Books by Wendy Doniger
The Hindus: An Alternative History
"Don't miss this equivalent of a brilliant graduate course froma feisty and exhilarating teacher."
-The Washington Post
An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth, The Hindus offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions. Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account. Many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated within a century; its central tenets arise at particular moments in Indian history and often differ according to gender or caste; and the differences between groups of Hindus far outnumber the commonalities. Yet the greatness of Hinduism lies precisely in many of these idiosyncratic qualities that continues to inspire debate today. This groundbreaking work elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds, the inner life and the social history of Hindus.
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The Hindus: An Alternative History
A Narrative Account Of History And Myth That Offers A New Way Of Understanding One Of The World's Oldest Major Religions, This Book Elucidates The Relationship Between Recorded History And Imaginary Worlds. Hinduism Does Not Lend Itself Easily To A Strictly Chronological Account: Many Of Its Central Texts Cannot Be Reliably Dated; Its Central Tenets--karma, Dharma, To Name Just Two--arise At Particular Moments In Indian History And Differ In Each Era, Between Genders, And Caste To Caste; And What Is Shared Among Hindus Is Overwhelmingly Outnumbered By The Things That Are Unique To One Group Or Another. Yet The Greatness Of Hinduism--its Vitality, Its Earthiness, Its Vividness--lies Precisely In Many Of Those Idiosyncratic Qualities That Continue To Inspire Debate Today. Wendy Doniger, One Of The World's Foremost Scholars Of Hinduism, Illuminates Those Moments Within The Tradition That Resist Forces That Would Standardize Or Establish A Canon.--from Publisher Description. Preface: The Man Or The Rabbit In The Moon -- Introduction: Working With Available Light -- Time And Space In India : 50 Million To 50,000 Bce -- Civilization In The Indus Valley : 50,000 To 1500 Bce -- Between The Ruins And The Text : 2000 To 1500 Bce -- Humans, Animals, And Gods In The Rig Veda : 1500 To 1000 Bce -- Sacrifice In The Brahmanas : 800 To 500 Bce -- Renunciation In The Upanishads : 600 To 200 Bce -- The Three (or Is It Four?) Aims Of Life In The Hindu Imaginary -- Women And Ogresses In The Ramayana : 400 Bce To 200 Ce -- Violence In The Mahabharata : 300 Bce To 300 Ce -- Dharma In The Mahabharata : 300 Bce To 300 Ce -- Escape Clauses In The Shastras : 100 Bce To 400 Ce -- Bhakti In South India : 100 Bce To 900 Ce -- Goddesses And Gods In The Early Puranas : 300 To 600 Ce -- Sects And Sex In The Tantric Puranas And The Tantras : 600 To 900 Ce -- Fusion And Rivalry Under The Delhi Sultanate : 650 To 1500 Ce -- Avatar And Accidental Grace In The Later Puranas : 800 To 1500 Ce -- Philosophical Feuds In South India And Kashmir : 800 To 1300 Ce -- Dialogue And Tolerance Under The Mughals : 1500 To 1700 Ce -- Hinduism Under The Mughals : 1500 To 1700 Ce -- Caste, Class, And Conversion Under The British Raj : 1600 To 1900 Ce -- Suttee And Reform In The Twilight Of The Raj : 1800 To 1947 Ce -- Hindus In America : 1900- -- The Past In The Present : 1950- -- Inconclusion, Or The Abuse Of History. Wendy Doniger. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [729]-753) And Index.
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On Hinduism
In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century. This series of interconnected essays and lectures surveys the most critically important and hotly contested issues in Hinduism over 3,500 years, from the ancient time of the Vedas to the present day.
The essays contemplate the nature of Hinduism; Hindu concepts of divinity; attitudes concerning gender, control, and desire; the question of reality and illusion; and the impermanent and the eternal in the two great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Among the questions Doniger considers are: Are Hindus monotheists or polytheists? How can atheists be Hindu, and how can unrepentant Hindu sinners find salvation? Why have Hindus devoted so much attention to the psychology of addiction? What does the significance of dogs and cows tell us about Hinduism? How have Hindu concepts of death, rebirth, and karma changed over the course of history? How and why does a pluralistic faith, remarkable for its intellectual tolerance, foster religious intolerance?
Doniger concludes with four concise autobiographical essays in which she reflects on her lifetime of scholarship, Hindu criticism of her work, and the influence of Hinduism on her own philosophy of life. On Hinduism is the culmination of over forty years of scholarship from a renowned expert on one of the world's great faiths.
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No copies available.
On Hinduism
In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century. This series of interconnected essays and lectures surveys the most critically important and hotly contested issues in Hinduism over 3,500 years, from the ancient time of the Vedas to the present day.
