: I would still write The Hindus the way I wrote it, for the most part: Wendy Doniger #IndiaNEWS #National,SPOTLIGHT By Sukant DeepakNew Delhi, July 17 (IANS) It is about the gaze. Those little observations

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I would still write The Hindus the way I wrote it, for the most part: Wendy Doniger #IndiaNEWS #National ,SPOTLIGHT
By Sukant DeepakNew Delhi, July 17 (IANS) It is about the gaze. Those little observations made in a dreamscape. A perpetual ambiguity in time.
Somewhere between hyper-realistic and dreamlike experiences, a young scholar effortlessly brings forth a cultures network of throbbing veins tangled, confusing, layered but madly enigmatic in letters written to her parents from India in 1963-64
US-based Wendy Doniger, an acclaimed authority on Hinduism and a Sanskrit scholar who has to her credit major works on the subject, including ‘The Hindus: An Alternate History, ‘Hindu Myths, ‘The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, ‘The Ring of Truth, ‘Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities and translations of the ‘Rig Veda and ‘Kama Sutra, whose latest, ‘An American Girl in India (Speaking Tiger), recently hit the stands, says she did not so much conceive the book as stumble upon it.
When I retired from the University of Chicago in 2018 and was cleaning out my office, I found a box of letters, and read one that began with: Calcutta, December 10, 1963. Dear Mommy and Daddy. My mother had apparently kept the letters all those years, and when she died the box came to me, but I never opened it until then. As soon as I read them, I thought they might be of interest to my students and my readers, especially in India, recalls the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.
Doniger, whose book Hindus: An Alternate History created a controversy, says that she does not really look back at that period at all. To tell the truth, I would still write The Hindus the way I wrote it, for the most part; but would try to improve the weakest part, which is the later section on Mughal and British history, about which I know much less than I know about ancient India.
I still feel that what I wrote about ancient India was basically accurate and written in the hope of showing how the voices of women and Dalits were always there in the texts, in praise of the open-mindedness of Hindus through the ages. And many, many Indian readers have written to me over the years, telling me that they did indeed understand what I was trying to do and that they liked the book.
For someone who has always insisted on the liberal essence of Hinduism, boasting of much multiplicity, its contemporary avatar projected by certain quarters which comes across as uni-dimensional, should be attributed mainly to politics. She stresses, too, that the country in 1963, as she discovered in her letters, was much different from contemporary India in many other ways too.
Television and the Internet had not yet invaded the countryside, and there was an openness to visitors from abroad, and pride in an India that was still shaking itself free from the colonial yoke, that made people happy to share their culture with someone who clearly appreciated it.

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