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Dr. Jai Maharaj
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 Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:45 am Post subject: THE INTERPRETATION OF GODS |
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The interpretation of gods
By Amy M. Braverman
Photography by Dan Dry
The University of Chicago Magazine
Do leading religious scholars err in their analysis of
Hindu texts?
[Caption] Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.
Photo: Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.
Wendy Doniger didn>t see the egg fly past her head, but she
heard it splatter against the wall behind her. Continuing a
November 2003 University of London lecture on the Hindu
Ramayan text, Doniger looked down, thinking perhaps she>d
broken her water glass against the podium. When an audience
member shouted, "It>s an egg!" she turned and saw the
trickle of raw goop. The man who>d thrown the ovoid missile
quickly exited the room.
During a post-talk discussion, an Indian woman took the
microphone and quietly read a series of questions that
went, as Doniger recalls: "From what psychoanalytic
institution do you have your degree?"
"None," she replied.
"Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?"
"No."
"Then why do you think you have the right to psychoanalyze
Hindu texts?"
They were questions that Doniger, the Mircea Eliade
distinguished service professor of the history of
religions, had heard before. At the November 2000 American
Academy of Religion (AAR) annual meeting in Nashville, her
former students marked her 60th birthday by producing a
Festschrift, Notes From a Mandala, filled with essays
assessing the state of Indology. A panel discussed the
impact that her teaching (at Chicago since 1978) and
scholarship (more than 20 books written, edited, and
translated) has had on religious studies. During the after-
panel Q & A a man raised his hand. Doniger called on him,
and he asked her the same questions the softspoken woman
repeated three years later in London.
Photo: The interpretation of the gods
The man was Rajiv Malhotra, an entrepreneur and activist
living in New Jersey. Malhotra, who studied physics at
India>s St. Stephens College and computer science at
Syracuse University, now works full time at the Infinity
Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1995 to "upgrade the
quality of understanding of Indian civilization in the
American media and educational system, as well as among the
English language educated Indian elite."
Malhotra remembers the Nashville exchange differently than
Doniger does. As he recounts in a 2002 online essay,
"Wendy>s Child Syndrome": "I...stood up and asked: Since
you have psychoanalyzed Hinduism and created a whole new
genre of scholarship, do you think it would be a good idea
for someone to psychoanalyze you, because an insight into
your subconscious would make your work more interesting and
understandable?
"[S]he replied that there was nothing new that any
psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not
hidden anything. I...stated that most clients also tell
their psychoanalysts that they have nothing hidden in their
mental basement, but that such clients are precisely the
most interesting persons to psychoanalyze. She...took it
well, and said, ‘You got me on this one.' I...predict[ed]
that research on her own private psychology would get done
in the next several years, and that it would become
important some day to psychoanalyze many other Western
scholars also, since they superimpose their personal and
cultural conditioning on their research about other
peoples."
His 23,591-word (including 91 footnotes) essay, published
on the Indian–community Web site Sulekha.com, has become a
pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western
Hinduism scholars -- many of whom teach or have studied at
Chicago -- and some conservative Hindus in India, the
United States, and elsewhere. Since G. M. Carstairs>s 1958
book The Twice-Born (Hogarth Press) scholars have noted
Freudian themes in old Indian texts and stories, arguing,
for example, that the god Ganesha can be read as having an
Oedipus complex. More recently, with the Internet>s help,
the Hindu diaspora -- about 2 million in the United States,
according to the Hindu American Foundation -- has become
better organized. Some members have begun to protest that
Western scholars distort their religion and perpetuate
negative stereotypes. They>ve raised questions about who
should teach and interpret their texts, whether it>s
appropriate to apply psychoanalysis and other Western
constructs to South Asian culture, whether there is one
correct way to teach religion, and how Hindus are portrayed
in the West.
In two years Malhotra>s essay received more than 22,000
hits and generated 445 comments (several by Malhotra
himself) and two response essays. Most readers agreed with
his conclusion: "Rights of individual scholars must be
balanced against rights of cultures and communities they
portray, especially minorities that often face
intimidation. Scholars should criticize but not define
another>s religion." Other readers took their anger
farther, calling for the scholars' resignations, sending
hate mail, tossing eggs, or issuing death threats. The
adamant, at times violent responses parallel a political
movement in India, where conservative Hindu nationalists
have gained power since the early 1990s. Though Malhotra>s
academic targets say he has some valid discussion points,
they also argue that his rhetoric taps into the rightward
trend and attempts to silence unorthodox, especially
Western, views.
For instance, in "Wendy>s Child Syndrome" Malhotra condemns
"the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, who is un-
doubtedly the most powerful person in academic Hinduism
Studies today," and "her large cult of students, who
glorify her in exchange for her mentorship." He notes that
religious studies -- a field that teaches about a religion
without preaching its beliefs -- is rare in India, making
academic discussions of Hinduism a mostly Western
conversation. "Under Western control," he argues, "Hinduism
studies has produced ridiculous caricatures that could
easily be turned into a Bollywood movie or a TV serial."
He cites, among others, two books for which Doniger wrote
the forewords: Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of
Beginnings (Oxford University Press, 1985), by Emory
University interim religion department chair Paul B.
Courtright, and Kali>s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic
in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (University of
Chicago Press, 1995), by Rice University religious studies
chair Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD>93.
