[INDOLOGY] The Snake and the Mongoose

[Nathan McGovern]

Dear Indology members:

I am very happy to announce the release of my book, /The Snake and the 
Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion/ by Oxford 
University Press. Since my book deals with the emergence of Brahmanical, 
Buddhist, and Jain religious identities in ancient India and thus a key 
part of the narrative of South Asian religious history, it will be of 
interest to many if not most Indology members.

For your reference, here is the blurb from the dust jacket:

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 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 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 /sutra/s, 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. It was through the contestation 
between these groups, says McGovern, that the distinction between 
Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical--the snake and the mongoose--emerged.

Nathan McGovern

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater



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