The essays contemplate the nature of Hinduism; Hindu concepts of divinity; attitudes concerning gender, control, and desire; the question of reality and illusion; and the impermanent and the eternal in the two great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Among the questions Doniger considers are: Are Hindus monotheists or polytheists? How can atheists be Hindu, and how can unrepentant Hindu sinners find salvation? Why have Hindus devoted so much attention to the psychology of addiction? What does the significance of dogs and cows tell us about Hinduism? How have Hindu concepts of death, rebirth, and karma changed over the course of history? How and why does a pluralistic faith, remarkable for its intellectual tolerance, foster religious intolerance?
Doniger concludes with four concise autobiographical essays in which she reflects on her lifetime of scholarship, Hindu criticism of her work, and the influence of Hinduism on her own philosophy of life. On Hinduism is the culmination of over forty years of scholarship from a renowned expert on one of the world's great faiths.
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Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Bollingen Series, 24)
by Mircea Eliade, Wendy Doniger, Willard R. Trask
First published in 1951, Shamanism soon became the standard work in the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Romanian émigré--scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) surveys the practice of Shamanism over two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia--where Shamanism was first observed--to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the Shaman--at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology, Shamanism will remain for years to come the reference book of choice for those intrigued by this practice.
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Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion)
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In Splitting the Difference, the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Face/Off.
Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology's prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger's comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.
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The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir (The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University)
“Many memories, many myths”―this is how Wendy Doniger begins the story of her parents’ origins in Europe and sharply bifurcated life in America. Recalling their contrasting attitudes toward Judaism and religion in general―and acknowledging the mythologized narratives that keep bubbling up in those recollections―Doniger tells the story of their childhoods, their unusual marriage, their life in the post–World War II Jewish enclave of Great Neck, New York, and her own complex relationship with each of them.
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The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)
"Somehow I woke up one day and found myself in bed with a stranger." Meant literally or figuratively, this statement describes one of the best-known plots in world mythology and popular storytelling. In a tour that runs from Shakespeare to Hollywood and from Abraham Lincoln to Casanova, the erudite and irrepressible Wendy Doniger shows us the variety, danger, and allure of the "bedtrick," or what it means to wake up with a stranger.
The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest items in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people get into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will learn that in Hong Kong the film The Crying Game was retitled Oh No! My Girlfriend Has a Penis. And that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ. Funny, sexy, and engaging, The Bedtrick is a masterful work of energetic storytelling and dazzling scholarship. Give it to your spouse and your lover.
"Doniger seduces the reader with her casual erudition, tempering the dizzying accumulation of evidence with wry asides."—Edward Rothstein, New York Times
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Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts
In this volume, leading American, European, and Indian scholars including John E. Cort, Friedhelm Hardy, Padmanabh S. Jaini, Laurie L. Patton, A. K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman discuss the subject of the Purāṇas, focusing particularly on the relationship between the "Great Puran'as" of the Sanskrit tradition and the many other sorts of Purāṇas. The Puran'as are essentially collections of stories dealing with all aspects of myth, ritual, science, and history, and the authors of these essays are all superb storytellers.
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Against Dharma Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics
An esteemed scholar of Hinduism presents a groundbreaking interpretation of ancient Indian texts and their historic influence on subversive resistance
Ancient Hindu texts speak of the three aims of human life: dharma, artha, and kama. Translated, these might be called religion, politics, and pleasure, and each is held to be an essential requirement of a full life. Balance among the three is a goal not always met, however, and dharma has historically taken precedence over the other two qualities in Hindu life. Here, historian of religions Wendy Doniger offers a spirited and close reading of ancient Indian writings, unpacking a long but unrecognized history of opposition against dharma.
Doniger argues that scientific disciplines (shastras) have offered lively and continuous criticism of dharma, or religion, over many centuries. She chronicles the tradition of veiled subversion, uncovers connections to key moments of resistance and voices of dissent throughout Indian history, and offers insights into the Indian theocracy's subversion of science by religion today.