Malhotra also quotes Harvard South Asian studies chair
Michael E. J. Witzel, who has questioned Doniger>s Sanskrit
translations and her proclivity for finding sexual meanings
in ancient texts. Doniger, who was named Martin Marty
Center director this year and whose appointments span the
Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages &
Civilizations, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean
World and Social Thought, and the College, knows that her
work, including a retranslation of the Kamasutra (Oxford,
2002), can be controversial. "If people think sexuality is
a shameful thing, then it>s embarrassing for them to have
the texts that talk about it discussed," she says. "A
Sanskrit word can have ten different meanings. A translator
must choose, based on her knowledge of the context.
Choosing the sexual meaning," she continues, "is not
incorrect if that is one of the attested meanings. It>s a
matter of, Did the author mean that? You can make a
judgment, and another person can argue and say you chose
the wrong meaning."
After Malhotra>s essay hit the Web Doniger received a dozen
negative e-mails. One person asked, "Were you raped as a
child? Is that why you write such things?" At first, she
says, she responded. When a critic argued, "Everything
you>ve written about Hinduism is incorrect. You must have
bought your degree from Harvard," she asked to which books
the protester was referring. "I would never read anything
you>ve written," came the reply. At that point, she
thought, "That>s it. This is not a serious discussion," and
she stopped answering such messages and reading the online
debates. After last year>s egg incident she canceled a
lecture in Bombay.
Emory>s Courtright, meanwhile, faced harsher threats. His
book, Ganesa, received little attention outside academia
when it was first published in 1985. In it he uses several
methods to interpret the story of Ganesha, the god created
by his mother, the goddess Parvati, to guard the door while
she bathed. When her husband, Shiva, came home to a
stranger blocking the way to his wife, he beheaded Ganesha.
Pavarti protested, so Shiva brought him back to life and
replaced his head with that of an elephant. On page 103 of
his book Courtright includes a psychoanalytic
interpretation -- "It would have been odd if I hadn>t done
so," he said in a Divinity School lecture this past April -
- noting the story>s oedipal theme of father-son
confrontation and its alternative conclusion of the son
being wounded rather than the father. He compares Ganesha,
who is celibate in most versions, to a eunuch who stands at
a harem doorway. And previous scholars, Courtright writes,
have called Ganesha>s broken tusk and his trunk phallic
symbols.
"I was approaching this story," he said, "as belonging to
the public domain, not just Hindus." Some Hindus, however,
didn>t see it that way. After Ganesa>s second edition in
2001 and Malhotra>s essay in 2002, the University of
Louisiana, Lafayette, Hindu Student Council collected 7,000
signatures on an Internet petition asking for a public
apology, a recall of the book, and a new version changing
parts the group found offensive. In India, where the
conservative, recently defeated Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) was still in power, the book was withdrawn from
bookstores. Courtright received hate mail, including some
threats. "You will get what you deserve from Lord Ganesha,"
one read. "He should be tortured alive until he turns to
ash," went another.
This past February eight members of a local Hindu
organization, the Concerned Community of Atlanta, met with
Emory College dean Robert Paul, AM>66, PhD>70, and other
faculty. The group wanted the school to "reiterate their
feelings of insult," classify his interpretations "as acts
of racial insensitivity," have Courtright issue an apology,
remove him from teaching Hinduism courses, and "find Hindu
scholars to teach Hinduism." After the meeting Paul wrote a
letter explaining that Courtright>s book was not meant "to
offend or provoke but to explore hidden connections." He
noted that using psychoanalysis was "widely controversial
but widely accepted as scholarly work of good faith." The
group wrote back to say they weren>t satisfied, but the
conflict has faded a bit since then.
"These things have a shelf life," Courtright says in a
November interview. "It>s moved on." Still, Malhotra and
his cohorts are "building a general case that American
scholars of Hinduism are anti-Hindu," he contends. Recently
on Malhotra>s radar screen, Courtright notes, is David
White, AM>81, PhD>88, University of California–Santa
Barbara religious studies chair. White>s book Kiss of the
Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago,
2003), Malhotra argues in a May Svabhinava.org entry,
contends that the Hindu tantra tradition "was intended as
South Asian decadent sexuality, without spiritual purpose,
and that this decadence was the result of sociological
suffering of Indian subaltern (lower castes) in classical
times." On the same Web site White>s former student Jeffrey
S. Lidke counters that the writer "does not reduce the
origins of tantra to anything other than the sphere of
religion" and that rather than "decadent," tantric sex in
White>s account "was a primary means by which yogins and
yoginis ultimately became immortal."
Malhotra also argues that U.S. Hinduism scholars actively
promote each other>s work. "You scratch my back, and I>ll
scratch yours -- this seems to be the modus operandi of
this cult of scholars," he writes. To Courtright, though,
the academic study of Hinduism "works like anything else":
an author submits a book to a publisher, the publisher
sends the text to expert scholars for review, and "on the
basis of those opinions they>ll make a decision on whether
to publish it." The idea, he says, "that we all somehow get
in a room and figure out who we>re going to publish and who
we>re going to screw over is ridiculous." photo: The
interpretation of the gods
While Courtright has answered critics in lectures and
essays, Rice>s Kripal has gone further, writing a new
introduction to Kali>s Child, fixing translation errors,
publishing several essays including a Sulekha.com response
to "Wendy>s Child Syndrome," and setting up a Web site
(www.ruf.rice.edu/~kalischi/) explaining his side of the
story. In Kali>s Child, which won the AAR>s 1996 award for
best first book in the history of religions, he analyzes an
original Bengali text to glean new information about the
19th-century saint Ramakrishna, an important figure in
modern Hinduism known for experiencing ecstatic states and
visions and for inspiring the Ramakrishna Order. The title
refers to the goddess Kali, whom Ramakrishna saw in his
visions. Kripal translates one passage as saying that
during his mystical experiences Ramakrishna often placed
his foot "‘in the lap' (kole) -- that is, on the genitals -
- of a young boy disciple." Interpreting that line and
others through the lenses of both psychoanalysis and Hindu
tantra, Kripal argues that the saint>s ecstasies were
driven by "mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully
accepted nor understood." In fact, Kripal writes, the
experiences were "profoundly, provocatively, scandalously
erotic," and Ramakrishna harbored unconscious "homoerotic"
desires for "young, beautiful boys."
Malhotra slams Kripal>s "scandalous conclusions," his
command of Bengali, and his psychological motivations. But
he wasn>t the first to criticize the book. In January 1997
Calcutta>s English-language daily the Statesman published a
full-page negative review, generating a flurry of even
angrier letters to the editor and further media attention.
"It morphed into a ban movement. The central government got
involved," and, he says, India>s Central Bureau of
Investigation started a file on him.
Two Ramakrishna Order reviewers pointed out translation
errors -- Swami Atmajnanananda (born Stuart Elkman) in the
International Journal of Hindu Studies and Swami Tyagananda
in a self-published and online article. Kripal printed
apologies and fixed the errors flagged in time for the 1998
second edition. Mistakes found after the new edition, he
says, "are all minor and can be changed easily without
changing the thesis." Several items criticized as errors,
he argues, "are issues of interpretation, not translation
per se."
In spring 2001 another ban movement germinated in India,
this time escalating beyond the papers and into the upper
house of Parliament, where it failed -- not because Kali>s
Child wasn>t offensive, according to newspaper accounts,
but because "it would have given undue publicity" to the
book. Then a letter-writing campaign tried to block his
2002 tenure at Rice. And though many readers liked the book
-- "I have received hundreds of appreciative letters, some
from spiritual leaders, scholarly reviews that are
extremely enthusiastic, and numerous enthusiastic responses
from Hindu readers" -- Kripal has "pretty much spent the
last eight years responding to these critics."
His response included another book, Roads of Excess,
Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study
of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001), which is "one long argument
that most mystical traditions are homoerotic," he says.
There he applies "the same methods of Kali>s Child to
Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, to the lives of
Western scholars, and to my own life and thought, including
my own experience of being psychoanalyzed." In other words,
he argues, it isn>t only in Hinduism but in many religions
that Western scholars see hidden, often sexual, meanings.
ALTHOUGH ACADEMICS FREQUENTLY INTERPRET religions through a
sexual lens (see, for example, Theodore W. Jennings Jr.'s
The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New
Testament [Pilgrim Press, 2003]), for some Hindus such
scholarship has hit a sensitive chord. Online writers
complain that psychoanalysis has been discredited in
psychology, and applying it implies that Hindus are "sick."
But "historians of religion are not doing therapy; they>re
interpreting texts," Kripal argues. "A model can be
accurate and therapeutically unhelpful" (though for him
personally, he says, psychoanalysis has been an effective
therapy). "People use psychoanalysis or Foucault because
it>s the most sophisticated language we have in the West to
talk about the questions we have." In Kali>s Child, he
says, he doesn>t apply a strict Freudian analysis but also
interprets Ramakrishna>s story through the Hindu tantric
tradition. "Both are languages," he says, "that turn to
sexuality as the key to human religious experience."
Even so, many Jewish or Christian studies scholars were
born into the religion they study, giving them, as Barnard
College religion professor John Stratton Hawley puts it,
"some sort of perceived right to speak. That>s not the case
for people like us [Doniger, Kripal, Courtright, himself]
who have come to Hinduism only later in life."
Hawley, who also has scuffled with Malhotra, acknowledges
the need for more Hindus in the field. "As a secular
academic discipline, religious studies scarcely exists in
India," he notes. "What theology meant in the British
academy was Christian studies." Hence India>s educational
landscape is different than in the United States. Although
students of Indian descent often take up history,
literature, anthropology, or the sciences, "that hasn>t
happened in religion. It>s going to take a generation for
people who are Hindu by background to enter religious
studies in large numbers." Meanwhile, Hawley says, "newly
immigrant families have encouraged sons and daughters to
enter fields that seem more meaningful, more mainstream" --
not to mention more lucrative. So while few Hindus have
gone into religious studies, "the injustice isn>t caused by
someone like me, but by the long history of what has
happened. We train Hindus to enter the field alongside non-
Hindus, and are very eager to do so. It takes time for the
numbers to even out on the other side of the Ph.D."
