Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda,

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
Wine is the liquid form of the Goddess Tara, who is the saviour of all living creatures, the mother of all enjoyment and Release, the destroyer of dangers and disease, who burns up all sins and purifies the worlds, O Beloved, who grants all success and increases knowledge, understanding and learning.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
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
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
But I felt that I wanted a book to be out there to counteract their claims and to tell the history of the Hindus the way I think it should be told, the way it is more to the credit to the Hindus. It's a very positive book-it shows how for so much of their history the Hindus have been so tolerant, and so open to different forms of religion, and that to close it down now would be a terrible shame. So it's really a backhanded compliment-Hinduism has always been so good, and these guys are ruining it.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
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
The dog who doesn't bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog's voice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
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
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
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
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
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
It's a book about the history of the Hindus, from 50 million B. C. E. to the present. It says that there is no evidence that Rama was born in the place that is now known as Ayodhya and there is no evidence that there was a Hindu temple on the spot where the Babur Mosque was. And that there is no evidence that Rama and a bunch of monkeys built a bridge from India to Sri Lanka, as the Hindu Right have claimed. That's just mythology, which is lovely, I've studied it all my life, but you don't legislate on the basis of mythology.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty