Wendy Doniger at Idea Exchange: ‘Ancient Hinduism is very liberal. What’s being said in its name today makes no sense historically’ | Idea Exchange News,The Indian Express
As one of the world’s foremost scholars of Hinduism, Sanskrit and mythology, Wendy Doniger has also found herself at the centre of contentious debates on the politics of knowledge, the study of religion, the insider-outsider readings of texts and traditions. Her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had to be withdrawn after a campaign against it in India in 2014.
Wendy Doniger on how she discovered Sanskrit and Hinduism, the backlash over her most successful book, and why, at its core, Hinduism has always been diverse. The session was moderated by Vandita Mishra, National Opinion Editor
VANDITA MISHRA: What drew that 22-year-old to the study of Sanskrit and Hinduism?
It was those Jewish refugee parents, my mother and my father. My mother gave me a copy of EM Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) when I was eight or nine years old. I also read Rumer Godden’s stories about India. Eventually, I came across a translation of the Upanishads, which I now realise was a terrible translation by Juan Mascaro. Then, I liked languages. I studied Latin in school, I had a young Latin teacher, and she said, ‘If you like Latin, you’d love Greek.’ I loved Greek. She said, ‘Well, if you want a difficult script, and a more complicated grammar, try Sanskrit’. I said, ‘What’s Sanskrit?’ And it was the language of India.
I grew up in a political household. There was a lot going on in America in those days, and I was part of it. I thought, ‘This is not what I want to do. I want to go into a strange language, where I can lose myself in another culture.’ So at the age of 17, I chose Radcliffe, because that was the only place a freshman could learn Sanskrit. I was already interested in India. By the time I got there, when I was 22, that was five years out of my formal study of Sanskrit.
It was 10 years after that that I thought, this is a country I really am interested in. It’s so different from my own country. Everything that I don’t like here, I like there. When I got to India, I found things I didn’t like there either. But I always loved the people, the language, the landscape, the religious rituals, the temples and the music. I continued to be amazed and delighted by it even when I found things that were difficult for me. Difficult, not so much because of the culture, but because of my culture that I had grown up very protected in. I had never really seen poverty in America. I could have, but I didn’t. So, it was a double culture shock. It was the shock of coming from America to India and the shock of coming from a very sheltered childhood to a grown-up world. India was my first taste of the real world. It was a deep leap.
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