When a decade ago, Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus’ got pulped, I was among those that raised voice in social media against it and some of my right-wing friends who supported the ban. I am not for all these talks of banning and making controversies about art, no matter how hideous, like those of Tracy Emin or ridiculous, as Maurizio Cattelan duct-taping a banana and selling it for millions of dollars. I am of the belief that the readers or art aficionados or film-enthusiasts are wise enough to discern and discard works that are unworthy. By creating needless controversy about arts and books, we only achieve a reverse effect, by making even ignorant bystanders curious about those exact arts and books we wanted to condemn to obscurity. As someone dear to me once told me, there is nothing called ‘negative publicity’ these days. But after reading this book, I am open to reconsidering my views, for I have never read such a mediocre translation from an ‘acclaimed’ author.
Her ignorance of the book’s cultural and religious importance as well as its standing as a beacon of moral principles is so glaring that most of her words sound ignorant and irreverent. Just to clarify that I am not a narrow-minded right winger and also to explain why I condemn this work, let me quote some glaring errors with my comments in box parantheses.
1. Because Ambalika closed here eyes when she conceived her son, Vyasa cursed him to be born blind. [Anyone that has ever read the Mahabharata knows that Vyasa did not curse her or her son, but simply stated the condition].
2. The Levirate (niyoga) is the law by which a brother (or, sometimes, any male in the family) begets legal children on behalf of his dead or impotent brother [Again, another half-baked, hasty equation of two cultural practices that though similar are not the same].
3. Although there is no archaeological evidence that the city of Dvaraka never existed, from time to time someone tries to find traces of it in the waters off the west coast of India. [The antiquity of Dwaraka may be as questionable as that of the Shroud of Turin, but writing it off as the city never ever existed, is mere naivete].
4. At the end of the year, Arjuna married Virata’s daughter Uttama, and eventually they had a son, Parikshit. [The most glaring and the most disgusting of all errors from this so-called scholar. Apart from misspelling Uttara’s name as ‘Uttama’ not once but twice, she also states that Arjuna married her, while any reader worth their salt know that it was not Arjuna but his son Abhimanyu that married Uttara and begot Parikshit. It is like saying Sarah was the mother of Abraham.]
5. Yudhishthira performed a horse sacrifice to atone for the Pandavas’ destruction of their Kaurava cousins. [Even a child studying history in India knows that Ashwamedha Yagna or the ‘horse sacrifice’ is performed not to atone for anything but to establish one’s sovereignty over the surrounding nation-states. But it would be too much to expect such cultural understandings from this so-called scholar.]
Apart from all these glaring errors, her translation does not pass muster. Instead of translating the soul of the text, the author has contented herself with merely translating the words which does nothing to enhance the flow or the reading experience. Maybe this is what happens when people have zero understanding about the cultural context of anything but start considering themselves ‘experts’ and ‘scholars’ based on their limited understanding of few books.
By the time I finished the book, I regretted having bought two of her books together without having experienced her writing first. I also did remove a couple of other books that I had saved on my wish list.
Ignorant, irreverent, mediocre work from someone who sounds less like a scholar and more like an imbecile to me!
