What is this compendium not about? Little, and yet it is not the given wisdom, handed down in sacred texts that comprise the traditional history of the people who the rest of the world mistakenly call "Hindus."
And the reason that "Hindu" or "Hinduism" cannot apply to any group in general or a specific person is that the word would be defined by a series of negatives: not Muslim, not Christian, not Sufi, not Jewish, not Buddhist and not everything else. Still, the Hindu people practice religious and other traditions that include elements of every explanation, worship or philosophy that contacted them from the beginnings of humanity.
That is exactly where Doniger starts this tremendous undertaking: 50 million years ago when a chunk of earth separated from Madagascar and drifted northeast, possibly bringing the prototypes that became the first Indians. Or not. Doniger allows for many alternatives in her all-inclusive review of how the Hindus and Hinduism developed.
While The Hindus is deliberately not based on the Sanskrit teachings generated and preserved by the priestly caste, the Brahmins, Doniger has obviously read them all, and compared every version to the others. She's also read every book ever written about them. See the book's voluminous Bibliography. Her erudition becomes even more clear from the multitudinous quotations, notes, footnotes, poems, stories and fascinating asides that keep the writing refreshing and interesting as the story lumbers along through the millennia. The writing is eminently accessible for any reader, despite the author's position as the world's foremost authority on Hinduism. No stuffy academic treatise, this.
"Imagine if the fundamentalists who run so many of the present governments of the world were replaced by Tantrics; now, there's a theocracy for you, to boggle the mind. Or perhaps we should regard Bill Clinton as our first Tantric president."
Some of the themes traced include the notions of "clean" and "unclean", the roles of horses, cows and dogs, gender and social differences, the changing notions concerning sacrifice, householders versus renunciants, political leadership and temple building. Doniger points out the influences of all other religions and foreign rulers in the more ephemeral Indian arts and philosophy as well as the concretions of architecture.
Article comments
1 - AgniVayu
The author is not a formal authority on anything. She is a racist anti-Hindu bigot who also has a very degenerate mind. She distorts the HIndu view and shows it as a hyper-sexual religion. This is more reflective of her personally than of Hinduism. Why would a racist narrow minded White non-Hindu become an authority on Hinduism? She is not even a Sanskrit scholar, one of the most basic things one must know to comment on Hinduism.
She (& others like her) will become a relic of the past as more Hindus take ownership of their own history and stop letting racist imperial colonial historians tell them the history of their own people. Someone should tell these losers the colonial era is over.
2 - Georganna Hancock
Thank you for the comment, although it sounds like a personal attack to me. Have you read the book?
3 - Agnivayu
No I havn't read this book. But I have read other things Wendy Doniger has written (and they absolutely are propaganda). She teaches in a Divinity school (i.e. Christian) which is not unbiased ofcourse but interested in spreading Christianity.
We are taking ownership of our own history. Just like Westerners don't look to Indians/Hindus to learn about European/Christian history.
Here is a link to a good response to her statements.
4 - AgniVayu
“Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.” (from Doniger’s article about Hinduism in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia"Microsoft Encarta subsequently removed her entry in 2004"
What kind of nonsense propaganda is this to defame Hinduism. Don't Christians simulate eating the flesh and blood of Christ in Church, is that a toned down version of Cannibalism from before?
5 - Georganna Hancock
A more personal response to "The Hindus" from my blog:
... Her work clears up my decades-long confusion about Hinduism as a religion--it's been like the blind fondling an elephant. Every time I approached it, I encountered a different set of stimuli. No wonder! Hinduism, I now understand, is a complex mix of influences, some antithetical, but as a whole, tolerant of it's various practices.
Another benefit of Doniger's book is a correlation of world events through time. I have a much better sense of where and when Christianity and Islam developed and how they influenced the Indian cultures. I'd read Bulfinch's MYTHOLOGY since childhood, but now I see how Greek and Roman thinking fits into a more comprehensive understanding of human history. It is as if I had a set of alphabet blocks scattered about my brain, and Doniger arranged them to spell something recognizable.
... Reading The Hindus felt like dropping in the keystone to my wobbly arch of understanding. Thank you, Dr. Doniger, especially for your very approachable writing style that kept me chuckling as well as intellectually stimulated and, of course, challenged. My readers know I'm a great fan of references and back matter -- yours is the best!
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It is interesting to note that some of the comments on the article in the link referenced two posts above make the same complaint, that the critic failed to read the book.
Ah, nothing like a battle of academics to fire us up for the upcoming season of peace and joy!
Namaste
6 - AgniVayu
The book is entertainment for White audiences, so looks like it served that purpose. If Prof. Michael Witzel of Harvard University (no fan of Hinduism by any stretch of the imagination) considers Wendy Doniger's translations to be unreliable that should tell you something.
7 - AgniVayu
Read the complete idiot's guide to Hinduism if you want a good book on Hinduism.