It>s a problem Malhotra also laments. In "Wendy>s Child
Syndrome" he notes that "a peculiar brand of ‘secularism'
has prevented academic religious studies from entering
[India>s] education system in a serious manner." Therefore,
unlike other religions, he writes in an e-mail interview,
"there is a lack of Indic perspective that would...provide
equivalent counter balance" to Western scholars' theories,
creating an "asymmetric discourse." Further, he says, most
of the Hinduism scholars are "either whites or Indians
under the control of whites. One does not find Arabs,
Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, etc., engaged in this kind of
Hinduphobia racket." He>s begun to research "whiteness
studies," which analyzes the "anthropology of white culture
and uncovers their myths. ... I am researching issues such
as white culture>s Biblical based homophobia, deeply
ingrained guilt of sex (Garden of Eden episode) and
condemnation of the body. ... I posit that many white
scholars are driven into Hinduism studies by their own
private voyeurism or fantasy, or an attempted escape from
white culture>s restrictions. This is what I earlier called
Wendy>s Child Syndrome because my sample was a few of
Doniger>s students. But now the sample is much larger..."
The Indian/white, or insider/outsider, issue has been
debated in both academia and the Hindu community. In
September 2002 Sankrant Sanu, a former Microsoft manager
and freelance writer, argued in a Sulekha.com essay that
Microsoft>s online Encarta encyclopedia article on Hinduism
-- written by Doniger -- put forth "a distinctively
negative portrayal of Hinduism," especially when compared
to the entries on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Sanu
recommended that someone "emic" to the community rewrite
the Hinduism entry, as had been the case for the other
religions. Microsoft obliged, exchanging Doniger>s essay
with one by Arvind Sharma, a McGill University professor of
comparative religion.
For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought: An
Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray.
"Both the insider and the outsider see the truth," he
writes in an e-mail interview, "but genuine understanding
may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At
this intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the
icon of the god Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by
outsiders but rarely by Hindus themselves, or that the
Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic ritual to outsiders
but not to Christians." He continues, "If insiders and
outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions of
intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the
other>s bluff." photo: The interpretation of the gods
There>s a fine line, some scholars say, between legitimate
Hindu concerns and the right-wing political wave that has
recently hit India. Although Malhotra, for example,
condemns the violence and threats, he has acknowledged in a
Washington Post article that the Hindu right has
appropriated his arguments. Just as he points to certain
Western academics, arguing they perpetuate what he calls
the "caste, cows, curry, dowry" stereotypes, in India, says
Vijay Prashad, AM>90, PhD>94, a Trinity College assistant
professor of international studies, "the Hindu right has
taken education as an important field of political battle,"
trying, for instance, to install conservative textbooks in
schools.
Malhotra>s goal is to "rebrand India," says Prashad, a
self-described Marxist who studied history and
anthropology, not religious studies, at Chicago, and who
has debated Malhotra in online forums. But "scholars, to
me, are not in the business of branding." Malhotra and
others "have created the idea that there is one Indic
thought," Prashad says, but "there are so many schools of
thought within Hinduism."
He does, however, agree with Malhotra about Western
educational institutions. "The U.S. academy is totally
insular," he says. "We don>t engage the public often
enough." Religious-studies professors, he argues, should
write editorials and otherwise engage the public as often
as political scientists. "The oxygen in public opinion is
being sucked by people like Rajiv [Malhotra]. He>s the only
one pressing so hard. He uses that silence to say that
people are arrogant and they don>t have any answers."
For Doniger it>s a matter of considering multiple
explanations. Both Courtright and Kripal, she says,
"applied psychoanalysis in a limited way, and they found
something that is worth thinking about. They said this
could be one of the things that>s going on here, not the
only thing." She understands that Indians are sensitive to
postcolonial threats to their culture. "For many years
Europeans wrote anything they wanted and took anything they
wanted from India," she says. "Even now so much of Indian
culture is influenced by American political and economic
domination. And India is quite right to object to that."
The protesters, however, have transferred that concern to
an intellectual level, arguing "that Western scholars have
pushed out Indian views the same way Coca-Cola has pushed
out Indian products." But, she argues, "it>s a false model
to juxtapose intellectual goods with economic ones. I don>t
feel I diminish Indian texts by writing about or
interpreting them. My books have a right to exist alongside
other books."
Though Doniger often (but not always) focuses on sexuality,
the current protests derive from more than a Victorian
sense of decorum, says Prashad. The issue seeps deeper, he
says, stemming from the Hindu right>s "protofascist views."
Recent events demonstrate the lengths to which some
nationalists have taken their protests. This past January a
group looted India>s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
because it was where James W. Laine, Macalester College>s
humanities dean, had researched his book Shivaji: Hindu
King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003) -- which suggests that
the revered parents of Shivaji, a Hindu nationalist icon,
may have been estranged. A month earlier another group
attacked Indian historian Shrikant Bahulkar, tarring his
face, because Laine had thanked him in his
acknowledgements.
Though such violence hasn>t occurred in the United States,
Western scholars have felt the effects of India>s new
politics. In her Hyde Park home Doniger displays her Indian
art collection -- colorful tapestries, bronze sculptures
including dozens of Ganeshas, and paintings adorn every
surface. "A lot of these things you couldn>t buy in India
now," she says, noting that some pieces she bought in the
1960s have become antiques, which today India, like many
countries, protects from exportation. But unlike art, ideas
don>t get stopped at the border.
More at:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0412/features/index.shtml
Jai Maharaj
http://tinyurl.com/24fq83
http://www.mantra.com/jai
http://www.mantra.com/jyotish
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
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harmony
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 4:00 am Post subject: Re: THE INTERPRETATION OF GODS |
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|
it surprises me no more that anybody brought up in mono culture can never
understand hindu sanskara. and it matters little whether that person is
brown mono grown up around hindus s/he may see everyday in india or monos
half a globe away. the american academia is illserved by monos pretneding to
be hindu scholars.
