India and Israel: Diverse in a homogeneous world

HT:Hindufocus.India and Israel: Diverse in a homogeneous world.In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History, Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism’s unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a “unified Hinduism.”She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a “British-Brahmin version of Hinduism – one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.” These “bad Hindus” are accused of having an inferiority complex. She claims that the Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) of today thus uses a fake Hinduism for its own historiography and that she seeks to tell an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they [the nationalists] tell.”When it comes to classic Hindu texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, she condemns them for their violence. The Mughal Muslim emperors who colonized India for Islam for 300 years were, according to a reviewer, “motivated by realpolitik rather than religious fundamentalism” when they destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and sold hundreds of thousands of Hindus into slavery.Hindu nationalism, like Zionism, is condemned for having a “nationalist archeology.” Critiquing Israeli archeology Nachman Ben-Yehuda has described the myth of Masada and Nadia Abu el-Haj has written on “reflections on archeology and Israeli settler-nationhood.” Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi writes that the Hindu temple at Ayodha that was destroyed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Babur to build the Babri Mosque was merely the site of “Hindu sentiment and myth” and not the historical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.Hindu nationalism is not a result of a British imperialism anymore than Zionism is; both grew out of a long suppressed and colonized peoples’ dreams for their own country free from foreign rule.Read the full story here. HT:HIDF