“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 (Book: On Hinduism)
“It is not uncommon for one culture to take from another a word to designate a concept for which the original culture had a concept but not a word.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“May highly placed Hindus so admired their British rulers that, in a kind of colonial and religious Stockholm syndrome, they swallowed the Protestant line themselves, and not only gained a new appreciation of those aspects of Hinduism that British approved of (the Gita, the Upanishads, monoism), but became ashamed of those aspects that the British scorned (polytheism, erotic sculptures or temple, devadasi temple dancers).” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Where there’s trade, people leave home, new commercial classes emerge and above all, new ideas spread quickly and circulate freely.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Hindus came to use the term ‘heretic’ as a useful swears word to indicate anyone who disagreed with them.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“In India and abroad, particularly in America, yoga is big business, a cash sacred cow.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Both yoga and the Kamasutra served the schizophrenic Victorian combination of public condemnation of sex and private obsession with it.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Fundamentalism is as much a political as a religious phenomenon and so is Hinduism.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Non violence was an idea propped up against the cultural reality of violence.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“In Hinduism from the very start the idea that transmigration occurred was immediately followed by two other possible ideas: that it was possible for some people to get free of it and that it was desirable for some people to get free of it.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Hindu thinking prefers to proceed as a pendulum of extremes that are never resolved and that are also constantly in motion” it refuses to modify its component elements in order to force them into a synthesis. In this way, Hinduism celebrates the idea that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other; that variety and contradiction are ethically and metaphysically necessary.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Tolerance, of course, is an English word, expressing the outsiders view of what they think happens in India. There is no word in any of the Indian languages that corresponds to the English term ‘religious tolerance,’ which covers everything from mere ‘endurance of,’ or ‘putting up with,’ religious difference (as one tolerates pain) to a more active endorsement, even celebration, of religious difference.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The concept of tolerance in the positive sense is a product of the Western Enlightenment. Yet, just because Hindus do not have a word for it does not mean that they do not have a set of intellectual concepts that might approximate the Western concept of ‘tolerance’ and that, the more important, might lead to the active embodiment of tolerance that might make people actually be tolerant.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Any times that we speak and state our own views to someone else, someone Other, we imply that we believe that what we are saying is better than the alternatives and in that sense all religious statements are attempts at conversion.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Tolerance is not the same as nonviolence, but the two have often been conflated, and one can see why; when intolerance is put into action, it can result in religious violence. The Vedantic emphasis on nonviolence, ahimsa, that Gandhi made so famous in the West, is far from typical of Hindu thinking, let alone Hindu action.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“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 others that we know of, always suffered from chronic and terminal violence.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The hatred of the fundamentalist Hindus is directed not only against Hindus of more diverse traditions but also, ironically, against the very monotheisms that started the rot (including the insistence that Hinduism is monotheistic) in Hinduism: Islam and Christianity.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Puranas are not so much by common people as for common people; they are often manipulated by Brahmins to teach people ideas that Brahmins think people should have.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The laws of Manu deeply infiltrated Hindu culture, building into it many negative assumptions about the lower castes and women that sharply restricted their freedom, regulated their behavior and blocked their access to social or political power. Memorized by generation of young men, it also penetrated the thinking of people who could not read a word of Sanskrit but picked up the ideas out of great maelstrom of Hindu oral literature. Manu lives on in the darker shadows of Hinduism.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Sex is among the most basic of human needs, the key to the survival of human life within the lineage or species. To control sex means to control everything else that stems from it – politics, power, everything. And as for the second side, the fact that this force is so deeply embedded in the human organism means that it is, like death, an area of great vulnerability inaccessible to reason or science. This is the shadowy place in which people feel a need for religion, where Brahmins are invited to enter or offer to enter.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The Hindutvavadis often blame Western influence on the people whom they censor, while, ironically, many of Hindutvavadis’ own actions closely resemble censoring frenzies in the United States. But the Indian incidents are better seen as part of a separate logic of Hindu Puritanism, which had a long history of its own.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“One reason why the Kamasutra plays almost no role at all in the sexual consciousness of contemporary Indians is that it is known, in both Indian and Europe, almost entirely through the flawed English translation by Richard Francis Burton.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Erotic religious imagery is as old as Hinduism. The earliest Hindu scared text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500BCE), revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Sanatana Dharma is the banner of Hindutva, which presides over the censorship of art, films, literature and social behavior.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Heresy is not really a Hindu idea at all. People have been killed in India because they did or did not sacrifice animals, or had sex with the wrong women, or disregarded the Vedas, or even made use of wrong sacred texts, but no one was impaled (the Hindu equivalent of burning at the stake) for saying that god was like this rather than like that.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“For the ultimate moment of transition from pre-creation to post-creation is a moment that no one can actually know, and that presents a logical dilemma that no argument can resolve.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The Hindutvavadis often blame Western influence on the people whom they censor, while, ironically, many of the Hindutvavadis’ own actions closely resemble censoring frenzy in the United States.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“One reason why the Kamasutra plays almost no role at the all in the sexual consciousness of contemporary Indians is that it is known, in both India and Europe, almost entirely through the flawed English translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“Since many Hindus do not read the Rig Veda at all, and no one, Hindu or otherwise, can understand all of it, it had become a cannon so deified and reified that one can have it and recite it but seldom think with it.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The Indian incidents are better seen as part of a separate logic of Hindu Puritanism, which had a long history of its own.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“The silent screams in the Sanskrit text have the quality of a nightmare. This is a world in which even vegetarianism is sinful, and the only way to remain without sin would be to starve to death.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
“People in ancient India did eat meat, both the meat of the sacrificial animals and any other meat they could hunt or breed; hundreds of texts insist on this. But the ideals of no-violence and vegetarianism were already in the air by the time Brahmans and Upanishads soon gained momentum as the practice of renunciation spread. Most Indian traditions of renunciation advise the renouncer to avoid eating meat, and renouncer were likely to be vegetarians ; to renounce the flesh is to renounce flesh.” ~~ Wendy Doniger (Book: On Hinduism)
Hope you enjoyed reading this collection of quotes.
