Wendy Doniger Quotes

Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa

Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.

Voltaire was deeply impressed by it and cited it often.

intrareligious and interreligious. Hinduism interacted

Although proselytizing is not in itself necessarily intolerant, it does close the open-ended door of pluralism

Its hatred is directed not only against Hindus of the more diverse traditions - the ones that the British, and Rammohan Roy, taught the Hindus to despise - but also, ironically, against the very monotheisms (Islam and Christianity) that nurtured the Hindu insistence that Hinduism is monotheistic.

I'm a pacifist. I don't believe in 'good' wars.

The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think,

As long as it was just a matter of graft and the lust for power, the British treated the people they robbed as human beings. It was religion that made them treat them like devils

Wine is the liquid form of the Goddess Tara, who is the saviour of all living creatures, the mother of all enjoyment and Release, the destroyer of dangers and disease, who burns up all sins and purifies the worlds, O Beloved , who grants all success and increases knowledge, understanding and learning.

Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda,