Hinduism: None, One, or Many?

‘Hinduism: None, One, or Many?’, review of Flood, G. (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Smith, D. Hinduism and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Michaels, A. Hinduism, Past and Present (tr. Barbara Harshav, Princeton University Press, 2004), Caldwell, S. Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kālī (Delhi: OUP, 1999) in Social Anthropology 12(3)(2004): 367-71. Hinduism – None, One, or Many? Flood, Gavin (ed.). 2003. The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Oxford: Blackwell. xiv + 599pp. Hb.: £85.00. ISBN 0 631 21535 2. Smith, David. 2003. Hinduism and Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. xii + 250pp. Hb.: £50.00/Pb.: £15.99. ISBN 0 631 20861 5/20862 3. Michaels, Axel. 2004. Hinduism, Past and Present (tr. Barbara Harshav). Princeton: Princeton University Press. xviii + 430 pp. Hb.: £42.95/Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0 691 08952 3/08953 1. Caldwell, Sarah. 1999 (Oxford India Paperbacks 2001). Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kālī. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. xvii + 320pp. Pb.: 495.00 RS. ISBN: 019 565 7696. Anthropologists of Buddhism are familiar with descriptions of Buddhists in which the author wonders whether what they are observing is ‘really’ Buddhism. In the case of Hinduism, confronted close up, the dominant attitude is more likely to be fascination. If observers of Hindu rituals rub their eyes, it is not usually because they are stricken by epistemological doubt about the very status of what they are observing. Scepticism about Hinduism tends rather to be meta-doubt, doubt experienced by theorists trying to grapple with the task of providing an overall picture of Hinduism, doubt about whether there is such a thing as Hinduism in the larger sense at all. In short, with Buddhism the assumption seems to be: It does exist, but village Buddhism isn’t really it. In the case of Hinduism the ontology is the other way around: Hinduism certainly exists in villages, but does it exist as an institution spanning millennia and the whole of South Asia? In the past some Panjabis returned their social identity as ‘Hindu Mussalman’ in the census. Many Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains used to be happy to be considered as a variety of Hindu, and some still so consider themselves today. Others describe themselves as ‘secular Hindus’. In other words, in this sense Hindu means approximately ‘Indian’ (though sorting out that historical and conceptual conflation is precisely the problem). Thus some influential scholarly voices have recently argued that there is really no such thing as Hinduism, and that, even if Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and the rest exist as separate religions, Hinduism does not. It contains several religions within it perhaps, but it is not itself a religion. Scholars may doubt the existence of Hinduism, but Hindus themselves are more certain. As Smith remarks, “essentialism is now seen, rightly, to be dangerous. But essentialism is an important part of Hinduism” (p. viii). And in the recent years, Hinduism has become political and threatening as well. Fuelled by anti-Muslim sentiment, which reached its apogee in riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 and again ten years later in Gujarat in February 2002, the ideology of Hindutwa (‘Hinduness’) espoused by the BJP has proved to be an 1 electoral asset that has propelled it from a minor player into India’s most powerful political party. In this context the idea that Hinduism is entirely a colonial construction, the bastard child of Western Orientalist scholarship and misguided Indian nationalists, is extremely attractive to left-leaning intellectuals. Unfortunately this theory is false, as has been shown in an important essay by David N. Lorenzen (‘Who Invented Hinduism?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 41: 629-59, 1999). Although he does not cite Lorenzen, Gavin Flood, the editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, in practice adopts a similar position: even though the name ‘Hindu’ does not occur until the fourteenth or fifteenth century and the label ‘Hinduism’ occurs only from the early nineteenth (Flood ‘Introduction: Establishing the Boundaries’, p. 3), by 500 CE there was nonetheless a family of traditions, with shared myths, rituals, and attitudes, that deserves to be considered ‘Hinduism’, and whose adherents considered themselves to be part of a shared set of traditions. In this collection Flood brings together as many experts as possible and they have approached Hinduism from as many different angles as possible, so that, even if everything is not covered, most important topics are. The approach of most of his contributors is, as Flood recognizes, predominantly textual “along with the importance of fieldwork” (p. 10). After two opening chapters on ‘Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism’ (G. Viswanathan) and ‘Orientalism and Hinduism’ (D. Smith), there are chapters on the Vedas and Upanisads (M. Witzel), the Dharmashastras (L. Rocher), the Epics (Brockington), the Puranas (F. Matchett), Tamil texts (N. Cutler), Malayali texts (R. Freeman), Hindi devotional literature (N.M. Martin), Shaivism (G. Flood), Vaishanavism (G. Colas), renouncer traditions (P. Olivelle), the householder tradition (T.N. Madan), the Teyyam tradition of Kerala (R. Freeman), and women’s devotions in Banaras (T. Pintchman). What the size of the book and the number of contributors allows, which would not be covered in more conventional and shorter surveys, is a whole section on “Indian Sciences”. Of course, here ‘Hindu’ is taken to mean ‘Indian’ since the sciences are part of all the Indic traditions and travelled with Buddhism to other parts of Asia. Frits Staal introduces the section with the observation that “Europeans discovered China during the Enlightenment and Indian during the Romantic Period. They are therefore disposed to find in China science and in India religion” (p. 346). The