: ‘The Sanskrit texts divided horses into castes, just as they divided people’: Wendy Doniger #IndiaNEWS Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions,

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‘The Sanskrit texts divided horses into castes, just as they divided people’: Wendy Doniger #IndiaNEWS
Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions, also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College, at the University of Chicago. In a career spanning more than half a century, she has authored over 40 books, many of them on the history and religious past of India. Her latest book, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, has recently been published in India. Excerpts from an interview:Indian mythology is replete with tales of horses, in various roles, guises and avatars. This is intriguing, given that horses are not indigenous to India, and have never been a feature of the countryside, unlike in Europe. Could the fact that horses were so expensive, elitist, and out of bounds for the common man have played a role in the proliferation of horse myths throughout Indian history?The fact that horses were not part of the real life of most people in India did, I think, inspire a more mythological and less realistic approach to them in the realm of art, and also made them seem magical and full of incomparable power and generally fantastic in every sense of the word.Sometimes it made the stories about...Read more

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