Wendy Doniger’s article from the April 10 issue of The New York Review, about the millennia-long relationship humans have with horses, appears thirty-one years after her first essay for us, about the history of idolatry. Though she is by training an Indologist, in “The Rise and Fall of Warhorses” she draws on her vast knowledge of myth, literature, and history across religions and continents to demonstrate the codependent bond between human and horse, and the roots of horsemanship in conquest: “The great equestrian kingdoms constantly needed to wage war to acquire new sources of wealth to keep their horses,” she writes, “and to wage war they needed more and more horses.”
For decades Doniger taught courses on Hinduism and mythology more generally at the University of Chicago. She published many translations of Sanskrit texts, including the great Hindu epics. (She has, with David Grene, also translated Euripides for the stage.) Her translations as well as her essays for this magazine often serve to upend received wisdom: about the bellicosity of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, or the most faithful way to translate the Ramayana.
Even after retiring six years ago, Doniger’s work continues. She published The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir (2019) and An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 (2022), and is “now deeply embroiled in a third memoir, tentatively entitled A Good Forgettery.” We corresponded over e-mail this week about equestrianism, her legal struggles against censorship in India, and the men of her youth.
Nawal Arjini: Forgive me for exposing you, but I’d like our readers to know that you’ve directed us, when we’re looking through the catalogs of forthcoming books for something to assign, to keep in mind for you books on “India, Hinduism, women, dogs, horses, jewelry, mythology, Great Neck, Cape Cod, Francis Coppola, [and] ballet.” We’ll get to India, but could you expand on some of those interests?
Wendy Doniger: My first memoir was about my parents: my father, a refugee from Russia/Poland, and my mother, from Vienna, two very different sorts of Jews in the very interesting Jewish town of Great Neck, Long Island. For a long time this was the only place on the North Shore where Jews could buy property, and hence it was the gathering place for many famous and talented Jews—Eddie Cantor, Sid Caesar, and lots of musicians and writers. (Jay Gatsby’s “West Egg” was a stand-in for Great Neck, which is why he was shut out of Daisy’s goyische “East Egg,” Manhasset.)
My memoir was about the stories that our family told, the myths we lived in that formed my own ideas about literature and religion and politics. It was about my belief that I was Daddy’s girl, wanting to be like him (he was a passionate reader and a very successful publisher) and not like her (my mother was not allowed even to finish high school, but was a brilliant, frustrated woman, a fine painter and writer of hilarious limericks; a passionate Communist). I tried to kill myself when he died. The doctor who brought me back to myself, herself a survivor of the Nazi camps, assured me that “If you commit suicide now, you will be sorry later.” And she was right. Ultimately, I came to realize that my mother, and not my father, was the most powerful influence in my intellectual formation.
Great Neck was also where I met three men from the class of 1956 (I was in the class of 1958) who were to play a central part in my later life: I married two of them (one after the other), and while I did not marry the third, Francis Coppola, he remained a close friend, and we worked closely together on two films. One was Youth Without Youth (2007)—which was an adaptation of a book by my mentor, Mircea Eliade—for which I wrote the Sanskrit lines spoken by characters in a scene set in ancient India. Francis and I were the only two people in the world who liked this film; Rex Reed wrote, “The only way to survive Youth Without Youth is dead drunk.” The other film we worked on was Megalopolis, Francis’s most recent, in which the mythology of time travel plays a central part and which opened to mixed reviews.
My new memoir is a record of both my personal life (my close friends, my colleagues and my students, my horses and my dogs) and my academic life, for the two were closely connected. I was often the only woman in any of my departments, which was sometimes a curse, sometimes a blessing. Looking back on it all, I have begun to realize the complex ways in which the problems that women in academia faced then were so different from the ones they face now.
In what way?
I was consistently hired to teach subjects in which I had no training (also both a curse and a blessing). Often, I had to make it all up as I went along, channeling my passions into academic areas in which I was untrained, inventing myself—and, sometimes, reinventing the academic field. I therefore suffered constantly from what appeared to be an imposter syndrome but really was not (so that even the syndrome was, in a sense, an imposter). I didn’t feel like an imposter; I didn’t pretend to be someone I was not, someone who knew about science or history or religion (the areas in which, respectively, I got my three jobs, at Harvard, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and at Chicago). I didn’t feel that I had a secret that might be discovered, that I might be found out. Everyone in my academic world knew about my training. I was just doing a job for which I wasn’t qualified.
