Posted on 05/19/2009 5:58:45 AM PDT by SJackson
In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History, Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism's unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a "unified Hinduism."
She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a "British-Brahmin version of Hinduism - one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries." These "bad Hindus" are accused of having an inferiority complex. She claims that the Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) of today thus uses a fake Hinduism for its own historiography and that she seeks to tell an "alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they [the nationalists] tell."
When it comes to classic Hindu texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, she condemns them for their violence. The Mughal Muslim emperors who colonized India for Islam for 300 years were, according to a reviewer, "motivated by realpolitik rather than religious fundamentalism" when they destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and sold hundreds of thousands of Hindus into slavery.
According to Pankaj Mishra, an author who has praised the book, Doniger should be admired for striding "intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-Arab relations." Mishra calls Hindu nationalists the "Indian heirs to British imperialists who invented 'Hinduism'" and accuses them of wanting to create a "culturally-homogenous and militant nation-state."
Reading this virulent condemnation of Hinduism and Hindu nationalism, one is reminded of European-Jewish intellectual Tony Judt's condemnation of Israel: "The very idea of a Jewish state [is] rooted in another time and place... in a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry... [it is] dysfunctional... an anachronism." Doniger's claim that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century bares a striking resemblance to Tel Aviv University Prof. Shlomo Sand's claim in his book When and How the Jewish People Was Invented (2008) that Jews are not a "nation-race" but rather a colorful amalgam of converts.
ALMOST EVERY BOOK on modern India is full of condemnations for Hindu nationalism, which is seen as the antithesis of Gandhi's "good" pacifism. Professors in the West are full of attempts to rewrite Hindu claims that their temples were destroyed by the Muslims and either declare there were no Hindu temples or excuse the mass destruction of them and the building of mosques atop them. Excusing the imposition of slavery on Hindus by Islamic invaders who arrived in large numbers in the 11th century under Mahmoud of Ghazna is a little harder, but even it is excused.
Hindu nationalism, like Zionism, is condemned for having a "nationalist archeology." Critiquing Israeli archeology Nachman Ben-Yehuda has described the myth of Masada and Nadia Abu el-Haj has written on "reflections on archeology and Israeli settler-nationhood." Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi writes that the Hindu temple at Ayodha that was destroyed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Babur to build the Babri Mosque was merely the site of "Hindu sentiment and myth" and not the historical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.
There is a connection between the contempt for Hindu nationalism and the disdain for Zionism that exists in many circles. They are widely condemned for similar things. Both are accused of inventing a history for their people and religion. Both are accused of inventing and perverting archeology. Both are accused of being anachronisms in a world that is supposedly multicultural. Both are seen as militant and anti-Muslim.
But there is another connection that is often overlooked. Both were unlikely victims of Gandhi's sometimes misplaced pacifism. Gandhi condemned not only Zionism but also encouraged the Jews of Europe to voluntarily submit to Nazism and throw "themselves into the sea from cliffs" to please Hitler. Gandhi, a Hindu, penned an introduction to the Koran, a book that is deeply prejudiced against pagan Hinduism, and during the partition of India he excused the ethnic cleansing of Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan, while encouraging India to protect her Muslim minority.
WHAT TRULY unites Zionism and Hindu nationalism, however, is the fact that both represent the aspirations of unique peoples and states. There is only one Hindu state and one Jewish state. Both are accused of daring to declare themselves Jewish and Hindu and thus seek "homogeneity." This accusation is made in a world with some 48 countries with a Muslim majority and 169 Christian majority countries. India and Israel, far from being homogeneous anachronisms are tiny drops of diversity in a world that is increasingly homogeneous.
Hindu nationalism is not a result of a British imperialism anymore than Zionism is; both grew out of a long suppressed and colonized peoples' dreams for their own country free from foreign rule. Those who want to expose themselves to Hindu nationalism and its true underpinnings should pick up Lal K. Advani's My Country My Life. Absent of that, people should at least give Hinduism, like Judaism, the benefit of the doubt. They are based on real religions and real texts, not myths conjured up in the 19th century.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Historical revisionism is always annoying but some of these folks really go off into La-La Land.
I thought the first part was a parody of academic anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism. It never occured to me that the left hates Hinduism.
There is an element of truth to the cited author’s thesis.
A movement was begun in Calcutta in the late 19th Century, of religious figures and intellectuals, who attempted to come up with a modern Hinduism whose rites were derived in part from both Protestant and Church of England practices.
Many Bengali luminaries were involved, grandees of the time, but ultimately it did not succeed or thrive.
any thoughts?
