'Sita was one tough lady'

Wendy Doniger might have to put Babur to sleep. That's Babur, her Arabian horse. The Mughal emperor he shares his name with was a great horseman, who managed to stay in saddle even when drunk or stoned. This Babur is 31 years old and very lame. He's lived a "long happy vanaprastha'' in a grassy field in Missouri, says Doniger. Doniger loves horses. They show up again and again in her newest book, The Hindus-An Alternative History.
That's history as seen through not just the eyes (and words) of Brahmin men but lower castes, women, homosexuals, dogs.And horses. Take the famous Vedic horse sacrifice says Doniger. Anyone who has owned a horse knows that this notion of a horse wandering around the country for a year is rubbish. "A stabled horse comes home every night,'' says Doniger. "You have to push him away to go to lands that you wish to seize. You can't just know Sanskrit, you have to know horses as well.''
Animals, for her, are markers of change. "People think dogs are filthy, then they are fine, then they are filthy again,'' says Doniger. "It goes against the idea that Hinduism is unchanging.'' The Rig Veda warns people to keep long-tongued dogs away from the sacrificial area lest they lick the oblations and pollute them. Yet Yudhisthira is willing to forego heaven if the faithful dog that followed him is not allowed in. "Perhaps when you can't say let an untouchable in, you can mask it with a dog,'' says Doniger.
Doniger has always been interested in the other voice, the shadow story, the Puranas instead of the Vedas. She was reading Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava for her thesis when her professor casually mentioned that story was also in the Puranas. "I read it and thought it was much more fun, much livelier,'' says Doniger. "Everyone was appalled. Sanskritists were supposed to study the Vedas and kaavya. Studying the Puranas was like studying comic books.''
In India, the great Puranas scholar Rajendra Chandra Hazra turned her down because she was a woman. In America Sanskritists snubbed her for studying the Puranas. "I guess I am the ugly duckling,'' she chuckles though she says she's found a good home for the past three decades at the University of Chicago. She chairs the History of Religions there and even gets to teach second year Sanskrit-her kind of Sanskrit, more about text than about grammar. But out in the world, she says, her real soulmates are historians and anthropologists.
Yet any ambition she might have had to be an anthropologist was abruptly ended one hot morning in Kolkata. She'd been spending a year there after college, soaking in the country and culture. She'd studied at Shantiniketan which she says was like "a ladies' finishing school for the bhadralok''. Then a friend said he'd take her to see a goat sacrifice at Kalighat. "It was 4 am, really hot, really crowded. I was on an empty stomach, squashed between people,'' she recalls. "Then the drums started. One person held the hind legs of the goat. One person spread the forelegs. Another person raised the sword and whooshed down. The head shot out and I passed out totally.'' She realised right then she didn't have the stomach to be an anthropologist.
But critics say she has turned into a psychoanalyst instead with someone else's religion. Doniger has had an egg thrown at her. (It missed.) She's gotten harassing phone calls, had her entry on Hinduism yanked from Encarta. Doniger says she's used psychoanalytic concepts only in a handful of her books. "I think what people mean is why are you so interested in sex,'' she says. "I have talked about sex because others have written about it.'' She acknowledges that millions of Hindus worship a Shiva lingam without thinking of it as a phallus, just as millions of Christians wear a cross without thinking about crucifixion and nails going into the hand. "But the historical origin is a real lingam,'' she protests.
Our knowledge of religion depends on who is writing the history, or who is translating the texts. For years Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Kamasutra was the only way most of the world knew that book. Doniger discovered, while re-translating it with psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, that the Kamasutra says a wife who catches her husband cheating can humiliate him in public as long as she doesn't use witchcraft. Burton wrote it as if the husband does something that displeases the wife, she should never humiliate him, nor be a scold. "He just ruined a very liberal moment in the Kamasutra,'' says Doniger. "Sita, for example, was one tough lady. She would tell Rama don't do this, that's a bad idea. You don't hear that. It's a matter of what you choose to translate.''
Many still bristle at this idea of Doniger getting to make that choice. What does she know of Hinduism, this Caucasian woman who grew up taking ballet lessons with George Balanchine and once had Francis Ford Coppola as a boyfriend? Doniger says her bibliography is full of the "internal voices-the people from inside the tradition''. But she is surprised people think her voice can silence other people. "I wish I was that powerful. I wish everyone would agree with me when I say there was no Rama temple under the Babri Masjid. But they don't.''