There are few in the world who can match the erudition and scholarship of Wendy Doniger as a Sanskritist and Indologist. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at The University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978.
Her major works include Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit.
Her 2009 book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, flung her into the spotlight when right-wing Hindu groups filed a lawsuit under India’s colonial-era anti-blasphemy law, Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which forbids ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community’. India had previously banned James Laine’s book on Shivaji, Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, among many others.
Wendy’s book was positioned as an alternative history of Hinduism, since (according to the author) mainstream history was written from a male Brahminical and white Orientalist perspective. Wendy instead portrays the history of Hinduism from the point of view of women, animals, outcasts, Dalits and tribals, in her signature playful and iconoclastic style.
The Hindus was subsequently withdrawn from circulation by its Indian publisher, Penguin, creating a massive furore over suppression of free speech in India. Almost two years later, the book returned to the Indian market with a different publisher, Speaking Tiger.
In this wide-ranging interview, Wendy discusses her forthcoming book, Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics, and compares sexual mores and gender relations in ancient and contemporary India and the West. She talks about her fascination for Shaivism, atheism in ancient India, explains the origins of the term dharma, the subversion of dharma in the Arthashastra and Kama Sutra, and how the term was co-opted by Savarkar to justify the creation of a Hindu ethno-state. Excerpts:
“Only a great scholar like Wendy Doniger could bring together Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Siegfried, Shakuntala and Marie Antoinette, Solomon and Shakespeare and so many others with such ease and lucidity in an endlessly mesmerizing ring.” So says Robert Calasso, about your last book, The Ring of Truth. Please describe the premise of the book. What would you like readers to take away from the surprising connections you have made?
Starting from the simple observation that jewellery has been the only form of wealth that women have been allowed to own throughout most of history and in most of the world, my book looks at stories that men and women have told about women and their jewellery. Early on, I identify what I call the “slut assumption”: that any time a woman appears with a piece of valuable jewellery, everyone assumes that she got it from some man she slept with: her husband (if she is a good girl) or a lover (if she is unmarried and not a good girl).
This is a variant of the theme that has recently burst into the news with Harvey Weinstein: the well-known fact that economically dominant men often demand sexual favours from women in return for money, jobs or other forms of economic reward, including jewellery.
By surveying a large range of stories, I show how deeply embedded the “slut assumption” is, even in the minds of people who know it is counter-factual. The use of rings to identify legal partners plays an important role in the Ramayana, where, when Sita is a prisoner on Lanka, she and Rama give Hanuman rings to carry back and forth to prove they are who they say they are.
And a taste for jewellery is presented as evidence of the weakness of women there too, when Sita sends Rama off to hunt a jewel-encrusted deer that she covets, thus making herself vulnerable to Ravana in the absence of Rama.
The related idea that the gift of a ring is proof of everlasting love continues to exert a mythological power even in our day. For instance, by drawing upon this mythology, the De Beers diamond company was able to invent in 1939, and successfully spread, a brand new myth, that a woman whose fiancé truly loved her had to have a diamond engagement ring, and that this had “always” been so.
But in fact only a few very wealthy people had ever been able to afford diamonds (all from Golconda in India) before the discovery of the South African mines at the end of the 19th century. So another point the book makes is the power of myths to perpetuate destructive ideas even in people who know they are not true.
What are some insights you gleaned about Indian sexual mores while researching this book? Did they confirm findings from your previous works, for instance on the Kama Sutra? What does it tell us about gender relations in contemporary India?
Sanskrit literature and Indian folklore are rich in stories about rings. Everyone knows the tale of Shakuntala, but not everyone knows that in the Mahabharata version of the story, there is no ring: Shakuntala accuses King Dushyanta of seducing and abandoning her, and he knowingly lies about it. Centuries later, when Kalidasa rewrote the story, he used the ring of forgetfulness (which magically erased Dushyanta’s memory of Shakuntala) to transform Dushyanta from the lying cad he was in the Mahabharatato the innocent and noble father of Bharata, the ancestor of the great kings of India.
The erasure of Shakuntala’s power is part of a more general pattern of the steady disempowerment of women in ancient India.
