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

consider the phenomenon and the name one by one.ARE THERE SUCH THINGS AS HINDUS AND HINDUISM?There are several objections to the use of any single term to denote what, for the sake ofargument, we will call Hindus and Hinduism. pHindus did not develop a strong sense of themselves as members of a distinct religionuntil there were other religions against which they needed to define themselves, like the invisibleman in the Hollywood film who could be seen only when he was wearing clothing that was not apart of him. Until as late as the seventeenth century, many Indian rulers used titles that identifiedthem with a divinity or with their preeminence over other rulers or with their personal qualitiesor with all their subjects, but not merely with the Hindus. Cultures, traditions, and beliefs cutacross religious communities in India, and few people defined themselves exclusively throughtheir religious beliefs or practices; their identities were segmented on the basis of locality,language, caste, occupation, and sect. 8 Only after the British began to define communities bytheir religion, and foreigners in India tended to put people of different religions into differentideological boxes, 9 did many Indians follow suit, ignoring the diversity of their own thoughts andasking themselves which of the boxes they belonged in. 10 Only after the seventeenth century dida ruler use the title Lord of the Hindus (Hindupati). 11Indeed most people in India would still define themselves by allegiances other than theirreligion. 12 The Hindus have not usually viewed themselves as a group, for they are truly arainbow people, with different colors (varnas in Sanskrit, the word that also designates “class”),drawing upon not only a wide range of texts, from the many unwritten traditions and vernacularreligions of unknown origins to Sanskrit texts that begin well before 1000 BCE and are stillbeing composed, but, more important, upon the many ways in which a single text has been readover the centuries, by people of different castes, genders, and individual needs and desires. Andthis intertextuality is balanced by an equally rainbow-hued range of practices, which we mightcall an interpracticality, on the model of intertextuality, practices that refer to other practices.Another objection to regarding Hinduism as a monolithic entity is that it is hard to spellout what “they all” believe or do (even if we exclude from “all” people like Shirley MacLaine).There is no single founder or institution to enforce any single construction of the tradition, to ruleon what is or is not a Hindu idea or to draw the line when someone finally goes too far andtransgresses the unspoken boundaries of reinterpretation. Ideas about all the majorissues—vegetarianism, nonviolence, even caste itself—are subjects of a debate, not a dogma.There is no Hindu canon. The books that Euro-Americans privileged (such as the BhagavadGita) were not always so highly regarded by “all Hindus,” certainly not before theEuro-Americans began to praise them. Other books have been far more important to certaingroups of Hindus but not to others.One answer to this objection is that like other religions—Christianity, Buddhism,Islam—Hinduism encompasses numerous miscellaneous sects. Religions are messy. Butintertextuality (as well as interpracticality) argues for the inclusion of this unruly miscellanyunder the rubric of Hinduism. The fact that later texts and practices often quote earlier ones, rightback to the Rig Veda, allows us to call it a single tradition, even though there are many otherHindu texts and practices that have no connection with any Sanskrit text, let alone the Veda.What literary critics call the anxiety of influence 13 works in the other direction in India. Theindividual artist composing a text or performing a ritual can make innovations, but shedemonstrates first her knowledge of the traditions of the past and only then her ability to build