Wendy Doniger holds two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and many books about Hinduism. She is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. In this monumental work of alternative history, Doniger reveals the roles women, lower classes and castes, and animals have played in Hinduism, which previously had been charted mainly by Brahmin Sanskritists. The author describes the book as "a kind of narrative quilt made of scraps of religion sewn in next to scraps of social history."
Although Hinduism's defining characteristics change over time, some have remained constant including regard for the Vedas, karma, dharma, a cosmology centered on Mount Meru, devotion to one or more members of an extensive pantheon of gods, ritual offering of fruits and flowers to a deity, vegetarianism as an ideal, nonviolence, and blood sacrifice. Doniger sheds light on all of them.
In this ambitious historical survey from the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (2,500 B.C.) to the present, Doniger shows that "the greatness of Hinduism — its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness — lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny." A large part of the book is taken up by the author's commentary on the Rig Veda and the 2,000 year-old Indian epics — The Ramayana (where monkeys stand in as the human unconscious) and The Mahabharata (which includes a meditation on violence). In these epics, demons and gods do battle and no clear lines are drawn between them.
Doniger also covers the complex relationships between Hindus and Muslims, the mythology and ritual of Tantra, the significance of the "bhakti" tradition as a radically egalitarian form of devotion, the impact of British colonialism on Indian culture, the popularity of cults of Rama and Krishna, Orientalism, the contributions of Gandhi to Hinduism, Kipling's novel Kim, the phenomenon of Bollywood, and the variety of Hindu experience and practice in America.
Anyone with the faintest interest and curiosity about Hinduism will find this book to be an illuminating, informative, and challenging work of immense erudition and insight.
