An American Girl in India is a delightful part-memoir by Wendy Doniger, who is acclaimed as one of ‘the world’s greatest living mythologists’ and a renowned scholar of Sanskrit and Hinduism. Former Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, she has an extensive body of work that includes her celebrated book The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, the original publisher, withdrew the book from the Indian market after objections by a conservative religious group, and it was unavailable for some years till it was republished by Speaking Tiger). Her other major books include After the War and The Darma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals—both of which retell stories from the Mahabharata; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; and translations of the Rig Veda and (with Sudhir Kakar) the Kamasutra.
Wendy has been attacked for her writing, mainly by Hindutva groups in India and the US. People are touchy when it comes to faith; to them, there cannot be an earthly, human way of dealing with the divine. In Hindustani, we would call them ‘dharam ke thekedaar’, the self-proclaimed arbiters and gatekeepers of faith. No scholar worth her salt would bow to such people. ‘The problem is that Wendy Doniger is both maverick and brilliant. Her wit bubbles up and escapes her, almost in spite of herself,’ as someone who knows her well describes her. To me this is not a problem. Like the Vedic sholaka puts it succinctly, Ekam sat viprah bahuda vadanti or truth is one, wise express it variously. I’d be happy if my work were as widely read and created a furore—to put it mildly—like hers has done.
I’m intrigued by the story Wendy tells in An American Girl in India. A 23-year-old privileged, sheltered American coming to Calcutta in 1963 to study Sanskrit and Bengali, and beginning a journey that would in three decades make her one of the most celebrated (also controversial) scholars of Indian textual traditions. Not much of it was planned, as is always the case with good things. Her story seems almost as unreal as the mythical texts (mainly Hindu and Greek, but also others) that she has dealt with all her life. To start with, she was alien to India and Indianness (if there can be such a thing in a country of continental proportions with varied sub-nationalities woven together by a Constitution that celebrates unity in diversity)—so alien, in fact, that it is often hilarious. And then things changed, and how. She is read and studied not only by her many admirers, but also by her critics—even by the furious gatekeepers who attack her!
‘I was so overwhelmed by the foreignness of so many of my experiences in India that I could only make sense of them, especially at the start, by comparing them to some roughly parallel phenomenon in a book, or painting, or opera, or song, or saying that I knew from my familiar childhood world,' writes Wendy.
India has had a profound impact on Wendy’s personality, even her Americanness. Now well into her 80s, dividing her time between big-city Chicago and the idyllic village of Truro, Wendy has written about being in the ‘vanaprastha’—the forest-dweller phase—of her life. Reading An American Girl in India you see the beginning of her association with India, which has grown deeper with time. It is a collection of her letters from Shantiniketan and other places in India, written primarily to her parents, in 1963-64, and some recollections of that brief but life-changing period.
Technology has changed the way people communicate and record their experiences now (sometimes the communication is like being stalked in the name of keeping in touch). But human experience is still the same. I have hosted 20 expats as flatmates, from three months to nearly a year, during the 15 years of my stay in CR Park, New Delhi. I’ve been witness to their existential struggles to get acquainted with India and her ways, a massive country of glorious contrasts and contradictions, and so different from anything they have ever experienced growing up in the West. Reading Wendy’s account reminds me of my 21st-century flatmates, some of them now part of my acquired family. Not much has changed in 60 years in this regard; India continues to be a challenge for many newcomers from the West. But often these same set of challenges over time become causes of endearment, leading to a life-long association with this country and its people.
Wendy writes: ‘I was so overwhelmed by the foreignness of so many of my experiences in India that I could only make sense of them, especially at the start, by comparing them to some roughly parallel phenomenon in a book, or painting, or opera, or song, or saying that I knew from my familiar childhood world. And an aura of childhood hovers over even the literary citations, which do include references to Pascal and Pinder but begin with Peter Pan and end with Winnie the Pooh, and cite a number other children’s books along the way, most frequently Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, my favourite books.’
