The Hindus: An Alternative History

The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) is a work of history and religious studies by American scholar Wendy Doniger. Narrating the history of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in chronological order, Doniger attempts to overturn the narrative of Hindu history favored by Hindu nationalists, which she sees as (ironically) rooted in British colonial prejudice. The book became the subject of controversy in 2014 when its publisher withdrew it from stores under threat of legal action.

Doniger introduces her subject by acknowledging its complexity. She stresses that the very concept of “Hinduism”—as a monolithic, centralized religion—is a falsehood imposed by unsympathetic colonial scholars. At the same time, the history of the Hindus is a politically contested subject. The most influential writers on the subject working today are the historians of Hindu nationalism, many of whom are invested in a narrative of Hindu history which casts Indian Muslims—and particularly the Mughal emperors—as villains. So, while Doniger acknowledges that her book can only be “a history, not the history, of the Hindus,” she also asserts the value of providing an “alternative” to the history told by the nationalist movement.

Both British colonial and Indian nationalist histories of the Hindus, Doniger argues, have tended to lean heavily on a small body of well-known Sanskrit texts, particularly the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Doniger traces the history of this bias. She suggests that the earliest, 18th-century British scholars of the Hindus, bringing with them the Judeo-Christian assumption that religion should be based on a book, sought suitable candidates in the Sanskrit literature. This bias was confirmed by the fact that for the most part, these scholars were—like Doniger herself—classicists, interested in Sanskrit in part for its links to classical Latin and Greek. By studying Sanskrit scripture, British scholars were also able to evade the “pagan” reality of Hindu belief.



Having selected a canon of Sanskrit texts, British Indologists invented a “unified Hinduism,” with a single set of beliefs and laws, ignoring entirely the enormous variations found between India’s many regions and languages. They found willing accomplices among the highest caste in Indian society, the Brahmins who were the custodians of the Sanskrit language, and might, Doniger suggests, rapidly have acquired an inferiority complex about their religion in the face of British Protestant scorn.

The reality, Doniger suggests, is that most 18th-century Indians knew no Sanskrit. They were unfamiliar with the texts especially dear to the Indologists, such as the Vedas and Upanishads. What is more, many sophisticated practitioners and thinkers in the Hindu tradition were similarly unaware of or uninterested in this textual tradition. Doniger argues that overlooked traditions such as tantra and bhakti form a core part of Hindu belief and history. Furthermore, she argues that the privileging of Sanskrit texts emphasizes the role of upper-caste men in Hindu history, while the alternative traditions express the roles of lower-caste men, women, and animals in the Hindu story. She also argues for alternative readings of the Sanskrit texts themselves, insisting that alternative narratives can be found in their margins.

In roughly chronological order—although necessarily skipping back and forth to follow up her many threads—Doniger tells the story of these alternative traditions. She begins with the ancient origins of Hinduism, piecing out what can be known and what can be speculated about Stone Age practices in India, the beliefs of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the better-documented beliefs and practices of the Vedic peoples.



The oldest alternative tradition is tantra, a loose grouping of esoteric practices whose roots are deeply entangled with those of “Unified Hinduism.” While she takes pains to debunk Western misunderstandings of tantra as a sexual practice, she points out that tantra does indeed include explicitly sexual practices, iconography, and language. She argues that these are things not absent but repressed in the Hinduism of the British Indologists and their Brahmin aides. She also argues that tantra has historically been welcoming to women and lower-caste men, eschewing the hierarchical divisions of “Unified Hinduism.”

She makes a similar argument about the later bhakti tradition, which focuses on ecstatic loving devotion to the divine. Doniger suggests that despite its origins among aristocrats and scholars, bhakti became just as much a “folk and oral phenomenon” as a courtly and poetic one.

Doniger devotes a chapter specifically to debunking the Hindu nationalist narrative of Muslim oppression. This narrative tends to focus on allegations that the Muslim Mughal emperors destroyed Hindu temples and sacred sites as part of a concerted effort to stamp out Hindu belief and replace it with Islam. Doniger argues that although the Mughal emperors certainly destroyed Hindu temples, they also built them. Furthermore, when they did destroy temples, it was motivated by political necessity rather than religious zealotry. Doniger finds “no evidence of massive coercive conversion.” On the contrary, Doniger suggests that the Mughals were benevolent patrons of Hindu belief and practice. She argues that much of what we know as Hinduism today took shape during their era.



Doniger finds evidence for her “alternative” history in the margins of the major Sanskrit texts on which the mainstream narrative is based. She addresses the question of “non-violence” in Hinduism with a close reading of the epic Mahabharata. She also finds evidence that the author or authors of the Mahabharata did not intend an unambiguous endorsement of the caste system. In particular, she relates the story of Eklavya, a low-caste archer in the Mahabharata whose thumb is amputated so he cannot embarrass a rival archer of a higher caste. Doniger argues that the text’s evident sympathy for Eklayva constitutes a criticism of the caste system. Doniger traces the subsequent history of the figure of Eklavya, who has served as a symbol of injustice for low-caste groups throughout Indian history. Doniger also finds implicit criticism of Indian gender politics in the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

The book closes with a survey of the state of Hinduism today, focusing on new and alternative practices overlooked by Hindu nationalists.