The Hindus (146 page)

To invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase.

Other readers, allergic to methodology, should skip straight to chapter 2.

The term “kitchen language” was, I think, first coined for Afrikaans. But the eleventh-century Indian lexicographer Acharya Yadavaprakasha does actually supply a number of otherwise unattested Sanskrit words for everyday cooking devices (ladles, pots, and so forth), evidence either that some Brahmins
did
speak Sanskrit at home or that Yadavaprakasha was showing off by inventing Sanskrit words for objects normally referred to only in the vernaculars. After all, even in the modern period, people called television
dur-darshana,
a made-up Sanskrit neologism for “far-seeing,” and it caught on, though
dhumra-varttika
(“smokestick”) for “cigarette” did not; people persisted in calling them cigarettes.

A. K. Ramanujan used to talk of his father’s speaking Sanskrit in the front room, his mother’s speaking Tamil in the kitchen in the back.

Apparently this was first said in Yiddish, by Max Weinrich, who referred to a dialect with an army and a navy (“
A sprach is a dialekt mit a armee un a flot
”).

All translations from the Sanskrit are my own unless otherwise noted, and I have usually condensed and/or excerpted them, as I have done with citations of other narratives translated from other languages, though I have added nothing that was not in the text.

South Asians continue to devise creative ways of addressing this dilemma. In Tibet in the summer of 2006, I met a Buddhist who said that he would eat yak, but not fish, on moral grounds. That is, if you kill a yak, you destroy one soul but feed many people, but you have to kill many fish, and destroy many souls, to feed the same number of people. It occurred to me that it is a good thing that Tibet does not border on whaling waters. This attitude varies by country; Sri Lankan Buddhists opt for fish over large animals.

As, for instance, in the cow protection riots.

This is not because they see the moon from a different angle; in the Southern Hemisphere this is true, but most of India and all of Japan are in the Northern Hemisphere. From the Northern Hemisphere the eyes are at eleven and one, and the mouth at six; the hare’s ears are at between twelve and two, his head at between ten and twelve, his nose pointing at between nine and eleven, and his tail at between four and six.

This last group represents in many ways the ideal scholars of Hinduism, people like (in my generation) A. K. Ramanujan, Sudhir Kakar, Ashis Nandy, Vasudha Narayanan, and V. Narayana Rao, and, in the younger generation, so many more.

This characterizes the “take a Hindu to dinner” approach of such institutions as the one I always think of as the Center for the Prevention of World Religions.

Wittgenstein would, I think, have appreciated a more recent double image that has been circulated on the Internet. Close up, it looks like Albert Einstein, but from five feet away, it is the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.

The author of the posting was Jitendra Bardwaj, of whom Wikipedia (which may or may not be accurate) says: “Jitendra Bardwaj (born 1937), an independent political campaigner in the United Kingdom, has contested five parliamentary by-elections in what began as an attempt to clear his name after he was convicted of assaulting a police officer outside the Houses of Parliament. As well as campaigning against what he believes is his personal mis-treatment by, and general flaws in, the British legal system, Bardwaj campaigns for the rights of ethnic minorities and for the introduction of Hindu yoga and meditation techniques in British schools.”