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Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
27 quotes
“The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think…Throughout the Mahabharata … Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war…. The Gita is a dishonest book …”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wendy Doniger, Quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 November, 2000. Quoted in Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Pub…
“There is generally, therefore, an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women. Nor are the goddesses by and large compassionate; they are generally a pretty bloodthirsty lot. Goddesses are not the solution.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wendy Doniger, Quoted in The Washington Post. Quoted in Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co., p…
“Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wendy Doniger, “When a lingam is Just a Good Cigar: Psychoanalysis and Hindu Sexual Fantasies,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, Vol. 18: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes, ed. L. Bryce Boyer, Ruth M. Boyer, and Ste…
“As the Hindu gods are "immortal" only in a very particular sense---for they are born and they die---they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details...and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however "archetypal" his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wendy Doniger, "Introduction," Hindu Myths, (Penguin Books: 1975).
“There was an Indian edition of most of my books, but it didn't make much of a splash.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2500 BC wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the impact of her books in India. But her publication of The Hindus: An Alternative History, a sweeping history of Hinduism from its origins in 2500 B.C. to the present, though a success, it has been controversial (t…
“I've always felt like I haven't given anything back to India after all that she had given me, just soaked up all the wonderful stories and told them to Americans. Now at last I feel that I have contributed something to India, sharing with them stories that many of them know but many of them do not, and sharing an approach to the history of the Hindus that highlights things that are usually ignored.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mother had rubbings from the temple at Angkor Watt on the walls-that was the first thing that interested me. But it really began when I was in my teens, when my mother gave me a copy of A Passage to India. I really came into it from literature-only later did I turn to religious literature. I read Rumer Godden's Mooltiki, and other stories and poems of India (1957) and I read Kipling's Jungle Books. Then I read the Upanishads, and it was just so fascinating to me. I was raised by atheist and communist parents, so we had no religion whatsoever.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was the other thing that drew me to India-the language. In high school my Latin teacher taught me Greek unofficially on Monday nights. I loved Greek; I loved the idea that there was another script. And then my Latin teacher told me there was a language that was even older and more interesting than Greek: Sanskrit. So everything started coming together-the art, the literature, the language.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was raised deeply imbued with my parents' atheism. The thought of really, seriously practicing any religion doesn't really work for me. But I feel at home in religious buildings and ceremonies. I still hang out a lot in Catholic churches in America. I like going to Catholic masses; I always go to Christmas and Easter. In India I always go to temples and to the pujas. But to be committed to the dogma of any religion-to be told what to believe-goes against my grain in some basic way.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So I agree with a lot of Hindu mythology and theology, and I think Hinduism describes life better than any other religion. It has a vision of the universe that corresponds more closely to the universe I've glimpsed in my 68 years on this planet than other visions of the universe.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel at home in Hindu temples. I like how complicated they are. Being in a great Hindu temple is like being in a forest. You can wander around all day. People kind of leave you alone. When you wander around temples when there isn't a ceremony, there's a kind of peacefulness about them, and I recognize the scenes and the icons. That's Shiva doing this, that's Parvati doing that. Whereas when I go to the Vatican, I have to have someone explain to me what the Sistine Chapel is all about. So I'm at home in Hinduism in that sense, I know what it's all about.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“India is still foreign to me, it's a familiar foreignness in some way, but it's still surprising. When you see a temple in India, you don't say, oh there's another temple, you say: "My God! How could anyone have had the imagination to do something so amazing!" It's never what you expect.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, since I know ancient India best.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: The Hindus: An Alternative History, Oxford University Press, 30 September 2010, p. 35.
