Wendy Doniger deals with the complexity of Hinduism by following the thread of ideas through their winding historical biographies in this compendium of essays. She traces key doctrines through the vast archive of Hindu texts, from the process of reincarnation, to the conflict between transcendent and immanent conceptions of the divine, to ideologies of dissent, and to the rights of minorities. In essays that have something of the familiar, literary charm of writing by Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Clifford Geertz, Doniger finds the underlying motivations, social conflicts, conceptual paradoxes, or insights that animate each doctrine. In order to tell these fascinating cultural tales Doniger must often be selective in her treatment of Hinduism's vast history, focusing more on some contexts than on others. The consequence is that this collection can be misleading if taken as a general picture of Hinduism. But as an exploration of religious ideas in their changeful complexity it offers a unique perspective – not only on Hinduism, but also on the way that all religious ideas develop over time.
A lifetime of work on a huge range of texts and topics is collected in On Hinduism. Doniger lets themes that re-emerge repeatedly in Hindu culture dictate her topics. The first section treats key defining doctrines: karma, the body, rebirth, yoga, and the notion of Hindu-ness itself, and examines the tension between transcendence and devotional particularism in Hindu forms of theism. The second section looks at concepts of the divine, sacrifice, and salvation, and the third at views of women and other genders. The sections that follow consider the themes of desire and sex, animals, illusions, and subversions, and the outsider views of orientalists and scholars. In each section Doniger does not aim to be comprehensive, but instead touches on key themes in novel, challenging, and usually insightful ways.
For the philosopher of religion, Doniger offers a historian's insights into the genesis and variants of key Hindu doctrines, such as the distinctive character of Hindu polytheism and the processes by which it was integrated with transcendent conceptions of the divine; the self and the curious effects that rebirth and incarnation have upon it; changing cosmogonic theories and their attempts to obscure the underlying ‘something-from-nothing’ problem; intentionality and its ambivalent relation to the attainment of salvation; ethics and the analysis of desire that underlies Hindu conceptions of morality; and the notions of sentience and personhood as they apply across the range of human, animal, and ‘other’ beings that populate the Hindu cosmos. A particularly strong point of Doniger's work is the study of transitions, ambiguities, and conflicts, rather than systematic doctrinal exposition. She shows, for instance, how conceptual problems inherent in the notion of creation ex nihilo have been obscured by the use of mythic elaboration (see ‘You can't get here from there’), and reveals the intra-Hindu struggles that took place between transcendent and qualified depictions of the divine (see ‘Saguna and nirguna images of the deity’), or action versus intention accounts of salvation (see ‘The scrapbook of undeserved salvation’). Her history of heresy, hypocrisy, and subversion (see ‘The concept of heresy in Hinduism’) is a wonderful patching-together of diverse sources into a coherent portrait of Hinduism's approach to insider and outsider perspectives, ortho- and heterodox lifestyles, and sincere and false appropriations of doctrine.
For the intellectual historian, Doniger unearths coherent ideological histories that might never otherwise come to light. Her account of the gradual development of reincarnation theories traces the ‘joints' in Hindu doctrinal history – points at which a new conception was aired and either rejected or incorporated into mainstream accounts (see ‘Death and rebirth in Hinduism’). In her study of the place of women, she reveals not only the traditions of orthodox repressions or marginal protest, but also the forgotten history of autonomous women who thrived as wealthy shapers of society, hard-working taxpayers, bodyguards and independent ascetics, freed single-mother slaves and scholarly courtesans (see ‘Women in the Mahabharata’, 546).
Throughout Doniger cites widely and at length from a range of texts – often little-known ones that she has uncovered – and sets them neatly against the background of the socio-political history that drives their logic. Many essays are essentially a charting of transformations of a particular idea in relation to concurrent changes in Indian society. Doniger adds to this a puzzle-solving approach to historical scholarship – typically she highlights a question about an apparent paradox in Indian thought, and dives backward into history to explain it. Thus her essay on notions of intolerance begins with the puzzle of why inter-religious violence should have erupted at the 1948 partition of India when Hindu culture was considered highly tolerant of religious pluralism; the essay then leaps back to early Vedic frameworks for pluralism, and marches forward through subsequent philosophical, cosmological, and practice-based discussions. Arriving anew at modernity, it touches on the Muslim colonial pluralism of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, Tennyson, Gandhi, and the twentieth-century Hindu RSS association – and alights back at partition again, all in fifteen smoothly narrated pages. Other pieces similarly swoop across history to observe the languid evolution of Hindu society in progress.
On the one hand, this ‘Owl of Minerva’ style of broad historical overview can be addictive. She alights most often on the curious histories of ideas, rather than the more straightforward developments. One of her self-confessed goals is to find ways of ‘telling the story of Hinduism by including the maverick as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story’ (see ‘The history of Ekalavya’, 547). In these essays as in much of her work Doniger is, in essence, a historical storyteller, weaving insightful intellectual narratives out of the fine threads of history. Her work possesses the virtue of illuminating the patterns by which cultures in general think, grow, and mature.
