Respecting the elephant

I would not go so far as some who would insist that a Hindu is not the person to ask about Hinduism, as Harvard professor Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to Nabokov's bid for chairmanship of the Russian literature department: "I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of zoology?"

That is from Wendy Doniger's new and noteworthy The Hindus: An Alternative History.  Here is a favorable Michael Dirda review of the book.  Read the Wikipedia section on "Criticism" of Wendy Doniger, some of it from fundamentalist Hindus.  Here is a defense of Doniger.