"In his well-argued and detailed textual study of the relationship between the figure of the ascetic and the Brahman in early Indian religion, McGovern confronts broader issues in the field of South Asian religion which have long divided the research into the fields of Hinduism/Brahmanism and Buddhism. His prose is crisp and his historical analysis is accompanied with delightful stories drawn from a wide variety of Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanical sources. This is an important study that should be required reading for students and scholars of early Indian religions."
-Justin Thomas McDaniel, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
"In this comparative study of religious identity formation in early India, McGovern identifies in a systematic and clear manner the flaws in the methods that dichotomize the śramaṇic and Brahmanical traditions. This welcome volume makes an important contribution to the academic field of South Asian religions by challenging the old assumptions embedded in standard textbook presentations on early Buddhism."
-Vesna Wallace, Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
"McGovern has provided a monumentally valuable contribution. This is a must for anyone who teaches undergraduate courses on South Asian religion. The Snake and the Mongoose will re-define much of the field, particularly in the powerful ways McGovern retires age-old historical narratives."
-Michael Jerryson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Youngstown State University
This book turns the commonly-accepted model of the origins of the early Indian religions on its head. Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the relationship between the major early Indian religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism has been based on an assumed dichotomy between two meta-historical identities: “the Brahmans” (the purveyors of the ancient Vedic texts and associated ritual system) and the newer “non-Brahmanical” śramaṇa movements (out of which the Buddhists and Jains emerged). Textbook and scholarly accounts typically purport an “opposition” between these two groups by citing the 2nd-century-BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali, often stating erroneously that he compared their animosity for one another to that of the snake and the 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 and “marketing” against a pre-existing Brahmanism. This book seeks to de-center the Hindu Brahman from our understanding of Indian religion by “taming the snake and the mongoose”—that is, abandoning the anachronistic distinction between “Brahmanical” and “non-Brahmanical” and letting the earliest articulations of identity in Indian religion speak for themselves on their own terms. It accomplishes this goal 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 sūtras, and the Vedic Brahmans as they represented themselves in their Dharma Sūtras. 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, and out of whose contestation with one another the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical—the snake and the mongoose—emerged.