Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty - The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009)

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I myself am by both temperament and training inclined to texts. I am neither an archaeologist nor an art historian; I am a Sanskritist, indeed a recovering Orientalist, of a generation that framed its study of Sanskrit with Latin and Greek rather than Urdu or Tamil. I've never dug anything up out of the ground or established the date of a sculpture. I've labored all my adult life in the paddy fields of Sanskrit, since I know ancient India best.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
It's a book about the history of the Hindus, from 50 million B. C. E. to the present. It says that there is no evidence that Rama was born in the place that is now known as Ayodhya and there is no evidence that there was a Hindu temple on the spot where the Babur Mosque was. And that there is no evidence that Rama and a bunch of monkeys built a bridge from India to Sri Lanka, as the Hindu Right have claimed. That's just mythology, which is lovely, I've studied it all my life, but you don't legislate on the basis of mythology.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word Hindoo (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
The two sets of sources, textual and nontextual, reveal bits of history to us in different ways, like the lame man riding on the shoulders of the blind man. When it comes to history, you can't trust anyone: The texts lie one way, while images and archeology mislead us in other ways. On the one hand, the gods did not fly around in big palaces, as the texts insist that they did, and we cannot know if women really did speak up as Gargi does in the Upanishads, or Draupadi in the Mahabharata.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
But I felt that I wanted a book to be out there to counteract their claims and to tell the history of the Hindus the way I think it should be told, the way it is more to the credit to the Hindus. It's a very positive book-it shows how for so much of their history the Hindus have been so tolerant, and so open to different forms of religion, and that to close it down now would be a terrible shame. So it's really a backhanded compliment-Hinduism has always been so good, and these guys are ruining it.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda,

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
The dog who doesn't bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog's voice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty