Photo: Alamy Stock PhotoSix weeks into her first visit, Wendy Doniger realized that “it is not necessary to love everything about India in order to love India.” A precocious judge of herself and her surroundings, Ms. Doniger was only 22, just out of Radcliffe College, and had traveled to Calcutta to study Bengali and Sanskrit. The year was 1963, and the India of that time was a “happy and innocent” place. It had not yet been “darkened,” Ms. Doniger writes in “An American Girl in India,” by the rise of a “jingoistic and repressive Hindu theocracy.”

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Persons: Wendy Doniger, ”, Doniger, Ms Organizations: Radcliffe College Locations: India, Calcutta, “, American