Quotes from Wendy Doniger

Thus the legal ruling that defined Hinduism by its tolerance and inclusivism was actually inspired by the desire of certain Hindus to exclude other Hindus from their temples.

In any case, whether or not there really is a Hinduism, there certainly are Hindus.

India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.

Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas.

Sita in the Ramayana is an ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase but largely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave traces that future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing on adjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.

The circularity of karma is explicitly set from the time of creation: You must be what you are; you cannot change your qualities.

But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?

Islam in India began not with the political conquest of India by Mahmud of Ghazni but much earlier, when the Muslims entered India not as conquerors but as merchants

whether or not people get the gods that they deserve, they tend to get the gods (and demons) that their animals deserve—

The Guptas' use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.

Who would not prefer animals to these people who prefer animals to people?

Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa

The swan is also a liminal bird, able to live in two worlds, land and water, or matter and spirit.

Often the future is shaped not by what we remember but by what we forget.

In the Puranas, there is a cure for everything.

All of us identify who we are in contrast with who we are not, and the 'who we are not' changes all the time.

James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word "Hindoo" (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: "This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy."30 Even Joyce knew that the word was not native to India.

Jainas have always taken vegetarianism to the greatest extremes, taking pains to avoid injuring even tiny insects, and this too heavily influenced Hindus. The breakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation and disregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority,32 three more crucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginning to take up some of the new doctrines and practices.

bees in Indian love poetry are said to form the bowstring of the god of lust and to plunge deep inside the flowers that ooze with sap even as the rutting elephant's temples ooze with musk.

the bee perishes because his lust for the lotus stupefies him and makes him stick to her even in death.

The qualities that make the soul cling to rebirth or to illusion are vividly encompassed by a Korean word, won, which has a cluster of meanings, including resentment, ingratitude, regret for lost opportunities, and a knot in the stomach; this state of the soul results from being poorly treated or unappreciated while living or from any of the many situations covered by the rubric "to die screaming.

The fish is an ancient symbol of liminal consciousness in India: "As a great fish goes along both banks of a river, both the near side and the far side, just so this person [the dreamer] goes along both of these conditions, the condition of sleeping and the condition of waking.

Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; what politics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and cultural development.

In 1864 a geologist named that supercontinent Lemuria, because he used the theory to account for the fact that living lemurs were found, in the nineteenth century, only in Madagascar and the surrounding islands, and fossil lemurs were found from Pakistan to Malaya, but no lemurs, living or dead, were found in Africa or the Middle East (areas that would never have been connected to Lemuria as Madagascar and Pakistan presumably once were).