Yet that very problem challenged me again and again to expand my knowledge into new and exciting spheres. (It may also in part explain why some of my books were about self-imitation: The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade.) Much of my scholarship was highly personal. Though at first I drew largely upon texts from ancient India, and then from ancient Greece, gradually I began to draw upon English literature and Hollywood films. I wrote about the myths that mattered to me, stories about men and women, horses, and jewelry.
And how did you come to Indology?
It all began in Great Neck High School, where a devoted English teacher taught me to write (though my first short stories were all in a style compounded of Hemingway and the King James Bible), and a young, enthusiastic Latin teacher taught me a little bit of Greek and inspired me to learn Sanskrit. (I had already become fascinated with India when my mother gave me a copy of A Passage to India; then I read what I now know was a very bad translation of the Upanishads, and I was hooked.)
My other autobiographical book, An American Girl in India (2022), is an annotated edition of the letters that I wrote home to my parents on my first visit to India, in 1963–1964, when I was a young girl and India was a young nation. The letters were often so politically naive, so embarrassing, that I was tempted to edit them, but my Indian publisher wisely persuaded me to keep them as they were, and to append comments informed by the wisdom of the intervening half century, showing both how India had changed and how I and other scholars of my generation had changed.
Your latest essay for the Review is on the unfortunately martial history of horses; do you also have a personal connection to horsemanship?
Horses have played an important part in my life. Though I started riding late—in 1965, when I got to Oxford—horses immediately became a grand passion. I rode to hounds in Berkshire; Penelope Betjeman taught me to ride, and the upper-class Brits with whom I rode did not, I think, know I was Jewish (though Penelope certainly did). I rode my Arabian gelding (named Smif, after my son’s imaginary friend) in the Berkeley hills when I taught there and I rode another Arabian gelding (named Babur, after a great Mughal emperor and horseman) in one of Chicago’s forest preserves, riding with David Grene from the time of my arrival in the city in 1978 and continuing for many years, until Babur went lame in both hocks and went out to grass, and I went lame in both knees and had them replaced. Horses also kept getting into much of my writing until finally, in 2021, I wrote a whole book about them (and, as always, about gender): Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History.
Will you speak a bit about your experience with censorship in India, about which you wrote for us eleven years ago?
In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2012)I took on the myth of history in India. The “alternative” was to the nationalist, anti-Muslim, sexist version of the history of India, now equated with the history of Hinduism, propounded by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi. Modi’s mafia brought a lawsuit against the book and Penguin dropped it.
This set off an extraordinary wave of angry publicity; newspapers and blogs accused Penguin of cowardice, especially in contrast with their former bravery, in 1960, in defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover from a British obscenity law. One counter-lawsuit suggested that Penguin change their logo from a penguin to a chicken. Other critics circulated a photo of a leopard seal pursuing a terrified penguin, with the caption “The Fundamentalist Leopard Seal.” Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie came to my defense. Finally in 2015 the book was republished by a new, liberal publishing company, Speaking Tiger, led by Ravi Singh, who has continued to publish The Hindus and a number of other books by me in India. But because I am still in contempt of court (I never answered my summons at the time of the original suit), I would be in some danger if I tried to return to Modi’s India. I am very sorry about this exile, but it does give me the privilege of speaking out freely against the Modi government, as my liberal colleagues in India do not dare to do.
As you wrote for us in 2014, “It is the particular responsibility of scholars with tenure—an increasingly rare luxury, nowadays—to write about topics that might ‘outrage religious feeling’ in India.” Do you have any updates or advice for US academics facing homegrown attacks on the university?
Although my book survived the attacks of the Hindutva brigades in India, it became increasingly apparent that many Indian journalists who wrote against Modi were being arrested or killed. When I wrote the above quote, I had in mind scholars outside of India, particularly scholars in the United States, whose views did not put them in physical danger and who were (if tenured) secure in their jobs or (if old, like me) retired and out of the fray. But now that our current president—who is, among other things, a strong ally of Modi—has attacked American universities on so many levels, I would no longer have the chutzpah to call on my American colleagues, no matter what their status, to take such risks. One might, however, invoke the situation in India—the widespread damage that the Modi government has done to religious coexistence and free speech—to underline the danger to these precious rights in our own land.
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