a book review that appeared in the New York Times on April 24, 2009, it says, “As Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, explains in her staggeringly comprehensive book, the British Indologists who sought to tame India’s chaotic polytheisms had a ‘Protestant bias in favor of scripture.’”
I tend to agree with these statements, as well as Doniger’s words in March 2009 in the Newsweek blog, On Faith: “And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in "The Hindus: An Alternative History," to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it's a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, "The Hindus believe. . . ," is talking nonsense.
“My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English--imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people.”
But in linking to the book excerpt, I took issue with this parenthetical sentence:
“(The gambler's wife who is fondled by other men reappears in the Mahabharata when the wife of the gambler Yudhishthira is stripped in the public assembly.)” Draupadi, Yudhishthira’s wife, is not stripped, there is only an attempt to do so. Any child who has heard this Mahabharata story can tell you this Draupadi’s faith in Krishna – love incarnate – is rewarded by Krishna’s protection. Dushshasana, the person who attempts to strip her, becomes exhausted as he pulls and pulls at her clothing, and it is he who is shamed as he collapses on the ground, while Draupadi retains her modesty.
In the Post, Dirda writes, “Although Sita proves and proves again her innocence, Doniger underscores the crassness of Rama's jealous-husband behavior but also notes certain textual hints that Sita is more sexual than she appears and that her feelings for Rama's brother Lakshmana might well be more than familial. As Sita is the classic model of Indian womanhood, such sacrilegious speculation once led to Doniger being egged at a London lecture.” I wring my hands at this simplification of Indian womanhood, and am left speechless at the implications of a relationship between Lakshmana and Sita.
My friend John Maunu, who sent me the link to the NY Times review, understood EM Forster to be anti-Hindu and Euro-centric, based on what Misra says: “Forster, who later used his appalled fascination with India’s polytheistic muddle to superb effect in his novel ‘A Passage to India,’ was only one in a long line of Britons who felt their notions of order and morality challenged by Indian religious and cultural practices.” Forster said in 1915 in “The Mission of Hinduism” that “it preaches with intense conviction and passion the doctrine of unity… these two contradictory beliefs do really correspond to emotions that each of us can feel, namely, ‘I am different from everybody else’ and ‘I am the same as everybody else.’”
I too have completely contradictory emotions – I should read this book and I should not read it. I don’t know the complete history of Sanatana Dharma, but as a practicing Hindu, I wonder whether I can rely on this book as the source for it. These concluding thoughts from the April 2009 review by Prof. V. V. Raman, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Humanities at Rochester Institute of Technology, helped me decide that I should read it (some day)…
Every Non-Hindu, whether scholar or lay person, who has any interest in the Hindu world is likely to read and benefit from this book. Many English-educated Hindus may also skim through the book, even if only reluctantly. Wendy Doniger who has devoted a lifetime to the study of Sanskrit and to (her own) elucidation of Hindu culture has written a semi-popular, but erudite treatise on aspects of classical India, drawing largely from original texts. The book is certainly a solid contribution to a global understanding of the Hindu world from interesting perspectives, tracing, as it does, the roots of Hindu worldviews to the vast corpus of literature, lay and religious, oral and written, in Sanskrit and in Tamil, ranging from Vedic hymns and the great epics to the Upanishads, Puranas, and more that have breathed life into Indic culture. Though interspersed with tongue-in-cheek comments which are not likely to sit well with all readers, the book is a delight to read. It brings together the many strands that weave traditional Hinduism into a rainbow richness, with its dichotomies and marvelous contradictions. There are not too many social histories of classical India, certainly none of this sweep and subtlety. What is sorely missing in the book is a narrative on the independent India of the past six decades and more, which has become oh so different, for the good and for the bad, from the purana India she has painted so well and in such detail.
Not all Hindus will be thrilled by the tone of the book here and there, but it is difficult for any objective reader to deny that Wendy Doniger has worthily executed the task she had set for herself: to capture the evolution to Hindu culture with emphasis on the perspectives of the underclass. In the process she educates everyone, or at least enriches the eager reader in countless ways.
In Passages From India By Michael Dirda, a book review that appeared in the Washington Post on March 19, 2009, it says, “In tracing the evolution of Hinduism, the author has a specialized focus unsuited to readers seeking an introduction to the subject.”
