27.03.09

Doniger, The Hindus

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:24 pm by nemo

The Hindus: An Alternative History (Hardcover)
by Wendy Doniger
Have been reading a new history of Hinduism. Although it is supposed to be ‘alternative’ it is a reasonably straightforward account.
There is no concession to the OIT thesis, nor much to the AIT, but Doniger paints a persuasive portrait of the ‘late Rig Veda’ version, essentially a modified AIT approach, with no ‘invasion’.

What i find interesting (but this was my original view from the nineties) is the suggestions that the Axial Upanishad/Buddhism emergence is against the Brahmin/Vedic tradition of ritualism.
In other words, what is the source of the great yogic tradition? It is hard to see how it can be derived from the Vedas without some other intervening factor.
The combination of prior tradition and Axial Age transformation is the solution I thought about many years ago, and after multiple distracting bum steers, am returning to again, it seems.

From Booklist
Note that Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of many books. Note that alternative neatly defines her. Learned, fluent, and entertaining in spite of the complexity of this ambitious undertaking, Doniger is also controversial, a role she embraces, confident that fresh viewpoints are essential to understanding the worlds that shaped the Hindu tradition, and the ways Hindus shaped society. While Doniger delves deeply into the Vedas and the “two great poems,” Ramayana and Mahabharata, she searches other spheres for clues to the lives of women and the lower castes. She also analyzes depictions of animals, which are central to Hindu tales and the “cultural ideal” of nonviolence. As she energetically parses the relationships between gods and humans, karma and renunciation, asceticism and sensuality, priests and kings, men and women, she is also seeking glimpses into everyday Hindu life during each of India’s empires. Lavishly detailed, dynamic, and encompassing, Doniger’s multidimensional history celebrates Hindu wisdom, diversity, and pluralism with knowledge, insight, and passion.

Product Description
From one of the world’s foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its history

An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world’s oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds.

Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century; its central tenets—karma, dharma, to name just two—arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another. Yet the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today.

Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes.

The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers—many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts—have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.

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