IRA MATHUR
“I found it very full of death and cold.” Wendy Doniger’s reaction to the Taj Mahal appears in An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64. The extract published here is taken from that book.
Wendy Doniger is an American scholar of religion and myth. She is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where she taught for several decades.
An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 was first published in the United States by State University of New York Press in 2023, and subsequently published in India by Speaking Tiger Books in 2025. The book draws on letters Doniger wrote during a year spent in India in 1963–64.
Doniger was born in New York City in 1940. Doniger studied Sanskrit and Indian traditions at Radcliffe College and Harvard University, and later at Oxford. The letters collected in An American Girl in India were written before Doniger’s academic career took shape and before Doniger became known for work on Hinduism, myth, and comparative religion.
Doniger says she “always wanted to be a writer, even as a young girl; but by that, I meant that I wanted to be a novelist.” In high school, Doniger wrote and published short stories in the school newspaper, work she later described as “truly awful”, written “in a style compounded of imitation Hemingway and King James Bible”, in which “every sentence started with, ‘And …”’.
Doniger found her passion as a freshman at Radcliffe and Harvard. Doniger began reading Hindu myths recorded in texts called the Puranas, “texts that no one was working on at that time”. They were “written in very simple, often incorrect Sanskrit” and “proper Sanskritists regarded them as the equivalent of cheap popular novels.” Doniger was drawn to them nonetheless. “I loved those texts, and loved the stories that they told,” Doniger wrote, “stories about gods and horses and women and mythical beasts and tricksters and yogis.”
Doniger decided to write about these stories rather than “the much more difficult Sanskrit texts of philosophy or poetry that everyone else was writing about”. Doniger wanted “people to know about these wonderful stories that American and British – and, indeed, Indian – scholars of Sanskrit had overlooked” stories “that had been told by women and people of lower castes for centuries before the Brahmins started retelling them in Sanskrit.”
Doniger used those stories for a Harvard dissertation, “a two-volume, 950-page, heavily annotated study of the god Shiva’’ completed in 1968 and published in 1973 as Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (Princeton University Press). Over time, Doniger began to understand those stories, “from a land long ago and far away” in a comparative frame, alongside stories Doniger knew “not as a scholar but as an American woman”, including Alice in Wonderland, Hamlet, and films such as The Red Shoes. “The wheel had come full circle,” Doniger says, “joining the stories I had loved as a child with the texts I had learned as a grown-up scholar at Harvard.”
The Agra passage published here comes from An American Girl in India (Speaking Tiger Books, 2025).
Extract
“Before we had gone to Agra, Mishtuni’s father had read us a translation he was just publishing of Rabindranath’s famous poem about the Taj Mahal. First, he extols its beauty and eternity, ‘a tear on the cheek of time’, but then he says that Shahjahan is more wonderful than the building he had built; the building is memory, static, eternal, but Shahjahan, like love itself, has gone forward, changing into another form of life, more wonderful than the perfection of stone. It is a wonderful poem, and I thought of it when I saw the Taj (by sunlight, unfortunately, as we missed the full moon), and I found it very full of death, and cold, though the marble is more liquid than any stone could be, and the dome seems to swell as you look at it. We then saw the tomb of Akbar, which moved me far more deeply; in the centre of a most magnificent, inlaid, marble, elaborate mausoleum, fit for an emperor of Akbar’s might, a staircase leads down to the room where his coffin lies – and it is an absolutely bare, plain, cold room, with a marble box of bones in the centre, and the thin light from one narrow window in the east. I have always loved Akbar, but most at that moment, when he expressed the mortality of empire more stunningly than I have ever known.
Then we saw the fort at Agra. I have come to understand, for the first time, seeing the endless fields and the beautiful women and the wonderful Arabian horses and the shining brass pots everywhere, just why the Arabs and so many others always wanted to possess India. Before, that desire just seemed foolish to me, and full of the stupidity of politics, but now I see it as the real lust that it must have been. To possess India – and yet possession is a spirit so completely alien to the Indian spirit, and perhaps that is why it was so easy for such a small band of outsiders – first the Arabs, then the British – to conquer and rule so many million Indians. When I saw the tremendous Mughal fort, it seemed like such a brutal thing, and it was an amazing revelation for me to go inside and sense once again, but on a far more personal level, what it was that made them fight so fiercely to retain it.
Inside the fort was the most beautiful, delicate, lively green miniature city, a full life. First, the steep stone hill where the horses galloped home, and above it the palaces where the women must have stood to see if their husbands had come home alive this time. Then, at the top of the hill, a green field, with shade trees and wells, and a quiet white mosque above it, and places where the goats and sheep used to graze, and the children played. I think the men, standing at the narrow slits of the fortress walls, must have been able to smell the cooking of the women in the palaces behind them, and perhaps hear their children’s voices shouting at play, and the sound of the women praying for them in the mosque only a few hundred feet above them on the hill, as they shot their long bows at the attacking enemy. I could see windows in the palaces that looked out upon the moat below, and I could really understand how these soldiers would fight to the death when they had their whole life right there behind them, put to the sword. It reminded me of the chapter in the Iliad when Achilles gets ready to fight, and he takes up the great shield that Hephaestus had made for him, and on that shield are pastoral scenes, and battle scenes, and villages, and palaces – all of Greek life is there, staked upon Achilles’s battle. And I remember reading what one of the Mughal kings had said about Agra: ‘If there is a heaven upon earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.”
Excerpted from An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 by Wendy Doniger. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025.
Wendy Doniger continues to write and lecture on Hinduism, mythology, and comparative religion. She lives in the United States.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
