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

and roast himself so that the Brahmin could eat him. Indra conjured up a magical fire; when therabbit—who first shook himself three times so that any insects that might be on his body wouldescape death—threw himself into the fire, it turned icy cold. Indra then revealed his identity asIndra, and so that everyone would know of the rabbit’s virtue, he painted the sign of a rabbit onthe orb of the moon. 22 The convoluted logic of the rabbit’s act of self-violence, in hisdetermination to protect anyone else from committing an act of violence against any otheranimal, is a theme that we will often encounter. The rabbit in the moon is one of so many ideasthat Hinduism and Buddhism share.As an approach to the history of Hinduism, seeing both their rabbit and our man in themoon means maintaining an awareness both of what the tradition says (the insider’s view) and ofwhat a very different viewpoint helps us to see (the outsider’s view). Hindus may approach theirscriptures as a part of their piety or as scholars who study Hinduism as they would study anyother human phenomenon, or both simultaneously. j There are certainly things that only a Hinducan know about Hinduism, both factual details of local and private practices and texts and theexperiential quality of these and other, better-known religious phenomena. This is what inspiresinterreligious dialogue, an often interesting and productive conversation between individualswho belong to different religions. k But there are also advantages in a more academic approach,such as a religious studies approach, to which the religion of the scholar in question is irrelevant.I would not go so far as some who would insist that a Hindu is not the person to ask aboutHinduism, as Harvard professor Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to Nabokov’s bid forchairmanship of the Russian literature department: “I do respect very much the elephant, butwould you give him the chair of zoology?” Nor would I go to the other extreme, to insist that aHindu is the only person to ask about Hinduism. For no single Hindu or, for that matter,non-Hindu can know all of the Hinduisms, let alone represent them. So too there are manydifferent ways of being an academic: Some are careful with their research, others sloppy; somemake broad generalizations, while others concentrate on small details.Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studiesyoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they writeabout. But any academic approach to Hinduism, viewing the subject through the eyes of writersfrom Marx and Freud to Foucault and Edward Said, provides a kind of telescope, the viewfinderof context, to supplement the microscope of the insider’s view, which cannot supply the samesort of context. 23 Always there is bias, and the hope is that the biases of Hindus and non-Hinduswill cancel one another out in a well-designed academic study of any aspect of Hinduism. Theancient Persians (according to the Greek historian Herodotus, c. 430 BCE) would debate everyimportant question first drunk, then (on the next day) sober or, as the case may be, first sober,then drunk (1.133). So too, in our scholarly approach, we need to consider the history ofHinduism first from a Hindu viewpoint, then from an academic one. Different sorts of valuableinsights may come to individuals both inside and outside the tradition and need not threaten oneanother. To return to those elephants, you don’t have to be an elephant to study zoology, butzoologists do not injure elephants by writing about them. To change the metaphor and apply itmore specifically to Hindu texts, a story is a flame that burns no less brightly if strangers lighttheir candles from it.To return to my central metaphor, once you’ve seen the rabbit (or hare) in the moon, it’shard to see the man anymore, but the double vision is what we should strive for. This means thatwhen we consider, for instance, the burning of living women on the pyres of their dead husbands(which we call suttee, to distinguish it from the woman who commits the act, a woman whom the