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Thursday, July 7, 2022
[New post] ‘An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964 by Wendy Doniger
TalkingBooks posted: " Publisher: Speaking Tiger Writing letters to parents across the distance of geography while trying to take in a different culture, the settling in to a new world – this is something that is no longer the norm today where video calls and instan" Books and Conversations
Writing letters to parents across the distance of geography while trying to take in a different culture, the settling in to a new world – this is something that is no longer the norm today where video calls and instant messages over various platforms reign. But when writing letters and receiving them was the only means to assuage one's yearning for home and all things familiar or fall deeper into the sickness for home; one wrote about anecdotes and insights, about discoveries over things new and rare similarities while asking for validations that the home we left behind is still the same as we knew it.
'An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964', a collection of letters from the correspondence that author, academic and Indologist Wendy Doniger wrote to her parents during her first visit to India for a one year period is a reminder of that time, apart from being an insight into the first impressions of someone who would go on to become an authority on Hinduism and world mythology, as a young woman in a strange new country. The larger part of Doniger's letters are around Shantiniketan while some are about the then Calcutta and her subsequent travel notes and impressions but more than a documentation of the author's footprints, it is an intimate account full of discoveries and self realization, cultural shocks and assimilation, learnings and observations.
Interestingly enough, the year that Doniger stayed in India happens to be an eventful period for India and for her own home, America. It is the year after the Indo China War and the beginning of shimmering tensions between India and Pakistan. It is also the year US President Kennedy gets assassinated. In between Doniger's letters accounts about her immediate surroundings, her fellow students at Shantiniketan, the staff and their fascination with her; it is her keen eye on the larger political winds blowing around her that gives readers a fascinating peek into socio political environment in India from a wider perspective. Doniger writes about the palpable public ire against the Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister for the Indo China War fiasco and his sidelining of political leaders in West Bengal in a succinct way even as she reacts in a most emotional manner to the news of Kennedy's assassination.
Doniger's letters to her parents has the nostalgia of her home and the things she has shared with them – it shows in her references to songs and films and lines and passages from books she has read, it has the usual concern that foreigners have about India – the hygiene and water (and some stomach upsets) but what stands out is the way she warms up to Indian scripture and dance through practice and constant engagement, the architecture of old temples and how they are more symbolic and artistic over the European designs of New Delhi and learning Bengali and Sanskrit as much as throwing herself into the intellectual philosophy of examining Hinduism and Indian mythology.
Her letters read like conversations full of wit, verve and humour making the reader in you a part of the scenes she is describing while adding an outsider's account, but one from very close quarters and very often, without any prejudice and coming from a seeker's humility. Many of her accounts cut close to home: the chaos that makes India what it is and the many dichotomies that exist in our socio cultural fabric. One of the many hilarious examples of the former is the author's consternation over how 'life is very approximate here' when she arrives at Bolpur en route to Shantiniketan and she finds the sign at the railway station reading 'Bolepur' while the post office spells it as Bolpure and the students spell it as Bolpur or the way she describes with the most minute details the scenes around a family puja with kids and incense, the priest and his airs. Of the many dichotomies in India, she writes about how men and women are segregated in socio cultural settings and yet end up eloping, how ancient paintings in temples where people come to pray and make offerings depict the many shades of sex which is again, a taboo in conversations. Of course, these contradictions have gone on a different tangent politically and otherwise in India since the author's observations decades earlier.
Shantiniketan comes alive through Doniegr's letters - as a legacy of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's worldview comes alive, its multi cultural synergy, the creative and artistic pursuits it facilitates for students not just from India but abroad as well. The only overbearing thing she finds is the over 'Bengali-ness' around her – the way newspapers devote themselves to everything Bengali with only a bit of what is happening in foreign shores.
Doniger's letters are a testament of her awareness of how her white-ness and her American roots comes with its privileges of opening doors to her in her academic journey as well as in the social settings she finds herself in. They are also a nod to how a country that has emerged out of colonial rule remains fascinated with all things foreign. The passage on the author explaining her being Jewish and that all Jews do not live in Israel is a bittersweet tragic comedy of sorts, revealing how most of us go and slot people.
Reading the author's early but very solid impressions about the India she saw and discovered decades earlier does make one wonder, of whether things have changed at all in the country and not so much in a good way. Doniger's mentions of the prejudice against Muslims amongst the most educated and well connected people juxtaposed between accounts of how common people helped one another cutting across religions in the days leading to the Independence of India and the aftermath shines light on the deep fractures on religious lines on one hand and the ties of humanity on the other.
This is a book that takes readers to an earlier time along with the author and her discoveries and journeys into a country's staggering cultural legacy while trying to find its way under the weight of communal prejudices and distrust.
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