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

matter was, women’s ideas may have gotten into his head. We can never know for sure when weare hearing the voices of women in men’s texts, but we can often ferret out (to use an animalmetaphor) tracks, what the Hindus call “perfumes” (vasanas), that women have left in theliterature. A hermeneutic of suspicion, questioning the expressed motivations of the author, istherefore required, but it is still worth reading between the lines, even making the texts talk aboutthings they don’t want to talk about. Moreover, texts are not our only source of knowledge ofthis period; women also left marks, perfumes, that we can find in art and archaeology. We cantry to resurrect the women actors in Hindu history through a combination of references to them,both unsympathetic (to see what they had to put up with from some men) and sympathetic (toshow that other men did treat them humanely), and moments when we can hear women’s ownvoices getting into the texts and, more rarely, discover actual female authorship.FROM DOG COOKERS TO DALITSBrahmins may have had a monopoly on liturgical Sanskrit for the performance of certainpublic rites, but even then the sacrificer uttered some of the ritual words and performed thedomestic rites. And the sacrificer need not have been a Brahmin, a member of the highest class;the other two twice-born social classes—warriors/rulers (Kshatriyas) and, below them,merchants, farmers and herders (Vaishyas)—were also initiated and therefore could besacrificers. The three upper classes were called twice born because of the second birth throughthe ritual of initiation (the ancient Indian equivalent of becoming born again), in which a manwas born (again) as a fully developed member of the community. u The lowest of the fourclasses, the servants (Shudras), were excluded from these and many other aspects of religiouslife, but the exclusion of Shudras doesn’t automatically make something “Brahminical.”There have been countless terms coined to designate the lowest castes, the dispossessedor underprivileged or marginalized groups, including the tribal peoples. These are the people thatSanskrit texts named by specific castes (Chandala,Chamara, Pulkasa, etc.) or called Low andExcluded (Apasadas) or Born Last (or Worst, Antyajas) or Dog Cookers (Shva-Pakas v ), becausecaste Hindus thought that these people ate dogs, who in turn ate anything and everything, and inHinduism, you are what you eat. Much later the British called them Untouchables, the CriminalCastes, the Scheduled (they pronounced it SHED-YULED) Castes, Pariahs (a Tamil word thathas found its way into English), the Depressed Classes, and Outcastes. Gandhi called themHarijans (“the People of God”). The members of these castes (beginning in the 1930s and 1940sand continuing now) called themselves Dalits (using the Marathi/Hindi word for “oppressed” or“broken” to translate the British “Depressed”). B. R. Ambedkar (in the 1950s), himself a Dalit,tried, with partial success, to convert some of them to Buddhism. Postcolonial scholars call them(and other low castes) Subalterns. Another important group of oppressed peoples is constitutedby the Adivasis (“original inhabitants”), the so-called tribal peoples of India, on the margins bothgeographically and ideologically, sometimes constituting a low caste (such as the Nishadas),sometimes remaining outside the caste system altogether.It is important to distinguish among Dalits and Adivasis and Shudras, all of whom havevery different relationships with upper-caste Hindus, though many Sanskrit texts confuse them.So too, the Backward Castes, a sneering name that the British once gave to the excluded castes ingeneral, are now regarded as castes separate from, and occasionally in conflict with, certain otherDalit castes; the Glossary of Human Rights Watch defines Backward Castes as “those whoseritual rank and occupational status are above ‘untouchables’ but who themselves remain sociallyand economically depressed. Also referred to as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or Shudras,”