Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics.

AuthorMcClish, Mark
PositionBook review

Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics. By WENDY DONIGER. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. xvi + 226. $26.

Against Dharma is a comparative study of what we might call the trivargapradhanasastrani. These are the premiere (pradhana) instructional treatises (sastras) of ancient India associated with each of the "group of three" virtues (trivarga): sacred law (dharma), material success (artha), and pleasure (kama). All three texts will be well known to Indologists. The first is the Manava Dharmasastra, commonly known as the Laws of Manu. It is the most important of the dharmasastras, texts that enunciate tenets of Brahmanical orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The second is the Arthasastra of Kautilya, the most extensive manual of statecraft to have survived from the classical period. The last is the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, the oldest extant handbook of erotics in South Asia. Based on Professor Doniger's 2014 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Against Dharma puts these three texts in conversation and argues that the latter two give evidence of a robust tradition of scientific dissent against the dominant cultural ethos, which is expressed in the first.

The historical context of the study is the Maurya-Gupta interregnum (second c. BCE to fourth c. CE). Doniger characterizes this period as a time of foreign invasion and influence in which "[t]here were no great dynasties," and small kingdoms were "almost constantly at war with one another"; it was "a creative chaos that inspired the scholars of the time to bring together all their knowledge, as into a fortified city, to preserve it for whatever posterity there might be" (p. 2). Among the intellectual products of this unsettled period were treatises "devoted to the three human aims (purusarthas)" (p. 5), another expression for the chief virtues pursued by humans. The elements of the trivarga have served historically to epitomize the disciplinary values that characterize the Manava Dharmasastra, Arthasastra, and Kamasutra as bodies of technical instruction. Although these texts claim that each virtue can be pursued in a way that reinforces the others, Doniger rightly points out that "[a]rtha and kama are in direct conflict with certain aspects of dharma from the start" (p. 13). The Arthasastra and Kamasutra, whatever else they might say, advise actions that go against sacred law as a matter of course. Based on "the power of the more traditional Brahmins" (p...

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