In Another Incarnation by Pankaj Misra, a book review that appeared in the New York Times on April 24, 2009, it says, “As Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, explains in her staggeringly comprehensive book, the British Indologists who sought to tame India’s chaotic polytheisms had a ‘Protestant bias in favor of scripture.’”
I tend to agree with these statements, as well as Doniger’s words in March 2009 in the Newsweek blog, On Faith: “And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in "The Hindus: An Alternative History," to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it's a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, "The Hindus believe. . . ," is talking nonsense.
“My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English--imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people.”
But in linking to the book excerpt, I took issue with this parenthetical sentence:
“(The gambler's wife who is fondled by other men reappears in the Mahabharata when the wife of the gambler Yudhishthira is stripped in the public assembly.)” Draupadi, Yudhishthira’s wife, is not stripped, there is only an attempt to do so. Any child who has heard this Mahabharata story can tell you this Draupadi’s faith in Krishna – love incarnate – is rewarded by Krishna’s protection. Dushshasana, the person who attempts to strip her, becomes exhausted as he pulls and pulls at her clothing, and it is he who is shamed as he collapses on the ground, while Draupadi retains her modesty.
In the Post, Dirda writes, “Although Sita proves and proves again her innocence, Doniger underscores the crassness of Rama's jealous-husband behavior but also notes certain textual hints that Sita is more sexual than she appears and that her feelings for Rama's brother Lakshmana might well be more than familial. As Sita is the classic model of Indian womanhood, such sacrilegious speculation once led to Doniger being egged at a London lecture.” I wring my hands at this simplification of Indian womanhood, and am left speechless at the implications of a relationship between Lakshmana and Sita.
My friend John Maunu, who sent me the link to the NY Times review, understood EM Forster to be anti-Hindu and Euro-centric, based on what Misra says: “Forster, who later used his appalled fascination with India’s polytheistic muddle to superb effect in his novel ‘A Passage to India,’ was only one in a long line of Britons who felt their notions of order and morality challenged by Indian religious and cultural practices.” Forster said in 1915 in “The Mission of Hinduism” that “it preaches with intense conviction and passion the doctrine of unity… these two contradictory beliefs do really correspond to emotions that each of us can feel, namely, ‘I am different from everybody else’ and ‘I am the same as everybody else.’”
I too have completely contradictory emotions – I should read this book and I should not read it. I don’t know the complete history of Sanatana Dharma, but as a practicing Hindu, I wonder whether I can rely on this book as the source for it. These concluding thoughts from the April 2009 review by Prof. V. V. Raman, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Humanities at Rochester Institute of Technology, helped me decide that I should read it (some day)…
Every Non-Hindu, whether scholar or lay person, who has any interest in the Hindu world is likely to read and benefit from this book. Many English-educated Hindus may also skim through the book, even if only reluctantly. Wendy Doniger who has devoted a lifetime to the study of Sanskrit and to (her own) elucidation of Hindu culture has written a semi-popular, but erudite treatise on aspects of classical India, drawing largely from original texts. The book is certainly a solid contribution to a global understanding of the Hindu world from interesting perspectives, tracing, as it does, the roots of Hindu worldviews to the vast corpus of literature, lay and religious, oral and written, in Sanskrit and in Tamil, ranging from Vedic hymns and the great epics to the Upanishads, Puranas, and more that have breathed life into Indic culture. Though interspersed with tongue-in-cheek comments which are not likely to sit well with all readers, the book is a delight to read. It brings together the many strands that weave traditional Hinduism into a rainbow richness, with its dichotomies and marvelous contradictions. There are not too many social histories of classical India, certainly none of this sweep and subtlety. What is sorely missing in the book is a narrative on the independent India of the past six decades and more, which has become oh so different, for the good and for the bad, from the purana India she has painted so well and in such detail.
Not all Hindus will be thrilled by the tone of the book here and there, but it is difficult for any objective reader to deny that Wendy Doniger has worthily executed the task she had set for herself: to capture the evolution to Hindu culture with emphasis on the perspectives of the underclass. In the process she educates everyone, or at least enriches the eager reader in countless ways.