I was under the benign influence of “Gates of the Lord,” the Art Institute’s exhibit of traditional Krishna paintings by Pushtimarg artists, when Wendy Doniger’s high-profile troubles popped into mind.
Last year, that cover, and some of the content of her book, put Doniger at the center of an international literary brouhaha sparked by Dinanath Batra—a former teacher who’d successfully campaigned against other books, as well as sex education in Indian schools—and other Hindu fundamentalists who didn’t find Doniger’s book chaste enough. The book had been the target of multiple lawsuits since it was published in India in 2010; Batra alleged that it violated an Indian law (Article 295a) that makes it a crime to deliberately “outrage” anyone’s religious sensibilities.
As I made my way through the scalloped arches and intimately-lit galleries of the Art Institute show (mounted with major funding from the charitable arm of Indian corporate giant Reliance Industries), I wondered if anything had changed for Doniger. As it turns out, it had.
“There’s a split right now in Hinduism,” Doniger told me in a phone conversation last week. “The Indian government, which is right-wing and fundamentalist, only approves of a certain, narrow band of all that Hinduism is—a sanitized version that excludes reference to anything erotic. But for centuries, Hinduism has had a great deal of eroticism built into it.”