Kama Sutra comes from the earlier, Mahabharata era, and women in those texts still have a great deal of control over their sexuality. Contemporary India is a complex mix of Kalidasa-era suppression of women, British Raj Victorian repression of sexuality that filtered into so-called Reform Hinduism (making Kama Sutra a source of embarrassment), and a layer of permissive modern cosmopolitanism. It’s a very uneasy, volatile mix.
Tell us about your upcoming book, Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics. By ancient Indian sciences, you are obviously referring to the Kama Sutra and the Arthashastra, which you describe as parallel texts. Please elaborate on the theme of dissent in Indic traditions, particularly in the context of this book.
Yes, the book is about the way these two scientific texts challenge dharma, justifying dishonesty, violence, and adultery, among many other things. They get away with it in two ways: first, by coating their antinomian thoughts with hypocritical praise of dharma at the start and end of the book, and often at the end of each chapter. And second, by attributing many of their most diabolical suggestions to previous scholars (acharyas), whose texts (if they ever existed) no longer survive.
This challenge to dharma, this dissent, was kept alive in later Sanskrit texts by that second method, the false attribution: many authors quote the sceptical views of the people called Charvakas, people that I don’t think existed at all except as an imaginary straw man through whom people could express anti-dharmic ideas without being accountable for them: “The wicked Charvakas say that Brahmins are only interested in making money, and that there is no heaven to go to after death — but of course I don’t believe them!”
Thus, Charvakas are quoted even now, saying things like, “If you believe that the sacrificial animal goes to heaven, why don’t you sacrifice your own father?” Or, “If the food offered in the shraaddha ritual really feeds the dead ancestors, then why do people bother to take food with them on journeys, when people back home could just eat the food for them?”
The final chapter of my book shows how the Modi government reverses the tradition of scientific dissent against dharma by using a narrow, repressive form of dharma to advance false science (such as the argument that there were airplanes, atomic power, television, genetic engineering and plastic surgery in ancient India). This “Vedic science” which is now being introduced into textbooks throughout India is a great embarrassment to the many fine genuine scientists in India, today, and to the honour of India’s great scientific tradition — in texts such as Arthashastra and Kama Sutra — in the past.
The idea of dharma has been cast as a cultural and religious monolith by Hindutva ideologues, a sort of one-stop-shop for all things ‘Hindu’. What are the origins of this term and what does it mean to you personally?
Dharma is a very complex term. In the ancient Sanskrit texts, it means at least two different important things. Ethical dharma is the moral law, theoretically the same for everyone (sadharana dharma, or dharma held in common), an ideal that was seldom realised; the Mahabharata is about the impossibility of living by this perfect dharma. Social dharma, by contrast, is what people really live by; it is caste law, different for each individual (sva-dharma, one’s own dharma). These two dharmas often conflict.
Under the British Raj, some Hindus in Calcutta developed, as the basis of ‘Reform Hinduism’, what they called sanatana dharma, “eternal” dharma, a form of sadharana dharma heavily influenced by Protestant ethics. They regarded this as a code for all Hindus, disregarding the fact that Hindus actually live by a number of very different codes — some are vegetarians, others are not; some sacrifice animals, others do not; and so forth.
When V.D. Savarkar developed the idea of “Hindutva” in 1923, he made sanatana dharma central to his nationalist agenda. To me, the term nowadays conjures up the oppression of Muslims and Dalits and women, and the falsification of the facts of Indian history that do not support the Hindutva agenda.
You mentioned in a recent interview that “the Shaiva scriptures are the most rational reaction to the irrationality of the world”. It’s an intriguing statement. Can you elaborate further?
Yes, I do think that. I find that the scriptures of other religions, particularly of monotheistic religions, and indeed of some forms of Hinduism, lack the direct encounter with the violence and irrationality of the world that is captured by the texts dedicated to Shiva, beginning with the hymns to Rudra in the Rig Veda and continuing through the Shaiva bhakti texts, both the Sanskrit texts of the Shaiva Puranas and, in particular, the South Indian texts in Tamil and Telugu and Kannada.
The great passion at the heart of Shaivism, the acceptance of the terror of the world and the terrifying power of the god, the celebration of the full emotional range of human experience, including both erotic cravings and destructive passions, as well as tragic losses, all of this seems to me to be the best way for a religion to help a worshipper process the chaos of the world.
The interviewer is a filmmaker, columnist and scholar. When not travelling, he hangs out with his cats, toucans and pet iguana.