The Hindus 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

“Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Most Hindus did not proselytize, but some Vedantic movements and some bhakti sects did.”
― 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

“Islam in India began not with the political conquest of India by Mahmud of Ghazni but much earlier, when the Muslims entered India not as conquerors but as merchants”
― 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

“But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“The circularity of karma is explicitly set from the time of creation: You must be what you are; you cannot change your qualities.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“In any case, whether or not there really is a Hinduism, there certainly are Hindus.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“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

“Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat started a revolution in India. For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist; Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they are perhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.”
― 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

“But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailability, which made it the power of an elite group.”
― Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

“It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later.”
― 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