The Pulping of Wendy Doniger's Book

Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus An Alternative History (2009), is  an almost unbelievably obtuse work of 700+ pages. After a first read-skim in 2009, I summed it up thus: “A work equaled in its confusion, incomprehension and malice perhaps only by John Mills’ History and Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. “

I noted one passage in particular as exemplifying the author's overall attitude and approach; on page 294, explaining the beginnings of the story of the Mahabharata, she writes:

“Where Rama and his brothers have different mothers and different wives but share both a single human father and a single divine father, the five Pandavas have one mother (and one wife) and one human father but different divine fathers.

“In this disastrous levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, for great-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins, and five kshatriyas, while the third has a Kshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins and four slaves. Are you still with me?)”

Doniger's writing ensures that the reader has no chance to be “with” her, and most could be forgiven for thinking the Mahabharata is a freak show. Nowhere in the book does she assay the enormous wisdom of the epic or tell of its central role in shaping India.

Can we imagine any respectable scholarly work dealing with the New Testament or the Koran in this manner?

That is not the only reason for complaint.

Doniger is a professor of Sanskrit untrained in history or theology; all her knowledge of Hinduism is a sort of accidental accretion upon a vulgar, highly sexualized sensibility.

That explains why her naive measure of Hinduism never departs from the standard of her own Judeo-Christian heritage.

On page 25 she explains earnestly, “There is no single founder or institution to enforce any single construction of the tradition, to rule on what is or is not a Hindu idea or to draw the line when someone finally goes too far and transgresses the unspoken boundaries of reinterpretation. Ideas about all the major issues – vegetarianism, nonviolence, even caste itself – are subjects of a debate, not a dogma. There is no Hindu canon. The books that Euro-Americans privileged (such as the Bhagavad Gita), were not always so highly regarded by ‘all Hindus,’ certainly not before the Euro-Americans began to praise them.”

She thinks vegetarianism, nonviolence and caste are the "major issues" of Hinduism?! And even more nonsensical is the observation about the Gita. Similar absurdities litter almost every one of the 692 pages of the main text.

From the Hindu tendency to debate all things about their faith, Doniger deduces that “there is no such thing as Hinduism in the sense of a single unified religion…” The whole book is an extended argument of the well-worked colonial theme that Hinduism does not exist.

She seems oblivious to the fact that it is not a virtue in a religion to be "single" and "unified," for their inevitable corollaries are Inquisitions, fundamentalisms and wars. Hinduism is undefinable because it is focused on that most overweening of all realities, God.(See here for a series on Hinduism.)

Many other errors and falsifications are picayune. Chapter 21 takes us on a "fast gallop" over the "two centuries during which India was part of the British Empire."
Now which two centuries would that be?

Bengal fell to the British in 1757. Over the next 100 years British rule expanded slowly across the country; Punjab was taken in 1849. Then came the earthshaking events of 1857. After that their rule lasted 90 years. It would be accurate to say that bits and pieces of India were under British rule for a two-century period; overall, some 3/5ths of the country was part of it for half that time.

On page 574 she highlights the "Black Hole of Calcutta" as causing "dozens of deaths," and a few pages later, gives details, drastically lowering the number of British prisoners (146) that imperial propagandists had reported held in a dungeon under inhuman conditions, killing 123.

The story of the Black Hole was originally cooked up six months after the supposed atrocity by the head Calcutta honcho of the East India Company as he sailed back to Britain. His motive was to justify the aggression that brought Bengal under British rule, and it worked like a charm; no one in London thought of questioning how 146 Englishmen (and one woman) could possibly have fit in a cell 18 feet by 14.

It is a mystery why Doniger reprised the story in 2009 as if were true and falsified figures to make it seem believable.
     
But it does put the book in context and explain its dedication to British propagandist William Dalrymple, “inspiration and comrade in the good fight.”

I am sorry to see any book destroyed, but cannot join in the general censure of Penguin India. Its editors should have seen this coming a long way off and imposed a minimum of quality control.  

Another Bizarre Essay from Brookings

Washington-based Brookings Institution has followed up the bizarre essay it published by British propagandist William Dalrymple with a much more complex distortion of history by Oxford Professor Margaret MacMillan.

Dalrymple expressed fears of an India-Pakistan war based on his astounding assertion that Afghanistan’s unending state of war is rooted in their rivalry and not, as anyone who knows history might think, in the proxy Cold War conflict the West financed by trading opium and heroin. That trade is now worth over $60 billion annually, and if there is war in South Asia after the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan, it will be in the service of its primary beneficiary, Britain, which needs chaotic conditions in an area that can absorb the proceeds without exciting the interest of American-German bank regulators.

