Quotes from Wendy Doniger

Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of apad, as Penelope in Homer's Odyssey carefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.

Hindus spoke in many voices about the Buddha, some positive, some negative, and some indifferent or ambivalent.

those readers (I confess that I am one of them) who go straight to the back and look at the notes and bibliography first, reading the book like Hebrew, from right to left, to see where the author has been grazing, like dogs sniffing one another's backsides to see what they have eaten lately.

many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.

I got around a lot" [bahu aham caranti] has the same double meaning in Sanskrit as it has in English—to move from one place to another and from one sexual partner to another—as well as a third, purely Indian meaning that is also relevant here: to wander as a mendicant.)

bees in Indian love poetry are said to form the bowstring of the god of lust

Hindu" is not a native word but comes from a word for the "river" (sindhu) that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE28), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and the Arabs (after the eighth century CE29) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as the Indus.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3).

The violent contrast between the hot season and the monsoon makes the soil ricochet between swampy in one season and hard, parched, and cracked in another.

Only the single word "innocent" ("without wrongdoing" [1.137.7]) suggests the slightest sympathy for the murdered Nishadas. They are sacrificial substitutes, whom the author of this text treats as expendable because he regards them as subhuman beings.

be ventriloquism

The story shows just how rotten the caste system is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven.

It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later.

But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailability, which made it the power of an elite group.

Most Hindus did not proselytize, but some Vedantic movements and some bhakti sects did.

The dog who doesn't bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog's voice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.

Renouncers tended to encourage a virulent loathing and fear of women, while worldly Hindus celebrated women in their sculptures, their poetry, and, sometimes, real life.

Like the Artha-shastra, but perhaps for the opposite reason, the Kama-sutra is wary of nuns; it advises a married woman not to hang out with "any woman who is a beggar, a religious mendicant, a Buddhist nun, promiscuous, a juggler, a fortune-teller, or a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots (4.1.9).

This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus.

Nonviolence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence.

In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they are perhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.

Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studies yoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they write about.

People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist; Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.

Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat started a revolution in India. For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.