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

different aspects of truth which no one could fully express,” which would, I think, make allUnitarians Hindus, or by the militant nationalist B. G. Tilak (1856-1920), who added helpfullythat “recognition of the fact that the means to salvation are diverse; and realization of the truththat the number of gods to be worshipped is large, that indeed is the distinguishing feature ofHindu religion.” 18 The Supreme Court of India in 1966, and again in 1995, codified andreconfirmed these two nondefinitions of Hinduism.In 1966 the Indian Supreme Court was called upon to define Hinduism because theSatsangis or followers of Swaminarayan (1780-1830) claimed that their temples did not fallunder the jurisdiction of certain legislation affecting Hindu temples. They argued that they werenot Hindus, in part because they did not worship any of the traditional Hindu gods; theyworshiped Swaminarayan, who had declared that he was the Supreme God. The court ruledagainst them, citing various European definitions of Hinduism and others, includingRadhakrishnan’s cited above. 19 But the Satsangis had brought their case to the court in order tochallenge the 1948 Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act, which guaranteed Harijans (Pariahs,Untouchables) access to every Hindu temple; if the Satsangis were not Hindus, this law wouldnot force them to open their doors to Harijans. Thus the legal ruling that defined Hinduism by itstolerance and inclusivism was actually inspired by the desire of certain Hindus to exclude otherHindus from their temples.THE ZEN DIAGRAMIn answer to several of the objections to the word “Hinduism,” some scholars have triedto identify a cluster of qualities each of which is important but not essential to Hinduism; notevery Hindu will believe in, or do, all of them, but each Hindu will adhere to some combinationof them, as a non-Hindu would not. Scholars differ as to the number and nature of those forms, 20and we have seen the attempts of the Indian Supreme Court to come up with an inoffensivecluster, but perhaps we can be a little more specific. The elements from which the clusters areformed might include some combination of belief in the Vedas (which excludes Buddhism andJainism), karma (which does not exclude Buddhism and Jainism), dharma (religion, law, andjustice), a cosmology centered on Mount Meru, devotion (bhakti) to one or more members of anextensive pantheon, the ritual offering (puja) of fruit and flowers to a deity, vegetarianism as anideal (though only between about 25 and 40 percent of Indians are actually vegetarian 21 ),nonviolence, and blood sacrifice (which may or may not be mutually exclusive). This polytheticapproach, which owes much to the concept of family resemblance laid out by the philosopherWittgenstein, 22 could be represented by a Venn diagram, a chart made of intersecting circles. Itmight be grouped into sectors of different colors, one for beliefs or practices that some Hindusshared with Buddhists and Jainas, another largely confined to Hindu texts in Sanskrit, a thirdmore characteristic of popular worship and practice, and so forth. But since there is no singlecentral quality that all Hindus must have, the emptiness in the center, like the still center of astorm, suggests that the figure might better be named a Zen diagram, which is not, as you mightthink, a Venn diagram with just one ring or one that has an empty ring in the center but one thathas no central ring. 23There is therefore no central something to which the peripheral people were peripheral.One person’s center is another’s periphery; 24 all South Asia was just a periphery, for instance, tothose Delhi sultans and Mughal emperors who viewed everything from a Central Asianperspective. We may speak of marginalized people in the sense that they have been dispossessedand exploited, but Hinduism has porous margins and is polycentric. The Brahmins had their