Himal Interviews: Wendy Doniger on myth and many Hinduisms

As battles over history intensify in India, questions about who controls myth have taken on new urgency. In this wide-ranging conversation, the Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions Wendy Doniger reflects on a lifetime of thinking about myth – how stories travel across cultures, how they are shaped by personal experience, and why they resist fixed meanings. From epics and oral traditions to the politics of interpretation in contemporary India, she speaks about the power of myth to illuminate, unsettle and endure.

The transcript below is from an episode of Himal’s Southasia Review of Books podcast from July 2025, in which associate editor Shwetha Srikanthan speaks with Doniger, about her recent book The Cave of Echoes: Stories About Gods, Animals and Other Strangers (Speaking Tiger, July 2025).

The episode is available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

This is an edited excerpt of the full interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting from it.

Shwetha Srikanthan: Wendy, you’ve continued to write and reflect on myth since The Cave of Echoes was first published in 1988, and you’ve noted how students’ responses and reviews have shaped your thinking. With this new edition, how do you look back on the book and your earlier approach? And how has your thinking about myths and rituals evolved since?

Wendy Doniger: It’s a good question. I wrote that book over 30 years ago, and when I looked at it now, I didn’t recognise it. I couldn’t imagine writing such a book. I couldn’t imagine who I was who wrote that book then. I recognised the jokes, the little turns of phrase, but I didn’t recognise the sources in the footnotes. Those are books I read 40 years ago. I thought, wow, I read that book then.

What I really recognised were the stories. I didn’t always recognise the arguments I made about them. The arguments didn’t seem to me as interesting as the stories. The basic argument I was making was against the idea of something being “just a myth” – just a lie, a silly story, something with no relationship to the truth.

I wanted to make people respect myths, and especially the truth content of other people’s myths. You could say, well, the story of the apple in Eden is just a myth, and the story of Shiva and Parvati – not only is that just a myth, but it’s a myth told by some crazy people over there in India, why should we pay any attention to that? So there was a double whammy: even our own myths – Christian and Jewish myths and so forth – were regarded as not having truth value, and other people’s myths were all the more susceptible to accusations of falsehood.

I was really writing for my people, trying to persuade American Jews to read Hindu stories and to take them seriously – not just to say, oh how orientalist, how weird, these people have such strange ideas – but to say, they’re writing about something I care about. And what they say about it actually makes more sense to me than what the Hebrew texts have said to me. I’ve worried about this all my life, and this story makes a kind of sense to me – partly because, in some cases, Indian storytellers were just better at it than the ancient Jewish storytellers. But also because we’re used to Adam and Eve, and the new stories seem strange. And yet in the end they aren’t strange. The people may be speaking a strange language and doing strange things, but they are dealing with our problems in ways we never thought of – which allows us to say, my goodness, maybe that’s the answer. Why didn’t we ever think of that?

That’s the eye-opening effect: thinking that a story might actually tell you something that matters to your own life – something that’s been making you sad or angry or puzzled – and that you might find it better not in your own sources, partly because you know them and ignore them, and partly because some of the people who wrote the Bible just weren’t as smart as the people who wrote the ancient Sanskrit texts. You think, now, that’s an interesting way to approach the problem.

So I cared a lot about myths. I came to care a little more about rituals after I got to Chicago. I’ve always been grateful for the kindness of anthropologists – there were wonderful anthropologists there. I joined the faculty in 1978, long before you were born, and they taught me a bit about rituals, which otherwise I wouldn’t have known about or cared about. Because of that, I began to think that seeing myths in the context of the rituals showed you an aspect of them. It doesn’t give you the secret – it’s not that now I understand this myth – but it fills it out in an interesting way. It makes you say, aha, I see that.

That’s partly why I started taking rituals more seriously. I never took them as seriously as myths. I’ve never been a fieldworker; I’ve always been an armchair scholar. I read books, I don’t go away and watch people doing things.

So I’m always a myth person. But I’ve come to respect that sometimes you understand a myth better when you understand the rituals in which it’s recited.

