Bending Over Wendy

AS the Pandavas ascend to heaven, a dog leads the way. Why of all animals a dog? Before this scene in the Mahabharata there is no mention of Pandavas’ love for dogs. My curiosity led me to some bookshops catering to religious tastes, but I did not succeed. My interactions with elders and family pundits too did not yield results. May be I should have searched more, but before that a bureaucrat friend gifted me this book by Wendy Doniger – The Hindus, An Alternative History (THAAH). And my search ended. The dog was Dharma incarnate, the father of Yudhishthir, leading his son to high heavens. I was hooked. This was two years ago.

Wendy is now accused of demeaning Hinduism, of disparaging its gods, of belittling the heritage of this great religion through the very same book. May be she intended all of the above. In the book she is cheeky of the kind to juxtapose Draupadi and Sita; comes out as sex-obsessed (Freudian would be a mild description); and even BBC has called her crude, rude, and lewd. If one believes her opponents, much like the Russians in Goa, Wendy has colonized the territory of Hindu studies outside of India, and is the reigning mafia queen of that terra firma.

Or may be she did not. Breathtaking is inadequate to explain the sweep of the Hindu dharmashashtras contained in the book. THAAH is a tome spilling over 750 pages covering a span from pre-history to Hindus in the present day America. Each page contains mythological stories with a meticulous cross reference of multiple Hindu texts. For example she traces Radha from Bhagvata Purana to Gita Govinda to the Bhakti era. While writing on Ramayana, she weaves in details from the Brahmavaivarta Purana that it was an illusory Sita that was abducted by Ravana and not the real Sita, something we do not get to read in both Tulsi and Valmiki versions. She locates satire in Upanishads and finds it bolshie (revealing her left orientation?), obviously something the Brahmins won’t do. To that extent she rescues the religion from the tyranny of the Brahmin clique. She seems to be on a mission to focus on the Hinduism narrative minus the Brahmin Sanskritists. Need we object? Has it not been attempted many times earlier from within? After all Buddha and Mahavir were not Jews.

So far so good.

Wendy declares her beef is with the privileged Hindu male who gets to construct, deconstruct, and guide the Hindu narrative, and hence her agenda of focusing on alternative people whom she defines as all those who are not high caste males. She believes and writes that Hindus seldom drew a sharp line between secular and religious? Well, does the Hebrew Bible not do the same? Was Moses not a king, a doctor, a judge, a priest, all rolled into one? Is it not the Levite male that constructs, deconstructs, and guides the narrative of her religion? Do not Paul and Mohammed guide Christianity and Islam respectively?

In her search of the alternative she meets adventurous, feisty, and intellectually sharp women in Draupadi, Gargi, Kunti, and Maitreya. In contrast, the only adventurous woman that comes out of Bible was an Egyptian queen from Sheba. Though Esther was Hebrew, she blossomed only as a Persian queen.

She gets it awfully wrong at places like when she claims that Hindus developed respect for the Gita only after the British and the Americans found and praised it. She is even more perplexed that a book written in the context of war can be a weapon of non-violence of equal measure in the hands of a Gandhi. So much for five decades of scholarship!

So the larger question is how we deal with her and her work. Is pulping the best option? This kind of counter attack renders us susceptible to be labeled as bigots. It's a trap we can well avoid. THAAH is not a thesis. It’s an encyclopedia on Hinduism with an ethnocentric spin. But it does narrate a story one would not get to hear easily from mainstream sources as a Hindu. I would wager we take it in stride. The religion of the Hindus survived the Charvakas who called Vedas full of internal contradictions and useless repetition. I am sure it would survive Wendy. If anything we should see this as an opportunity to make our religion’s intellectual heritage more accessible – a sort of taking it away from the snooty Brahmins. We don’t need less Wendy; we need more of her, but from within our own stables. I know it is easier said than done in the context of the contested domain of history studies in our country with the dominance of the Left. But that's the only way to go.

AAP Ka Kya Hoga?

AS coincidences go, the day AAP was trying to work out a “stalled decision” on forming Delhi government, television was showing 1986 Hindi flick ‘Ek Ruka Hua Faisla (ERHF)’ – a Bollywood remake of 1957 Hollywood classic ‘12 Angry Men’.

The echo of similarity between AAP’s exercise and the movie’s title was not the end of the coincidence however. If one was about crowdsourcing democracy, the other was about crowdsourcing justice. Now I have not seen the Hollywood original and am told that the Bollywood copy was only a poor cousin. More significantly, India does not have a jury system so the idea itself is a little out of place. But this post is not about a movie review.

The sum and substance of ERHF was a caricature. Of what happens when a crowd or a mob is made the decider of destinies.

For those who have not seen the movie, ERHF is centred on a verdict that needs a unanimous approval of a jury. The court has found a young man guilty of his father’s murder and slapped a death sentence. The jury – a dozen men who are a hodgepodge of varying degrees of temperaments, motivations, prejudices, and flippancy – has to iron out their differences and make a choice which would mean life and death for the convict.

The film is a commentary on consensus building by a group and proves the adage ‘too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth’ rather apt. Most of the jury conclusions are based on assumptions and speculation, not facts. The proceedings amount to a mis-trial looked at from a legal eye.

Now I come to my point.

Arvind Kejriwal swore on his children that he would not take or give support to Congress or BJP. Now following a crowdsourced decision he is set to be Delhi Chief Minister. Kejriwal and his party have made a decision – or rather cooked one – for which they would pay through their nose as soon as the summer of 2014.

Like the jury in ERHF, AAP’s decision might be based on assumptions and speculation that do not go well with hard politics. For one, Congress has bared its fangs even before the oath taking. So for all practical purposes, Kejriwal can forget about any honeymoon period. Two, post results analysis, pollsters are clearly of the opinion that much of AAP’s vote was a snatch from an ill-prepared BJP’s kitty. Come 2014 and a Modi BJP would not be the same entity as a Harshvardhan BJP. Three, Delhi saw over two years of AAP activism, including its IAC avatar, prior to elections, which is not the case in rest of the country. Four, after Delhi government, effectively there are no personalities left to fan out across the country to work the AAP magic.

Am still not writing AAP’s epitaph. But the party might already have seen its best.