Wendy Doniger > Quotes

“Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Who would not prefer animals to these people who prefer animals to people?”
― Wendy Doniger

“Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The swan is also a liminal bird, able to live in two worlds, land and water, or matter and spirit.”
― Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“The qualities that make the soul cling to rebirth or to illusion are vividly encompassed by a Korean word, won, which has a cluster of meanings, including resentment, ingratitude, regret for lost opportunities, and a knot in the stomach; this state of the soul results from being poorly treated or unappreciated while living or from any of the many situations covered by the rubric “to die screaming.”
― Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word “Hindoo” (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: “This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy.”30 Even Joyce knew that the word was not native to India.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The fish is an ancient symbol of liminal consciousness in India: “As a great fish goes along both banks of a river, both the near side and the far side, just so this person [the dreamer] goes along both of these conditions, the condition of sleeping and the condition of waking.”
― Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda,”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Often the future is shaped not by what we remember but by what we forget.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Lokayatas (“This Worldly” people, also called Materialists and Charvakas, followers of a founder named Charvaka) not only rejected the doctrine of reincarnation (arguing that when the body was destroyed, the spirit that had been created specifically for it dissolved back into nothingness) but believed that physical sense data were the only source of knowledge and that the Vedas were “the prattling of knaves, characterized by the three faults of untruthfulness, internal contradiction, and useless repetition.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Nonviolence became a cultural ideal for Hindus precisely because it holds out the last hope of a cure, all the more desirable since unattainable, for a civilization that has, like most, always suffered from chronic and terminal violence. Non-violence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence. Classical Hindu India was violent in ways both shared with all cultures and unique to its particular time and place, in its politics (war being the raison d’être of every king); in its religious practices (animal sacrifice, ascetic self-torture, fire walking, swinging from hooks in the flesh of the back, and so forth); in its criminal law (impaling on stakes and the amputation of limbs being prescribed punishments for relatively minor offenses); in its hells (cunningly and sadistically contrived to make the punishment fit the crime); and, perhaps at the very heart of it all, in its climate, with its unendurable heat and unpredictable monsoons. Hindu sages dreamed of nonviolence as people who live all their lives in the desert dream of oases.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“In 1864 a geologist named that supercontinent Lemuria, because he used the theory to account for the fact that living lemurs were found, in the nineteenth century, only in Madagascar and the surrounding islands, and fossil lemurs were found from Pakistan to Malaya, but no lemurs, living or dead, were found in Africa or the Middle East (areas that would never have been connected to Lemuria as Madagascar and Pakistan presumably once were).”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Jainas have always taken vegetarianism to the greatest extremes, taking pains to avoid injuring even tiny insects, and this too heavily influenced Hindus. The breakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation and disregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority,32 three more crucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginning to take up some of the new doctrines and practices.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“In the Puranas, there is a cure for everything.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; what politics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and cultural development.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The Ramayana, for instance, and the Mahabharata were first recorded in Sanskrit but have been retold—both written down and orally performed—in Tamil, Bangla and most of the other languages of India. And the people who share these texts did have ways of referring to themselves long before they called themselves ‘Hindu’. The term ‘Hindu’ was coined in opposition to other religions, but this self-definition through otherness began centuries before there was contact with Europeans (or, indeed, with Muslims).”
― Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

“As the Hindu gods are ‘immortal’ only in a very particular sense – for they are born, and they die – they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals only in a few trivial details (gods do not sweat or blink, for example) and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however ‘archetypal’ his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.”
― Wendy Doniger, Hindu Myths

“the bee perishes because his lust for the lotus stupefies him and makes him stick to her even in death.”
― Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“Voltaire was deeply impressed by it and cited it often.”
― Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

“All of us identify who we are in contrast with who we are not, and the ‘who we are not’ changes all the time.”
― Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

“bees in Indian love poetry are said to form the bowstring of the god of lust and to plunge deep inside the flowers that ooze with sap even as the rutting elephant’s temples ooze with musk.”
― Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities

“Thus the legal ruling that defined Hinduism by its tolerance and inclusivism was actually inspired by the desire of certain Hindus to exclude other Hindus from their temples.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of apad, as Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey carefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Hindu” is not a native word but comes from a word for the “river” (sindhu) that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE28), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and the Arabs (after the eighth century CE29) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as the Indus.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, and compassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysics demands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Nonviolence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The Guptas’ use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Hindus spoke in many voices about the Buddha, some positive, some negative, and some indifferent or ambivalent.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History