SS: In the first chapter, you use the Indian metaphor of the hunter and the sage to reflect on the scholar’s personal stake in studying myth. You describe the hunting sage as your ideal historian of religions – someone who thinks and feels, who is self-aware in navigating both head and heart. You also write that all creative scholarship in the humanities is, on some level, autobiographical, and that scholars of myth in particular often find themselves caught up in the very stories they study.  

Could you talk more about how personal experiences have changed the way you approach myth as a scholar?

WD: “The Hunter and the Sage” is a wonderful story that I found in the Yoga Vasishta, a wonderful Sanskrit text. The sage gets inside the head of the hunter, in some ways, and it came to represent for me two different ways of thinking about important human questions. One is by meditation and reading, just staying home and thinking – that’s the sage. And the other is the hunter, who actually goes out and sees things and experiences things.

In my day, a scholar was supposed to write about the stuff that he or she read in books – to be a sage. Here I was arguing that it was also relevant, and necessary, to use your own personal experience, to bring to life your scholarship about your own texts and other people’s texts. The big questions – about the meaning of life, about relationships with parents and partners and animals – we all have those experiences, and then we read about them.

So my thinking about my father’s death became part of my thinking about all the myths of death. I began to understand them better, and I began to see how the people in those stories, and the authors of those stories, had also lost parents and other loved ones. Not only the personal experience but everything you’ve ever read about death, not just Sanskrit texts, fills your mind with insights and ideas that you can hear echoing in those texts.

You realise these weren’t strange people. They had different experiences – they lived in India, the climate was different, they ate different food – but those differences made them experience something like the death of a parent both in the same way we do and in other ways that might actually be more useful to us than our own.

Rituals of death are very rigid because the people experiencing them are out of control to some extent, and the community takes over and says: sit here, drink this, eat this, touch this. People who are bereaved are grateful not to have to think in a way. So rituals take over – the poems you recite, the ceremonies you’ve known all your life. Death is enormously ritualised in order to provide a kind of crutch, until you come back to life and can begin to think straight again after the first terrible impact.

That’s where other people’s rituals can be even more useful. They take you out of your own narrow, solipsistic sense that no one has ever experienced this before, that your life will never be the same – whatever it is you’ve locked yourself into. So I thought the myth of the hunter and the sage – the way the sage gets into the hunter’s head – was a wonderful metaphor for the way we ought to open ourselves to the emotional wisdom of other people’s myths. In some ways that wisdom is the same as ours, in some ways it’s different, but in either case it can strike us with a new wisdom, even if it’s not entirely new, because it comes at a different angle, in a different light. And we say, aha, now that’s interesting, why did I never think of that?

I think that’s the right way to read great literature in general, and certainly great mythology, because it so often deals with questions for which there is no answer. The failed answer of your own tradition can become boring, even invisible, whereas the failed answer of someone else’s tradition can be much more enlightening, and more fun, too. They’re wearing different clothes, dancing different dances. It clothes the bare bones of these deep, sometimes gruesome life questions in forms that sneak up on you. You don’t realise how deep it is because you’ve been enthralled by the poetry, the gardens full of flowers you’ve never seen before. 

So there are many reasons why these personal truths can come to you with more power and meaning from other people’s texts than from your own.

SS: You’ve written that the categories of true and false are inadequate when it comes to myths, and that myths can ring false when we try to construct or legislate them rather than interpret them. Different cultures draw different boundaries between myth, history and fiction – what one culture sees as myth, another might call history or legend.

The myths you explore in this book deal with questions religion asks – about life, death, creation, meaning and so on. Since myth is, at its core, a narrative, how does it differ from other kinds of narratives like history or legend?

WD: Before I wrote that first book, when I was living in Russia in 1971 – 15 years before I wrote that book – I met some anthropologists who introduced me to the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One thing that he wrote in particular deeply influenced me and changed everything I did after that. 

He said something so simple and so true. He said the reason why there are so many different variants of great myths – even in a particular text, about how the world began; any Sanskrit Purana will give you five or six different versions of creation; look at the Christian New Testament, there are four different Gospels telling you the life of something that actually has a historical basis, which is the life of Jesus Christ, they tell it four different ways.

Lévi-Strauss says the reason there are so many different variants of a single important myth is that it poses a question to which there is no answer – that it’s trying to tell you how to put a square peg in a round hole, so you just keep trying again and again. Every single myth is the failure to answer a great metaphysical question, so you try it again. That one doesn’t do it either, and so on and so forth.

So myth is doomed, by the nature of the questions it asks, never to come to rest and say, well, that’s done, I’ve got that over with, let’s try something else. Myth is always left open-ended because there is no answer.

History has different problems. It works with different materials; it bases itself on physical and historical facts. But history, too, is often written in the shadow of the same agendas as myth. As we see in our own time, the available facts are twisted to serve particular religious and political agendas. We’re not going to talk about politics, but your country and mine are in a very bad place right now because of this.

History doesn’t exactly have just the facts. It starts with facts, but it works in much the same way as myth – it twists things around to get one answer for one person, another answer for another. There is no single way to tell the story of how India began, or whether America is a democracy. These historical things are also unanswerable, and therefore never at rest; they never come to a final resting place.

Legend pretends to be based on history, but it begins with, at best, one or two historical facts – there was somebody named George Washington in America long ago – and then it takes off immediately from those facts to tell an entirely different story.

So myth does not take off from physical facts or historical events. It begins with shared, insoluble human problems, but it soon enters the same cloudy territory of human emotion that history and legend have to plough through, with very similar distortions. The building blocks you start with in legend have a different basis in what you would call hard facts, but it never stays there for long. It always takes off into the realm of human imagination in the attempt to answer bigger questions: what is truth? What is justice? What actually happened in the past?

You can see this in our own lives. Did your parents really love each other when you were little? Were you happy? Were you sad? We no longer have access to facts – we have memories, and we tell stories. Of course I love my parents. Of course my parents loved each other. That’s myth-making. And we all do it. If one of your parents killed the other, then you have some basis for fact – but most of us live in a much shadier territory than that. So the way we live our lives is by taking the things we remember that mean something to us and embroidering them with our human penchant for storytelling.

I’m trying to write a memoir now, and I put down what I remember, and then what I don’t exactly remember, but feel it was. I have a brother ten years younger than I am, and I try it out on him. He says, that’s not how it was. So it’s hard to stick to the so-called facts.

We are a mythologising race. We tell whatever we tell to make ourselves feel better, to please the people we’re telling it to. So many ways that we distort memory. There are always some facts, but the embroidery is so much more important to us than the fabric we’re embroidering on. 

SS: You write that in response to the colonial and missionary distortion of non-Western religions, much recent scholarship has leaned towards cultural relativism. But you argue that truly engaging with other people’s myths means being honest about our emotional responses to them, including discomfort.

You give the example of the myth underlying sati, an archaic practice in India in which a widow throws herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. Could you say more about this balance between affect, critique and empathy in the study of myth?

WD: It’s a tricky question, especially nowadays, with so much political confusion about attitudes toward others in general, which is what this is all about. I think some myths are violent because they’re reacting to the violence of human experience – to earthquakes and famines. These are sad, but are not generally used in the service of political agendas, evil agendas.

There are other myths, particularly those in the service of particular human groups, which distinguish themselves from other human groups. It could be Indians against Chinese, men against women, white people against Black people. These myths are defined as positioned in the service of particular human groups and are often violent because they’ve been used in the service of violent political agendas directed against certain groups of people. I’m thinking of racist and sexist myths, and the one you’ve mentioned – the myth of sati – is such a sexist myth.

There are Sanskrit texts that say that the wife of Shiva, whose name was Sati – which also just means a good woman – burned herself to death voluntarily. And that myth has been used in history, on some occasions, to encourage women to burn themselves on their husbands’ pyres. So I think we have the right to make moral judgments about myths – our own myths and other people’s myths – if they support agendas that are injurious to particular groups of people.

