There is this story that the scholar Wendy Doniger recounts in her new memoir, For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist. She and Sanskritist Robert P. Goldman had an old enmity: he “loathed me and made my life in that department hell,” she writes of her time at the University of California at Berkeley. Some four decades later, Doniger finds her retribution. Now she is well-ensconced at the University of Chicago in a triple-departmental appointment with the Divinity School, and the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Social Thought. When she is invited to review Goldman’s single-volume translation of the Ramayana (the full, seven-volume set had been published some years earlier), she makes “a number of points and jokes at Bob’s expense”—which prompt Goldman to write what she calls a “furious, humorless, self-incriminating response.” The New York Review publishes both pieces, and titles the latter “Cousin Bob and Cousin Wendy,” because the two authors are in fact related by marriage, Doniger has outed this fact in her review, and the exchange is like a petty family feud turned amusingly public. Putting the whole affair into her memoir, Doniger claims the last laugh.
For the Love of Stories asks us to find interest in such common backstories of a distinguished academic life. Doniger’s work has been dedicated largely to the study of Puranic texts and has resulted in the publication of over two dozen books and translations on gender and power, evil, dharma, desire, sex and eroticism in Hindu mythology.
A “proto-feminist” who responded to the unfairness of her own environments and fought battles for herself, she is unfailingly anti-authoritarian. The academic milieu in which she finds herself is male-dominated, given to stodgy, exclusive forms of scholarship. So, she gravitates naturally to the marginal(ised) and the ignored in her studies and finds appeal in Puranic language over high Sanskrit (at a time when the former was barely valued by established Sanskritists). Her memoir chronicles her crossing of such sound barriers and becoming “the first woman” several times in a professional arc that would make it easier for generations of women scholars, myself included, to function within the United States academy.
The world she describes is both spread wide (across the US and Europe), and incredibly small. Her book rattles off lists of “all the people I knew,” which makes it a good source for what we as graduate students used to call “star gazing”: attending conferences and listening to “the big names” talk, for the intellectualism and sophistication we imagined them to have was inspiring and the hallway talk entertaining. I soon found in Doniger’s lists a sort of Venn diagram marking out common colleagues and acquaintances; suddenly, the memoir took on the quality of a gossip column for academic celebrities.
Tabloid fascinations aside, however, the overriding experience of reading Doniger’s memoirs soon became one of culture shock. Her body of work deals with a great many sacred texts and deeply revered hymns and story systems, all of which are culturally and civilisationally precious, and very much part of living Indian traditions to this day.
To study such materials requires, at the very least, a love of Sanskrit and of Hindu mythological and philosophical imaginaries, combined with a cultivated cultural attunement to what they have represented and continue to mean in their local contexts. But there are almost no glimpses of this process in Doniger’s memoir though she professes a love of Sanskrit and story. Instead, we are presented multiple tales of the academic pettiness, alignments, politically inflected strategising, and very problematic personal entanglements that undergird knowledge production in the Western academy.
Take how women language scholars were known jocularly as “pillow dictionaries” back in the day in Berkeley, for their utility to their husbands’ research (and the husbands were usually in far more secure faculty positions). It was common everywhere for men to openly date and marry their students. Doniger remarks of course on the structural inappropriateness of such behaviours, yet she seems unconcerned that a vast and authoritative scholarship on Hinduism in general was being systemically produced via extraneous commitments and liaisons that were never strictly intellectual or professional—her own included.
“It’s best to translate the Kamasutra with someone you have slept with,” she writes plainly of her “partnership” with the Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, reducing the text’s complex commentary on social conduct and the pursuit of pleasure to just sex. Any idealised notion of scholarship or intellectualism in the tradition of the great Indian commentators, for whom personal disciplines were likely not things apart from scholastic inquiry, crumbles in the face of such revelations.
There is a bluntness to Doniger’s writings and a cavalier tell-all randomness on which she seems to thrive. Full birth dates of colleagues and others appear for no apparent reason, along with the dates of when many have died. The book is periodized by the phases of Doniger’s career but populated by “all of Wendy’s favourite things”: dogs, horses, places, graduate students, moments, men. They are an odd jumble of knick-knacks one collects over a lifetime: at once telling, affecting, and strange. Doniger presents a lifetime’s list of acknowledgements, even to those who may not want them. She names the historian Thomas Trautmann as the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript that would become her book on evil in Hindu mythology—in spite of Trautmann denying it and clearly not wanting to be named.
Ironically, such nonchalance may well be behind her work’s popular appeal—that and the fact that she has three Penguin Classics to her name: The Rig Veda, The Laws of Manu, and Hindu Myths. It is easy to simplify “Hinduism” in a single broad stroke for its problematic attitudes towards women and lower castes without regard for regional, class, historical and cultural variation with internal questioning represented only by a handful of corner cases such as those of Ekalavya or Vali.
It is easier still to flatten Siva’s profound asceticism into just moral “chastity” or to read “desire” in the “Kamadahana” episode as always “lust”, when these ideas are not so easily pinned to gender or sexuality.
Doniger has come under fire from Harvard Sanskritist Michael Witzel for taking such liberties in her translation of the Rig Veda, but she explains the decisions away as the compulsions of publishing with Penguin for non-specialist readers. Then she has her revenge against Witzel in much the same way she did with Goldman, via another cleverly snarky piece of text written as a blurb for his book.
The flip side of popular appeal is of course offence. It is this latter response to Doniger’s work that led to the pulping of her The Hindus: An Alternate History by Penguin India in 2014. The book is positioned as a corrective to Hindutva history-telling, one in a series of works which feel obligated to settle Indian debates over history, and only the latest of Doniger’s anti-authoritarian stances. Here, Doniger takes it upon herself to “bring to the Indian public the parts of Hinduism that were in danger of being suppressed by Hindu nationalists” and “defending the right of a non-Hindu to write about Hinduism.” After all, as she has explained elsewhere, Hindutva supporters are largely engineers and IT professionals, heirs to 19th century Protestant missionary interpretations of Hinduism, who therefore reject aspects of their own faith in self-loathing and now need to be guided back to the pre-colonial truth of their roots by scholars, including non-Hindu ones.
Doniger’s memoir is a record, not a reflection, neither on the presumptions that have prompted the critical responses to her work nor on her implication that her Hindu critics are merely duped and mesmerised by the rising tide of Hindutva. Again, she has the last laugh: the pulped book had a fine commercial run, even in India. Filling it with “good stories and jokes” gets Doniger fanmail. It is what allows her to also get away with the other careless slippages which characterise her academic work.
Perhaps such stories give us another way to read Doniger: less as a resource in the long and difficult processes of post-colonial self-making or in learning to parse ancient Sanskrit texts, and more as entertainment. If indeed the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, jokes and repartee are both and what we should read Doniger for. Then maybe we’ll be able to share in all her last laughs.
Deepa S. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist with the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She is working on a project to document Puducherry’s temples and ritual life for the Centre for Shaiva Studies, Puducherry.