<usenet@mantra.com and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj)> wrote in
message news:20081014Y9W297F3L15r1q3C70Lk9G7@A66h7...
[quote]The interpretation of gods
By Amy M. Braverman
Photography by Dan Dry
The University of Chicago Magazine
Do leading religious scholars err in their analysis of
Hindu texts?
[Caption] Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.
Photo: Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.
Wendy Doniger didn>t see the egg fly past her head, but she
heard it splatter against the wall behind her. Continuing a
November 2003 University of London lecture on the Hindu
Ramayan text, Doniger looked down, thinking perhaps she>d
broken her water glass against the podium. When an audience
member shouted, "It>s an egg!" she turned and saw the
trickle of raw goop. The man who>d thrown the ovoid missile
quickly exited the room.
During a post-talk discussion, an Indian woman took the
microphone and quietly read a series of questions that
went, as Doniger recalls: "From what psychoanalytic
institution do you have your degree?"
"None," she replied.
"Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?"
"No."
"Then why do you think you have the right to psychoanalyze
Hindu texts?"
They were questions that Doniger, the Mircea Eliade
distinguished service professor of the history of
religions, had heard before. At the November 2000 American
Academy of Religion (AAR) annual meeting in Nashville, her
former students marked her 60th birthday by producing a
Festschrift, Notes From a Mandala, filled with essays
assessing the state of Indology. A panel discussed the
impact that her teaching (at Chicago since 1978) and
scholarship (more than 20 books written, edited, and
translated) has had on religious studies. During the after-
panel Q & A a man raised his hand. Doniger called on him,
and he asked her the same questions the softspoken woman
repeated three years later in London.
Photo: The interpretation of the gods
The man was Rajiv Malhotra, an entrepreneur and activist
living in New Jersey. Malhotra, who studied physics at
India>s St. Stephens College and computer science at
Syracuse University, now works full time at the Infinity
Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1995 to "upgrade the
quality of understanding of Indian civilization in the
American media and educational system, as well as among the
English language educated Indian elite."
Malhotra remembers the Nashville exchange differently than
Doniger does. As he recounts in a 2002 online essay,
"Wendy>s Child Syndrome": "I...stood up and asked: Since
you have psychoanalyzed Hinduism and created a whole new
genre of scholarship, do you think it would be a good idea
for someone to psychoanalyze you, because an insight into
your subconscious would make your work more interesting and
understandable?
"[S]he replied that there was nothing new that any
psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not
hidden anything. I...stated that most clients also tell
their psychoanalysts that they have nothing hidden in their
mental basement, but that such clients are precisely the
most interesting persons to psychoanalyze. She...took it
well, and said, 'You got me on this one.' I...predict[ed]
that research on her own private psychology would get done
in the next several years, and that it would become
important some day to psychoanalyze many other Western
scholars also, since they superimpose their personal and
cultural conditioning on their research about other
peoples."
His 23,591-word (including 91 footnotes) essay, published
on the Indian-community Web site Sulekha.com, has become a
pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western
Hinduism scholars -- many of whom teach or have studied at
Chicago -- and some conservative Hindus in India, the
United States, and elsewhere. Since G. M. Carstairs>s 1958
book The Twice-Born (Hogarth Press) scholars have noted
Freudian themes in old Indian texts and stories, arguing,
for example, that the god Ganesha can be read as having an
Oedipus complex. More recently, with the Internet>s help,
the Hindu diaspora -- about 2 million in the United States,
according to the Hindu American Foundation -- has become
better organized. Some members have begun to protest that
Western scholars distort their religion and perpetuate
negative stereotypes. They>ve raised questions about who
should teach and interpret their texts, whether it>s
appropriate to apply psychoanalysis and other Western
constructs to South Asian culture, whether there is one
correct way to teach religion, and how Hindus are portrayed
in the West.
In two years Malhotra>s essay received more than 22,000
hits and generated 445 comments (several by Malhotra
himself) and two response essays. Most readers agreed with
his conclusion: "Rights of individual scholars must be
balanced against rights of cultures and communities they
portray, especially minorities that often face
intimidation. Scholars should criticize but not define
another>s religion." Other readers took their anger
farther, calling for the scholars' resignations, sending
hate mail, tossing eggs, or issuing death threats. The
adamant, at times violent responses parallel a political
movement in India, where conservative Hindu nationalists
have gained power since the early 1990s. Though Malhotra>s
academic targets say he has some valid discussion points,
they also argue that his rhetoric taps into the rightward
trend and attempts to silence unorthodox, especially
Western, views.
For instance, in "Wendy>s Child Syndrome" Malhotra condemns
"the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, who is un-
doubtedly the most powerful person in academic Hinduism
Studies today," and "her large cult of students, who
glorify her in exchange for her mentorship." He notes that
religious studies -- a field that teaches about a religion
without preaching its beliefs -- is rare in India, making
academic discussions of Hinduism a mostly Western
conversation. "Under Western control," he argues, "Hinduism
studies has produced ridiculous caricatures that could
easily be turned into a Bollywood movie or a TV serial."
He cites, among others, two books for which Doniger wrote
the forewords: Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of
Beginnings (Oxford University Press, 1985), by Emory
University interim religion department chair Paul B.
