An American Girl in India

An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections by Wendy Doniger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Her patronizing tone may be excused, given that her reminiscences are written in the Sixties. However, she does have some startling observations

Well, Delhi is a Muslim town anyway, and being a Hindu I was glad to leave it.

Her quirky take on the contrast between Islamic architecture and Hindu temples

The Taj, for instance, is marvellous, but it belongs in a Persian garden, not in the irregular splendour of the plains of Agra…In photographs, the Hindu temples look a little silly and sort of bulgy, but in India they are breath-taking. They melt into the land like tigers in the jungles, grasshoppers on leaves. They are the colour of land, and the shape of the land, sandstone and granite, not perilously imported marble…They are made of gods, as well as being the houses of gods.

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