David Shulman NOVEMBER 19, 2009 ISSUE

British Library, London/HIP/Art Resource

The Hindus: An Alternative History
by Wendy Doniger
Penguin, 779 pp., $35.00
The Hindu god Vishnu lying upon the cosmic waters with his consort Lakshmi, supported by the folds of the serpent Ananta Shesha,
with a lotus sprouting from his navel bearing the tiny god Brahma; illustration of the tenth-century Bhagavata Purana, 1863
Sometime in the second or third decade of the eleventh century, the astronomer, geographer, and
historian Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni went to India. He was not a casual visitor. He
came along with the army of his patron, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (in present-day Afghanistan), who
seems to have kept close watch over his learned protg, the greatest luminary of his court. Sultan
Mahmud raided northern India nearly every year during those decades and, following the standard
practice of his times, left much devastation in his wake. Among other things, he is remembered for
having, in 1026, plundered (but not destroyed) the great Hindu temple of Somanatha, on the Gujarat
coast. As Wendy Doniger points out in The Hindus, the story of this violent act was endlessly recycled
and embellished, from contrary perspectives, in medieval Muslim and Hindu sources and lives on in
communal polemics between Hindus and Muslims in Indian politics today.
As is usually the case, Mahmuds other military ventures and political excesses were largely forgotten.
But it was by bringing al-Biruni with him that the sultan made his most lasting mark. The great
polymath must have stayed on in northern India for some years. He took the trouble to learn Sanskrit,
the ancient language of the Hindu scriptures and of Indian science; he has left us a remarkably rich and
precise Arabic translation of one of the great classics of Hindu thought, the Yogasutra of Patanjali,
together with materials taken from commentaries that were still extant in al-Birunis time. But his true
masterpiece was an encyclopedic anthropology of India, written in Arabic, that bears the title Kitab fi
tahqiq ma lil-hind, or A Scientific Discourse on Indian Thoughtwithout question one of the best
books ever written about the subcontinent, eminently worth reading by visitors today. There are those
who claim, with some justice, that al-Biruni was the worlds first serious field anthropologist.
Al-Biruni gave a detailed and generally sympathetic picture of Indian civilization. He knew about the
Vedas, the ancient scriptures of Hinduism (which we now date to the end of the second millennium
BC), and the mystical speculations of the Upanishads, which were composed over a long span from
roughly the eighth century BC on. He studied with learned Brahmins, mastered the major arts and
sciences, and noticed the existence of a revered prophet called Buddha. He knew about Hindu
theories of reincarnation and about altered states of consciousness that tend, in his understanding,
toward a kind of abstract monism (Advaita, nondualism, in the Sanskrit lexicon).
On one important matter, however, he was definitely out of tune with the ways of his Hindu teachers
and hosts. Trained in the rigorous tradition of Islamic historiography, al-Biruni complains that
unfortunately, the Hindus do not pay much attention to the historical order of things, they are very
careless in relating the chronological succession of kings, and when they are pressed for information
are at a loss, not knowing what to say, they invariably take to tale-telling. We know that al-Biruni
read Sanskrit puranas immense compendia of mythic narratives, dynastic traditions, metaphysical
speculations, and erudite materials taken from various classical disciplines. It is not hard to imagine
him throwing up his hands in despair at what must surely have seemed to him an endlessly
proliferating, tropical jungle of undigested information about the past.
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His judgment has been echoed by other visitors for roughly a thousand years. Here, for example, is Sir
Aurel Stein, the famous nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century explorer of Chinese Turkestan, but
also a major historian of Kashmir and translator of the twelfth-century Kashmir chronicle TheOcean of
Kings: The Indian mind has never learned to divide mythology and legendary tradition from true
history. Its fair to say that all the colonial historians of India, and all too many of their successors,
have subscribed to this view. Many of them, like Stein himself, were also only too happy to make
sweeping generalizations about the amorphous entity they called the Indian mind.
f you take this view seriously, then India has no carefully recorded past of its own, no historical
self-understanding worthy of so ancient a civilization. But al-Biruni and his successors were wrong.
