Wendy Doniger’s memoir blends scholarship, feminism, travel, controversy and personal experience, offering an intimate portrait of the woman behind her influential studies of Hinduism and mythology
Bhaskar Parichha
Book Name: For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Some lives are shaped by ambition, some by circumstance, and some by stories. In “For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist”, Wendy Doniger suggests that hers was shaped by all three. Candid, funny, irreverent, and intellectually restless, this memoir is much more than an account of an illustrious academic career. It is an intimate portrait of the making of one of the most influential and unconventional scholars of Hinduism, mythology, and Sanskrit.
Doniger, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading mythologists, has spent much of her scholarly life examining how human beings create meaning through stories. In this memoir, she turns that analytical gaze upon herself. The result is an engaging intellectual autobiography in which scholarship and personal experience constantly overlap. She does not present herself as a remote academic authority. Instead, she allows the reader to see the person behind the scholarship – the curious student, teacher, traveller, feminist, friend, and sometimes controversial public intellectual.
The geographical sweep of the memoir mirrors the evolution of her intellectual life. From Great Neck in New York to Harvard, Calcutta, Oxford, Moscow, Berkeley, and Chicago, Doniger moves through institutions and countries that shaped her understanding of the world. But the real journey is inward. Ballet studios, Sanskrit classrooms, academic corridors, friendships, romances, political encounters, and intellectual disagreements all become part of the story.
One of the pleasures of the book is its cast of characters. Professors and scholars appear alongside students, friends, lovers, filmmakers, aristocrats, dogs, and horses. Doniger has an eye for eccentric detail and an appetite for gossip, but the gossip is rarely gratuitous. It helps recreate the texture of an academic world that has largely disappeared – a world of intense intellectual friendships, institutional hierarchies, personal rivalries, and freedoms that could coexist rather uneasily with deeply embedded prejudices.
Her account of being a woman in mid-century academia is particularly revealing. The memoir explores how women negotiated institutions largely designed around male assumptions about authority, scholarship, and professional life. Doniger’s feminism, as suggested by the subtitle, was not necessarily a predetermined ideological position. It emerged through experience – through encounters with discrimination, expectations, and the contradictions of institutions that could celebrate intellectual achievement while remaining uncomfortable with women who challenged established conventions.
The book is equally interesting when Doniger discusses her scholarship. Her engagement with Hindu mythology and Sanskrit texts was never simply an exercise in recovering ancient narratives. She approached myths as complex, evolving stories through which societies express anxieties about gender, sexuality, power, desire, and identity. That approach made her work innovative but also controversial, particularly in debates surrounding academic freedom and the interpretation of Hindu traditions.
Doniger does not shy away from those controversies. Yet the memoir’s larger concern is not to settle old academic battles. It is to understand how ideas, friendships, institutions, and personal experiences shape an intellectual life. Her reflections on Communism, travel, teachers, and changing academic cultures demonstrate the intellectual curiosity that has remained central to her work.
What makes the book especially appealing is its refusal to maintain a rigid boundary between the scholarly and the personal. Doniger understands that intellectual history is also human history. Behind every book is a life; behind every interpretation are experiences, prejudices, friendships, and desires. Doniger’s life, like the myths she studies, refuses to follow a straight line. It loops back, surprises, and contradicts itself.
For the Love of Stories is a memoir about storytelling as much as it is about a scholar. It asks how we become the people we are through the stories we inherit, question, interpret, and eventually retell. Wendy Doniger’s greatest achievement here is that, after a lifetime of interpreting other people’s stories, she offers readers her own—with wit, candour, intelligence, and an engaging absence of solemnity.
(The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.)