In my own tradition, I object to certain anti-Semitic myths that begin in the New Testament and are included in some of the great Christian works of art. One of my favourite pieces of music is Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which tells the story of the crucifixion. At one point he has a chorus of Jews singing “Kreuzige, kreuzige, kreuzige” – crucify him. It’s a great work of art, and every time I hear it I think, my god, here comes that passage I hate. It’s still a great work of art, but it has contributed to the murder of Jews at different points in history. And I wish it didn’t have that passage. You can’t leave it out, it’s part of the St Matthew Passion.

I would include the myths of Sati in this same category, because they have been used at certain times and places. In fact, they were mainly used in British propaganda against Indians to say, look, these people are burning all their widows to death, they certainly need us to govern their country. They greatly exaggerated the prevalence of sati. So that’s a mythologising of a different kind – the British mythologising of the practice, which was largely limited to Rajputs at a certain period in history. It wasn’t something that all Hindus did. So that’s already a political use of a myth.

The myth of sati was used at certain times by certain people, and later went on to support other incidental agendas in more recent Indian history, such as the murder of widows for their dowries. That was not general either – it’s not that all Indian widows were murdered for their dowries – but some were indeed persuaded to kill themselves so that others could get their money. So that’s a bad myth, used by some people in a bad way.

I think it’s a myth that should be discouraged from being retold or better than that, should be told and explained: what it is, why it happened, who used it, and why it was misused by human beings to hurt other human beings. I think people should know about the myth of sati, and know that it was created at a certain time in history by certain political groups who found it useful to encourage women to kill themselves. That’s an important part of mythology too, the use of certain myths to persecute certain people. I would call this a myth motivated not by genuine shared human questions, as great myths are – why do we die, what happens after we die – but by the particular agendas of one group at the expense of another. I would call it a hurtful myth, perpetrated by one group of men, at a certain moment in history, in order to hurt another group – certain women at that time. So that’s a category of mythology which I think should be recognised.

But I’m sorry that people who are anti-religious in general, or just anti-myth, use it as an example of why myths are bad – look what happened in India with sati. That’s a peculiar, small subcategory within mythology. It does need to be understood, and, if possible, banished. But I don’t think it casts a shadow on the importance and the beauty of the great religious myths told all over the world. 

SS: When literacy was not as widespread in Southasia, the written word was often reserved for elites, while oral culture belonged to the people at large. You note that this pattern prevailed for centuries in Europe and continues in many parts of India. Sanskrit, for example, restricted sacred texts and Indian classics largely to males of the dominant castes, and widespread illiteracy meant that written literature, even in vernacular languages, remained inaccessible to many. But you also note that illiteracy does not equal cultural deprivation.

In India, epics like the Mahabharata have been experienced collectively through oral tradition, allowing millions to engage deeply with their own classics. And with the rise of print, texts like the epic Ramayana became widely available, leading not only to more private reading but also to public recitations attended by large audiences.

How does this fluid oral tradition empower marginalised communities and non-Sanskrit-reading audiences to claim their own relationship to these ancient stories?

WD: This is a very good question, and a very timely one. The idea of making everybody in India speak Hindi – people who I shall not name have recently propounded – goes against everything that India has always been and meant. And I hope it will not succeed. That said, let me say what I feel about the history of the problem, which is really very interesting.

The great texts I know best are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. And my long-lost, wonderful colleague, A K Ramanujan, very famously said that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time. These stories have been around for a very long time. They’re great big books, full of stories, god knows where they began. At some point they were put into Sanskrit, and therefore the oldest written versions we have are in Sanskrit – big, big texts. And Sanskrit has traditionally been the language of male Brahmins.

But in the first place, there always were some women Sanskritists right from the start. And these poems are collections of stories of a nature that, in English, have often been called “old wives’ tales” or Mother Goose fables. Those phrases reflect the fact that the tellers of stories in most traditions have been women – raising children, doing household tasks that allow them to sit and tell stories. So even these early Sanskrit texts, attributed to Indian sages like Valmiki and Vyasa, may well have originated in oral traditions passed on by women.

