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

addiction, and the senses that cause addiction are likened to horses; animals often represent bothwomen and the lower classes; the tension between sexuality and renunciation results in anambivalence toward women as mothers and seductresses; and violence is first addressed largelyin the form of violence against animals. Violence and tolerance also interact in attitudes not onlyto other religions but between the upper and lower castes, between men and women, andbetween humans and animals. I will highlight in each period those moments when intrareligious(including intercaste) or interreligious interactions took place, marked by either tolerance orviolence, the deciding factor between the two options often being historical circumstances. Eachchapter deals with several themes, but not every chapter has instances of every theme or treatsthe same theme in the same way (chapter 12 for instance, is about women more than aboutgoddesses, while chapter 14 is about goddesses more than about women), and indeed I haveoften noted the activities of women in other contexts, without explicitly highlighting theirgender. But wherever the evidence allows, I will organize each chapter around these centralthemes.(NON)VIOLENCEIn the Introduction (chapter 1), I spell out the assumptions behind my attention to historyand to the particular actors in this story (women, lower classes and castes, and animals). Here letme just say a few words about the central action: (non)violence.The term “nonviolence” (ahimsa) originally applied not to the relationship betweenhumans but to the relationship between humans and animals. Ahimsa means “the absence of thedesire to injure or kill,” a disinclination to do harm, rather than an active desire to be gentle; it isa double negative, perhaps best translated by the negative “nonviolence,” which suggests bothmental and physical concern for others. The roots of ahimsa may lie in Vedic ritual, in animalsacrifice, in the argument that the priest does not actually injure the animal but merely “pacifieshim”; the primary meaning of ahimsa is thus to do injury without doing injury, a casuistargument from its very inception. In the Rig Veda’ (the earliest Sanskrit text, from c. 1200 BCE),the word ahimsa refers primarily to the prevention of injury or violence to the sacrificer and hisoffspring, as well as his cattle (10.22.13). 18 The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the verbon which ahimsa is based, han, is ambiguous, meaning both “to strike or beat” and “to kill.”Ahimsa, therefore, when applied to cows, to take a case at random, might mean refraining eitherfrom beating them or killing them—quite a difference. In any case, ahimsa represents not apolitical doctrine or even a social theory, but the emotion of the horror of killing (or hurting) aliving creature, an emotion that we will see attested from the earliest texts. gArguments about whether or not to kill, sacrifice, and/or eat animals were often at theheart of interreligious violence, sometimes the grounds on which human beings attacked otherhuman beings (usually with words, though occasionally with blows). h Arjuna, the heroic warriorof the Mahabharata, the great ancient Sanskrit poem about a tragic war, excuses the violence ofwar by saying, “Creatures live on creatures, the stronger on the weaker. The mongoose eatsmice, just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beastseat the dog. Even ascetics [tapasas] cannot stay alive without killing” [12.15.16-24]. The texthere justifies human violence by the violence that is rampant in the animal world. Yet the mostcommon sense of ahimsa refers to humans’ decision to rise above animal violence.Vegetarianism, both as an ideal and as a social fact in India, challenges Arjuna’s belief thatanimals must inevitably feed on one another and attempts to break the chain of alimentaryviolence simply by affirming that it is not, in fact, necessary to kill in order to eat.