Bøker av Wendy Doniger

The earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas, and the first extensive composition to survive in any Indo-European language, the Rig Veda (c. 1200-900 BC) is a collection of over 1,000 individual Sanskrit hymns. A work of intricate beauty, it provides a unique insight into early Indian mythology, religion and culture. This selection of 108 of the hymns, chosen for their eloquence and wisdom, focuses on the enduring themes of creation, sacrifice, death, women, the sacred plant soma and the gods. Inspirational and profound, it provides a fascinating introduction to one of the founding texts of Hindu scripture - an awesome and venerable ancient work of Vedic ritual, prayer, philosophy, legend and faith.

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country. Over the coming year--a lot of it spent in Tagore's Shantiniketan--she would fall completely in love with the place she had till then known only through books.The India she describes in her letters back home to her parents is young, like her, still finding its feet, and learning to come to terms with the violence of Partition. But it is also a mature civilization which allows Vishnu to be depicted on the walls in a temple to Shiva; a culture of contradictions where extreme eroticism is tied to extreme chastity; and a land of the absurd where sociable station masters don't let train schedules come in the way of hospitality. The country comes alive though her vivid prose, introspective and yet playful, and her excitement is on full display whether she is telling of the paradoxes of Indian life.

Brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the items in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people get into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands.

Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, this text recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India. The comparisons show that differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture.

Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventy-five seminal myths are the many incarnations of Vishnu, who saves mankind from destruction, and the mischievous child Krishna, alongside stories of the minor gods, demons, rivers and animals including boars, buffalo, serpents and monkeys. Immensely varied and bursting with colour and life, they demonstrate the Hindu belief in the limitless possibilities of the world - from the teeming miracles of creation to the origins of the incarnation of Death who eventually touches them all.