Wendy Doniger

Biography

Doniger was born in New York City to immigrant non-observant Jewish parents, and raised in Great Neck, New York, where her father, Lester L. Doniger (1909–1971), ran a publishing business. While in high school, she studied dance under George Balanchine and Martha Graham.

She graduated summa cum laude in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Radcliffe College in 1962, and received her M.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in June 1963. She then studied in India in 1963–1964 with a 12-month Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in June 1968, with a dissertation on Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of Siva, supervised by Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr. She obtained a D. Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University, in February 1973, with a dissertation on The Origins of Heresy in Hindu Mythology, supervised by R. C. Zaehner.

Doniger holds the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Chair in History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the editor of the scholarly journal History of Religions, having served on its editorial board since 1979, and has edited a dozen other publications in her career. In 1985, she was elected President of the American Academy of Religion, and in 1997 President of the Association for Asian Studies. She serves on the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

She was invited to give the 2010 Art Institute of Chicago President's Lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival, which was titled, "The Lingam Made Flesh: Split-Level Symbolism in Hindu Art".

Recognition

Since she began writing in the 1960s, Doniger has gained the reputation of being "one of America's major scholars in the humanities". Assessing Doniger's body of work, K. M. Shrimali, Professor of Ancient Indian History at the University of Delhi, writes:

... it (1973) also happened to be the year when her first major work in early India's religious history, viz., Siva, the Erotic Ascetic was published and had instantly become a talking point for being a path-breaking work. I still prescribe it as the most essential reading to my postgraduate students at the University of Delhi, where I have been teaching a compulsory course on 'Evolution of Indian Religions' for the last nearly four decades. It was the beginning of series of extremely fruitful and provocative encounters with the formidable scholarship of Wendy Doniger.

Doniger is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions. By her self-description,

I myself am by both temperament and training inclined to texts. I am neither an archaeologist nor an art historian; I am a Sanskritist, indeed a recovering Orientalist, of a generation that framed its study of Sanskrit with Latin and Greek rather than Urdu or Tamil. I’ve never dug anything up out of the ground or established the date of a sculpture. I’ve labored all my adult life in the paddy fields of Sanskrit, ...

Her books both in Hinduism and other fields have been positively reviewed by the Indian scholar Vijaya Nagarajan and the American Hindu scholar Lindsey B. Harlan, who noted as part of a positive review that "Doniger's agenda is her desire to rescue the comparative project from the jaws of certain proponents of postmodernism". Of her Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit, the Indologist Richard Gombrich wrote: "Intellectually, it is a triumph..." Doniger's (then O'Flaherty) 1973 book Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva was a critique of the "Great tradition Śivapurāṇas and the tension that arises between Śiva's ascetic and erotic activities." Richard Gombrich called it "learned and exciting"; however, John H. Marr was disappointed that the "regionalism" so characteristic of the texts is absent in Doniger's book, and wondered why the discussion took so long. Doniger's Rigveda, a translation of 108 hymns selected from the canon, was deemed among the most reliable by historian of religion Ioan P. Culianu. However, in an email message, Michael Witzel called it "idiosyncratic and unreliable just like her Jaiminiya Brahmana or Manu (re-)translations."

Criticism

Beginning in the early 2000s, a disagreement arose within the Hindu community over whether Doniger accurately described Hindu traditions. Together with many of her colleagues, she was the subject of a critique by Rajiv Malhotra for using psychoanalytic concepts to interpret non-Western subjects. Aditi Banerjee, a co-author of Malhotra, criticised Wendy Doniger for grossly misquoting the text of Valmiki Ramayana.

Christian Lee Novetzke, associate professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Washington, summarizes this controversy as follows:

Wendy Doniger, a premier scholar of Indian religious thought and history expressed through Sanskritic sources, has faced regular criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of Hinduism in general.

Novetzke cites Doniger's use of "psychoanalytical theory" as

...a kind of lightning rod for the censure that these scholars receive from freelance critics and 'watch-dog' organizations that claim to represent the sentiments of Hindus.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, concurring with Novetzke, adds that while the agenda of those in the American Hindu community who criticize Doniger appears similar to that of the Hindu right-wing in India, it is not quite the same since it has "no overt connection to national identity", and that it has created feelings of guilt among American scholars, given the prevailing ethos of ethnic respect, that they might have offended people from another culture.

While Doniger has agreed that Indians have ample grounds to reject postcolonial domination, she claims that her works are only a single perspective which does not subordinate Indian self-identity.

The Hindus

Doniger's trade book, The Hindus: An Alternative History was published in 2009 by Viking/Penguin. According to the Hindustan Times, The Hindus was a No. 1 bestseller in its non-fiction category in the week of October 15, 2009. Two scholarly reviews in the Social Scientist and the Journal of the American Oriental Society, though praising Doniger for her textual scholarship, criticized both Doniger's poor historiography and her lack of focus. In the popular press, the book has received many positive reviews, for example from the Library Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Hindu. In January 2010, the National Book Critics Circle named The Hindus as a finalist for its 2009 book awards. The Hindu American Foundation protested this decision, alleging inaccuracies and bias in the book.

In February 2014, as part of settlement with plaintiff to a lawsuit brought before an Indian district court, The Hindus was recalled by Penguin India. Indian authors such as Arundhati Roy, Partha Chatterjee, Jeet Thayil, and Namwar Singh inveighed against the publisher's decision. The book has since been published in India by Speaking Tiger Books.

Recognition

Works

Doniger has written 16 books, translated (primarily from Sanskrit to English) with commentary nine other volumes, has contributed to many edited texts and has written hundreds of articles in journals, magazines and newspapers. These include New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, International Herald Tribune, Parabola, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daedalus, The Nation, and the Journal of Asian Studies.

Interpretive works

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger:

Translations

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger:

Edited volumes

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger: