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

mutandis. Hybridity, by contrast, implies fusion. An example of religious hybridity in anindividual: On Monday you attend the same sort of basic Catholic mass, but in place of theEucharist you kill a goat, or you attend the same sort of basic Hindu puja but the goddess towhom you pray is Mary, the mother of Jesus, with all her epithets and physical characteristics.The Oxford English Dictionary defines “hybrid” as “anything derived from heterogeneoussources, or composed of different or incongruous elements,” which, when applied to acommunity, leaves conveniently open the question of whether those elements remain unchanged.The OED definition applies to individuals rather than communities: “the offspring of twoanimals or plants of different species, or (less strictly) varieties.”Both hybridity and multiplicity can be applied to both communities and individuals. Thetrouble with both multiplicity and hybridity (as well as syncretism) lies in the assumption that thecombinatory elements are separate essences that exist in a pure form before the mix takes placeand that the combination either does (for hybrids) or does not (for multiplicities) change them insome way. But there are seldom any pure categories in any human situation, certainly not by themoment when history first catches up with them. Long before 2000 BCE, the Indus ValleyCivilization was already a mix of cultures, as was Vedic culture at that time, and eventually thetwo mixes mixed together, and mixed with other mixes. Hybridity defies binary oppositions andunderstands reality as a fluid rather than a series of solid, separate boxes.Hyphens can be read as multiple or as hybrid. The hybrid, hyphenated word“Anglo-Indian” confusingly denotes two opposite sorts of people: The OED defines“Anglo-Indian” as “a person of British birth resident, or once resident, in India,” or “a Eurasianof India,”which is to say either a privileged Englishman ruling “Inja” or a hybrid, anunderprivileged person whom the British regarded as the lowest of all castes, a mixed breed.Hybridity, traditionally, has had the additional disadvantage of carrying a largelynegative attitude to the mixing of categories, an attitude that we now regard as reactionary. Thusthe hybrid has been despised as a hodgepodge, a mix in which both (or all) of the contributingelements are modified; the OED adds, gratuitously, to its definition the phrase, “a half-breed,cross-breed, or mongrel,” the racist overtones of its definition echoing the Hindu fear of themixture of social classes (varna-samkara). But nowadays both postcolonial and postmodernthinkers prefer hybrids, define “hybrid” more positively, and indeed argue that we all arehybrids, 61 all always mixed and mixing. 62The Parsis (“Persians”—i.e., Zoroastrians) in several communities in India tell a positivestory about social hybridity. They say that when the Parsis landed in India, the local Hindu rajasent them a full glass of milk, suggesting that the town was full. The Parsi leader added sugarand returned the glass, indicating that his people could mix among the Arabs and Hindus likesugar in milk, sweetening it but not overrunning it. 63 The metaphor of sugar in milk ae suggeststhe extreme ideal of communal integration, in which individuals change the community bymelting into it, flavoring it as a whole with their qualities (Zoroastrianism, or sweetness). TheParsis did not in fact dissolve into Islam and Hinduism; they remained Parsis and indeed wereoften caught in the crossfire during the riots that followed the Partition of India and Pakistan in1947. This seems to me the more accurate way to view such cultural mixes: as a suspension ofdiscrete particles rather than a melting pot.Despite their shortcomings, the concepts of hybridity and multiplicity are useful, if usedwith care. The phenomenon is basically the same in either case; it’s just a matter of points ofview, and it doesn’t really matter whether you call it multiple or hybrid (or even syncretic). Whatdoes matter is how you evaluate the fused mix. Whatever word you use for it, I think it applies to