Moreover, the Mahabharata itself tells us that the stories were told and retold at sacrifices by people called sutas. And “suta” is a word that has two very different meanings: one is a poet, an oral poet, and the other is a charioteer. And the caste of suttas is a low caste – it is not a Brahmin caste and it’s not a Kshatriya caste, but a mixed caste, whatever its origins.

So these suttas were people who drove chariots. That’s why it’s particularly striking in the Bhagavad Gita that Krishna drives Arjuna’s chariot, because the charioteer is doing a low task – he is dealing with animals, which is considered unclean, and no Brahmin or Kshatriya would have done that. During the day, he takes care of the animals. At night, when everyone has survived and is sitting around, the sutas tell the stories – what happened in battle, what they saw. And the sutas there were the basis of the telling of the epic stories.

In the Ramayana, too, Rama’s sons become sutas. They go from village to village singing these oral songs, and they are people of low caste. So these Brahmin Sanskrit texts are being transmitted, according to the tradition itself, by people of lower caste. So even while you’re still dealing only with Sanskrit versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, you have the input of women and the transmission by people of low caste. And once you get them translated into the vernacular – or I might even say translated back into the vernacular, because surely these stories were told in vernaculars long before the Brahmins collected them and put them into the Sanskrit texts we have – they go back into the vernacular. Then they belong to everyone. And there is no one way of telling the story. When someone tells you the story, you don’t say, you got that wrong – you say, my auntie told it to me differently.

This happened to me in my days of teaching at the University of Chicago. There I am, the Sanskrit teacher – the students are supposed to be listening to me – and I say, there’s this story in the Mahabharata, it goes like this, and a hand goes up. I say, yes, Radha, what is it? And she says, “My granny told it differently,” and she tells us her version. And indeed, she has every right to say that the story goes that way rather than the way I was telling it.

So they come out of the oral tradition, they come out of women’s traditions, and they go back into the oral tradition and back into women’s traditions. And so, though we can certainly find male Brahmin agendas in the texts – god knows we can – we can also hear, even in the Sanskrit texts and in other versions, the voices of women and oppressed castes. And therefore they really do belong to all the people of India.

This distinguishes them, I should say, from a text like the Rig Veda, which was a priestly document, recited in sacrifice by Brahmins and largely transmitted by Brahmins. So that text is a Brahmin text, but not the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. And those are the ones people turn to. The Mahabharata is so much more fun than the Rig Veda. That, I think, is the answer to that.

And going back to the present, it’s told in all different languages, in all different ways – there’s the Telugu way of telling it, the Tamil way of telling it. The idea of making everybody in India speak Hindi is just such a bad idea. I hope it doesn’t work. 

SS: Hindu nationalists have become increasingly invested in rewriting Indian history and mythology to serve a majoritarian political agenda. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose platform openly embraces Hindutva, came to power in 2014, this ahistorical narrative-building has accelerated, moving beyond social media and political rhetoric into academic institutions and textbooks.

That same year, just before Narendra Modi took office, a retired Hindu schoolteacher, Dinanath Batra, succeeded in pressuring Penguin India to withdraw your book The Hindus: An Alternative History on the grounds that it offended religious sensibilities under India’s blasphemy law.

You’ve spent your career studying and interpreting Hinduism, and yet your work has long been a target of vilification by vocal groups of Hindu fundamentalists. Could you talk about that experience, how it revealed the extent to which Hindutva voices now shape political and cultural discourse in India, and why Hindu nationalists care so deeply about controlling myths? What do you think are the consequences of their growing influence over these narratives?

WD: So that story about me and Penguin has always been told in different ways, sometimes wrongly. What really happened was that Penguin India published the book, and shortly thereafter Penguin India was bought by an international conglomeration in Germany that took over. When Mr Batra – Modi’s henchman – brought the case against the book, the people at the top in Germany of Penguin International told the people in India to drop it.

The man who was in charge of Penguin India at the time, Ravi Singh, resigned, and the book was dropped. It was never banned in India, because the case never came to law. Penguin simply said, okay, we’ll drop it. Nor was the book ever burned, because the remaining copies were immediately gobbled up.