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Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts
by Wendy Doniger, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
"An important, provocative and original work, of great interest to Indian scholars, historians of religions, psychologists and historians of ideas, but accessible also to the cultivated reader. Even if one does not always agree with the author's interpretation, one cannot but admire her vast and precise learning, her splendid translations and exegesis of so many, and so different, Sanskrit texts, and her uninhibited, brilliant, and witty prose."—Mircea Eliade, University of Chicago
"This is . . . a book which is as rich in detail as the carvings of the great Hindu temples. It shares with them a delight in the interplay of myth and mundane experience, and above all an empathy with the Hindu preoccupation with the meaning of human existence in all its complexity."—G. M. Carstairs, Times Literary Supplement
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Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade
by Wendy Doniger, Christian Wedemeyer
This volume comprises papers presented at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Joachim Wach's death, and the centennial of Mircea Eliade's birth. Its purpose is to reconsider both the problematic, separate legacies of these two major twentieth-century historians of religions, and the bearing of these two legacies upon each other. Shortly after Wach's death in 1955, Eliade succeeded him as the premiere historian of religions at the University of Chicago. As a result, the two have been associated with each other in many people's minds as the successive leaders of the so-called "Chicago School" in the history of religions. In fact, as this volume makes clear, there never was a monolithic Chicago School. Although Wach reportedly referred to Eliade as the most astute historian of religions of the day; the two never met, and their approaches to the study of religions differed significantly. Several dominant issues run through the essays collected here: the relationship between the two men's writings and their lives, and in Eliade's case, the relationship between his political commitments and his writings in fiction, history of religions, and autobiography. Both men's contributions to the field continue to provoke controversy and debate, and this volume sheds new light on these controversies and what they reveal about these two `scholars' legacies.
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The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry
Why are sex and jewelry, particularly rings, so often connected? Why do rings continually appear in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade? What is the mythology that makes finger rings symbols of true (or, as the case may be, untrue) love?
The cross-cultural distribution of the mythology of sexual rings is impressive--from ancient India and Greece through the Arab world to Shakespeare, Marie Antoinette, Wagner, nineteenth-century novels, Hollywood, and the De Beers advertising campaign that gave us the expression, "A Diamond is Forever." Each chapter of The Ring of Truth, like a charm on a charm bracelet, considers a different constellation of stories: stories about rings lost and found in fish; forgetful husbands and clever wives; treacherous royal necklaces; fake jewelry and real women; modern women's revolt against the hegemony of jewelry; and the clash between common sense and conventional narratives about rings. Herein lie signet rings, betrothal rings, and magic rings of invisibility or memory. The stories are linked by a common set of meanings, such as love symbolized by the circular and unbroken shape of the ring: infinite, constant, eternal--a meaning that the stories often prove tragically false.
While most of the rings in the stories originally belonged to men, or were given to women by men, Wendy Doniger shows that it is the women who are important in these stories, as they are the ones who put the jewelry to work in the plots.
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Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right
by Martha C. Nussbaum, Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values? India's stunning linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity has been supported since Independence by a political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and protects liberties of religion and speech. But a decent Constitution does not implement itself, and challenges to these core values repeatedly arise-most recently in the form of the Hindu Right movements of the twenty-first century that threatened to destabilize the nation and upend its core values, in the wake of a notorious pogrom in the state of Gujarat in which approximately 2000 Muslim civilians were killed.
Focusing on this time of tension and threat, the essays in this volume consider how a pluralistic democracy managed to survive. They examine the role of political parties and movements, including the women's movement, as well as the role of the arts, the press, the media, and a historical legacy of pluralistic thought and critical argument. Featuring essays from eminent scholars in history, religious studies, political science, economics, women's studies, and media studies, Pluralism and Democracy in India offers an urgently needed case study in democratic survival. As Nehru said of India on the eve of Independence: ''These dreams are for India, but they are also for the world.'' The analysis this volume offers illuminates not only the past and future of one nation, but the prospects of democracy for all.
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Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right
by Martha C. Nussbaum, Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values? India's stunning linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity has been supported since Independence by a political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and protects liberties of religion and speech. But a decent Constitution does not implement itself, and challenges to these core values repeatedly arise-most recently in the form of the Hindu Right movements of the twenty-first century that threatened to destabilize the nation and upend its core values, in the wake of a notorious pogrom in the state of Gujarat in which approximately 2000 Muslim civilians were killed.
Focusing on this time of tension and threat, the essays in this volume consider how a pluralistic democracy managed to survive. They examine the role of political parties and movements, including the women's movement, as well as the role of the arts, the press, the media, and a historical legacy of pluralistic thought and critical argument. Featuring essays from eminent scholars in history, religious studies, political science, economics, women's studies, and media studies, Pluralism and Democracy in India offers an urgently needed case study in democratic survival. As Nehru said of India on the eve of Independence: ''These dreams are for India, but they are also for the world.'' The analysis this volume offers illuminates not only the past and future of one nation, but the prospects of democracy for all.
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The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (American Lectures on the History of Religions)
Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. She extracts political meaning from a variety of texts while respecting the original ideas of each. A new preface confronts the difficulty of contextualizing the comparison of religions as well as controversies over choosing subjects and positioning arguments, and the text itself is expanded and updated throughout.
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The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism
This groundbreaking new Norton Anthology enables the six major, living, international world religions to speak to students in their own words.
