Hinduism scholar Wendy Doniger on her memoir, The Hindus controversy

At 85, Wendy Doniger has the enviable air of someone who has lived several lives — and remembers all the best stories. One of the foremost scholars of Hinduism, whose The Hindus: An Alternative History provoked both admiration and fury, now turns the scholar’s gaze upon herself. In her memoir For the Love of Stories: Confessions of An Accidental Feminist, Doniger talks about a life lived on her own terms — her many romances (the man she did not marry, however, turned out to be Francis Ford Coppola), forging unlikely friendships in a chauvinistic academic world, learning to hold her own amid a bruising battle with Dinanath Batra, and a lifetime spent between Sanskrit texts and Hindu mythology. In this interview, she speaks of a vanishing academic world, and looking back in longing and gratitude. Edited excerpts:

Has writing this memoir changed the way you understand your story?

Yes, certainly. I began to write it at a moment when I was beginning to feel very strongly the loss of so many parts of my life as I aged — the loss of friends, of my own physical and mental powers, of important aspects of the worlds that I had loved and now had changed so violently — my own country, India, and academia. It was a time of considerable sadness. But as I wrote, I kept recalling all the wonderful people I had known and the great adventures I had had, and I stopped mourning the present and the future as I became more and more grateful for the past that had given me so much joy.

The controversy surrounding The Hindus brought questions of faith, free speech and scholarship into focus. Did that experience change the way you think about the limits — and responsibilities — of a scholar writing about another culture?

The controversy made me realise, as I had not realised before, that, as a scholar living outside India, I had the chance, indeed the duty, to write things that would have landed an Indian author in jail or worse. Of course, the view from outside can never capture the intimacy of reports by writers who lived there and experienced the oppression first-hand. But at the same time, an author who lived outside of India (and was willing to give up the great pleasure of ever visiting India again) had a kind of special privilege, that could be regarded as a duty, to speak out.

In hindsight, would you have done anything differently with that book?

I would not change what I wrote about Hinduism, which was based on texts I knew well and was, I still feel, highly relevant to our understanding of what happened in India since about 1,500 BCE, when our first records appear, and also since 1947. But I wish I had called on my colleagues in the study of India during the period of the Mughals and the British Raj for more help in writing those chapters. I am not familiar with the primary sources for these times, and those chapters are rather weak.

If a student came to you today wanting to study mythology the way you did — combining rigorous philology with a willingness to provoke — what would you tell her?

I would love to have such a student! I would, of course, still insist on the philology — history is in the texts, as well as the archeological record, and it is such a pleasure to get to know the texts, and everything else follows from that. But the ‘willingness to provoke’ has become so much more dangerous, in both India and the United States, since I published The Hindus that I could not, in good conscience, advise any student to go out on the limbs I went out on in 2009.

Your work speaks of the diversity of Hinduism. Do you recognise that in the Hindu nationalism that has come to characterise India’s political life?

Hinduism is so much more various than any other religion I know of, that even in the narrow Hindutva ideology, there are bits and pieces that a student of Hinduism can recognise — a bit of the Gita, an image from a Krishna-Lila, instances of Hindu chauvinism, including sexism and anti-Muslim discourse. But Hindutva swallows up these historic chards in an ocean of contemporary bigotry — railing against Muslims, women, and other perceived enemies of the ‘true’ religion — that ignores the great diversity that is the glory of Hinduism.

You write of the pleasure of scholarship that you encountered both as a student and for the greater part of your academic career. That world of academic freedom, you write, seems no longer a possibility, not just in India, but also in America, because of the twin onslaught of politics and AI. How do you see the way forward?

I have taken refuge in what my friends and I call Ostria (my mother actually came from Austria), the land of the ostrich. When I contemplate the impact, in my country, of the politics of the rich, and the backlash against the movements that tried to fight racism and sexism, and the corruption of intellectual life by the widespread use of AI, I put my head back in the sand.

You speak of your tryst with ageing, of time stopping when you retired in 2018. Do the academic and the individual approach age differently?