J. GONDA LECTURES

Speaker: Wendy Doniger
Title of the lecture: Masquerading Mothers and False Fathers in
Ancient Indian Mythology.
Place: KNAW building, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam
Date: 29 October, 1993
Time: 16.00 p.m.

The American indologist Wendy Doniger, who has been invited to
give the first J. Gonda lecture. The Gonda fund has been
established in 1993 under the auspices of the Royal Dutch Academy
of Arts and Sciences and has the task of administering the
inheritance bequeathed to the Academy by the Sanskritist and
indologist Professor J. Gonda who died last year.
Doniger has published several books in the field of Indology,
e.g. a translation of the 108 hymns of the Rig Veda (Penguin
Classics). Other well-known studies by her in the field of Hindu
mythology are "Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts"
(1980), "Dreams, Illusions, and other Realities" (1984), "Tales
of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and the danger in
Jaiminiya Brahmana" (1985) and " 'Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave
of Echoes" (1988).

Wendy Doniger studied Sanskrit and Indology at Harvard Universi-
ty, and Oriental Culture at Oxford University. She has lectured
at the universities of Havard, Oxford, London and Berkeley. At
the moment she holds the Micrea Eliade Chair of the History of
Religions at the University of Chicago. In 1984 she was elected
as chairman of the American Academy of Religion and in 1989 she
became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In her lecture 'Masquerading Mothers and False Fathers in Ancient
Indian Mythology' Wendy Doniger will examine in detail the
history of the old Indian myth of the masquerading parents. This
myth is already present in the earliest Indian text, the Rig
Veda, in which it is related that the sun god is abandoned by his
wife, who leaves behind a surrogate of herself; this surrogate
gives birth to twins, Yama and Manu, the ancestors of the human
race. All the heroes in the famous epic Mahabharata descend from
these surrogate parents, with all the tragic consequences this
entails. Wendy Doniger will treat the implications of the myth
from a theological and psychological point of view.

For further information contact:
The secretariat of the Stichting J. Gonda-fonds
Antwoordnummer 10785, 1000 RA Amsterdam.