The Hindus (152 page)

I have in mind, in India, Romila Thapar, the historian of India, and the filmmaker Mira Nair and, in America, Vasudha Narayanan and A. K. Ramanujan, scholars of Hinduism, all of whom have been attacked by the Hindutva faction.

A patent example of this
ressentiment
is the opening paragraph of Rajiv Malhotra’s article “Wendy’s Children,” posted on the Internet in September 2002, which enormously exaggerates my influence in the academic field of the study of Hinduism. I sometimes use that passage as a brief paragraph to give to people who ask for something with which to introduce me at public events, where hype is often called for.

D. N. Jha, the author of
The Myth of the Holy Cow,
which marshaled abundant proof that Hindus did eat beef in the ancient period, was so violently attacked, physically as well as in the press, that he had to have a police escort twenty-four hours a day for several years after his book was published in India.

The
OED
defines “Irish bull” as “A self-contradictory proposition; in mod. use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker. Now often with epithet
Irish;
but the word had been long in use before it came to be associated with Irishmen.”

One learns early in this game never to say “never” about anything in India; sooner or later you discover that everything exists, though you yourself may not yet have come upon it.

Such as the Kurubas (a shepherd caste) and Kurnis (a weaver caste) of Northern Andhra Pradesh.

Now, scholarly opinion has differed for the past century on the location of the mythical Lanka, the island to which Ravana brought Sita, and the identification with present-day Sri Lanka is problematic.

The earliest name for this island, judged by Indian and Greek and Latin sources in the third century BCE, is Tamraparni (“with copper leaves”), which Greek geographers called Taprobane. Later, in the early centuries CE, the name more commonly used in South Asia was Sinhala or Sinhala-dvipa (“Lion’s Island”). Arabs referred to it as Sarandib or Serendib (from which Horace Walpole coined the term “serendipity” in his 1754 novel
The Three Princes of Serendip
). Later European mapmakers called it Ceylon (a transformation of Sri Lanka), a name still used occasionally for trade purposes. It became Sri Lanka officially in 1972. This chronology of names poses a puzzle for the historian. If the author of the oldest
Ramayana,
c. 200 BCE, was referring to what we now call Sri Lanka, then the name should have been the one by which the island was known then, either Tamraparni or else Sinhala. But since the name used is Lanka, which appears not to have been the name for the island at that time, then perhaps that Lanka was located somewhere other than where Sri Lanka is now. Alternatively, if Lanka in the text is a reference to the present Sri Lanka, then the composition of the Valmiki poem would have to be dated to a much later period, when the island was called Lanka.

A yoking (
yojana
) is the approximate distance, sometimes said to be ten miles, sometimes fifty, that you can travel without changing and reharnessing horses.

The present-day Sri Lanka is about nineteen miles from India. If we take a yoking as ten miles, it’s a thousand miles from India to the
Ramayana’
s Lanka; if we take a “yoking” as fifty miles, it’s five thousand miles to Lanka.

Two films made on the same topic in the same year (1964),
Dr. Strangelove
and
Fail Safe,
imagined a doomsday plan (think: Kali Yuga) for American planes to drop atomic bombs on Russia.

Bahuchara, meaning “Getting Around a Lot,” is the same phrase that the mother of Satyakama, in the Upanishads, used to refer to her promiscuity.

This is a joke that historians of Russia used to make about revisionist Soviet Union historical propaganda during the cold war. Alas, it applies equally well to many revisionists in India today.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana (
The Life of Reason,
1905).

As Carl Sandburg once said.