She was always very close to her parents, which may have appeared unusual to her American peers but was not unusual in India to people of her generation. ‘One stunning piece of evidence of that intimacy,’ she writes, ‘is that they planned to visit me in India.’ Her Mother, a strong-willed leftist, did make the trip, but her father, a publisher, couldn’t for some unavoidable reason. The mother, Rita Doniger, flew into Madras in January 1964. Wendy records the visit:
‘[She] descended from the plane in Madras, carrying a New York salami in her hand luggage, the one thing she felt I most needed in India. From Madras, Rita and I went to Mahabalipuram, where we stayed in a lovely thatched bungalow right on the shore, from which we wandered about admiring the great free-standing statues, and even climbing on the statue of Shiva’s great bull Nandi.’
A wonderful photograph of mother and daughter with Nandi in Mahabalipuram makes the cover of An American Girl in India.
I reproduce some passages from the book, particularly from the preface, where Wendy lists some of the experiences that did not go into the letters she wrote to her parents, and these omissions are particularly interesting, and important to understand her early days. She qualifies that this book doesn’t contain some ‘embarrassing remarks only meant for the doting parents’—like, for example, that everyone was impressed with her Sanskrit and her ‘burgeoning Bengali’. And since the letters were written to loving parents, they ‘were in some ways highly censored from the start, a reverse twist on Parental Guidance’.
To me, a bachelor, ironically enough, the following passage made a strong impression:
‘I had married at the end of my junior year at Radcliffe, in large part in order to get out of the dormitory, which I loathed. The marriage lasted for a year; I was divorced at twenty-one. I never mentioned it to anyone in India, so I was truly surprised when my friend Chanchal guessed it, ostensibly from reading my palm. Now I was planning to marry again, as soon as I returned from India, and I did, on March 31, 1964. I left all of that out of this book. But I couldn’t resist including, after describing how Parvati’s parents thought Shiva wasn’t good enough for her, a brief remark about “the way that parents are about daughters, even if they marry gods”, and a not-so-oblique reference to my own forthcoming marriage, and another aside about “the attitude of fathers towards sons-in-law”.’
Wendy also censored witnessing the sacrifice of a goat. Her parents never got to know this episode: ‘As soon as the head of the goat sprang free from the body, I passed out cold right there in the temple, and my friends had to carry me out into the fresh air and give me water and fan me until I came to, therefore missing the rest of the ceremony… And that put an end to any idea I had about becoming an anthropologist; I decided to stick to Sanskrit texts.’
In October of 1963, she had her first bhang lassi (she describes it as a sweet milky drink made from liquid marijuana) in Calcutta. ‘As it was my first experience of bhang lassi, I mistook it for a delicious milkshake, downed the first one in just a few swallows, and cheerfully asked for a second one, wondering only in retrospect why everyone giggled at my request. When we drove out in the jeep, with the rest of the family, along the Calcutta Maidan, a big circular park that was dark at night, Ed [she was staying in the home of an American professor, Edward Cameron Dimock, in Ballygunge] was so high that he thought he was in Chicago and that the Maidan was Lake Michigan, and he wanted to jump out of the jeep to go and swim the lake. It took all of us to restrain him.’
Wendy misses those days. ‘Sadly, I cannot imagine such open-hearted and joyous encounters between an American visitor and the average Indian of the India of today,’ she writes.
My experience with my flatmates in Delhi has been different, though only one of them was an American, almost all the others were European. They have taken to India, as India has taken to them. However, I know many American travellers, some of them nirvana seekers, and I get the sense that they are fairly paranoid about any place other than America. They feel like a sitting duck—that suddenly something woeful might befall them. I tell them, ‘You’re safer in India’—as the transformation of guns from tangible weapons to ideological ammunition hasn’t quite happened here yet. Some visitors are reassured by this, others are not and continue to feel nervous in India. Despite this, I remain hopeful—like Wendy, who concludes here preface with this line: ‘And yet the memory of happy and innocent days in India long ago gives me courage to hope.’
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