Wendy Doniger

Original I am from Bangalore, India, but work as a professor in Belgium, Europe. My name is not Batra but am known as ‘Balu’. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of either the BJP (the nationalist party in India) or organizations collectively known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’. Even though I am born a ‘Hindu’, some of my ‘liberal’ associates are convinced that I am a ‘crypto-Christian’. So much …

Jakob de Roover’s Untangling the knot Sufiya Pathan’s No Alternative Jakob’s Disturbing Story Jakob’s How Free are We? Jakob’s The Indian Jews Balagangadhara’s What can India offer?

Earlier, I suggested that the psychoanalytical explanations (like the transformation of Linga into a penis as a fertility symbol etc.) not only trivialize and distort but also deny access to our own experience. In this post, I want to highlight one of the consequences of transforming our experiences in this fashion. In at least two different ways, these explanations hinder the emergence of …

Dear Patrick Hogan, It is jolly good of you, as the British say, to contribute to the ’literary landscapes’ column in Sulekha at this particular juncture. I am glad too that you put across some thoughtful considerations without being polemical, and that can only help generate a stimulating discussion among all the concerned parties. However, the way you frame your points make the task an exercise …

Let us begin in a very intuitive way and ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter ‘cultural differences’? In human contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? In inter-individual contacts. That is, we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with individual human beings. You do not meet ’the western culture’ but individual Americans, Germans, …

The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children (including Jeffrey Kripal) systematically portray the Indian traditions in an unfavorable light, even when compared to how religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are true or false, whether they …

Someone, let’s say her name is Wendy Doniger, comes along and sniggers ‘when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus’. I do not identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. I say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do. Here is what I say: “I am doing Puja to Shiva.” No discussion about ‘Lingam’ or its many meanings. This is a wrong way …

Question: “In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in particular “phallus”? A Wendy says “Yes”, a Balu says “No”. For some person, not on this board, there is not a dialog; it is a reading of Wendy, a reading of Balu - how to decide between the two answers, which one represents the truth about Hindus?” Depending on the patience of the visitor, a number …

I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyze what Rajiv portrays about Wendy and her children in the field of religious studies; (b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about (c) how we should not analyze this situation. Given that all …