Its true that pre-modern Hindu historiography often looks quite different from the kinds of history,
whether Islamic or Chinese or European, with which many of us are familiar. Its also true that the
major historical works produced in various Indian languagesSanskrit, Persian, Tamil, Telugu,
Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, to name but a fewin the last centuries before the Europeans
established their control are full of colorful tales. As a result, modern historians of the subcontinent
have often ignored these works; or, if they consult them at all, they apply a primitive probabilistic
method meant to sift fact from fiction.
Here is one example: Ashoka, who ruled in the third century BC and is probably the best known of all
of Indias kings, is said in the Buddhist sources to have had a son named Kunala, who had beautiful
eyes, so beautiful that his stepmother, Queen Tishyarakshita, fell in love with him and tried to seduce
him. He rejected her advances, so, like Potiphars wife, she was determined to have her revenge.
Taking advantage of the kings illness, she ruled for one week in his name; and in that week she
managed to have Kunala blinded, his splendid eyes torn out by reluctant but dutiful officers of the
regime in the great city of Takshasila or Taxila, in Kashmir, where the prince had been sent to put
down an uprising. Kunala became a wandering singer whose melancholy songs carried the Buddhist
message of renunciation:
If you know the suffering that comes with living,
if you have bad thoughts
yet still you hunger for happiness
you might begin by putting aside
as quickly as you can
whatever your senses have to say.
Eventually the blind singer-beggar arrived back home at his fathers palace in Pataliputra, in the
eastern Gangetic plain; and Ashoka, hearing the voice, affected by the force of its message, recognized
his son and reinstated him in the court.
Such moments of painful recognition of a lost son, often a traumatized artist, by an errant father turn
up elsewhere in the Indian sources, perhaps most notably in the great Ramayana epic, whose hero,
Rama, recognizes the twin sons he has never seen when they appear at a royal ritual and recite to their
father the story of his lifethat is, the text of the Ramayana itself. We might even identify this scene
as a patterned, profoundly expressive theme or mythic motif, something that can teach us something
about the way some ancient Indians thought about fathers and sons and about what makes a person into
a poet or singer.
But what can a modern historian do with the Ashoka story? Almost everyone seems to agree that
Ashoka more or less converted to Buddhism (at that time, still a very young religion), though not
because of listening to Kunalas haunting verses. Its quite possible that Ashoka gave early Buddhism a
powerful push by patronizing the Buddhist monastic establishment, the Sangha, and perhaps by
sending out emissaries to propagate the Buddhist message in distant lands. In any case, thats the
standard story that crops up in all the modern histories.
Im a little skeptical; Ashoka looks to me like any other precariously perched Indian king trying to
shore up his political base by patronizing whoever was there to be patronizedBuddhists, Brahmins,
and probably other peripatetic dreamers and religious virtuosi. For much of Indian history, it was the
only sensible thing for a king to do. As for Kunala and the vicious queen, professional historians,
seeking a grain of what might pass for empirical fact, will tell us that there were probably minor
revolts in various parts of Ashokas kingdom toward the end of his reign, and that the aging king
might well have fallen under the spell of his brash new queen during a period of court intrigues. One
skeptical historian concluded that the Kunala story is the result of monkish imagination.
Arguments like this clearly wont take us very far. They dont begin to recognize the expressive force
of the narrative sources, and in my view they miss the true historical potential these sources hold. One
always pays a price for too narrow a notion of what constitutes fact. If we read the Kunala story with
the sensitivity that Doniger so often demonstrates, then we might conclude, first, that even the greatest
of Indian kings was strikingly lacking in effective power, unable to prevent catastrophe in his own
family or to control his own officers in distant Takshasila, and secondly, that Buddhist monks claimed
from very early on a critical part in the very core of political life as kingmakers and carriers of primary
values. Buddhism is not, and never was, an apolitical religion.
enerally, modern historians tend to stick to the terra firma of inscriptions, coins, the accounts of
foreign travelers, and other precisely datable sources. There are obvious advantages to such a
method, and we can certainly learn critically important things from such evidence; but one unfortunate
byproduct of these choices is that modern histories of India, heavily empiricist in the narrowest sense
and loaded down with unwieldy records of temple donors and royal land grants, tend to be boring.
