The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

factions, the times of the “mixing of classes” (varna-samkara) that the Brahmins alwaystried—inevitably in vain—to prevent.Second, in addition to focusing on a special group of actors, I have concentrated on a fewimportant actions, several of which are also important to us today: nonviolence toward humans(particularly religious tolerance) and toward animals (particularly vegetarianism and objectionsto animal sacrifice) and the tensions between the householder life and renunciation, and betweenaddiction and the control of sensuality. More specific images too (such as the transposition ofheads onto bodies or the flooding of cities) thread their way through the entire historical fabric ofthe book. I have traced these themes through the chapters and across the centuries to providesome continuity in the midst of all the flux, 2 even at the expense of what some might regard asmore basic matters.Third, this book attempts to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, asa linga (an emblem of the god Shiva, often representing his erect phallus) is set in a yoni (thesymbol of Shiva’s consort, or the female sexual organ), or any statue of a Hindu god in its baseor plinth (pitha). I have organized the topics historically in order to show not only how each ideais a reaction to ideas that came before (as any good old-fashioned philological approach woulddo) but also, wherever possible, how those ideas were inspired or configured by the events of thetimes, how Hinduism, always context sensitive, 3 responds to what is happening, at roughly thesame moment, not only on the political and economic scene but within Buddhism or Islam inIndia or among people from other cultures entering India. For Hinduism, positioning kings asgods and gods as kings, seldom drew a sharp line between secular and religious power. In recentyears a number of historians of religions, particularly of South Asian religions, havecontextualized particular moments in the religious history of the subcontinent. 4 This bookattempts to extend that particularizing project to the whole sweep of Indian history, from thebeginning (and I do mean the beginning, c. 50,000,000 BCE) to the present. This allows us to seehow certain ongoing ideas evolve, which is harder to do with a focus on a particular event or textat a particular moment.This will not serve as a conventional history (my training is as a philologist, not ahistorian) but as a book about the evolution of several important themes in the lives of Hinduscaught up in the flow of historical change. It tells the story of the Hindus primarily through astring of narratives. The word for “history” in Sanskrit, itihasa, could be translated as “That’swhat happened,” giving the impression of an only slightly more modest equivalent of vonRanke’s phrase for positivist history: “Wie es [eigentlich] gewesen ist” (“The way it [really]happened”). But the iti in the word is most often used as the Sanskrit equivalent of “end quote,”as in “Let’s go [iti],” he said. Itihasa thus implies not so much what happened as what peoplesaid happened (“That’s what he said happened”)—narratives, inevitably subjective narratives.And so this is a history not of what the British used to call maps and chaps (geography andbiography) but of the stories in hi-story. It’s a kind of narrative quilt made of scraps of religionsewn in next to scraps of social history, a quilt like those storytelling cloths that Indian narratorsuse as mnemonic devices to help them and the audience keep track of the plot. The narratorassembles the story from the quilt pieces much as the French rag-and-bones man, the bricoleur,makes new objects out of the broken-off pieces of old objects (bricolage). 5Like any work of scholarship, this book rests on the shoulders of many pygmies as wellas giants. I have kept most of the scholarly controversies out of the text, after laying out the rulesof the game in these first two chapters of methodological introduction and in the pre-Vedicperiod (chapters 2 through 4), which might stand as paradigms for what might have been done