CapitalistImperialistPig

My experience with the book was a bit conflicted. On the one hand, I thought that I learned a lot, and certainly finished with more respect for and, I like to think, understanding of Hindu thought. Despite the heavy presence of scholarly apparatus (thousands of citations and hundreds of endnotes), there are some curious inexactitudes ( India lies mostly in the Northern Hemisphere - so far as I can tell India and its islands lie entirely in the Northern Hemisphere). The author is addicted to a chatty, discursive, and frequently frivolous tone which I sometimes found annoying. It's important to note that the author hasn't written a history of India, but a history of its main religion. There are bits of the history of the country included, but mainly just as background. Because it's a history, the focus is on evolution and change. Moreover, as the author declares at the outset, her focus is not on the central figures of the religion, it's priestly and other high cas...

Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History , has aroused fierce anger in a great many Hindus, most of whom appear not to have read it. On the other hand, it has also sold very well in India, despite an official ban based on claims of blasphemy - it can still be ordered from abroad or by Kindle. So what exactly are they so pissed off about? That's the question that started me reading the book and the asking of which seemingly cost me all my Hindu friends. A part of the answer seems to be Doniger's feud with the so-called Hindu fundamentalists, including Hindutva and its political incarnations the BJP and the RSS. Broadly speaking, these groups are nationalistic or chauvinistic, espouse a fundamentalist view of Hinduism and are against Muslims, Christians, Jews and other non-native religions. Doniger has this quote from a leader of the RSS: . The non-Hindu peoples in Hindustan . . . must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness...

Outline of the plot of The Hindus. The oldest document of Hinduism is the Rig Veda, first written in the early centuries AD, but probably composed as much as two thousand years earlier. The peoples who composed it and the other Vedas may or may not have affinities with the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization (IVC)(3300-1300 BCE), but their life style, horse riding and nomadic, was certainly different. Unfortunately the IVC left no decipherable records, so we don't know what language they spoke. The Vedic peoples spoke an Indo European language which left its traces in Sanskrit, the liturgical language of the Vedas and much subsequent Hindu literature as well as in widely spoken Indian languages of today. The Indo-European speakers, who conquered most of Europe and big chunks of Asia, are commonly assumed to have originated in central Asia, but other hypotheses are sometimes entertained, and their diaspora occurred some 5000-6000 years ago or so. There is a huge later religi...

The Hindus: An Alternative History , by Wendy Doniger, was a complicated and somewhat difficult book for me, but I would like to begin by stating quite categorically that the claim that it is an an attempt to demean, discredit or otherwise disrespect Hinduism is false. That claim, made to me by some Hindus who admit that they haven't read the book, and some that I don't know who do claim to have read it is, in my opinion, quite absurd. When I have tried to find out what offended them, they have responded with circumlocutions, incomprehensible analogies, evasions, and finally, anger. Whatever it is, they either don't know or don't want to tell me. Perhaps the closest thing to a bill of particulars that I have seen is this quote, via Arun, from emeritus Professor Madan Lal Goel: Wendy Doniger’s 779-page tome titled, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) is a hurtful book, laced with personal editorials, folksy turn of the phrase and funky wordplays. She has a ...