chapters in this section cover language (F. Staal), Indian mathematics (T. Yayashi), astrology and astronomy (M. Yano), and medicine (D. Wujastyk). After a section on philosophy and theology – chapters on reason and logic (J. Ganeri), ‘Hindu theology’ (F. Clooney SJ), and mantra (A. Padoux) – there is a final section on ‘Society, Politics, and Nation’, with chapters on caste (D. Quigley), Hindu reformism (D. Killingley), political Hinduism (C. RamPrasad), divine personifications of Tamil and of Bharata Mata (S. Ramaswamy), and gender in Hindu devotionalism (V. Narayanan). Many of these essays are written by experts who have discussed and analysed their topics at much greater length in books. As such, it is very useful to have succinct summaries of their work (Olivelle, Madan, Padoux, Quigley). But this remains a reference text that most anthropologists will want to seek out in the library. There have been many textbooks on classical Hinduism, but few, if any, on modern Hinduism, so David Smith’s Hinduism and Modernity is an especially welcome addition to the literature. As a Sanskritist he is better informed than most of those who have written on Hinduism in the modern period, and this also makes him less likely to 2 dismiss everything that occurred in the nineteenth century as the invention of colonialism. He has read very widely and viewed many Indian films. The style, no doubt reflecting the book’s origin in undergraduate lectures, is simple and straightforward, sometimes overly so (“The position of Muslims within India is difficult”, p. 50), sometimes aphoristically (“caste was unaffected by rail travel (and strengthened by censuses)”, p. 27; “Not all goddesses are nice”, p. 122). One of the best passages is his passionate defence of the great French Sanskritist, Louis Renou, against the misrepresentations of Ronald Inden in his Said-inspired polemic, Imagining India (1992, Blackwell). Smith shows that Inden played fast and loose with the evidence in his determination to find ascriptions of femininity in colonial descriptions of India (pp. 97-9). (The entire chapter in which this appears is identical to his contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Hinduism discussed above.) Anthropologists who have read Smith’s book will be much better informed about actually existing Hinduism – everything from Bernier’s observation of India in the seventeenth century, to Phulan Devi, the impact of the Miss World competition, and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism (which in many cases would be better named Hindu modernism). As a survey and an introduction, it should be added to the reading list of all those planning to work in India. That said, it does not approach the details of Hinduism in anything like an anthropological way; the anthropological sources are read only patchily; and it should not be taken as a guide either to Dumont or to anthropology in South Asia since Dumont. In this respect Axel Michael’s more traditionally focused book, Hinduism, Past and Present, represents an interesting contrast. Michaels is also an Indologist (Professor of Sanskrit at Heidelberg University), but unlike Smith he has no ambition to tackle modern Hinduism. However, and paradoxically perhaps, his book, though more oriented towards the past, is also much better read in the anthropological literature. (This could, of course, also be read as a criticism of anthropologists of South Asia, for concentrating on ‘traditional’ manifestations of Hinduism, a trend which is certainly now changing.) Michaels grabs the definitional bull by the horns as follows: “Hinduism” is nothing more than a collective term for certain religions, religious communities, and socioreligious systems that fulfill the following five criteria: (1) they emerged or spread on the South Asian subcontinent; (2) their social organization is characterized essentially by special rules of descent and marriage (the so-called caste sytem); (3) Vedic-Brahmanic values, rituals, and myths dominated (originally); (4) a manifestation of Siva, Visnu, Devi, Rama, Krsna, or Ganesa is worshipped as god or divine force, or is at least not explicitly rejected; (5) an Identificatory Habitus prevails, closely connected with a salvation linked to descent, derived from the ancient Indian sacrifice, but which has broken links with that to a large extent. I am aware that this is a tepid definition. Yet, definitions do not conclude the work, but constitute a summary and a program… (p. 20) What he means by the Hindu ‘Identificatory Habitus’ is something similar to what in earlier times might have been called ‘the Hindu mind’, and what Dumont later indicated with his notion of a hierarchical mode of thought. It is the proclivity to see 3 one’s own personal identity as part of a larger whole, by identification with some larger divine unit (god or brahman). Michaels continues, “Examined closely, Hinduism consists of three Hindu religions and four forms of Hindu religiosity…” (p. 21). The three religions are Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hinduism, folk or caste religion, and founded religions (whether of the sectarian, syncretic, or guru-focused sort), and the four forms of religiosity are ritualism, spiritualism, devotionalism, and heroism. Although Michaels proceeds to give outline tables that list Hindu scriptures and periods of history, in fact his book concentrates on Hindu practice, i.e. the practice of traditional Hinduism as it is today. There is relatively little on the history of Hinduism and the focus, informed by fieldwork in north India and Nepal, is on life-cycle rituals, caste, the meaning of worship, sacrifice, and asceticism, notions of time, space, and salvation. Throughout he tries to specify how the ‘Identificatory Habitus’ is at work. Because of the angle which Michaels has chosen to take and because he has produced an intellectually coherent synthesis from an enormous mass of material and over a century of Indology, his book is essential reading for any anthropologist of Hinduism who seeks to get beyond mere documentation