The Hindus: An Alternative History.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

The Hindus: An Alternative History. By WENDY DONIGER. New York: THE Penguin Press. 2009. Pp. 779. maps, illustrations. $35.

Immediately after its publication in 2009. Wendy Doniger's The Hindus became the object of several reviews, some ecstatic, others generally positive notwithstanding various provisos; in the same year it also figured among the five finalists for general nonfiction of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is a learned book: one cannot help being amazed by the amount and variety of source materials the author has at her command, many of which one would not find, or not expect to find, in a book on the history of Hinduism and its practitioners (see the bibliography, pp. 729-53).

On the other hand, even as with Doniger's oilier books, or for that matter, her public lectures (remember the egg-throwing incident during a lecture on the Ramayana at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2003) the book provoked a negative reaction among conservative Hindus. The Hindu American Foundation, for example, strongly urged the National Book Critics Circle not to bestow the award (in a letter of 5 February 2009). Under the title "A Professor With a Taste for Controversy At the Expense of Truth." on 9 January 2010 they posted a message, saying among other things. "As an academic and apparent non-believer. Professor Doniger ... has completed her analysis from a Freudian psychoanalytical perspective with Mule or no regard or respect for the esoteric deeper meanings entrenched in the Hindu Faith." And on 10 March 2010 they organized a protest march in New York.

In the preface to The Hindus, aptly tilled "The man or the rabbit in the moon." Doniger faces her Critics head on: "Nowadays mosl non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about. But any academic approach to Hinduism, viewing the subject through the eyes of writers from Marx and Freud to Foucault and Edward Said, provides a kind of telescope, the viewfinder of context, to supplement the microscope of the insider's view, which cannot supply the same sort of context. Always there is bias, and the hope is that the biases of Hindus and non-Hindus will cancel one another out in a well-designed academic study of any aspect of Hinduism" (p. 13). She admonishes her readers: "I intend to go on celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the...