The New York Times > Books > The Scholar Who Irked the Hindu Puritans

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/31/books/31conn.html?_r=1&pagewan...

January 31, 2005

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

ook at the author's photo on the flap of "The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was" (Oxford) and you get some idea of why in recent years this woman has had an egg thrown at her at a lecture and received threatening e-mail, and why just last week she was worrying about a student who was being ominously followed. This woman, Wendy Doniger, is one of the foremost scholars of Hindu mythology, the author, editor or translator of 20 books, and a professor with multiple appointments at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1978. But her photograph is not the image of a typical Sanskrit scholar, exuding mastery of "The Mahabharata." It is the image of an ingnue, perhaps barely out of her teens, gazing into the distance with earnest, sensuous grace. As a footnote quietly points out, it shows the author in another era, as if Ms. Doniger, 64, was "pretending to be who she was almost half a century ago." Such is the spirit of wry playfulness that can be found in Ms. Doniger's work, and certainly throughout this new book, which almost gleefully catalogs myths and movies and plots about characters who disguise themselves as themselves. There is Hermione in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale," who pretends to be a dead woman pretending to be a live woman. There is Kim Novak's character in Hitchcock's "Vertigo," who is covered with so many self-reflexive masks that only at the end does James Stewart see the awful truth. And there are Indian stories of Shiva and his wife, Parvati, whose identities refract over multiple incarnations. Through it all are hints of sexuality misdirected and redirected, sexuality that tricks or reveals. With Ms. Doniger's interest in archetype, her invocations of Freud, her postmodern playfulness and her interest in exploring Hinduism from multiple perspectives, it was perhaps only a matter of time before her approach would run afoul of some of the more solemn currents in contemporary Hinduism. Though sexual imagery is found throughout Hinduism's baroque mythology, many groups would like to minimize its importance. They have different concerns: some with purity, some with Hindu power, some with minimizing the influence of "Eurocentric" commentators. In 2002, for example, Ms. Doniger and some former students were attacked in a 24,000-word essay on Sulekha.com, an "online community" for Indians. The essay, by Rajiv Malhotra, an entrepreneur whose foundation is devoted to improving the understanding of India in the United States, accused Ms. Doniger and her colleagues of Hindu bashing with their obsessive preoccupation with sexuality. That essay seems to have galvanized the opposition. A Sulekha.com article posted in 2002 accused Ms. Doniger of denigrating Hinduism in her article written for the Encarta encyclopedia. Microsoft, the encyclopedia's publisher, ended up replacing Ms. Doniger's contribution. Meanwhile threatening e-mail messages were sent to Ms. Doniger and her colleagues. And in

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The New York Times > Books > The Scholar Who Irked the Hindu Puritans

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/31/books/31conn.html?_r=1&pagewan...

November 2003, an egg was lobbed at her at the University of London, after she lectured about monkey imagery in "The Ramayana." In India things have become even more serious. Hindutva, a form of Hindu orthodoxy, was enshrined during the Bharatiya Janata Party's reign (from 1998 until this May). But even with that party's fall from power, violence from Hindu groups has grown along with violence from radical Muslims. Scholarship about Hinduism has also come under scrutiny. Books that explore lurid or embarrassing details about deities or saints have been banned. One Western scholar's Indian researcher was smeared with tar, and the institute in Pune where the scholar had done his research was destroyed. Ms. Doniger said one of her American pupils who was studying Christianity in India had her work disrupted and was being relentlessly followed. In an interview Ms. Doniger explained that this kind of fundamentalism was not new to Hinduism: the strain has run through the religion for centuries, but now it has a political cast. In May, she addressed some of these issues in The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing "Kiss of the Yogini," a book by David Gordon White about the origins of tantric sex. Mr. White argues that Tantra's origins were in a South Asian sexual cult that required the consumption of all manner of bodily emissions, a hypothesis that Ms. Doniger found plausible, if overstated. But, she pointed out, the book also had "political importance" because it was "flying in the face" of a revisionist Hindu tradition that had led to intemperate attacks on European and American scholars. These attacks are not just about particular interpretations, she said. Another kind of challenge is being raised. Ms. Doniger wrote: "Right-wing Hindu groups, in India and the diaspora, have increasingly asserted their wish, indeed their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism." The objection is not just to an unflattering image of Hinduism, but to who shapes that image, who creates Hinduism's public mask. This complaint dominates many essays on Sulekha.com and, of course, it echoes the complaints of many Western groups that have not developed traditions of critical scholarship, but find themselves subject to what they consider outsider examination. In this, the Hindu right is echoing the Western left. Unfortunately, the alternative offered is usually not scholarship but self-promotion. In this case, Ms. Doniger wrote in her review, the "righteous revolution" also threatens to become a "reign of terror." Moreover, the insistence on stripping away masks created by others may be an attempt to create a single rigid mask that presents a supposedly appropriate visage, an idea that flies in the face of the multifaceted Hindu traditions that Ms. Doniger explores. It makes Hinduism pretend to be what it only occasionally was. The Connections column will appear every other Monday. | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top

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