2/16/14

Totalising history, silencing dissent - The Hindu

Opinion Op-Ed
Totalising history, silencing dissent
Ratna Kapur

Wendy Doniger
The agreement by Penguin Books India to destroy all existing copies of Wendy Donigers book represents the destruction of the very
fabric of Indian culture

The agreement by Penguin Books India, a unit of Penguin Random House, to withdraw as well as destroy all existing
copies of its 2009 book titled The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion at the
University of Chicago, within six months, is both disturbing as well as foreboding. The lawsuit filed against Penguin
India by Dina Nath Batra, the head of Shiksha Bacho Andolan, a fringe Hindu right-wing group dealing with
education and text books, objected to the pluralistic representation of Hinduism and its references to the esoteric and
heterodox practices that constitute the tradition.
In the lawsuit filed in 2011 under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which punishes deliberate and malicious
acts intended to outrage the feelings of a religious community, the group claimed that the book insulted millions of
Indians, in particular, Hindus. The group also argued that the book was inaccurate, presenting a shallow, distorted,
non-serious presentation of Hinduism filled with heresies and that it reduced Hinduism to a narrative of a woman
hungry for sex or what one reviewer described as an overeroticized account of the religion.
Cultural identity
While Wendy Doniger has responded to the court settlement as sounding the alarm bells for the survival of free speech
in an ever-worsening political climate in India, she also remarked that not being either a Hindu or a male placed her
in a doubly disadvantaged situation with the Hindutva forces.
Dr. Doniger has established herself as a provocative scholar through the use of psychoanalytic theory to approach
issues of gender, sexuality and religion and her work has been a lightning rod for Hindu nationalists and fanatics
alike. She has written a plethora of texts that subvert the projection of Hinduism as a homogenous, unified and
cohesive tradition. In one of her earliest books Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Dr. Doniger
established her credentials as a Sanskrit scholar and used her in-depth knowledge of Sanskrit texts to speculate on
their significance in challenging and creative ways. She defends the eclecticism that she deploys in her analysis as
opening up culture as something that is dynamic, shape-shifting and always tentative.
Dr. Donigers work is reminiscent of the extraordinary and influential scholarship of the black British scholar Stuart
Hall, an intellectual Titan in cultural studies, who recently died, and his approach to culture as hybrid.
According to Dr. Hall, one position on cultural identity is that it consists of one shared culture, a sort of collective
one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial and artificially imposed selves, which people with a
shared history and ancestry hold in common. It is a position which assumes that cultural identity is stable and
unchanging. Cultural identity consists of an essence that needs to be excavated and brought to light.
The second view of cultural identity is based on the recognition that there are points of similarity within the context
of a culture, but there are also points of difference, of discontinuity and dispersal. It does not entail an archaeological
search, but a re-telling of the past. Dr. Hall pointed out that it was not possible to speak about one identity, one
story, without acknowledging the ruptures and discontinuities of the story we tell or re-tell. We cannot speak for very
long, with any exactness, about one experience, one identity, without acknowledging its other side differences and
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2/16/14

Totalising history, silencing dissent - The Hindu

discontinuities.
The effort by the conservative and right movements to cabin and contain this fluidity and hybridity is reminiscent of
colonial as well as fascist forces that have sought to ensure that their versions of the truth prevailed. And this effort
was pursued not only through physical annihilation, but also through erasures of history and the silencing of
dissenting voices.
The settlement is not only a story about free speech in a democracy; it is reminiscent of the darkest aspects of the
2002 Gujarat riots. The extreme violence inflicted on the Muslim community, women in particular, was not just
about the objectification and victimisation of women or the community about injuries that could be healed through
reparations. The violence was embedded in the broader ideological agenda and discursive aspects of the Hindu rights
strategy that have constituted the subjectivities of both the majority and minority communities. The complete
erasures of Muslim bodies, houses, shrines, and mosques almost overnight, and their replacement with roads and
Hindu temples was nothing short of an effort to expunge the Muslim from the very body politic and structure of
Indian (read Hindu) society.
Hindu nationalist project
The settlement needs to be read within this broader discursive and material reality, where the establishment of the
Hindu nationalist project that seeks to project the Muslim as a foreigner and alien and hence a threat requires to be
completed. Education, cultural representation, and the media are all tools deployed in the zealous and undeterred
march of the steely-eyed and determined Narendra Modi and the Hindu right in this direction. The loss of The
Hindus: An Alternative History represents not only a defeat for the publishing world; it represents the destruction of
the very fabric of Indian culture as chaotic, diverse, subversive, and provocative. It is an injury inflicted on more than
just the work of one author it is an injury inflicted on critique and dissent, and points to the precariousness of lives
and histories that do not conform to the totalising agenda of the Hindu right.
(Ratna Kapur is professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat.)
Keywords: Penguin Books India, Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Shiksha Bachao Andolan

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