Ravi Singh, having left Penguin, started a company of his own called Speaking Tiger and republished the book, which was not banned or in any way threatened. I mean, lots of writers have been threatened in India, and some have been killed. In my case, nothing actually happened. No legal case was brought against the book. For a while the book was sold under the counter, in back rooms, and in the end it sold over 100,000 copies – much more than any book I’ve ever written.

There’s a great American theatrical producer, P T Barnum, who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He did me a great favour. The book has been absolutely a great success. I still get some hate mail about it from people who don’t seem to have read it, and I get fan mail all the time from people in India saying how much they liked it. So the book has been, in every way, my greatest success.

The law, however, under which it was prosecuted, is a very bad law. It was a law that the British made in the 1920s to protect Muslims. It says that it is against the law to write or publish anything that would offend someone’s religious sensibilities. So if you write a book in which you say the moon rises in the east and sets in the west, and I say I have a religion that says the moon rises in the west and sets in the east, and I get very upset when I read that sentence, the book can be banned on that. It’s an insane law, and it’s an entirely subjective law. And as far as I know, it is still on the books in India.

One of the things that I said in The Hindus was that I quoted Swami Vivekananda, who said, I eat meat when it’s properly cooked, which is a famous thing that he said. And Mr Batra didn’t say that he didn’t say it – he said it made him feel really bad when he read that. And the book was banned. So it’s an insane law. It’s been used against other people besides me. In this particular case, it did me nothing but good, because of the great bravery and initiative of Ravi Singh, whose company, Speaking Tiger, has gone on to publish many wonderful books and to continue to publish my books in India, and indeed just published Other People’s Myths. 

So Ravi Singh was the hero of that story. He stood up to them, and he won. But that law is still on the books, and many other people have been prosecuted under it, many authors have been killed. Bad things are happening, because books are still powerful.

The version of Hinduism that the Hindutva agenda of Modi is propelling bears no resemblance to Hinduism – to what people in India really believe. There is no such thing as one Hinduism. There are millions of Hinduisms. It’s a wonderfully individualistic religion. People do this, they do that – you can’t say it’s all one thing. You also can’t say it’s all in Hindi.

The diversity of India is what drew me to it in the first place. I thought I could spend my whole life studying this religion and still not know a tenth of what it’s about. It’s just so rich. Every time I read something, I found something entirely new. There’s no way to say the Ramayana is our book, or the Bhagavad Gita is our book. The Bhagavad Gita wasn’t anybody’s book, it was never a primary text. The British came to India and said to some Brahmin in Calcutta, where is your Bible? And he said, here, and sold them the Gita.

Most Indians don’t read the Gita. And when you do read it, what does it tell you? It tells you it’s just fine to wage war, because the body doesn’t count and the soul goes to heaven. Go ahead, kill your brothers, kill your cousins, kill everybody – that’s the message of the Gita. So it isn’t the Hindu Bible, it shouldn’t be the Hindu Bible. There is no Hindu Bible.

Lots and lots of Hindus have lots and lots of texts that they love and care about, and that’s why it is such a fabulous religion. I don’t think Modi can ruin Hinduism. I don’t think anybody can ruin Hinduism. He can certainly ruin the lives of an awful lot of people in India. We have somebody doing that now in our country – I can hardly point the finger. We’re in the same boat, and it’s a very leaky boat.

But I do think that whatever happens to the people of India – god help them – and of my country, Hindu stories will go on being told, in the villages and in the cities. People will write books, people will make movies and the stories will continue to be told. They’re too wonderful to fade out. People may suffer, people may be jailed, people may be killed – that’s something that scholars of literature cannot control. But the stories, I think, will survive. They do. They seem to. You just need a couple of people to remember them. There are all sorts of Hindu myths about that – where a Kali Yuga comes, the Earth is destroyed by flame, the mare with the fire in her mouth comes out, everything is burned. And then it turns out not everything was burnt. There are these caves where some people have been hiding. And as soon as the flames subside and the waters recede, they come out, they remember the stories, and they start telling them again. That’s a myth I hold on to – for your country and for mine.