The Bhagavad-Gita, and the Mahabharata, among other texts are far, far older than the 1800s. Not only because of textual and chronological evidence, but also because of evidence from far-away cultures where Hinduism spread to, ages ago.
Bali, for example. Or for that matter, the Angkor Vat in Cambodia.
As for the mention of Mughal structures in India being built over ancient Hindu temples, most of these claims are likely dubious.
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History: Fiction or Science?
by Anatoly T. Fomenko
The problem with Hindu nationalism is that the nationalism part has often been supplanted by chauvenism and contempt for religious minorities. That’s a crucial difference with Zionism.
Not to mention that many leaders of the main Hindutva organisation, the RSS and other idealogues like Bal Thackeray have been admirers of a certain Adolph Hitler.
Dr. Wendy Doniger on Gov. Sarah Palin
with 10 comments
I couldn’t help but call Dr. Doniger, of the University of Chicago, when I read her quote on Sarah Palin, “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” Amazingly, she took my call while she was on vacation at Cape Cod.
QUICK UPDATE: Suprisingly, Dr. Doniger gave $1,000 to John Kerry back in 2004. I was expecting to see a connection to Obama. Alas…. And nevermind that Unversity of Chicago students pay over $35,000 per year to be taught by people like this. Does anyone have a guess how much tax payer money is sent to the University of Chicago?
(photo)
Dr. Wendy Doniger
Her basic complaint is that Sarah Palin wants to impose her theology on women and that, “[Palin] does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.”
Working class women…? While Wendy Doniger spends her time in the Ivory Tower at the University of Chicago and vacations at Cape Cod while school is in session. By contrast, Palin is actually a working class woman. Remember she went back to work three days after following through on her ‘choice’ to have Trig.
My ultimate question for Dr. Doniger was, whether a woman should be defined by her behavior and political beliefs? Cleverly, she answered that she wasn’t expert on Palin’s horomones and she doesn’t doubt that Palin does have a womb. But she was clear that Palin wasn’t “acting like a woman.”
Ultimately, Dr. Doniger and her ilk, do want to define womanhood by how someone votes and their political beliefs
This is the height of sexism.
UPDATE: A clever NationalReview.com reader wrote on Dr. Doniger, “The left’s new position: Being homosexual is genetic. Being a woman is a choice.” Ah, the brilliance of leftist nuance.
http://thismodernage.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/dr-wendy-doniger-on-gov-sarah-palin/
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/tejo.html
Taj Mahal - A Hindu Temple-Palace
Excerpt:
The most valuable evidence of all that Tejo Mahalaya is not an Islamic building is in the Badshahnama which contains the history of the first twenty years of Shah Jahan’s reign. The writer Abdul Hamid has stated that Taj Mahal is a temple-palace taken from Jaipur’s Maharaja Jaisigh and the building was known as Raja Mansingh’s palace. This by itself is enough proof to state that Tejo Mahalaya is a Hindu structure captured, plundered and converted to a mausoleum by Shah Jahan and his henchmen. But I have taken the liberty to provide you with 109 other proofs and logical points which tell us that the structure known as the Taj Mahal is actually Tejo Mahalaya.
There is a similar story behind Every Islamic structure in Bharat. They are all converted Hindu structures. As I mentioned above, hundereds of thousands of temples in Bharat have been destroyed by the barbaric muslim invaders and I shall dedicate several articles to these destroyed temples. However, the scope of this article is to prove to you beyond the shadow of any doubt that Taj Mahal is Tejo Mahalaya and should be recognized as such! Not as a monument to the dead Mumtaz Mahal—an insignificant sex object in the incestous Shah Jahan’s harem of 5,000...
Thanks. That’s the one.
Thats surprising to know. I know many people, some of them my own relatives, who are worshippers of Lord Ayyappa, yet they worship other Hindu gods and celebrate all Hindu festivals. This is the first time I am hearing something like this. In anycase, Lord Ayyappa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayyappan) is Shiva’s son. His worshipers are invariably Hindu!
you are correct — I meant to say Ayyavazhi, not followers of Lord Ayyappa.
>>cultural sense
Many, many Christians partake fully in many Hindu festivals, and social gatherings involving Hindus, Christians and Muslims are commonplace, at least in the big cities for major festival days......
Bollywood in particlar emphasizes cultural and national commonalities and unity while decrying “communalism”.
Thanks FN!
Funny thing is, I do know Muslims in America, in this case Shias from India, whose women used to wear saris and western dresses too, the former because of being from India.
Now, after years in America, the women are wearing traditional Islami types dresses after exhortations from their mullahs.
One of the men now claims the family’s ancestors as being from Yemen originally, instead of the Rann of Kutch.
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