Courtright, and Kali>s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic
in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (University of
Chicago Press, 1995), by Rice University religious studies
chair Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD>93.
Malhotra also quotes Harvard South Asian studies chair
Michael E. J. Witzel, who has questioned Doniger>s Sanskrit
translations and her proclivity for finding sexual meanings
in ancient texts. Doniger, who was named Martin Marty
Center director this year and whose appointments span the
Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages &
Civilizations, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean
World and Social Thought, and the College, knows that her
work, including a retranslation of the Kamasutra (Oxford,
2002), can be controversial. "If people think sexuality is
a shameful thing, then it>s embarrassing for them to have
the texts that talk about it discussed," she says. "A
Sanskrit word can have ten different meanings. A translator
must choose, based on her knowledge of the context.
Choosing the sexual meaning," she continues, "is not
incorrect if that is one of the attested meanings. It>s a
matter of, Did the author mean that? You can make a
judgment, and another person can argue and say you chose
the wrong meaning."
After Malhotra>s essay hit the Web Doniger received a dozen
negative e-mails. One person asked, "Were you raped as a
child? Is that why you write such things?" At first, she
says, she responded. When a critic argued, "Everything
you>ve written about Hinduism is incorrect. You must have
bought your degree from Harvard," she asked to which books
the protester was referring. "I would never read anything
you>ve written," came the reply. At that point, she
thought, "That>s it. This is not a serious discussion," and
she stopped answering such messages and reading the online
debates. After last year>s egg incident she canceled a
lecture in Bombay.
Emory>s Courtright, meanwhile, faced harsher threats. His
book, Ganesa, received little attention outside academia
when it was first published in 1985. In it he uses several
methods to interpret the story of Ganesha, the god created
by his mother, the goddess Parvati, to guard the door while
she bathed. When her husband, Shiva, came home to a
stranger blocking the way to his wife, he beheaded Ganesha.
Pavarti protested, so Shiva brought him back to life and
replaced his head with that of an elephant. On page 103 of
his book Courtright includes a psychoanalytic
interpretation -- "It would have been odd if I hadn>t done
so," he said in a Divinity School lecture this past April -
- noting the story>s oedipal theme of father-son
confrontation and its alternative conclusion of the son
being wounded rather than the father. He compares Ganesha,
who is celibate in most versions, to a eunuch who stands at
a harem doorway. And previous scholars, Courtright writes,
have called Ganesha>s broken tusk and his trunk phallic
symbols.
"I was approaching this story," he said, "as belonging to
the public domain, not just Hindus." Some Hindus, however,
didn>t see it that way. After Ganesa>s second edition in
2001 and Malhotra>s essay in 2002, the University of
Louisiana, Lafayette, Hindu Student Council collected 7,000
signatures on an Internet petition asking for a public
apology, a recall of the book, and a new version changing
parts the group found offensive. In India, where the
conservative, recently defeated Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) was still in power, the book was withdrawn from
bookstores. Courtright received hate mail, including some
threats. "You will get what you deserve from Lord Ganesha,"
one read. "He should be tortured alive until he turns to
ash," went another.
This past February eight members of a local Hindu
organization, the Concerned Community of Atlanta, met with
Emory College dean Robert Paul, AM>66, PhD>70, and other
faculty. The group wanted the school to "reiterate their
feelings of insult," classify his interpretations "as acts
of racial insensitivity," have Courtright issue an apology,
remove him from teaching Hinduism courses, and "find Hindu
scholars to teach Hinduism." After the meeting Paul wrote a
letter explaining that Courtright>s book was not meant "to
offend or provoke but to explore hidden connections." He
noted that using psychoanalysis was "widely controversial
but widely accepted as scholarly work of good faith." The
group wrote back to say they weren>t satisfied, but the
conflict has faded a bit since then.
"These things have a shelf life," Courtright says in a
November interview. "It>s moved on." Still, Malhotra and
his cohorts are "building a general case that American
scholars of Hinduism are anti-Hindu," he contends. Recently
on Malhotra>s radar screen, Courtright notes, is David
White, AM>81, PhD>88, University of California-Santa
Barbara religious studies chair. White>s book Kiss of the
Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago,
2003), Malhotra argues in a May Svabhinava.org entry,
contends that the Hindu tantra tradition "was intended as
South Asian decadent sexuality, without spiritual purpose,
and that this decadence was the result of sociological
suffering of Indian subaltern (lower castes) in classical
times." On the same Web site White>s former student Jeffrey
S. Lidke counters that the writer "does not reduce the
origins of tantra to anything other than the sphere of
religion" and that rather than "decadent," tantric sex in
White>s account "was a primary means by which yogins and
yoginis ultimately became immortal."
