Wendy Doniger
Biographic Data
| ID | 144045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wendy Doniger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wendy |
| FAMILY NAME | Doniger |
| SIGNATURE | DONIGER W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Tapas
This essay is the first of four introductory pieces for the Common Knowledge symposium "The Satisfactions of Asceticism." A problem for any discussion of this topic, if it explores more than one culture and more than one period of time, is that the participants' definitions of the subject will not coincide. The four introductory pieces are thus focused not on defining the subject but on the problems facing those who would make the attempt. Certai…
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions
Exile's Return in the Ancient Indian Epics
The essay explores the positive aspects of exile in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in both of which the exiled heroes experience magical adventures quite different from those that we know from the exploits of exiles in Greek and Latin classics and European children's literature. These heroes also vividly encounter ancient Indian mythology and philosophy, and in the end undergo a transformation that prepares them for their ultimate entrance int…
My Life in Wonderland: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
The two Alice books (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) have, from my earliest childhood, supplied the metaphors, images, and phrases with which I have explained my life to myself. The themes of hallucinogenic mushrooms and dreams dreamt have inspired several of the books I have written. Alice's ambivalence about eating creatures with whom she has conversations has haunted my own guilty carnivoraciousness. The forest where things …
Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology
Though ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Indian texts tell tales of generous people rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers, particularly to gods in disguise, these strangers often subject their hosts to many torments. And the ancient mythology of hosts and guests tricked or forced to eat their own children suggests that the widespread laws enforcing hospitality to strangers were needed to counteract a basic human tendency to fear such guests, a …
Chapter 2. Jewels of Recognition and Paternity in Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu Traditions
Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
The jewelry of princess Sita plays a key role in the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, and in a play about an Indian king who falls in love with a mystery woman identified only by her necklace. A ring is found in a fish in the tale of Shakuntala, a simple forest girl seduced by a king who pretends to forget her when she appears at court, pregnant with his child. When a court poet retold the story, he saved the king’s reputation by adding a ring …
The ring of truth and other myths of sex and jewelry
In 'The Ring of Truth', Wendy Doniger expertly unfolds the cultural and historical significance of rings and other kinds of circular jewelry through timeless stories taken from mythology, religious traditions, and literature
A Response
When the lawsuit from Dina Nath Batra hit the fan, and I believed (and said) that the law was the true culprit, my feeling was that Mr. Batra was doing what he thought was right: there will always be people with such opinions, and they have a right to express them. They should not, however, have the right to suppress other peoples' opinions, and Indian Penal Code 295A was what gave them that right. The articles in this volume finally spell out be…
Invisibility and Sexual Violence in Indo-European Mythology
Is invisibility in the eye or in the mind? Is it a force for good or for evil? And does it work equally well for men and for women? These are questions to which we might seek answers in the mythologies of ancient Greece and India, medieval Germany, and 20th and 21st century America. Many of these texts seem to regard invisibility as a subjective mental state, subject to suggestion and the projection of ideas, while others think of it as a more ph…
Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right
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—not least in the first decade of th…
Entretien avec Wendy Doniger
Barbu Daniel, Meylan Nicolas, Sargent Jesse, Matthey Philippe, Doniger Wendy. Entretien avec Wendy Doniger. In: ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, n°10, 2015. pp. 39-60
Afterword
This essay is a response to the five essays included in this special section “Animals and Enchantment in South Asia.” In addition to summarizing these essays, this essay argues that animals keep eluding and exceeding the intellectual categories and cages humans set for them. Religion has always been the source of much of the human imagination of animals, but this imagination has often been more imprisoning than liberating. This volume points us t…
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; attitu…
Doniger O'flaherty on Doniger
In this chapter, the author reflects on the review she made for her own book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, using under the name Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. Published in 1999, the book explores several clusters of myths, from ancient Greece and from ancient India, in which men or women were beheaded, doubled, split in half, or reversed in gender. It also compares the myths of the shadow Sitai and the shadow …
The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic
Love's subtle magic: An Indian Islamic literary tradition, 1379-1545
The Magic Doe: Qutban Suhravardi's Mirigavati
Mirigāvatī or The Magic Doe is the work of Shaikh Qutban Suhravardi, an Indian Sufi master who was also an expert poet and storyteller attached to the glittering court-in-exile of Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur. Composed in 1503 as an introduction to mystical practice for disciples, this powerful Hindavi or early Hindi Sufi romance is a richly layered and sophisticated text, simultaneously a spiritual enigma and an exciting love story full …
From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India
Erotic religious imagery is as old as Hinduism. The earliest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE), revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility. In addition to this and other religious texts that incorporated eroticism, there were more worldly texts that treated the erotic tout court, of which the Kamasutra, composed in north India, probably in the third century CE, is the most famous. The two words in its title mean "desire/lov…
God's Body, or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva
A dispute about the symbolism of the lingam, a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, has been going on for many centuries: is its meaning inexorably tied to a particular part of the physical body of the god, or is it abstract, purely spiritual? This essay will trace the history of this dispute, considering both icons made of carved stone in India that may or may not represent lingams and images made of words in Indian tex…
Hermeneutics, politics, and the history of religions
The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the major thinkers of the modern age. Regarded as a crucial figure in the development of structuralism, his writings are studied across a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss presents a major reassessment of his work and influence. The fifteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume engage with the controversies that have surr…
Reading the “Kamasutra”: The strange & the familiar
Ihe Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living finding a partner, maintaining power in a mar riage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs and al so about the positions in sexual inter course. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of anc…
Many masks, many selves
Asceticism and eroticism in the mythology of Śiva.
Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification
Les theoriciens du sacrifice de substitution : H. Hubert, M. Mauss, R. Girard, S. Freud. Les theories vediques de la substitution dans le sacrifice. Le ritualisme vedique interprete par la mythologie hindouiste
Purāṇa Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts
Why study dreams? A religious studies perspective
Off with Her Head: The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture
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 re…
Presidential Address: "I Have Scinde": Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse
Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the …
From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India
Erotic religious imagery is as old as Hinduism. The earliest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE), revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility. In addition to this and other religious texts that incorporated eroticism, there were more worldly texts that treated the erotic tout court, of which the Kamasutra, composed in north India, probably in the third century CE, is the most famous. The two words in its title mean "desire/lov…
Reading the “Kamasutra”: The strange & the familiar
Ihe Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living finding a partner, maintaining power in a mar riage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs and al so about the positions in sexual inter course. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of anc…
Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India
Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology
Though ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Indian texts tell tales of generous people rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers, particularly to gods in disguise, these strangers often subject their hosts to many torments. And the ancient mythology of hosts and guests tricked or forced to eat their own children suggests that the widespread laws enforcing hospitality to strangers were needed to counteract a basic human tendency to fear such guests, a …
God's Body, or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva
A dispute about the symbolism of the lingam, a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, has been going on for many centuries: is its meaning inexorably tied to a particular part of the physical body of the god, or is it abstract, purely spiritual? This essay will trace the history of this dispute, considering both icons made of carved stone in India that may or may not represent lingams and images made of words in Indian tex…
Many masks, many selves
On Translating the Kamasutra: A Gurudakshina for Daniel H. H. Ingalls
Speaking in Tongues: Deceptive Stories about Sexual Deception
Rationalizing the Irrational Other: "Orientalism" and the Laws of Manu
T HE ATTEMPT TO RATIONALIZE other peoples' apparent irrationalities is a game that many scholars of religion have enjoyed playing, particularly but not only in this age of moral relativism. Much has been written concerning the arguments about food prohibitions, for example, in Leviticus and elsewhere, from Marvin Harris's flat-footed and unconvincing functionalist and materialist arguments (They knew how to get protein, a thinly veiled descendant…
Asceticism and eroticism in the mythology of Śiva.
Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification
Les theoriciens du sacrifice de substitution : H. Hubert, M. Mauss, R. Girard, S. Freud. Les theories vediques de la substitution dans le sacrifice. Le ritualisme vedique interprete par la mythologie hindouiste
Structuralist Universals versus Psychoanalytic UniversalsThe Jealous Potter. Claude Lévi-Strauss , Bénédicte Chorier
Animals in Four Worlds: Sculptures from India
Rationalizing the Irrational Other: "Orientalism" and the Laws of Manu
T HE ATTEMPT TO RATIONALIZE other peoples' apparent irrationalities is a game that many scholars of religion have enjoyed playing, particularly but not only in this age of moral relativism. Much has been written concerning the arguments about food prohibitions, for example, in Leviticus and elsewhere, from Marvin Harris's flat-footed and unconvincing functionalist and materialist arguments (They knew how to get protein, a thinly veiled descendant…
Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa (1915-1992)
Why study dreams? A religious studies perspective
Barbara Stoler Miller (1940-1993)
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Purāṇa Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts
Asian Mythologies
Speaking in Tongues: Deceptive Stories about Sexual Deception
Off with Her Head: The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture
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 re…
Myths and Methods in the Dark
Sita and Helen, Ahalya and Alcmena: A Comparative Study
Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts
Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India
The Dreams and Dramas of a Jealous Hindu Queen
Dreams are a serious matter in classical Hinduism, indeed seriously material. This is a subject that I have treated elsewhere at some length,1 but it might be useful to summarize some basic Hindu approaches to dreams before focusing on the particular group of texts I wish to discuss. The Hindu attitude to dreams is part of a more general Hindu attitude to illusion, called maya. The entire material world is regarded, theoretically at least, as an …
Presidential Address: "I Have Scinde": Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse
Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the …
On Translating the Kamasutra: A Gurudakshina for Daniel H. H. Ingalls
The Symbolism of Black and White Babies in the Myth of Parental Impression
AN ANCIENT and enduring cross-cultural mythology explores what the texts generally perceive as a paradox: the birth of white offspring to black parents, or black offspring to white parents. This mythology in the Hebrew Bible is limited to animal husbandry , but in Indian literature from the third century B.C.E. and Greek and Hebrew literature from the third or fourth century C.E. it was transferred to stories about human beings. These stories ori…
The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, or, Bestiality
Wendy Doniger The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, or, Bestiality CULTURES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD REPRESENT OUR DECEPTIVE relationships with animals as masquerades, which operate in both directions: in our rituals, humans often masquerade as animals, but in our myths we imagine that animals masquerade as humans. The most intense version of this universal theme is the tale of the bestial decep tion, the masquerade of an animal as a human in the m…
Bisexuality in the Mythology of Ancient India
Does the term 'bisexual' refer to what one does or what one is? It makes a difference, and Americans seem uncertain as to which is the primary meaning. Bisexuality refers, in common English parlance, primarily to the existential nature of a person's sexual partners; thus the Britannica Online defines bisexuality actively, as 'in human sexuality, sexual interest in and attraction to members of one's own and the opposite sex. A bisexual is a person…
Many masks, many selves
Reading the “Kamasutra”: The strange & the familiar
Ihe Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living finding a partner, maintaining power in a mar riage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs and al so about the positions in sexual inter course. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of anc…
The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the major thinkers of the modern age. Regarded as a crucial figure in the development of structuralism, his writings are studied across a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss presents a major reassessment of his work and influence. The fifteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume engage with the controversies that have surr…
Philosophy (27 works) · Art (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · History (17 works) · Literature (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Religious studies (14 works) · Theology (13 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (12 works) · Hinduism (11 works)