“The two sets of sources, textual and nontextual, reveal bits of history to us in different ways, like the lame man riding on the shoulders of the blind man. When it comes to history, you can’t trust anyone: The texts lie one way, while images and archeology mislead us in other ways. On the one hand, the gods did not fly around in big palaces, as the texts insist that they did, and we cannot know if women really did speak up as Gargi does in the Upanishads, or Draupadi in the Mahabharata.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word “Hindoo” (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: “This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doniger makes clear that no history focused on an imperial centre can capture the history of the Hindus here, any more than could such a state-focused story in the days before the arrival of the Muslims. But at the same time, the very structure of her presentation points also to the import-ance of the state as a locus for understanding how the history of the Hindus depends also on an engagement with broader currents of historical change extending outside India and linking this history to larger, worldwide processes.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gilmartin, David (December 2010), "Review of Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin), 2009. 779 pages. $35", Indian Historical Review, 37: 338–345
“An array of puns, asides and (sometimes off-key) jokes makes the book more bulky and somewhat anecdotal, but also entertaining to read.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shome, Shubhodeep (2012), "Review of The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger", South Asia Research, 32: 77–79
“But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's the religious aspects in which I feel most at home, in a way. No, I don't really feel at home in India anymore. I'm not physically comfortable in India most of the time-I like Chicago, I like snow. It's an irony that I should be an Indologist because I don't like hot climates. I don't like crowds. There are too many things about India that don't suit my physical makeup. And also, I hardly ever go to Bengal, so I don't have a language[ to speak. So I go as a visitor. I visit friends. To some extent, ironically, I'm more at home in India now because there are fabulous hotels with good food and people speaking English, it's like being in New York, but if I go to a village I can't talk to people. I don't know if I ever really was at home in India, but I love being there.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate... I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book [The Hindus: An Alternative History]. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a w:Lawsuitcriminal suit. They were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece – the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a loosely applied, but strongly integrative, model, she proposes three roughly consecutive alliances: first the Vedic one of gods and humans as opposed to anti-gods and ogres, then the epic-Puranic one in which ascetics and renunciants seem to join over-ambitious ogres and anti-gods in threatening the gods, and finally the bhakti alliance that restores human dependence on the gods. From the point of view of the historian such a loose periodisation is satisfactory and convincing, especially in the first three fifths of the book, which deal with little else than the social and cultural history of religion. For the periods of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals and the British, however, when the author's focus partly shifts to political circumstances, her story is often episodic and sometimes, I think, a little naïve..”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 1177 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kolff, D. H. A. (2011). "Wendy Doniger, the Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin), 2009. 779 pages. Rs 999". Indian Historical Review. 37 (2): 333–338. doi:10.1177/037698361003700214.
“Long before Doniger’s book was pulped, an event which the secularists have eagerly highlighted, her book was replied to in detail by Vishal Agarwal... He showed that she was either wrong or unmistakably biased in hundreds of passages. For a lifelong tenant of a very prestigious Indology chair, it is shameful that she could deliver such substandard work. But the fact that her work was anything but scholarly, has been carefully hidden by the secularists, including in the present article. Yet the fact that such a bad book was universally applauded and even earmarked for an Indian award, tells you a lot about the power equation, with the anti-Hindu forces jubilantly on top.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015 Ch 17
“But because Doniger’s flippant approach serves the purpose of belittling and ridiculing Hinduism well, it is welcomed and highlighted by the Indian elite with its many-pronged attack on Hinduism... American Indologists including Wendy Doniger have always condoned religious discrimination on condition that Hindus are at the receiving end; they only protest when Hindus show initiative... Yet, they did have the arguments. A list of the numerous factual errors in Doniger's book has been compiled by Vishal Agarwal.. [he] has shown how her book's treatment of Hinduism is unconscientious and flippant to a degree that would never be accepted from a professor of her rank for more established religions. ... ... And she is not even a psychologist: elsewhere, her “alternative” (actually quite conformistic, only a bit more titillating) deconstruction of a religion would have been criticized as not based on any competence.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Elst, Koenraad. Hindu dharma and the culture wars. (2019). New Delhi : Rupa
“It is a learned book: one cannot help being amazed by the amount and variety of source materials the author has at her command, many of which one would not find, or not expect to find, in a book on the history of Hinduism and its practitioners...She especially loves to illustrate ancient stories by interjecting comparisons with situations with which the audience is familiar: Doniger commands an unbelievably vast array of comparable material, often, though not always, from American popular culture.... Since Wendy Doniger openly disclaims any ambition to have written a conventional history ("my training is as a philologist, not a historian," p. 3), minor historical slips may be forgiven. Yet, there are some that deserve to be rectified.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rocher, Ludo (April/June 2012), "Review: The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 132 (2): 302–304
“There are several issues that need more detailed and nuanced analysis rather than straight-jacketed formulations that we read in The Hindus. These concern terminologies and chronologies invoked, perfunctory manner in which class-caste struggles have been referred to — almost casually, complex inter-religious dialogue seen only in the context of Visnu's avataras, and looking at the tantras merely in terms of sex and political power. The work rarely rises above the level of tale telling... On the whole, this is neither a serious work for students of Indian history, nor for those with a critical eye on 'religious history' of India, nor indeed it is the real Alternative History of the 'Hindus'. The main actors of the narrative are not speaking themselves. They merely seem to be mouthing dialogues scripted by the privileged upper classes.”
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born 1940) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shrimali, K. M. (July–August 2010), "Review of The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger", Social Scientist, 38 (7/8): 66–81