In love with a complex country

Renowned Indologist Wendy Doniger first came to India as a 22-year-old on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali

In 1963, 22-year-old Wendy Doniger landed in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to study Sanskrit and Bengali (now Bangla) for a year in Shantiniketan.

Even though Doniger was in a foreign land, studying foreign languages, braving outdoor classes, changing seasons, spicy food, baffling festivals, and sacrificial ceremonies, she found herself grateful for the tiny little joys of life —“the sky, and the children, and the trees.” In this sense, she felt at home in India.

But overcome by what she calls the “excesses” of India and overwhelmed being away from her parents, she wrote letters to them, in which she assured them that she was safe and described India — its many quirks and corrupt ways of functioning — as she saw and understood then. An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 (Speaking Tiger) is a collection of these letters.

These letters not only capture the then-Indian reality as is, but also locate something real and true about a scholar’s life — her motivations, biases, and naiveté. Additionally, they stand testimony to a lifelong association that neither the young American woman nor the newly independent country imagined. As we wait to witness what another decade of their togetherness holds, these letters point us in the direction of empathy, open-mindedness, and humility that seem to have been lost on the youth today. It’s worth noting what young Doniger wrote in one of the letters: “I think it is what we are that makes the distance between people, not what we are not.”

While the book is full of youthful yet twisted wisdom, a plethora of light-hearted anecdotes, and serious deliberations on India and its future, DHoS connected with Doniger to learn more about some untouched aspects of her recollections. Excerpts from an interview

When did you decide to be a scholar of Sanskrit? What drew you to the language?

When I was still a young girl, my mother gave me a copy of E M Forster’s A Passage to India, and I read the (bad, I know now) translation of the Upanishads by Juan Maspero, and I became fascinated by India, particularly by its excesses — the bright colours of the sarees, the intricate details in the paintings and the temple carvings, the sensual blurring of musical notes. Then, in high school, my Latin teacher taught me some Greek, which I loved, and she suggested that I might like Sanskrit. So, in 1958, I chose Radcliffe College because not only was it the only way women could go to Harvard then, but it was also the only place where I could study Sanskrit.

As a budding scholar, what was it like to come to India at a time when the country itself was young and confused?

It was wonderful. People were so proud of having their country back at last, and so happy that I appreciated it so much, and complete strangers were eager to befriend me and to help me to learn about their country. I travelled alone, or with friends from Shantiniketan, and stayed in dak bungalows and in the homes of friends I’d made at Shantiniketan, everywhere quite safely, always helped by people on trains and buses and in the temples I visited everywhere.

How would you summarise your experiences in Shantiniketan?

I lived there through the late summer monsoon and the winter, and met wonderful people, including members of the Tagore family, learned some Bangla and some Bengali myths and folktales and a lot of Tagore poems and songs, and wandered about the beautiful countryside, deliriously happy but also rather homesick.

You note in the book that “had this actually been a diary, I would surely have included a lot of sensational incidents”. Can you share any?

I put a few of them into the preface of the book. “Sensational” is perhaps an exaggeration. They were things I would not tell my parents, such as the time when I unknowingly drank two large glasses of bhang lassi at Durga Puja in Calcutta and had only a foggy memory of the rest of the evening. Or the time I witnessed a group of Hindu boys, in South Calcutta in 1963, in the early stirrings of the Indo-Pak war of 1965, surrounding the houses of Muslims and setting fire to them and not letting the inhabitants come out.

Sharing varied spellings of Bolpur — “the sign on the station spelt it Bolepur, the post office spells it Bolpure, the people at the University spell it Bolpur,” you conclude, “life is very approximate here.” Do you feel the same or any different about India today?

The sad truth is that I no longer know India as well as I knew it then. For many years I visited India for just a month or two at a time, and never settled into any place as I had settled in Shantiniketan. So, my memories are in a sense frozen in time. I still feel the same way about India, but it is an India half a century old. My knowledge of India today is compartmentalised in another part of my head and heart, heavily influenced by my experience with The Hindus: An Alternative History (Speaking Tiger) between 2011 and 2014. But my memories of Bolpur (however you spell it!) are still preserved intact, a fly in amber, in a different part of my head and heart.

Do you still feel that Indian myths “are all glorified shaggy dog stories”?

No, that was a rather silly thing for me to say, but I was young. Some of the myths do indeed follow a narrative pattern that suddenly comes to an unexpected and inconclusive end — a rather flat end, like a shaggy dog story, but most of them are carefully crafted to make a very serious point conclusively.

Like your book (The Hindus), people seemed to have gotten offended by the International Booker-winning Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell. Your comments?

I think that the Indian law (295A), under which several writers, including me, were prosecuted — a law that makes it illegal to write anything that might offend a person’s religious sensibilities — makes no sense. (That law was actually passed, under the British Raj, to protect Muslims from Hindus, a fact not without its irony today.)

Anything that anyone writes, including “the sky is blue,” might offend someone somewhere. I think people ought to have free will in deciding what to read and what not to read; there are many Hindus who are not offended by my books — they have written to me over the years. Those who find my approach offensive should not read my books.

Is the world getting increasingly intolerant when it comes to artists and writers?

It seems to me that the internet and social media make it possible for people to publish appallingly violent, offensive, and untrue statements; thus, it’s not surprising that many people have become oversensitive to such posts (a sensitivity that I can well understand) but this phenomenon has also bred intolerance to less-offensive statements, in fact, to anything that they don’t like.

But when it comes to faith, people have always been touchy...

Surely some people have always been touchy about sex, religion, politics, etc. There has always been censorship of one sort or another, but what’s new in each age is precisely what it is that people want to censor, and the degree to which the ruling powers support that sort of censorship.

Do you have a sense of “limit” of artistic liberty, for yourself, when it comes to art and literature?

Like everyone else, I have my limits. There are things I do not like to read about or see in films. I’m intolerant of intentional physical violence, and torture in films; I can’t watch films that include such scenes. But I wouldn’t for a moment say that other people should not watch such films, let alone that such films shouldn’t be made. It’s the same with literature, and people who cannot tolerate certain ideas about sex, race, or, indeed, religion shouldn’t read books about them.

What are you working on next?

I’m about to publish a book After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata, which is a translation of the end of this great Sanskrit text and a commentary on it.

It seems to me that this brilliant text has much to teach us about what we now call truth and reconciliation, namely, how to go on living with people who have killed your brothers and your children, and whose children and brothers you have killed. It is about the violence of Partition, the violence of the political scene in India and the United States today, and so many other places.

On a lighter note, given that you’ve described an array of benefits of wearing a saree, do you wear sarees? And do you have someone to help you with the pleats in the US?

What a sweet question! I gave away most of my sarees, but I kept the one I got married in (a white Banarasi saree, heavily gold encrusted) and another beautiful one that we used to call mayur-kanthi, “peacock-necked,” because the blue and green threads give it two different sheens. I wear the blue-and-green one very seldom now, only on very special formal occasions. And, indeed, I have wonderful Indian students who help me with the pleats! And I wore a gown made of multicoloured pieces of sarees to have my portrait painted for the University of Chicago, a portrait that now stands in the Divinity School. →(see pic)

Is there any special place in India you’d like to visit the next time you’re here and why?

I fear I will never return to India, in part because old age and a series of injuries and surgeries have rendered me physically unable to travel, and in part, because I would not feel safe in India today because of the political situation. But I am so very sorry that I never got to visit Kashmir, as I had always hoped to do, or even the hill stations that I have read so much about.

The interviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist, who covers books, gender, and sexuality. He can be found on Instagram @writerly_life