Wendy Doniger

Wendy 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.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born November 20, 1940) is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades.

A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit.

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:

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 Robert Charles Zaehner.

Doniger holds the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Chair in History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

"... 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."

She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978.

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 served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.

Beginning in the early 2000s, some conservative diaspora Hindus started to question whether Doniger accurately described Hindu traditions.

Together with some of her colleagues, she was the subject of a critique by Hindu right-wing activist speaker Rajiv Malhotra.

for using psychoanalytic concepts to interpret non-Western subjects.

Aditi Banerjee, a co-author of Malhotra, criticised Wendy Doniger as 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.

Her authorship of the section describing Hindu Religion in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia was criticized for being politically motivated and distorted.

Following a review, the article was withdrawn.

Patak Kumar notes that Doniger has given a "dispassionate secular critique" of Hinduism, which is met with defensive responses by Indian scholars such as Varadaraja V. Raman, who acknowledged the "sound scholarship" of Doniger, but urged "appreciation and sensitivity" when "analyzing works regarded as sacred by vast numbers of people."

Doniger's trade book, The Hindus: An Alternative History was published in 2009 by Viking/Penguin.

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".