Notes
253 Notes Introduction 1. “India’s Gift to the World,” Brooklyn Standard Union, February 27, 1895. 2. Axel Michaels, Hinduism: Past and Present, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 32. 3. Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13–14. 4. Thus “Brāhmaṇic” would refer to something related to the texts and “Brahminical” would refer to something related to the people. 5. Michael Witzel, “Vedas and Upaniṣads,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003), 68. 6. G. S. Mudur, “Caste Barriers Not Older than 2000 Years—Indians Mated Across Ethnic Groups until 2nd Century: Study,” The Telegraph, August 9, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia. com/1130809/jsp/nation/story_17213287.jsp. 7. Tracing one Vedic lineage will help to illustrate the structure of the corpus: The Taittirīya branch of the Black Yajur Veda contains the Taittirīya Saṃhitā, the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa, the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, and the Taittirīya Upaniṣad. 8. David N. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism: Essays on Religion in History (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), 2. 9. We should note, though, that the period in which Roy considered himself a “Hindu Unitarian” was between the years 1824 and 1828, well after he coined the word. 10. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism, 36. 254 Notes 11. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961); Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). The more accurate French title translates to something more like “Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth.” 12. La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972); Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 13. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset, 1978); Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and G. Lefort, eds. Stephen Bann and Michael Leigh Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 14. Again, the French title, Achever Clausewitz: Entretiens avec Benoît Chantre (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2007), translates to “Completing Clausewitz,” which gives a much better idea of the project the book undertakes. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 15. Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 161. 16. This gives a rather ominous subtext to the old saying “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” 17. J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 412. 18. Terry Eagleton expresses the idea with admirable lucidity in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 131: [Western philosophy] has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all others . . . for the anchoring, unquestionable meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the ‘transcendental signified’). A great number of candidates for this role—God, the Idea, the World Spirit, the Self, substance, matter and so on—have thrust themselves forward from time to time. Since each of these concepts hopes to found our whole system of thought and language, it must itself be beyond that system, untainted by its play of linguistic differences. It cannot be implicated in the very languages which it attempts to order and anchor: it must be somehow anterior to these discourses, must have existed before they did. It must be a meaning, but not like any other meaning just a product of a play of difference. It must figure rather as the meaning of meanings, the lynchpin or fulcrum of a whole thought-system, the sign around which all others revolve and which all others obediently reflect. That any such transcendental meaning is a fiction though perhaps a necessary fiction—is one consequence of the theory of language I have outlined. There is no concept which is not embroiled in an open-ended play of signification, shot through with the traces and fragments of other ideas. It is just that, out of this play of signifiers, certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position, or made the centres around which other meanings are forced to turn. 19. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, eds. Stephen Bann and Michael Leigh Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 102–103...
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