“For the Love of Stories” by Wendy Doniger
As luck would have it, this year two important scholars of India published memoirs reflecting their nine decades of life and learning. One of these, Romila Thapar’s Just Being, will be reviewed in the NYRB by none other than Wendy Doniger, whose For the Love of Stories has just been published in India. These twinned publications represent a case of “battling begums”. While Thapar focuses primarily on her life as a public intellectual in India, Doniger provides us private glimpses into the golden age of academia.
Doniger’s charmed life encapsulates this age. Immensely talented, charming, with a big appetite for risk, she leaves the reader dazzled by the adventures she survived—a head-on auto collision, falling from a horse; academic positions she secured without applying for them; teaching courses for which she had no accreditation; sleeping on the floor of third-class waiting railroad waiting rooms in India, ill-advised romantic relationships that left no visible wounds on either side—all these humorously-recalled events highlight above all Wendy Doniger’s extraordinary run of luck.
Doniger is the precocious offspring of a talented Viennese woman, frustrated by American conformism, colorfully depicted in an earlier memoir, The Donigers of Great Neck. At 18, she is so fascinated by Indian mythology she decides to study Sanskrit at Radcliffe College. The virtuoso poetry of Kalidasa interests her less than dramatic tales about gods and heroes, transmitted by the Puranas and other popular texts. For the next four decades, she brings these tales alive for a global audience, through her teaching, translations and essays. Critical of James Campbell for imposing a monolithic, Jungian interpretation on Indian mythology, Doniger revels in the contradictory, elusive meaning of these stories, which often tell of irrepressible women, recalling both her mother and herself.
Pursuing a career when most professors were male, Doniger encounters a lot of casual sexism. Her attempts to fight back give rise to comical moments, as when she insists on taking snuff in an Oxford common room. She admits to being a “selfish feminist”, less interested in creating advancement for women than in simply trying to fulfil her own youthful promise. She explores the life of Sita, as opposed to Ram, heroes of the Ramayana, not out of feminist conviction, but because she has more to say about a woman struggling against the patriarchy. At the same time, she is indulgent to her male colleagues, when they behave themselves, and regrets having to tell one of them, at a night in the opera, that he ought not to have invited his female student.
One cannot mistake the focus of Doniger’s research. Her works include Beyond Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics, Reading the Kamasutra, The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals, The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts and the Woman who pretended to be herself. This focus on women did not prefigure gender or subaltern studies. She does not disown white privilege or the elitism of the old Oxford system where she obtained a PhD. She enjoys the company of the people who once ruled the Raj. She is anything but politically correct. Her student days pre-dated Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which tarred the teaching of Sanskrit as a colonial project, and changed forever the nature of how the West engages with Asia.
By then, however, Doniger was well-launched. On the recommendation of Mircea Eliade, she began to teach the history of religion at the University of Chicago. Unlike many US institutions of higher learning, Chicago maintained throughout this era a principled commitment to free speech and open inquiry. There were no witch hunts or decolonialising efforts. Doniger’s luck continued to hold.
Then the movement to decolonialise academia took aim at Doniger. US-based Hindu nationalists argued that she, as a white woman, should not be writing about Hinduism. The irony that Hindutva itself arises from colonial thinking is not lost on Doniger. In response she wrote The Hindus, an Alternate History, where she shows that the real subalterns here were not the high-caste nationalists but women and lower castes and their rich diversity of practices. When Penguin published The Hindus in India in 2010, an 81-year old teacher sued the publisher on the grounds of offence to his religious sensitivities. Despite much criticism at the time, Penguin decided to pull the book. This resulted in the book selling out rapidly. It was just another one of those adventures, like being thrown from the horse, from which Doniger moves on.
Her mother’s Vienna informs Doniger prose, with its blend of humour, finesse, world-weariness and besser-wisserism. Her anecdotes flow along like von Suppé’s “Light Cavalry Overture”. Older readers will recall their student years fondly, remembering the idiosyncrasies of that era, but also the freedom and the warmth that existed, while today’s students and faculty members will wonder how, in such a party-like atmosphere, could any serious work get done?
As Doniger wraps up her web of stories however, she foresees a world where Sanskrit will not only not be taught by a white woman, but will not be taught at all, in the name of subaltern studies. In the age of AI, she sees even more dire days ahead for the academy. She has lived a charmed life, and she is ready, like the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier (her mother’s and this reviewer’s mother’s favourite opera), to “halten und lassen” (“grasp and let go”). That’s what she has done in For the Love of Stories.