MacMillan’s essay comparing the situation in 2014 with the one that in 1914 led into World War I is a more complex assault on truth in that it deliberately blurs what happened, hiding Britain's primary role in shaping the terrible realities of the modern world. Items:

1. There had been “an extraordinary period of general peace since 1815,” MacMillan writes of the century preceding WW I. She obviously thinks the “general peace” was undisturbed by the war of 1857 in India, the two “Opium Wars” in China, the numerous massacres during the European “scramble for Africa” (too one-sided to be called wars), and the genocide of Native Americans, the Maori in New Zealand and the Australian Aborigine. In an essay that notes globalization as a factor in generating international tensions it is deeply racist to ignore conflicts that killed well over a hundred million people. It is no defence that she is merely reflecting the mainstream perspective of European historians. 
2. MacMillan sees no difference between modern migration patterns and what happened in the century before WW I. Then “as now” she writes, “waves of immigrants were finding their way to foreign lands — Indians to the Caribbean and Africa, Japanese and Chinese to North America, and millions of Europeans to the New World and the Antipodes.” Those “waves of immigrants” included slaves from Africa and indentured Chinese and Indian workers – slaves in all but name – carried away from their homes mainly in British vessels.
3. In asserting that the conflicts since 1945 have been “relatively minor … with the number of casualties dwarfed by those sustained in the two world wars,” MacMillan is entirely wrong. Authoritative estimates place the toll of the “proxy wars” of the Cold War era at over a hundred million lives. Since 1990, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Somalia have killed additional scores of millions. In South Asia since Indian independence some ten million have been killed in armed conflicts caused by manipulative British policies.
4. Her comparison of the pre-WW I rivalry of Britain and Germany with the current US-China relationship will not bear examination. Britain in the early 20th Century was a savage imperial Power openly glorying in its subjugation and oppression of other nations; Germany was a challenger self-pitying in its lack of imperial “lebensraum” (elbow room). Their cynical drive for dominance was unrestrained by any moral considerations, even concern for their own people, millions of whom were killed and crippled in WW I. The post-Cold War, post-Mao history of Sino-American relations pits a democracy sometimes drunk with its own power against a deeply oppressive tyranny with unsettled borders; but neither is imperialist, and both support the economic and social development of other countries.
5. MacMillan’s description of the Middle East as “made up largely of countries that received their present borders as a consequence of World War I,” sanitizes a history of brutal manipulations by Britain and France. She does that consistently, in overall analysis and on specific issues. In noting “Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of poison gas” she asserts that it was “a weapon first deployed in the trench warfare of 1914, then outlawed because world opinion viewed it as barbaric.” Neither assertion is true. Britain used poison gas against the Kurds in Iraq before WW I – Winston Churchill saw it as useful test of the new weapon – and it was given up not because it was too barbaric but because it could not be controlled: a shift of the wind could blow the gas back into the ranks of those who loosed it.

The essay is too dishonest to be useful to anyone trying to understand what lessons WW I holds for policy makers today.

It pays no attention to the massively obvious lesson of the bloodiest period in world history: that the most lethal dangers lie in the delusions of elite groups capable of manipulating public opinion into supporting violence.

It should be a cause for general alarm that MacMillan’s essay is published by an institution with great influence on American policy.

Cancel Prince Charles' Visit to India

New Delhi should cancel the projected Indian tour of Britain’s Prince Charles and spouse Camilla set for November 6 to14.

Their nine-day perambulation (Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Pune, Kochi), will add immeasurably to the difficulties of maintaining a secure environment in the country as it holds the first of five Assembly polls on 11 November.

In fact, security will be virtually impossible to maintain, for there are multiple indicators that the Brits are moving toward a radical endgame to the India-Pakistan face-off they initiated with Partition in 1947.

They have tried this twice before. In 1984, a visit by Princess Anne provided the distraction that allowed the Game of Thrones assassination of Indira Gandhi, followed by anti-Sikh riots calculated to wreck Indian unity. In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of the Tamil Tigers – the killers brought their own cameraman to ensure that everyone would know who did it – was clearly supposed to set off anti Tamil riots, but failed in that.

This time around, I think the target will be another candidate for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

If the assassin is a Muslim – easily ensured by people who control the ISI and its many proxies – it could precipitate communal bloodletting on a scale that would make Gujarat 2002 look like a nosebleed, set off an India-Pakistan war and balkanize India.

