As you all may know Wendy Doniger has established herself as Scholar in Hinduism at University of Chicago and has been writing anti-Hindu educational books for so many years. The latest book is the worst of all. In USA, most universities have Christian Professors heading the Hinduism/India study faculties and all of them are presenting derogatory views on Hinduism, from a Christian angle. Recently, another Scholar, Michael Witzel, head of Harvard Sanskrit dept., really put up a strong fight against Hindus of California who protested and submitted objectionable incorrect paragraphs about Hinduism in 8th grade school textbooks published by California State School Board.  He even, on his own, fought in courts against Hindus to shut them up.
For Encyclopedia Encarta (was No. 1 reference book in 2006, for USA High school term work), the chapter on Hinduism was written by a Christian and had distorted fundamental principles of Hinduism to present them as being illogical and out right derogative.  Few yeras ago USA HIndus protested and had the chapter replaced by the one written by a Hindu. In that encyclopedia, the Muslim has written about Islam that Islam is a way of life.  Christianity chapter is written by a Christian and it says Christianity believes in one truth spoken by many prophets.

Wendy is an anti-Hindu Scholar

http://www.petitiononline.com/dharma10/petition-sign.html

Wendy’s book review by Vishal Agarwal.

Excerpted from http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/

Summary:

“Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all.”

Wendy Doniger in ‘When the Lingam is Just a Cigar, Psychoanalysis and Hindu Sexual Fantasies’.

Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus, an Alternative History” (see the cover), published and distributed by Penguin has been a phenomenal sales success. Already (in February 2010), more than 600 libraries in North America have acquired a copy of the book, in less than one year since its publication. The Indian division of Penguin has brought out an Indian reprint as well. Doniger claims that her book is about Hindu women, low castes, dogs and horses. But these merely appear to be an excuse for her to indulge in bouts of lewd descriptions, imaginary rapes, violence, titillating sleaze, drugs, booze and the like – all of which is then superimposed on the Hindus and on their traditions. As usual, she kinks fairly straightforward narratives in Hindu scriptures to present her own pornographic versions.

Medieval India is not her forte at all, and Doniger is often seen reproducing (and even amplifying) the errors already present in her secondary and tertiary sources. The book is more than 600 pages long, and the number of errors average more than 1 per page. There are errors of chronology, of historical dates and sequence of events, geography, verifiable historical facts, proper names, translations of Sanskrit texts and so on. These errors are compounded by strained and agenda driven interpretations that whitewash medieval atrocities on Indians, perpetuate colonial and racist stereotypes about Hindus, attribute many positive developments within the Hindu society to impulses from Christianity or Islam and grossly distort historical evidence.

[The summary comments relate to only 6 of the 25 chapters and to Maps and Bibliography.]

Comments on Maps in Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus, An Alternative History” (2009)

The book has four maps immediately after the Index. Unfortunately, the maps are full of errors. We point some of these errors below:

In the first map (‘India’s Major Geographical Features’), the Waziristan Hills area is marked erroneously as ‘Kirthar Range’, which is actually several hundred miles further south.

In the second map (‘India from 2500 BCE to 600 CE), Kashmir is marked north of the river Indus (it should be south of Indus); Baluchistan is marked at the boundary between Sindh and Punjab whereas it is further west; Magadha is marked in northern Orissa and the bordering areas of Bihar (it should be further north, just south of the Ganga); Mithila is marked a bit north‐west of its actual location and so on.

In the third map (‘India from 600 CE to 1600 CE), at least four historical sites are marked several hundred miles from their correct geographical location – Janakpur, Nagarkot, Mandu and Haldighati.

In the fourth map (‘India from 1600 CE to the Present’), Kanpur is indicated as the modern name of the ancient city of Kanauj. This is incorrect and the two cities are distinct from each other.

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-Maps.pdf

Chapter Title: “Civilization in the Indus Valley: 50,000 to 1500 BCE”

Summary comments: Good scholarship requires skepticism but Doniger verges towards cynicism when she starts questioning the quite reasonable interpretations that archaeologists of this culture have given to the artifacts unearthed during excavations. Her cynicism sounds quite hypocritical, considering that her own standard methodology is making reckless Freudian free associations between disparate facts (in different eras and geography) to consistently paint a pornographic picture of the Hindu culture. Other than her witty remarks and cute English phraseology, the chapter really adds nothing new to our knowledge or understanding of the Harappan Culture.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the origins of Hindu religious practices to Harappan times. Due to her ignorance of the relevant technical literature (as mentioned above), she does not mention several remarkable parallels between Harappan artifacts and Hindu artifacts in later times. And when archaeologists (i.e., those quoted by her) do point to these parallels, her skepticism about these reasonable identifications sometimes borders on cynicism. Doniger’s omissions and attitudes result not just from her limited acquaintance with technical literature on this topic, but also from her attachment to the racist Aryan invasion theory (which becomes clear when we read chapter 4 of her book) that holds that the superior white skinned Aryan invaders overpowered brown skinned natives of the Indus Valley Civilization. As in the rest of her book and in her other writings, here too Doniger tries to dodge academic debate by simply lampooning her critics as ‘Hindu Nationalists.’ Perhaps, that really reflects her own hatred for Hindus, because many of them have questioned her pretense of ‘love’ for the Hindu culture, a spurious claim that she makes even in this book (p. 16 etc.). Is a pedophile’s ‘love’ for children really love at all? …

It is perhaps apt to close the review with the following remarks from a leading archaeologist because they also show precisely what Doniger’s chapter fails to demonstrate –

“It has recently been written that the Indus Civilization ‘provided the structure for the later Indian civilization’ and that ‘all the people of the subcontinent are, in one way or the other, inheritors of the Indus Civilization.’ This strong emphasis on the role of the Indus Civilization as laying down the foundations of the later developments of Indian history and culture rests on a large number of archaeological features, especially those related to agriculture, crafts, internal and external trade, communications, social and political framework, religion, and art forms.”18

18 Dilip Chakrabarti, The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology, OUP (2006), p. 211

Chapter Title: “Civilization in the Indus Valley: 50,000 to 1500 BCE”

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-03.pdf

Chapter Title: “Humans, Animals, and Gods in the Rig Veda”

Summary comments:

The disrespect that Doniger shows towards Hindus in this chapter (as in several others) is astounding. She compares the Vedic worshipper to an unfaithful, philandering boyfriend and refers to Vedic hymns as ‘poems’. And finally, the chapter has several errors of fact. There is practically nothing that the chapter adds to our knowledge about the period. In fact, it seems to be largely a collection of excerpts from non‐state‐of‐the‐art works on the Vedic period and merely perpetuates colonial paradigms about the Vedic peoples.

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-05.pdf

Chapter Title: “The Three (Or is It Four) Aims of Life in the Hindu Imaginary”

Summary comments: Wendy Doniger wastes too much ink on drawing silly parallels and using data selectively to prove useless theories that do not illuminate the doctrine of Purushartha which is the subject of this chapter. Here generalizations seem to be dependent more on sensational claims and cute phrases rather than on facts – a problem that plagues her entire book.

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-08.pdf

Chapter Title: “Fusion and Rivalry under the Delhi Sultanate 650 – 1500 CE”

Summary Comments : In this chapter, which is rampant with factual errors, Doniger (and her students who helped her?) has indulged in large scale fabrications, cherry picking of data, fraudulent interpretations and agenda driven white‐washing. The dominant trend in the chapter appears to be to promote hatred against Hindus, and to label her critics as Hindu Nationalists to stymie all debate and criticism of her fictitious historiography. It also appears that Doniger wants to ingratiate herself with the powerful lobby of Marxist‐Communist historians in India by peddling their distortions of medieval Indian history by excessively referring to their agenda driven publications.

Details at http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-16.pdf

Chapter Title: “Dialogue and Tolerance Under the Mughals”

General Comments : The chapter is written in a very amateurish manner. Doniger’s main references are overview books on Indian history such as the one by John Keay, and she has reproduced errors already found in her sources. Though the title of the chapter implies that the Mughal rulers were tolerant towards Hindus, the data presented by her makes it clear to even a casual reader that the reverse was actually the case. In other words, she does a good job at demonstrating that the Mughal Emperors, with the honorable and partial exception of Akbar, held Hindus and Hinduism in utter contempt and disdain and also indulged in considerable religious persecution of Hindus. Doniger tries to counter this obvious conclusion by culling piece‐meal data from the works of agenda driven authors, such as the communist historian Harbans Mukhia (who even advocated a ban on archaeological digs in India recently after a Jaina Saraswati idol was unearthed from Fatehpur Sikri, because it shattered the Indian Communist historians’ cherished claim that Akbar was uniformly tolerant towards Hindus and Jains)1 and Richard Eaton, an apologist for Islamic iconoclasm in medieval India. Further, the chapter is replete with dozens of factual errors, and of course with questionable interpretations of historical data. As usual, Doniger focuses on horses, dogs, drugs, booze and sex in this chapter too. Lastly, several paragraphs are written in very hurried and careless English and are therefore either misleading or undecipherable. Below, the reviewer lists just a few of the errors found in this chapter of the book. If we have not cited references to point out the sources of our corrections, it is because these facts are too well known to students of medieval Indian history. Doniger has acknowledged the help of her students Manan Ahmed and Rajeev Kinra in writing this chapter. Perhaps they can help her with these corrections, and also learn good history in the process.

Some of the errors pointed by us above can be a matter of interpretation, but most are plain errors of fact. The chapter covers a period of almost 200 years (from 1526 – 1713 AD) and to attribute all natural developments within the Hindu society to Moghuls is insulting to the intelligence of the Hindu community. Toeing the official ‘secularist’ line of history writing followed by India’s communist historians, Doniger exaggerates the supposed contributions of Moghuls and of Islam to Hinduism. She glorifies Akbar in a rather ahistorical fashion not asking the most elementary of all questions – “When Akbar fashioned the vast Moghul empire during his 49 year reign, were his conquests of a peaceful nature or were they preceded by terrible violence and bloodshed in the invaded territories of India?”

For all her pretenses that her book is about the under‐privileged sections of Hindus whose voices are not heard, Doniger too forgets them completely in this chapter, and instead glorifies their feudal and imperial lords. It is just the very last (and short) paragraph of the chapter that highlights the plights of the masses, but even this para closes by drawing a false parity between the construction of temples earlier and royal mosques during the Moghul rule.

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-19.pdf

Chapter Title:‐ “Hinduism under the Mughals 1500‐1700 CE”

Comments:

Practically all of Doniger’s bibliographic references are several degrees removed from the original sources (whether historical chronicles or religious writings of that period). The chapter is full of exaggerations, crediting the Mughal rulers for the survival or efflorescence of some forms of Hinduism from 1500‐1700 CE. No counter theses are considered, and the choice of Saints is also highly idiosyncratic. In fact, most of the Saints discussed in this chapter were beyond the sphere of influence of Mughals. In effect, she has torn these Saints from the larger canvas of the Bhakti movement, and has projected them as having been under some kind of tutelage under the Mughals. As with many other chapters, this one too wastes several pages on horses and on Muslim ladies in royal harems. Her students (Rajeev Kinra and Manan Ahmed) whom she mentions for helping her with this chapter have not been able to correct the errors of their teacher’s work.

The review gives a few examples of the flaws in this chapter.

http://vishalagarwal.voiceofdharma.com/articles/thaah/THAAF-20.pdf