of local variation. His book is a challenge both to those who think that such a synthesis is impossible because of the special nature of Hinduism and to those who think all generalization in the human sciences is specious and motivated. I have left till last Sarah Caldwell’s book, Oh Terrifying Mother. Although all three books considered so far are influenced by anthropology, at least in so far as they admit the usefulness of fieldwork (no small matter for some Sanskritists), this is the only one that actually is a work of anthropology. And it is not rarified, positivistic or textually based anthropology either, but postmodern in-your-face feminist and reflexive anthropology, which – as befits its subject-matter, the fearsome goddess Kali – is red in tooth and claw, but, for all that, clearly and accessibly written. Caldwell originally went to Kerala to study mutiyettu dances which enact the story of the goddess Kali killing the demon Darika. The dancers are exclusively male and high caste, but the dances are a part of folk Hinduism and the dancers are possessed by the goddess while performing. The book starts from the dance performances, but extends to the different ways in which men and women are brought up and experience the goddess, and the effect of the goddess on the author herself. Caldwell combines conventional analysis with passages from her fieldnotes, as well as other passages from her field diaries that reveal her own deepening personal involvement in the cult of Kali and the dramatic effect that this had on her family relationships. In a radical departure from the scholarly conventions that guide the other books under review, she participates fully in what she is studying: “When I realized that the revolution in my own life had begun and ended on the exact dates demarcating the goddess’s traditional month of destructive fury, I was both terrified and elated. On one level it seemed my life was totally out of control, but on the other hand this meant the goddess was somehow ‘running my show’, and therefore, taking care of me” (p. 267). As such, the book is also part of ongoing anthropological discussions of method, one which is all the more convincing because – unlike some other contributors to this debate – the author appears to be trustworthy when she is discussing matters other than her own self. Caldwell’s book is thus far from being an ethnography in the conventional sense – and some may wish she had spent less time talking about herself – yet it is full of human voices. She makes an interesting contribution to the growing body of psychoanalytically 4 inspired work on Hinduism and Indian childrearing. Unlike much of that work – particularly Stanley Kurtz’s All the Mothers are One (1992, Columbia University Press) – it is ethnographically based: the myths and the rituals are found in a single cultural area, and there is a serious attempt to ground the assertions about mother-son, husband-wife, and father-daughter relations in local culture, informants’ statements, and actual experiences. It is interesting to compare how Kali appears in the different books under review. Caldwell has to admit that the cult of Kali is basically a male one which “expresses deep ambivalence about women and femininity” (p. 277) and that the women she knew reacted to Kali with fear and felt distant from her. This is where a more rounded ethnography might have shown how women worship and relate to the goddess under other more peaceable forms. In other words, despite all the depth psychology, many basic facts about Hindu women’s lives in Kerala are missing from her account. Caldwell suggests that “though no woman admitted to identifying in any way with Bhadrakali… Kerala women could theoretically make use of these progressive symbols and work out their own traumas through identification with Kali” (p. 262; original emphasis). David Smith devotes a whole chapter to ‘Kali East and West’. He, like Caldwell, relates Kali’s fierceness to Indian childrearing patterns, but warns us that middle-class Indians regard Kali as the embodiment of warm motherhood, despite her bloodthirsty icon. And in fact some Hindus have been deeply offended by psychoanalytic interpretations of Hindu mythology. Smith surveys all the different forms of the Goddess, as well as the new Western feminist worship of Kali, which Caldwell invokes as a theoretical possibility for Keralan Hindu women. He concludes by quoting Axel Michaels on Guhyakali, the secret Kali, who is powerful precisely because she is beyond identity. Michaels, in his own book, discusses Kali only briefly, noting that “like many other goddesses, Guhyesvari is wild and mild at the same time, carnivorous and vegetarian, Hindu, Buddhist, and folk religious; she is worshipped both by pure Brahmans and by Tantric priests or the lower castes; she is mobile and yet is rooted to her seat in a particular place” (p. 224). (Surprisingly nowhere does he refer to Robert Levy’s Mesocosm, 1990, University of California Press, which contains an analysis of the multifarious yet identical forms of the Goddess that is rather similar to his Identificatory Habitus.) Likewise, in the Blackwell Companion to Hinduism there are only passing references to the cult of Kali: the lack of a chapter focusing on goddess traditions (whereas there are substantial pieces on Shaivism and Vaishnavism) is surely a serious gap in an otherwise comprehensive volume. In very different and complementary ways all of the four books under review have much to offer the student of Hinduism. Between them they cover an awful lot of ground. For a fully anthropological view of Hinduism they would need to be supplemented by Chris Fuller’s survey, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (1992, Princeton University Press) and by some fully ethnographic studies – for example, in the case of goddess worship and its meaning for women, by Bennett’s classic Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of High-Caste Women in Nepal (1983, Columbia University Press; reissue Kathmandu 2002). DAVID N. GELLNER University of Oxford 5