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Mythologist Dr Devdutt Pattanaik interviews Wendy Doniger in the Mid Day and provides the full interview on his website:
In one of the questions, I had suggested that she enjoys intellectual heckling. It is an opinion I have held for long. I realise after reading her answer that it could be just a case of a different sensibilities....
When I read your books, I feel you enjoy heckling people. Your choice of words can be rather stark. I can almost feel you chuckle at the orthodox getting their knickers in a twist. Am I imagining this?
Yes, I think you are indeed imagining this, but apparently you are not the only one. Perhaps if you gave me an example of something that you regard as heckling or stark I could see where the misinterpretation has come in. My sense of humor, which is a New York Jewish sense of humor, sometimes is mistaken for flippancy. But I never ever write with the intention of making anyone angry. The only people I poke fun at in The Hindus are the scholars who generated such outlandish ideas about the Indus Valley on the basis of absolutely no evidence. I never ever poke fun at any Hindus. I sometimes see Hindu texts as themselves as funny, or as poking fun at other people, and I enjoy those texts and cite them. I certainly do not always agree with what the texts say. But I do not heckle them.
Read the full interview: 'I never ever poke fun at any Hindus'
In Outlook:
Elsewhere, on/by/from the same book/author:
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Oct 26, 2009 AT 19:13 IST
Namit Arora in the excellent 3 Quarks Daily:
The Carvaka denied the authority of all scriptures. First, knowledge based on verbal testimony is inferential and so vitiated by the flaws of inference. The scriptures, they claimed, are characterized by three faults: falsity, self-contradiction, and tautology. Based on such a theory of knowledge, the Carvaka defended a complete reductive materialism according to which the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air are the only original components of being; all other forms are products of their composition. Consciousness arises from the material structure of the body and characterizes the body itself—rather than a soul—and perishes with the body.
More here
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON May 26, 2009 AT 00:47 IST
Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago’s Divinity School writes about her new book:
People are being killed in India today because of misreadings of the history of the Hindus. In all religions, myths that pass for history--not just casual misinformation, the stock in trade of the internet, but politically-driven, aggressive distortions of the past--can be deadly, and in India they incite violence not only against Muslims but against women, Christians, and the lower castes.
Myth has been called "the smoke of history," and there is a desperate need for a history of the Hindus that distinguishes between the fire, the documented evidence, and the smoke; for mythic narratives become fires when they drive historical events rather than respond to them. Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat, sparked a revolution in India in 1857. We are what we imagine, as much as what we do.
....And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in "The Hindus: An Alternative History," to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it's a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, "The Hindus believe. . . ," is talking nonsense.
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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Mar 20, 2009 AT 23:58 IST
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