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1 Introduction I wander afield, thriving in sturdy thought, Through unpathed haunts of the Pierides, Trodden by step of none before. I joy To come on undefiled fountains there, To drain them deep; I joy to pluck new flowers, To seek for this my head a signal crown From regions where the Muses never yet Have garlanded the temples of a man: First, since I teach concerning mighty things, And go right on to loose from round the mind The tightened coils of dread religion; Next, since, concerning themes so dark, I frame Songs so pellucid, touching all throughout . . . —Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book I, “The Infinity of the Universe” But although his fury and sarcasm leave the Vedic seers unscathed, he takes aim at modern anthropologists with exuberant zeal . . . In their presence, Girard incessantly repeats “Molière’s inexhaustible comment, ‘Ah! qu’en 2 The Head Beneath the Altar termes galants ces choses-là sont mises!’ [‘How elegantly those things are phrased!’].” —Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch I ndia is the birthplace of the religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism , Jainism, and Sikhism. It has served as a pilgrimage place and source of spiritual renewal for Chinese monks in the fifth century, Tibetan royalty in the tenth century, and the Western counterculture since at least the early twentieth century. India’s gift to the world, in the words of the nineteenth century Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda, is religion.1 But India is also the site of some of the last century’s worst episodes of violent conflict, including the bloody 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the successive wars between the two nations over the next 25 years; the political murders of Mahatma Gandhi (by a Hindu), Indira Gandhi (by her Sikh bodyguards), and Rajiv Gandhi (by a Tamil separatist); the deadliest manmade ecological disaster in history at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1985; the periodic outbreaks of communal violence against Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians; and the nuclear armament of India and Pakistan. Religion, in addition to India’s gift to the world, is also often the scapegoat for India’s violence. Hindu mythology reflects this mixture of otherworldly spiritualism and worldly violence. Like most mythologies, it is full of images of cosmic wars, apocalyptic destruction, and tragic heroes. But it is also the repository of as many stories about courtly love, self-sacrifice, ethical quandaries, and sophisticated philosophical edifices to rival (or even surpass) Augustine and Aquinas.AndunlikeGreekorScandinavianmythology,Hindumythologyis also connected to a living religious tradition and helps to define the religious identity of hundreds of millions of Hindus. As scholars of Hinduism have learned, one is far more likely to draw protests when writing about Gaṇeśa or Śiva than when writing about Loki or Aphrodite. Indeed, as we shall see, scholars of Hindu mythology have recently found themselves enmeshed or implicated in India’s religious conflicts. Many books have been written about the violence of religion, the religions of India, and the violence of the religions of India. But René Girard, who has spent the last four decades thinking and writing about religion and Introduction 3 violence, has had virtually nothing to say about it until his lectures on the Sanskrit Brāhmaṇas at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in October of 2002. This book will make a study of those lectures, published in English in 2011 as Sacrifice, in light of the rest of Girard’s work, current Indological scholarship, and primary texts from the Hindu tradition. Along the way, we will also visit the work of Girard’s predecessors, heirs, rivals, and critics, examine some well-known and some frequently overlooked Hindu myths and rituals, and take some sidelong glances into Christian theology, contemporary philosophy, and Greek, Iranian, and Scandinavian literature. In the end, we will come to some conclusions about what it means for him and for us that Girard has finally turned to India so late in his long and distinguished career and how a Girardian reading of Hindu myth might contribute to a new universal history built on humanity’s shared future rather than its diffused pasts. From Mimetic Theory to Hinduism . . . This book has two separate but related aims. First, I want to see to what extent René Girard’s “mimetic theory” of the sacrificial origin of religion and culture can enrich our understanding of Hinduism. More specifically, I...

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