Malhotra also argues that U.S. Hinduism scholars actively
promote each other>s work. "You scratch my back, and I>ll
scratch yours -- this seems to be the modus operandi of
this cult of scholars," he writes. To Courtright, though,
the academic study of Hinduism "works like anything else":
an author submits a book to a publisher, the publisher
sends the text to expert scholars for review, and "on the
basis of those opinions they>ll make a decision on whether
to publish it." The idea, he says, "that we all somehow get
in a room and figure out who we>re going to publish and who
we>re going to screw over is ridiculous." photo: The
interpretation of the gods
While Courtright has answered critics in lectures and
essays, Rice>s Kripal has gone further, writing a new
introduction to Kali>s Child, fixing translation errors,
publishing several essays including a Sulekha.com response
to "Wendy>s Child Syndrome," and setting up a Web site
(www.ruf.rice.edu/~kalischi/) explaining his side of the
story. In Kali>s Child, which won the AAR>s 1996 award for
best first book in the history of religions, he analyzes an
original Bengali text to glean new information about the
19th-century saint Ramakrishna, an important figure in
modern Hinduism known for experiencing ecstatic states and
visions and for inspiring the Ramakrishna Order. The title
refers to the goddess Kali, whom Ramakrishna saw in his
visions. Kripal translates one passage as saying that
during his mystical experiences Ramakrishna often placed
his foot "'in the lap' (kole) -- that is, on the genitals -
- of a young boy disciple." Interpreting that line and
others through the lenses of both psychoanalysis and Hindu
tantra, Kripal argues that the saint>s ecstasies were
driven by "mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully
accepted nor understood." In fact, Kripal writes, the
experiences were "profoundly, provocatively, scandalously
erotic," and Ramakrishna harbored unconscious "homoerotic"
desires for "young, beautiful boys."
Malhotra slams Kripal>s "scandalous conclusions," his
command of Bengali, and his psychological motivations. But
he wasn>t the first to criticize the book. In January 1997
Calcutta>s English-language daily the Statesman published a
full-page negative review, generating a flurry of even
angrier letters to the editor and further media attention.
"It morphed into a ban movement. The central government got
involved," and, he says, India>s Central Bureau of
Investigation started a file on him.
Two Ramakrishna Order reviewers pointed out translation
errors -- Swami Atmajnanananda (born Stuart Elkman) in the
International Journal of Hindu Studies and Swami Tyagananda
in a self-published and online article. Kripal printed
apologies and fixed the errors flagged in time for the 1998
second edition. Mistakes found after the new edition, he
says, "are all minor and can be changed easily without
changing the thesis." Several items criticized as errors,
he argues, "are issues of interpretation, not translation
per se."
In spring 2001 another ban movement germinated in India,
this time escalating beyond the papers and into the upper
house of Parliament, where it failed -- not because Kali>s
Child wasn>t offensive, according to newspaper accounts,
but because "it would have given undue publicity" to the
book. Then a letter-writing campaign tried to block his
2002 tenure at Rice. And though many readers liked the book
-- "I have received hundreds of appreciative letters, some
from spiritual leaders, scholarly reviews that are
extremely enthusiastic, and numerous enthusiastic responses
from Hindu readers" -- Kripal has "pretty much spent the
last eight years responding to these critics."
His response included another book, Roads of Excess,
Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study
of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001), which is "one long argument
that most mystical traditions are homoerotic," he says.
There he applies "the same methods of Kali>s Child to
Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, to the lives of
Western scholars, and to my own life and thought, including
my own experience of being psychoanalyzed." In other words,
he argues, it isn>t only in Hinduism but in many religions
that Western scholars see hidden, often sexual, meanings.
ALTHOUGH ACADEMICS FREQUENTLY INTERPRET religions through a
sexual lens (see, for example, Theodore W. Jennings Jr.'s
The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New
Testament [Pilgrim Press, 2003]), for some Hindus such
scholarship has hit a sensitive chord. Online writers
complain that psychoanalysis has been discredited in
psychology, and applying it implies that Hindus are "sick."
But "historians of religion are not doing therapy; they>re
interpreting texts," Kripal argues. "A model can be
accurate and therapeutically unhelpful" (though for him
personally, he says, psychoanalysis has been an effective
therapy). "People use psychoanalysis or Foucault because
it>s the most sophisticated language we have in the West to
talk about the questions we have." In Kali>s Child, he
says, he doesn>t apply a strict Freudian analysis but also
interprets Ramakrishna>s story through the Hindu tantric
tradition. "Both are languages," he says, "that turn to
sexuality as the key to human religious experience."
Even so, many Jewish or Christian studies scholars were
born into the religion they study, giving them, as Barnard
College religion professor John Stratton Hawley puts it,
"some sort of perceived right to speak. That>s not the case
for people like us [Doniger, Kripal, Courtright, himself]
who have come to Hinduism only later in life."
Hawley, who also has scuffled with Malhotra, acknowledges
the need for more Hindus in the field. "As a secular
academic discipline, religious studies scarcely exists in
India," he notes. "What theology meant in the British
academy was Christian studies." Hence India>s educational
landscape is different than in the United States. Although
students of Indian descent often take up history,
literature, anthropology, or the sciences, "that hasn>t
happened in religion. It>s going to take a generation for
people who are Hindu by background to enter religious
studies in large numbers." Meanwhile, Hawley says, "newly
immigrant families have encouraged sons and daughters to
enter fields that seem more meaningful, more mainstream" --
not to mention more lucrative. So while few Hindus have
gone into religious studies, "the injustice isn>t caused by
someone like me, but by the long history of what has
happened. We train Hindus to enter the field alongside non-
Hindus, and are very eager to do so. It takes time for the
numbers to even out on the other side of the Ph.D."