Edited by world-renowned scholars under the direction of Pulitzer Prize–winner Jack Miles, The Norton Anthology of World Religions provides a flexible library of more than 1,000 primary texts from the world’s major religions―Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam―in six portable paperbacks. This anthology unites foundational works―the Bhagavad Gita, the Daode jing, the Bible, the Qur’an―with the writings of scholars, seekers, believers, and skeptics whose voices have kept these religions vital for centuries, allowing instructors to shape a variety of courses. The selections are supported by the meticulously prepared apparatus―introductions, explanatory annotations, bibliographies, maps, and glossaries―for which Norton Anthologies have set the standard for fifty years.
Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism brings together over 300 texts from 1500 B.C.E. to the present, organized chronologically and by region. The volume features Jack Miles’s illuminating General Introduction―“How the West Learned to Compare Religions”―as well as Wendy Doniger’s “The Zen Diagram of Hinduism,” a lively primer on the history of Hinduism in relation to geography, language, gender, sexuality, class, folk traditions, and the politics of empire.
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Redeeming the Kamasutra
The Kamasutra, composed in the third century CE, is the world's most famous textbook of erotic love. There is nothing remotely like it even today, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated. Yet it is all but ignored as a serious work in its country of origin-sometimes taken as a matter of national shame rather than pride - and in the rest of the world it is a source of amused amazement and inspires magazine articles that offer "mattress-quaking sex styles" such as "the backstairs boogie" and "the spider web".
In this scholarly and superbly readable book, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient Indian texts seeks to restore the Kamasutra to its proper place in the Sanskrit canon, as a landmark of India's secular literature. She reveals fascinating aspects of the Kamasutra as a guide to the art of living for the cosmopolitan beau monde of ancient India: its emphasis on grooming and etiquette (including post-coital conversation), the study and practice of the arts (ranging from cooking and composing poetry to coloring one's teeth and mixing perfumes), and discretion and patience in conducting affairs (especially adulterous affairs). In its encyclopedic social and psychological narratives, it also displays surprisingly modern ideas about gender and role-playing, female sexuality, and homosexual desire.
Even as she draws our attention to the many ways in which the Kamasutra challenges the conventions of its time (and often ours) - in dismissing procreation as the aim of sex, for instance - Doniger also shows us how it perpetuates attitudes that have continued to darken human sexuality: passages that twin passion with violence, for example, and those that explain away women's protests and exclamations of pain as ploys to excite their male partners. In these attitudes, as in its more enlightened observations on sexual love, we see the nearly two- thousand-year-old Kamasutra mirror twenty-first-century realities.
In investigating and helping us understand a much celebrated but under-appreciated text, Wendy Doniger has produced a rich and compelling text of her own that will interest, delight, and surprise scholars and lay readers alike.
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The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism: Hinduism
“A major landmark of religious publishing and one to be widely welcomed.”―William Dalrymple, New York Times The Norton Anthology of World Religions offers a beautifully designed library of more than 1,000 primary texts, accompanied by headnotes, annotations, glossaries, maps, illustrations, chronologies, and a dazzling general introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Miles. This collection “will unsettle some current certainties about the nature of faith and, in so doing, may help its readers arrive at a nuanced and accurate perception of our predicament in this dangerously polarized world” (Karen Armstrong, New York Times).
Unprecedented in scope and approach, The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism brings together over 300 texts from 1500 B.C.E. to the present, organized chronologically and by region. The volume features Jack Miles’s illuminating General Introduction―“How the West Learned to Compare Religions”―as well as Wendy Doniger’s “The Zen Diagram of Hinduism,” a lively primer on the history of Hinduism in relation to geography, language, gender, sexuality, class, folk traditions, and the politics of empire.
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The Woman who Pretended to be who She was Myths of Self-imitation
Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.
In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexual betrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity.
These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infinite regress of self-discovery.
Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.
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Off with Her Head!: The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture
by Wendy Doniger, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz
Whereas many books look at how women's bodies are represented in different religions and cultures around the world, this work explores the site of a woman's voice and identity, her head. The female head threatens to disrupt the classic gender distinctions that link men to speech, identity, and mind while relegating women to silence, anonymity, and flesh. The contributors to this collection argue that the objectification of women as sexual and reproductive bodies results in their symbolic beheading. Decapitation occurs symbolically in myths as well as in actual practices such as veiling, head covering, and cosmetic highlighting, which by sexualizing a woman's face turns it into an extension of her body.
The essays explore how similar treatments of the female head find their unique articulation in diverse religious traditions and cultures: in Hindu myths of beheading, in Buddhist and Tantric practices and poetry about the hair of female nuns, in the resistance to veiling by early Christian women at Corinth, in contemporary veiling practices in a Turkish village, in the eroticization of the female mouth in ancient Judaism, and in Greek and Roman cosmetic practices.
Together these essays show how the depiction of the female head is critical for an understanding of gender and its influence on other fundamental religious and cultural issues.
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