An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections Twenty-two-year-oldWendy Doniger arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country. Over the coming year—a lot of it spent inTagores Shantiniketan—she would fall completely in love with the place she had till then known only through books. The India she describes in her letters back home to her parents is young, like her, still finding its feet, and learning to come to terms with the violence of Partition. But it is also a mature civilization which allowsVishnu to be depicted on.