Nathan McGovern's The Snake and the Mongoose draws upon a zoological metaphor to introduce a central issue in ancient Indian history that he considers widely misunderstood. Numerous scholars have written that the implacable opposition between śramaṇa (striver, an appellation often applied to Jains and Buddhists) and brāhmaṇa (Brahmin) is likened by the Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali to the opposition between the snake and the mongoose. McGovern observes that although Patañjali (second century BCE) does offer the word śramaṇa-brāhmaṇa as an example of an “oppositional compound,” he never in fact compares the relationship of these two types of people to the snake-mongoose relationship. For McGovern, this scholarly confusion is symbolic of a bigger mistake. The central issue he reexamines in this book is the oft-repeated narrative that the “śramaṇa movement” was a response to a well-established system of Brahmanical hegemony based on Brahmins’ status by birth. Like recent work by Johannes...
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