I feel at home in Hindu temples. I like how complicated they are. Being in a great Hindu temple is like being in a forest. You can wander around all … - Wendy Doniger

It (1973) also happened to be the year when her first major work in early India's religious history, viz., Siva, the Erotic Ascetic was published and had instantly become a talking point for being a path-breaking work. I still prescribe it as the most essential reading to my postgraduate students at the University of Delhi, where I have been teaching a compulsory course on 'Evolution of Indian Religions' for the last nearly four decades. It was the beginning of series of extremely fruitful and provocative encounters with the formidable scholarship of Wendy Doniger.

So I agree with a lot of Hindu mythology and theology, and I think Hinduism describes life better than any other religion. It has a vision of the universe that corresponds more closely to the universe I've glimpsed in my 68 years on this planet than other visions of the universe.

Doniger makes clear that no history focused on an imperial centre can capture the history of the Hindus here, any more than could such a state-focused story in the days before the arrival of the Muslims. But at the same time, the very structure of her presentation points also to the import-ance of the state as a locus for understanding how the history of the Hindus depends also on an engagement with broader currents of historical change extending outside India and linking this history to larger, worldwide processes.