No one would say such a thing about Wendy Donigers new book. Experts on India and professional
historians of South Asia will, no doubt, find something to disagree with on every page; but they will
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Freer Galleryof Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
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also, I think, be charmed by Donigers scintillating and irreverent prose (perhaps against their better
judgment) and by the unexpected, strangely delightful connections she makes. Her book is no ordinary
trek through inscriptions and chronicles. It is more like a psychedelic pilgrimage to sites, ritual
moments, and beloved texts scattered over three millennia. Make no mistake: its a bumpy ride, with a
provocative and erudite guide who scorns the usual rules of the historical guild. That is not to say that
this improbable history lacks method. There is a sense in which Doniger is close to the indigenous
South Asian, puranic model of writing history, of the type that put off al-Biruni.
Take the notion of myth, for example. Even Doniger occasionally uses the word in the pejorative sense.
After telling us that Mahmud of Ghazni, with whom we began, attacked the Somanatha temple in
1026, she continues:
Then comes the mythmaking. According to some versions of the story but not others, he
stripped the great gilded linga [the icon of the god Siva] of its gold and hacked it to bits with
his sword, sending the bits back to Ghazni, where they were incorporated into the steps of the
new Jami Masjid (Friday Mosque).
Here we have the standard opposition between myth and fact. But what happens if we allow a
strong notion of factuality to incorporate, perhaps not without tension, an equally strong notion of
mythic patterns that have an effect within a particular time and history? We can then better understand
why, for example, as Doniger writes:
Rama defeating the ogre Khara in a scene from the Hindu epic Ramayana; miniature commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar the
Great, 1582
British historiographers made much use of it [Mahmuds attack on the Somanatha temple] for
their own purposes (such as the claim that they had rescued the Hindus from oppression by
Muslims).
This is what we find throughout the pages of Donigers monumental book. She didnt invent the
method. David Grene has described the historical imagination of Herodotusthe founder of the
discipline in the Westas encompassing a threefold relation to reality: reality as ordinarily perceived,
reality as coming to a special meaningful pattern in myth, and reality as expressed in the original
creation of a tragic writer. Its the second of these that is relevant to Doniger, who is surely no
Thucydides but is, in my view, a loyal follower of Herodotus, in more ways than one. Grene also says
about Herodotus that his History is that of a storyteller who is never quite out of the frame of the
narrative and never quite within it.
hat kinds of meaningful mythic patterns does Doniger find in Indias long history? One of them
is stated clearly in the books subtitle. It is an alternative history of the Hindus, after the model
of alternative medicine or alternative politics. What this means is that the standard, orthodox,
conventional, and usually hierarchical ways of telling the story are overturned. We get a history of
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India as seen largely through the eyes of people on the margins of lifefirst of all, women, low castes,
tribals, and Dalits (who used to be called Untouchables); but then Doniger also deals with all kinds of
twilight-zone holy men, wonder-workers, alchemists, poets, mystical mavericks of one kind or another,
unorthodox Brahmins and social reformers, colonial traders and administrators gone native, subversive
scholars (including the early Western Orientalists), Tantric ritualists with their kinky sexual
ceremonies, and finally animals, especially horses (also some dogs, monkeys, bears, and cows), which
work their way into all major texts from the Vedic period on.
Throughout her largely chronological account, these are the voices that Doniger listens for, detecting
their mostly dissident tones and isolating their more creative gestures, especially those that generated
significant social protest or religious change. In Donigers India, the religious establishment and its
professed idealswhich she sometimes refers to by somewhat dubious terms like the hegemony of
the Brahmins or Brahmin exclusivity or simply the Brahminslook like a paper-thin
superstructure. Real life, the stuff of mythic history, happens continuously below.
In itself, this notion may appear unexceptional; were used to thinking that innovation springs from the
margins even in much more top-heavy societies than Hindu India. But mythography comes in varying
strengths and textures. Take Donigers account of the Adivasis, early-twentieth-century tribals, in
southern Gujarat on the western coast. They were famous both for selling and for consuming the
country liquor known as toddy (tadi, the fermented sap of the palm tree) and the stronger daru (from
the flowers of the mahua tree). Severely oppressed by higher-status liquor salesmen and emerging
small-scale capitalists in the colonial towns, and with Adivasi women raped and forced into
prostitution by liquor dealers, the Adivasis began receiving direct verbal communications from the
goddess Sitala, who advised them to drink tea instead of liquor.
