Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History.

• Author: Sojkova, Barbora

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History. By WENDY DONIGER. Charlottesville: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS, 2021. Pp. 300. $35.

In 1978 J A OS (98.4) published Wendy Doniger's paper, "Contributions to an Equine Lexicology. with Special Reference to Frogs," which started with the sentence "In the course of preparing a book on ancient Indian horsemanship..." Little did readers of JAOS (and perhaps Doniger herself) know that the preparation of the advertised book would span a large part of her career--over forty years--and that it might be her last book altogether (as she suggested in the podcast. New Books in Indian Religions, October 5, 2021). Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, however, was worth the forty-year wait. It is an inspiring and lively publication that tells the story of an animal that, although not an indigenous species of the Indian subcontinent and not well adapted to its environment, has captivated the fantasy of its inhabitants for millennia.

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares is not the largest of her books (the text itself is just over 200 pages long) but it seems to be, in a sense, the culmination of Doniger's career, linking her lifelong passion for horses with Indian history and storytelling. The deep personal connection to both of the subjects is noticeable throughout the book and makes it a pleasure to read. As always. Doniger writes with ease (and without diacritics), which suggests that the book is aimed not only at Indologists but also at a wider audience, including what she calls the "horsey people."

To a certain extent the book is an annex of Doniger's famous take on Indian history, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009). Just like The Hindus, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares follows a similar format of "a pointillist collage, a kaleidoscope, made of small, often discontinuous fragments" (Hindus, p. 8). The Hindus is meant to be an alternative account of Indian history that gives a voice to groups of beings traditionally underrepresented in the Indian literature: women, non-Sanskrit-speaking communities, lower classes, and animals. Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares continues this trend, narrowing the focus to a single phenomenon--the horse--and its variations throughout Indian history.

The book consists of thirteen chapters, arranged in a roughly chronological order. The initial chapter, "Horses in Indian Nature and Culture," is possibly the most important part of the book, as Doniger provides zoological facts about Indian...