Book review of For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist

If Wendy Doniger were to put on a stand-up comedy show, I would like a front row seat. The American Sanskrit scholar, who has translated the Rig Veda, Manusmriti, Kamasutra, and sections of the Mahabharata into English, has a wild sense of humour. Her ability to turn romantic adventures and academic rivalries into comic material is perhaps the astonishing takeaway from her new book, For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist.

“Francis and I often went out together, and he has several times gone on record to say that I was the first girl he ever kissed,” she writes about filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who directed The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Since they went to the same high school, she calls him “the boy in the class of 1956 whom I did not marry”. For a more professorial touch, she adds, “He was for me what Robert Frost would have called the road not taken.” This is not the kind of citation you might have expected in an academic memoir, but it is undeniably funny.

As the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, Doniger’s designation itself is a mouthful, and hard to utter without a chuckle. Her lack of political correctness will delight some and trigger others. Not a fan of self-censorship, she writes about her intellectual and amorous pursuits with unfiltered glee. “The men were not just warm bodies in bed; they were also colleagues. I published translations with three of them and taught and wrote with others,” she notes. Among them was psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, whose interest in Hindu mythology overlapped with Doniger’s. They met when he was a divorced man. “It’s best to translate the Kamasutra with someone you have slept with, and Sudhir and I had become close friends long before we began the translation,” says Doniger.

Two of her lovers, Brian Smith and Douglas Sell, were former students. The former went on to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and the latter became a Lutheran Christian minister. Fond of self-deprecation, Doniger writes, “…both of my young lovers took holy orders after we parted.”

Women in academia who de-sexualise themselves to avoid unwanted sexual advances at the workplace might be startled with the question that Doniger poses: “What did it mean for a woman scholar to have a reputation as a femme fatale? I certainly didn’t feel that I was striking a blow for sexual equality, but I think it sometimes had that inadvertent effect,” she recalls.

This book exposes the double standards of university departments that look down upon women having younger male companions but do not mind men having younger female companions. It also draws attention to relational dynamics that were called out during the MeToo movement. “…several of my male colleagues…had slept with their students”, notes Doniger. She clarifies that Smith became her lover only when she had no “power to give him an academic grade”.

Her thematic centering of eroticism in life and textual studies must not be mistaken for her championing of embodied scholarship. The latter treats lived experience of race and gender identity as a site of critical enquiry. Doniger, on the other hand, characterises ‘the Woke world’ as one where “you couldn’t study x if you were not x”, and where “most departments would hire an Indian woman instead of me”. This claim comes perilously close to portraying whiteness as victimhood, but her belief stems from a bitter personal experience: one of her “most brilliant Sanskrit students was turned down for a job”, arguing that “Sanskrit is just a Brahmin language… a language of oppression and the University should not hire any Sanskritist.”

Doniger’s tirade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) seems odd for someone whose book mentions repeatedly that she was unqualified for most of the jobs she got. She had a joint appointment in the university’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, and mentored several South Asian students, but does not seem to recognise how her paranoia reflects the anti-immigrant political climate in the United States. It is ironic that she does not extrapolate from “you couldn’t study x if you were not x” to reflect on how rare it is to come across South Asian scholars studying American habits, customs and traditions. Compare that with the number of white Americans travelling to study other cultures.

What is most admirable in this book is her honesty, whether she talks about fighting “not for women’s rights but for my own rights” or thanks Dinanath Batra, the founder of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, for “the rocketing international sales” of her controversial 2009 volume The Hindus: An Alternative History that led to a lawsuit against her and Penguin India.

At the age of 85, looking back at a life filled with people and adventures, she has no need to network feverishly like younger scholars who must temper what they say and to whom. It is the lack of pretense and posturing that makes her book worth reading, even if one disagrees with her.

Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic

For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist

Wendy Doniger

Speaking Tiger Books

Pp 384, Rs 899