Internationally acclaimed Sanskrit scholar and author Wendy Doniger was famously at the receiving end of an egg thrown by an enraged Hindu at a London lecture in 2003. Since then, she has continued to infuriate the Hindutva brigade with her unorthodox views on Hinduism and its sacred texts, earning for herself the epithet: “crude, lewd and very rude in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit academics”. Undeterred, Doniger has gone on to write a learned and rambunctious 780-page opus, The Hindus: An Alternative History, which is out this week in its Indian edition. Some excerpts of an interview with Sheela Reddy: