A crucial question runs as an undercurrent through the book — if ancient India had all the scientific inventions some of our ministers think it had, what happened to them?
The relentless backlash her work has evoked hasn’t deterred American Indologist Wendy Doniger from engaging with India and its various texts.
In her latest book, Beyond Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics (Speaking Tiger), she seeks to show that the tradition of subversion and dissent was alive and well in ancient Indian writing.
For her, most ancient Hindu texts speak of the three pillars that help humans lead a full and fulfilling life — dharma (religion), artha (wealth) and kama (pleasure) — and it is on these that the book is based.
Doniger notes how balance among the three is a goal that is often not met, and that dharma has historically taken precedence over the other two qualities. Through her book, she offers a spirited and close reading of ancient Indian writings — especially Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra — which looks at the long and unrecognised history of opposition against dharma.
Beyond Dharma… is a delightful read not just because it flows easily, keeping the reader immersed, it also encourages them to take up (or go back to) Arthashastra and Kamasutra.
True to the theme of the book, she also chronicles in detail what she believes is the “subversion of science” under the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. According to Doniger, a climate of intense ‘mythoscience’ has taken shape since the NDA government assumed office in May 2014.
A crucial question runs as an undercurrent through the book — if ancient India had all the scientific inventions some of our ministers think it had, what happened to them?
She urges the government to take to heart the true lesson of Arthashastra — its scepticism and dispassionate clarity — as a counterweight to the cause of the ‘sanatan dharma’ and its “false science”. “Until then”, she adds, “India remains a land in which, after so many centuries in which scientific traditions managed to keep alive a subversive attack on religion, religion now is invoked in the subversion of science.”
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