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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Comparative religion
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The Snake and the Mongoose - The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion (Hardcover)
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The Snake and the Mongoose - The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion (Hardcover)
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Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the
relationship between the early Indian religions of Buddhism,
Jainism, and Hinduism has been predicated on a perceived dichotomy
between two meta-historical identities: "the Brahmans" (purveyors
of the ancient Vedic texts and associated ritual system) and the
newer "non-Brahmanical" sramana movements from which the Buddhists
and Jains emerged. Textbook and scholarly accounts postulate an
opposition between these two groups, citing the 2nd-century BCE
Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali, who is often quoted erroneously as
likening them to the proverbial enemies snake and mongoose.
Scholars continue to privilege Brahmanical Hindu accounts of early
Indian history, and further portray Buddhist and Jain deviations
from those accounts as evidence of their opposition to a
pre-existing Brahmanism. In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan
McGovern turns this commonly-accepted model of the origins of the
early Indian religions on its head. His book seeks to de-center the
Hindu Brahman from our understanding of Indian religion by "taming
the snake and the mongoose"-that is, by abandoning the
anachronistic distinction between "Brahmanical" and
"non-Brahmanical." Instead, McGovern allows the earliest
articulations of identity in Indian religion to speak for
themselves through a comparative reading of texts preserved by the
three major groups that emerged from the social, political,
cultural, and religious foment of the late first millennium BCE:
the Buddhists and Jains as they represented themselves in their
earliest sutras, and the Vedic Brahmans as they represented
themselves in their Dharma Sutras. The picture that emerges is not
of a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical,
but rather of many different groups who all saw themselves as
Brahmanical. Thus, McGovern argues, it was through the contestation
between these groups that the distinction between Brahmanical and
non-Brahmanical-the snake and the mongoose-emerged.
General
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