It>s a problem Malhotra also laments. In "Wendy>s Child
Syndrome" he notes that "a peculiar brand of 'secularism'
has prevented academic religious studies from entering
[India>s] education system in a serious manner." Therefore,
unlike other religions, he writes in an e-mail interview,
"there is a lack of Indic perspective that would...provide
equivalent counter balance" to Western scholars' theories,
creating an "asymmetric discourse." Further, he says, most
of the Hinduism scholars are "either whites or Indians
under the control of whites. One does not find Arabs,
Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, etc., engaged in this kind of
Hinduphobia racket." He>s begun to research "whiteness
studies," which analyzes the "anthropology of white culture
and uncovers their myths. ... I am researching issues such
as white culture>s Biblical based homophobia, deeply
ingrained guilt of sex (Garden of Eden episode) and
condemnation of the body. ... I posit that many white
scholars are driven into Hinduism studies by their own
private voyeurism or fantasy, or an attempted escape from
white culture>s restrictions. This is what I earlier called
Wendy>s Child Syndrome because my sample was a few of
Doniger>s students. But now the sample is much larger..."
The Indian/white, or insider/outsider, issue has been
debated in both academia and the Hindu community. In
September 2002 Sankrant Sanu, a former Microsoft manager
and freelance writer, argued in a Sulekha.com essay that
Microsoft>s online Encarta encyclopedia article on Hinduism
-- written by Doniger -- put forth "a distinctively
negative portrayal of Hinduism," especially when compared
to the entries on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Sanu
recommended that someone "emic" to the community rewrite
the Hinduism entry, as had been the case for the other
religions. Microsoft obliged, exchanging Doniger>s essay
with one by Arvind Sharma, a McGill University professor of
comparative religion.
For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought: An
Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray.
"Both the insider and the outsider see the truth," he
writes in an e-mail interview, "but genuine understanding
may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At
this intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the
icon of the god Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by
outsiders but rarely by Hindus themselves, or that the
Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic ritual to outsiders
but not to Christians." He continues, "If insiders and
outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions of
intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the
other>s bluff." photo: The interpretation of the gods
There>s a fine line, some scholars say, between legitimate
Hindu concerns and the right-wing political wave that has
recently hit India. Although Malhotra, for example,
condemns the violence and threats, he has acknowledged in a
Washington Post article that the Hindu right has
appropriated his arguments. Just as he points to certain
Western academics, arguing they perpetuate what he calls
the "caste, cows, curry, dowry" stereotypes, in India, says
Vijay Prashad, AM>90, PhD>94, a Trinity College assistant
professor of international studies, "the Hindu right has
taken education as an important field of political battle,"
trying, for instance, to install conservative textbooks in
schools.
Malhotra>s goal is to "rebrand India," says Prashad, a
self-described Marxist who studied history and
anthropology, not religious studies, at Chicago, and who
has debated Malhotra in online forums. But "scholars, to
me, are not in the business of branding." Malhotra and
others "have created the idea that there is one Indic
thought," Prashad says, but "there are so many schools of
thought within Hinduism."
He does, however, agree with Malhotra about Western
educational institutions. "The U.S. academy is totally
insular," he says. "We don>t engage the public often
enough." Religious-studies professors, he argues, should
write editorials and otherwise engage the public as often
as political scientists. "The oxygen in public opinion is
being sucked by people like Rajiv [Malhotra]. He>s the only
one pressing so hard. He uses that silence to say that
people are arrogant and they don>t have any answers."
For Doniger it>s a matter of considering multiple
explanations. Both Courtright and Kripal, she says,
"applied psychoanalysis in a limited way, and they found
something that is worth thinking about. They said this
could be one of the things that>s going on here, not the
only thing." She understands that Indians are sensitive to
postcolonial threats to their culture. "For many years
Europeans wrote anything they wanted and took anything they
wanted from India," she says. "Even now so much of Indian
culture is influenced by American political and economic
domination. And India is quite right to object to that."
The protesters, however, have transferred that concern to
an intellectual level, arguing "that Western scholars have
pushed out Indian views the same way Coca-Cola has pushed
out Indian products." But, she argues, "it>s a false model
to juxtapose intellectual goods with economic ones. I don>t
feel I diminish Indian texts by writing about or
interpreting them. My books have a right to exist alongside
other books."
Though Doniger often (but not always) focuses on sexuality,
the current protests derive from more than a Victorian
sense of decorum, says Prashad. The issue seeps deeper, he
says, stemming from the Hindu right>s "protofascist views."
Recent events demonstrate the lengths to which some
nationalists have taken their protests. This past January a
group looted India>s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
because it was where James W. Laine, Macalester College>s
humanities dean, had researched his book Shivaji: Hindu
King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003) -- which suggests that
the revered parents of Shivaji, a Hindu nationalist icon,
may have been estranged. A month earlier another group
attacked Indian historian Shrikant Bahulkar, tarring his
face, because Laine had thanked him in his
acknowledgements.
Though such violence hasn>t occurred in the United States,
Western scholars have felt the effects of India>s new
politics. In her Hyde Park home Doniger displays her Indian
art collection -- colorful tapestries, bronze sculptures
including dozens of Ganeshas, and paintings adorn every
surface. "A lot of these things you couldn>t buy in India
now," she says, noting that some pieces she bought in the
1960s have become antiques, which today India, like many
countries, protects from exportation. But unlike art, ideas
don>t get stopped at the border.
More at:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0412/features/index.shtml
Jai Maharaj
http://tinyurl.com/24fq83
http://www.mantra.com/jai
http://www.mantra.com/jyotish
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
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