On the other hand, she occasionally lets details fall under the wheels of the tale she wants to tell. This means that cautions are in order for anyone who might be expecting a straightforward, balanced exposition of Hindu thought here. Various personal preferences find their way into the text, often of a secularizing, structuralizing, or norm-subverting nature. An early essay supports Georges Dumézil's theory that India is one of those ancient cultures that structured its thinking around triads, and further argues for the inclusion of a Louis Dumont-esque ‘transcendent fourth’ category that was meant to incorporate ascetic, transcendence-valuing ideas into an otherwise practical, worldly ancient Brahmanical culture (see ‘Three (or more) forms of the three (or more) paths in Hinduism’). The theory is a neat and enticing one but it is rather too keen to use vague structural patterns to depict transcendence, meditation, and ascetic culture as alien to the original Hindu world-view. One wonders whether the category of the Shudras, the servant class, really ‘roughly corresponds' to the ascetic as a fourth social category, or whether the category of the forest-dweller in the traditional four stages of life really stands on the ‘worldly’ side of a structural opposition to the renouncer, and whether the Bhagavad Gita does not actually go to great lengths to show that ‘worldly’ devotion is not opposed to ‘otherworldly’ release, but in fact offers the best path to it. On such occasions a touch of creative interpretation seems to be in evidence, perhaps warning us to recall that many of these essays were originally meant for collections on broad cultural topics – the triadic essay, for instance, first appeared in a collection entitled Madness, Melancholy and the Limits of the Self. But with the appropriate cautions in place, these essays serve purposes that a more conventional exposition could not serve.
Importantly, this filling out of histories is aimed not only at the scholar. Doniger makes it clear that she sees the orientalist's classic history of Hinduism as a fabrication that has hidden Hinduism from Hindus themselves, as much as from the West. She writes in her introduction that the controversy provoked by her book The Hindus: An Alternative History was a surprise to her because ‘it hadn't occurred to me that Hindus would read it. I had figured, the Hindus already knew about their own religion, or at least as much as they wanted to know, or in any case didn't want to learn more from an American woman’ (xi). She freely admits the naivety in this, and in On Hinduism she responds to the problem by designing the collection specifically (in part at least) for an Indian audience. This adds an extra dimension to her quest to bring hidden histories to light. Just as the most modern Christians know all too little about Christianity's past struggles over the omnipresence of the divine, or the contrast between an afterlife in heaven and a timeless ‘beatific vision’, or the Pantheism Controversy and the ‘God of the Philosophers’, so Hindus tend to know little of the undercurrents within their own cultural history. These essays seek to revive Hinduism's ‘alternative archive’ of subversive and dissenting, atheist and sceptical, playful and paradoxical texts for the use of any Hindus themselves who wish to know more about the options that exist within their own cultural history. In many ways Doniger writes as an egalitarian, humanist, psychoanalytic thinker who is ‘re-reading’ Hindu culture for a new India.
Whether one agrees with her approach or not, there is no doubt that this collection is overflowing with insights, both scholarly and personal. Doniger makes us wonder whether the reincarnating soul would feel chagrin at remembering its past misdemeanours. She encourages us to let paradoxes about divinity into our minds as freely as centuries of Indian imagery have managed to do. One of the most powerful moments is when she illuminates the psychological impact of doctrines of rebirth by recalling the moment in which, as a woman who had wanted more children, she sees another woman's large, happy family playing nearby; it made her understand reincarnation as a belief that allows us to annex other lives and possibilities as part of our own. She writes of the woman that: ‘Her life was my life too; I felt it then, and I remember it now. What had been an idea until then, the idea of my karmic identity with other people, became an experience. I was able to live her life in my imagination’ (105). Whether we call this a psychological, phenomenological, or philosophical comment, it offers a genuinely helpful perspective on a doctrine that is rarely treated by scholars as a meaningful outlook on life.
In these passages one feels that Doniger's work inhabits a special genre that lies between academic exposition and personal essayism in the sense of original thinking about life. The irony is that if she were working on a tradition that is more widely understood, there would be no controversy attached to her work (as there was to her ‘alternative history’ of the Hindus, which made her a centre of impassioned debate); existentialists, psychologists, novelists, and theologians themselves have been giving readings of Christianity for centuries, and the audience always knows enough of the tradition to recognize when it is being offered an imaginative, subversive, or provocative interpretation. Doniger is before her time, in that she is writing for a public still discovering the vast cultural landscape of Hinduism, and that public does not always know how to place her creative insights and her sometimes provocative tone. But, followed with the appropriate caution, she is a guide who will be able to reveal little-known regions of Hindu thought, and explain many of the tectonic shifts that have shaped its landscape. In this sense Doniger's Hinduism is a richer, more multifaceted, and unpredictable tradition than the one that we will glimpse in almost any other book.