They followed the goddesss advicewhich sometimes emerged from her incarnation as an old buffalo
cow, speaking through possessed women who, Doniger writes, held the men to the mark and goaded
them onand, in the space of a few years, produced a minor social revolution in southern Gujarat.
Reformed, sober, and galvanized into collective action, the Adivasis climbed rapidly to a higher rung
on the social ladder (this is a good example of the upward mobility that traditional caste-oriented
society regularly allowed) and largely freed themselves from the grip of the urban middlemen and
racketeers. At some point a deified form of Gandhi replaced the goddess, and the Adivasis joined the
struggle to free India from British rule. Doniger rightly concludes: The mythmade history
possible.
One result of Donigers taking myths seriously is that she exposes many of the old romantic clichs
about Indian history as meaningless. Sometimes the history of India looks like a story about endless
waves of virile invaders from the north-northwestScythians, White Huns, Afghans, Turks, and, most
recently, the Britishwho slowly grew soft and decadent under the insidious influence of the dreamy,
langorous, mystically inclined Hindus. Some of these virile outsiders, such as Kipling and a few
Persian poets at Muslim courts in the subcontinent, liked to tell their own story more or less along
these lines. But Doniger offers a more convincing approach, inflected differently at different times and
places and embodied in recurring equine images.
First, there is the home-grown, indigenous Hindu stallion, an emblem of irresistible power right from
the beginning of Vedic civilization in the second millennium BC but also a sign of esoteric wisdom and
insight: thus the horse-headed gods called the Ashvins learn the secret of an ancient sacrificial
ritualhow to replace the victims head after it has been cut offliterally from the horses mouth (to
be precise, from a sage, Dadhyanc, who temporarily exchanged his human head for an equine one).
Occasionally, we find a certain tension between these two themes of royal power and metaphysical
insight, as when the young prince Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be, on his way to enlightenment in the
forest, has to say goodbye to his beloved horse Kanthakaa favorite scene in Buddhist iconography.
But, as Doniger writes, the medieval literature is full of untamed, self-possessed, sexually adventurous
Hindu mares that tend to triumph over imported, usually befuddled stallions.
Thus Indias astonishing talent for absorbing and transforming the peoples and cultures pouring in
from outside, seen through a Hindu lens, has nothing to do with any softening or melting down of a
hard, preexisting monolithic culture; it is, rather, an active process of selection and pragmatic
recycling, with the female principlemare, queen, dancing girl, or goddessdriving the rather
helpless (often foreign) male. The Tantric schools of medieval India elaborated a whole metaphysics
and a complex ritual praxis out of this simple model. As Ashis Nandy has shown, Gandhi, with his
philosophy of nonviolent resistance, used it to marvelous effect against his British opponents.
learly, Donigers is a different kind of history than we are used to, a kind in which fresh
perspectives can easily arise. One can always read Gandhi, in his iconic loincloth and spectacles,
as a kind of utopian romantic, as in Richard Attenboroughs famous filmor, by contrast, as a wily
politician and hard-headed manipulator of traditional Hindu images of power, as much modern folklore
about Gandhi would suggest. But suppose, following Donigers account, we try to understand him as
embodying a modernist, spruced-up version of the medieval Tantric ritualist and magician, mesmerized
by the possibility of enhancing his own inner strength, and thus his effect on the world, by classic
methods such as frequent fasting and abstinence, severe chastity tests (sleeping beside nubile young
women), and Yogic meditation.
We might even contemplate the possibility that such practices, translated into the modern historical
situation of India, really worked. I, for one, wouldnt exclude this explanation. As Doniger says in
what she calls her Inconclusion: India is a country where not only the future but even the past is
unpredictable. Actually, I think this sense of the past is true of any history worthy of the name. Its
particularly true when you begin to unravel the enduring, self-transforming patterns a culture has
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imprinted on time, including our own.
