Two years after the Indian state channel Doordarshan began daily broadcasting, when only Delhi-ites were lucky enough to get their first taste of television, a question was asked during a children's quiz show: "Who was the mother of Ram?" The participating children, who had earlier effortlessly handled all the stumpers on Greek mythology, were now dumbfounded. Such was Kaushalya's status in 1967. This rather inconsequential moment in India's secular era would have simply passed by had one chance viewer not felt so deeply humiliated by the way "the glorious heritage of India" had once again been trumped. The viewer, Anant Pai, soon left his career with the Times of India, which brought American superheroes like Phantom and Mandrake to Indian readers through Indrajal Comics, and launched his own Amar Chitra Katha, through which he issued monthly and fortnightly comic books based on episodes from Hindu epics and puranas. Uncle Pai, as he is better known, thought of himself as an educator, and he must consider it an enormous feat that, after a sensational reception of his comics, golden boys and girls on Bournvita Quiz Contest no longer miss questions on Hindu legends.
In the following decades, Uncle Pai's comics sold by the millions, which perhaps not astonishingly coincided with the resurgence of 'Hindu values' in Indian politics. Assembling the narratives of dazzling characters like Ram, Krishna and Hanuman from stories originating from different ends of India – dotingly ironing out the contradictions, and while at it ridding the 'unpleasant' bits – Uncle Pai had one eye on the Hindu past and the other on the post-Independence project of national integration. This double vision of Amar Chitra Katha would prove to be remarkably self-legitimising, becoming imperative to subsequent raconteurs of Hindu legends. Uncle Pai, as it turned out, was only one of the many in modern India who was hoping to simplify the bewilderingly and boisterously diverse past for an emerging country. Following his success, in the late 1980s the triumphant creators of the Ramayana and Mahabharata serials on the by-then-pervasive Doordarshan heralded what can veritably be called a golden age of Hinduism – an uncanny kind of unification guided by the light of television screens, where millions of Hindus everywhere, of hitherto disparate traditions, could for the first time access, claim and share a uniform set of stories.
This prologue is necessary to understand what the scholar Wendy Doniger, in her new work, means by 'alternative'. Alternative to what? Doniger has in mind the overbearingly malicious and fanatical turn of contemporary Hinduism that has much beleaguered her; but even more so, her adversary here is the troubling standardisation of the general Hindu outlook. Her book then is a colossal tribute to the plurality of Hinduism's history, a millennia-long saga that wildly defies both the narrative of Brahminical orthodoxy as well as the pre-eminence of modern homogeny. Doniger's attempt is significant. Tolerance, diversity and open-endedness become much more than vague and tiresome touts about the virtuous side of Hinduism; they appear embedded here within continuous struggles over ideas, influence and institutions. Particularly attentive to the sparse presence (or apparent absence, as Doniger would perhaps argue) of women, Dalits, Adivasis and other pariahs in predominant accounts of Hinduism, Doniger's claim is not just that their views can be found in the various texts composed since the Vedas, but that they sometimes even command the voice of the Brahmin authors through curious circumstances of cultural ventriloquism. In other words, the beliefs of the high-caste males that have come down to us and the perspectives of the 'subalterns' that remain hidden are often overlaid, hybridised, the latter occasionally capable of 'speaking' through the former.
This is a titillating argument. In vast lacunas of historical and archaeological evidence, Doniger's hope is that a certain chronology of 'alternative people' can nevertheless be deduced from the texts written largely by Brahmins, most of them decidedly fictive. Doniger's "hermeneutic of suspicion", as she calls it, or the interrogation of authorial motive, is not without merit. The book flaunts a deep affection for and immense knowledge of the texts, and the author draws on an incredible bounty of stories to make her case. Starting with the moments of self-doubt among the Vedic bards, to displays of self-assurance in the Brahmanas, encounters in the Upanishads between sacrificial rituals and the notions of renunciation and non-violence, challenges by the ascendancy of Buddhism and Jainism, conflicts between Brahmins and Kshatriyas for political dominance, ambivalent portrayal of women and the low castes in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the subsequent influx of devotional movements, adjustments under Islamic and British rules, and finally moving on to the revivalist innovations of the post-Independence champions of Hinduism – in all of this, the author's choice of stories reveals the ideological evolution inherent in the texts, and hence a stimulating possibility for understanding the historical implications of those changes. She means to undermine the stereotypical (and the old Orientalist) imagination of Hinduism as a static source of wisdom, and disrupt the seemingly unbroken tradition of Sanskrit writing through oral, rural and folk interpolations.