There are numerous indicators that such a scenario is in the works. They include the steep escalation of Pakistan’s outrageous aggressions in Kashmir, General V. K. Singh’s treacheries, Baba Ramdev’s 2011 boast that he could field an armed force, recent attempts to push large quantities of lethal weapons into India, and Navaz Sharif’s bid to get Washington to play a part in Kashmir. (The firm American denial of any such role will not stand when a nuclear war is in the offing.)

William Dalrymple’s bizarre essay “A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India,” published by the Brookings Institution a few weeks ago set the scene for American intervention. In arguing that India-Pakistan rivalry was the main reason for the Afghan war it ignored entirely the Cold War roots of the conflict and the drug trade out of Afghanistan that is now its primary reason for continuing. The trade sluices some $60 billion into the British-run global black market annually (with $2 billion of that going to the ISI/Taliban).

The 1984 and 1991 assassinations show that the plan to destroy India is not new; and a 20 May 2011 article in The Financial Times made quite clear that it is being dusted off for use again.

The article, headlined “Henry Kissinger talks to Simon Schama,” ended thus:

Kissinger laughs even as he sketches a scenario for an Afghanistan even grimmer than anything anyone has yet imagined, where the presence or absence of al-Qaeda will be the least of its problems. What might happen, he says, is a de facto partition, with India and Russia reconstituting the Northern Alliance, and Pakistan hooked to the Taliban as a backstop against their own encirclement.

Suddenly, spring goes chilly. The prospect looms of a centennial commemoration of the First World War through a half-awake re-enactment … Sarajevo. Think proxy half-states; the paranoia of encirclement; the bristling arsenals, in this case nuclear; the nervous, beleaguered Pakistanis lashing out in passive-aggressive insecurity. “An India-Pakistan war becomes more probable. Eventually,” says the Doctor, his voice a deep pond of calm. “Therefore some kind of international process in which these issues are discussed might generate enough restraints so that Pakistan does not feel itself encircled by India and doesn’t see a strategic reserve in the Taliban.” He looks directly at me. “Is it possible to do this? I don’t know. But I know if we let matters drift this could become the Balkans of the next world war.”

What this makes crystal clear is that very powerful forces outside India plan to make the 2014 general elections our last. The reference to the “next world war” indicates that there will be attendant crises also in Russia and China.

It should also make very clear to the BJP that its British supporters are not interested in Modi’s promise of a reformed and well administered India. They want India broken up and at their mercy.

If Charles-Camilla are not in the loop of these plans, they also have cause to worry. The coldblooded strategists of Empire would think nothing of sacrificing them at the altar of a really believable crisis.

William Dalrymple's Afghan Diary

Dear Diary,

I'm an "eminent historian" I'll have you know. Strobe Talbot said so in a letter introducing my essay for Brookings. Been getting a lot of mail about that. All good except for a narky note that said it was all nonsense, the Afghan War wasn't about the India-Pakistan rivalry at all but about the $60 billion drug trade out of Afghanistan.

You know, I was thinking perhaps I should have mentioned drugs, just to be on the safe side. But then again, once you mention something like that, there's no telling where it will lead ...

Before long someone will probably rake up the fact that we Brits originated the opium trade in the 18th Century and fought two “Opium Wars” in the 19th Century.

Then someone will surely mention how in the 20th Century, HSBC and Matheson and all the other Brit companies took the drug trade underground when the Americans insisted on banning it.

And inevitably, some busybody will mention that we were up to our chins in creating the Afghan war.

I'm not saying any of that's wrong, but do we have to talk about it all the time!

What good will it do to admit yes, we did create Pakistan and its ISI, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. And yes, London also jockeyed all of them into supporting the Mujaheddin who established the Afghan opium trade ... but hey, permanent interests, you know.

Anyway, I like the title: “A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.”

I don't know if I really made the case that “hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan,” but even if I didn't there's enough razzle dazzle to distract everyone.

I like the paragraph that goes on about "the existential threat posed by India" to the Pakistan military taking "precedence over all other geopolitical and economic goals.”

Hope no one asks why there should be an existential threat when things are improving between the two countries and the atmospherics are quite friendly.

Also: “The fear of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker is so great that it has led the ISI to take steps that put Pakistan's own internal security at risk ... For much of the last decade the ISI has sought to restore the Taliban to power so that it can oust Karzai and his Indian friends.”

Wonder if the Yanks really buy that...

Well, MI6 certainly will. They desperately need talk of an Indo-Pak war, or perhaps even a real war, to soften up Delhi’s resistance to Vodafone and BP. With China on the skids and a mega recession looming, what’s The City to do if India continues to hang tough!”

Well, Dear Diary, don't be too surprised if there is another blatant 26/11 type episode to get things back the way we like them!