For an alternative history, the traditional chronological scheme of The Hindus is surprising, beginning
as it does with prehistory generally and quickly moving into the great prehistoric civilization of the
third millennium BC in the Indus Valley (in todays Pakistan), followed by the arrival of the Sanskrit-
speaking Vedic people toward the end of the second millennium BC. Then Doniger presents the
standard sequence: the Upanishadic crisis (mid-first millennium BC), when the old Vedic system broke
down under the pressure of new ascetic and speculative practices and radical visions of personal
salvation; the birth of Buddhism and Jainism and other heterodox religions; the crystalization of a
Brahminical synthesis in the great epics and erudite literature; the high classical period in the north
usually linked to the Gupta dynasty (fourthfifth centuries AD); the emergence of devotional cults and
sects in South India and of Tantric practices throughout the subcontinent; the arrival of Muslims from
Central Asia and Afghanistan and the formation of the major Muslim states centered in Delhi (the
Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire), and finally the modern period of colonial rule and
independence.
Sometimes the chronology takes an unpredictable and rather refreshing loop, as when Gupta
classicismthe restrained artistic masterpieces of the fifth century AD and the inflated imperial claims
of the royal patrons who commissioned them, both of which Doniger seems mostly to dislikeis
discussed only after a long prelude on medieval South India. These loops often include short passages
that look more like conventional history, replete with names of kings and dynastic transitions and
respectable datings; such dreary passages within the intense colors that enliven the chapters as a whole
seem almost parodic, as if Doniger were throwing the occasional bone to her staid colleagues (or to the
publisher). If you want a sense of Indian history in a more-or-less conventional sequence, you can no
doubt get it from this book, with some effort; but its not the main message by any means.
Doniger formulates that message at different points, and she demonstrates it continuously by the
sources she cites and the dramatic, not to say lurid, stories she loves to tell. It comes through most
eloquently and boldly at the end: Surely history is one of the most important things for us to imagine
and to realize that we are imagining. This doesnt mean that there are no external constraints on our
imaginingquite the contrary, I understand the Doniger principle as incorporating a commitment to
factuality and as assuming a clear-cut distinction between fiction and fact, a distinction that is made in
all indigenous South Asian historiographies as wellbut her approach does mean that you have to
make room for the truly effectual, pragmatic, often transformative role of myth in any historical
situation and in any vision of historical patterns. Isaac Babel said it well: A well-devised story neednt
try to be like real life. Real life is only too eager to resemble a well-devised story. Doniger has put
this idea to the test, and the result, sometimes baffling, usually entertaining, occasionally infuriating,
often uncannily insightful, is mythic in the most positive sense of the word.
This was how I first knew her, in London in 1972. As a first-year student of Tamil at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, I was required to take an introductory course on Indian historytaught
by a young Sanskritist, Wendy Doniger (then OFlaherty). She taught the way she has written this
book, with passionate abandon and a great love for everything Indian. But coming from Jerusalem and
the severely positivist philological obsessions of Islamic studies at the Hebrew University, I was at first
mostly irritated by Wendys seemingly cavalier style and somewhat elastic notions of truth.
One day matters came to a head. Wendy recounted, apropos of something or other, the well-known
story about the Arab conqueror of Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, who was supposed to have ordered the
burning of the great library at Alexandria on the grounds that all the books that agreed with the Koran
were superfluous and all the others were heretical. Amr lived in the seventh century AD; the
Alexandria library was destroyed in the late third century, under the Roman emperor Aurelian. So
when I heard the story from Wendys lips, without thinking, I cried out in protest from my seat in the
back row, not realizing that I was about to bestow on her the highest compliment she could imagine:
That, I shouted, is a myth!
See Shlomo Pines and Tuvia Gelblum, Al-Birunis Arabic Version of Patanjalis Yogasutra: A Translation of His First Chapter and a Comparison
with Related Sanskrit Texts, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1966), pp. 302325.
Alberunis India, translated by E.C. Sachau (London: Truebner, 1888), Vol. 2, pp. 1011.
M.A. Stein, Kalhanas Rajatarangini: A Chronicle of the Kings of Kasmir (Westminster, 1900), Vol. 1, p. 29.
The Asokavadana, edited by Sujitkumar Mukhopadhyaya (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1963); Kunalopakhyana, p. 117. See John Strong, The
Legend of King Asoka: A Study and Translation of the Asokavadana (Princeton University Press, 1983).
Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 53. The Thapar biography is by far the best study we
have of Ashoka and his time.
This version actually owes much to the impeccable al-Biruni.
Herodotus, The History, translated by David Grene (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 12.
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Isaac Babel, My First Fee, in The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, edited by Clarence Brown (Penguin, 1993), p. 226.
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