When it matters most, in times of great loss or great happiness, Wendy Doniger, author of “On Hinduism”, says she turns to Hindu Gods, especially Siva whom she finds, “Beautiful, violent, charming and terrifying…” The book is a compilation of her essays written over a long span of time.
“When I started off as a Sanskritist, I was not interested in kavya or Panini’s grammar…the two respectable things…but I loved the stories…the Siva purana for instance which is written in terrible Sanskrit…but I loved the way it told the story, there was a freshness to it. So I started writing about the Puranas which are the common voice…”
Partly because Doniger grew up in times of struggle and so when divisions between the less and more privileged appeared greater and partly because of her own femininity, Doniger says she is sensitive to the state of women, animals and other marginalized sections of society. Doniger says there are some Hindu texts which are very discriminating against women and yet others which are wonderful.
Doniger’s love for India is apparent as she says, “…I resonate with Hindu aesthetics better,” and mentions Madurai Meenakshi, Khajuraho. Kailashnath and Ajanta Ellora as examples which captivate her. “Holy and beautiful places. I love Indian music…” Doniger has learnt to play the sarod, “Indian food, colours, writing…and these years of living with Hinduism have meant a great deal to me.”
How is it like to live with Siva and Parvati and all the stories surround them?
“I liked Hinduism and its stories from the start because I found meaning in the stories and found they were not limited to someone who was not actually a worshipping believing Hindu. I felt the stories had wisdom and a sad reality to them in some ways. When you look at the world around you and you look at the headlines in the papers, walk through any city or landscape, it seems to be a world that was not well covered by the religions I have been raised in….and it seems to me that Siva is actually the kind of God who could have made the world; that the extremes of passion and power and beauty and the terrible things that human beings do to one another and that happen in natural catastrophes, floods and earthquakes and all that…that is Siva! That is what it must be like, the Hindu deity is like. The Hindu concept of Siva is like this beautiful dance and his terrible dance, his beauty, power and ruthlessness…they make sense to me.”
Doniger says when she experienced the first personal tragedy in her life, “When I lost my father whom I loved so much I had a hard time dealing with it. It also coincided with the birth of my child and that was a lot to deal with…I was not handling it properly at all…till one of my friends told me what I was writing about. I was writing about ‘The Origins of Evil…’, the Hindu ideas about why there is suffering, why there is evil in this world, what meaning it has, what kind of pattern is there which is meaningful, the apparently random occurrences of tragic events, tragedies and personal tragedies…really that is what helped me. To make sense of what was happening to me. I have always felt the Hindu ideas of karma are very useful in thinking about the consequences of the things you do and the possible ways why you would have got into the fixes you have…karma explains it better than anything else I know…I also love the ashramas, the idea of the stages of life…I am now in the forest dweller stage…the vanaprastha…how beautiful it is when you still doing things but they don’t matter the way they did when you were in the thick of things… when you were growing up and trying to figure out who you were and what you want to accomplish in life and all of that…it is great pleasure to be done with that and yet not to be in sanyas, something I could never do.” sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=how-wI-Gxj4
