The Hindus

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY WENDY DONIGER

 

 

TRANSLATIONS:
The Rig Veda
The Laws of Manu
and
Kamasutra

THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Wendy Doniger, 2009

All rights reserved

Acknowledgments for permission to reprint copyrighted works
appear on page 754.
Illustration credits appear on page 754.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doniger, Wendy.
The Hindus : an alternative history / Wendy Doniger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02870-4

1. Hinduism—Social aspects—History. 2. Women in Hinduism—History.
3. Pariahs in Hinduism—History.
4. Hinduism—Relations. I. Title.
BL1151.3.D66 2009
294.509—dc22
2008041030

 

 

 

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KATHERINE ULRICH—student, friend, editor supreme—
and
WILL DALRYMPLE—inspiration and comrade in the good fight

PREFACE:

The image of the man in the moon who is also a rabbit in the moon, or the duck who is also a rabbit, will serve as a metaphor for the double visions of the Hindus that this book will strive to present.

Since there are so many books about Hinduism, the author of yet another one has a duty to answer the potential reader’s Passover question: Why shouldn’t I pass over this book, or, Why is this book different from all other books? This book is not a brief survey (you noticed that already; I had intended it to be, but it got the bit between its teeth and ran away from me), nor, on the other hand, is it a reference book that covers all the facts and dates about Hinduism or a book about Hinduism as it is lived today. Several books of each of those sorts exist, some of them quite good, which you might read alongside this one.
¹
The Hindus: An Alternative History
differs from those books in several ways.

First, it highlights a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in Sanskrit (the literary language of ancient India) and represented in most surveys in English. It tells a story that incorporates the narratives of and about alternative people—people who, from the standpoint of most high-caste Hindu males, are alternative in the sense of otherness, people of other religions, or cultures, or castes, or species (animals), or gender (women). Part of my agenda in writing an alternative history is to show how much the groups that conventional wisdom says were oppressed and silenced and played no part in the development of the tradition—women, Pariahs (oppressed castes, sometimes called Untouchables)—did actually contribute to Hinduism. My hope is not to reverse or misrepresent the hierarchies, which remain stubbornly hierarchical, or to deny that Sanskrit texts were almost always subject to a final filter in the hands of the male Brahmins (the highest of the four social classes, the class from which priests were drawn) who usually composed and preserved them. But I hope to bring in more actors, and more stories, upon the stage, to show the presence of brilliant and creative thinkers entirely off the track beaten by Brahmin Sanskritists and of diverse voices that slipped through the filter, and, indeed, to show that the filter itself was quite diverse, for there were many different sorts of Brahmins; some whispered into the ears of kings, but others were dirt poor and begged for their food every day.