INVADING the SACRED an Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America
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INVADING THE SACRED An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America Editors: Krishnan Ramaswamy Antonio de Nicolas Aditi Banerjee Copyright © Infinity Foundation 2007, 2012 Published 2007 by Rupa & Co 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002 For additional information: www.invadingthesacred.com www.RajivMalhotra.com Twitter: @RajivMessage Facebook: RajivMalhotra.Official Join my discussion egroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RajivMalhotraDiscussion/ Contents Foreword by S.N. Balagangadhara VII Preface by Arvind Sharma XI About the Contributors XIX 1. Why This Book is Important 1 Section I: Exposing Academic Hinduphobia 13 Pandita Indrani Rampersad 2. Religious Studies: Projecting One’s Shadow on the ‘Other’ 17 3. Targeting Sri Ramakrishna 27 4. The Hindu Goddess Reinterpreted as a Symbol of Sex and Violence 42 5. Abusing Ganesha and Shiva 53 6. Targeting Hindu Mothers and ‘Hijackers’ 60 7. Challenges to Wendy Doniger’s Sanskrit 66 8. De-Spiritualizing Tantra 73 9. Chakra Hermeneutics 96 10. It’s All About Power 108 Section II: Storming the Fortress 117 11. The Floodgates of Criticism are Opened 119 12. Balagangadhara on the Biblical Underpinnings of ‘Secular’ Social Sciences 123 13. The Children of Colonial Psychoanalysis 132 Yvette C. Rosser 14. Is the Fight Between Siva and Ganesa an Episode of Oedipal Conflict? 146 Yuvraj Krishan 15. Kripal on the Couch in Calcutta 152 Yvette C. Rosser 16. Is There Prejudice in Hinduism Studies? A Look at Encarta 169 Sankrant Sanu 17. Paul Courtright’s ‘Ganesa, Lord of Obstacles, 190 Lord of Beginnings’: An Independent Review Vishal Agarwal and Kalavai Venkat Section III: Whistleblowers, Witch Hunters and Victims 249 Aditi Banerjee 18. Myth of the Savage Frontier 253 19. An American Community Gets Awakened 262 20. Attempts to Refocus on the Issues 280 21. Circling the Wagons: Dissent and Censorship 285 22. Character Assassination 303 23. Restoring the Debate: Silenced Voices Speak Out 324 24. Calling Courtright’s Bluff 334 Section IV: Media Images: Diasporic ‘Savages’ versus Academic ‘Victims’ 341 25. Hyping Hindu ‘Wrath’: Mythmaking and the 344 Washington Post Krishnan Ramaswamy 26. Muddying the Waters: Doniger Rolls Out the Big Guns 355 Krishnan Ramaswamy 27. The Power of ‘Connections’: Using the New York Times 364 for PR Krishnan Ramaswamy 28. University of Chicago Magazine: Obscuring the Issues 378 Yvette C. Rosser 29. The Diaspora Press: India Abroad Encourages Debate 397 Krishnan Ramaswamy Appendices 405 Appendix 1: The Uses (and Misuses) Of Psychoanalysis in South Asian Studies: Mysticism and Child Development 407 Alan Roland Appendix 2: India and Her Traditions: A Reply to Jeffrey Kripal 429 S.N. Balagangadhara Appendix 3: The Butterflies Baulked: Public Comments on the Debate 448 Yvette C. Rosser Appendix 4: Hindu Students’ Council Petition: ‘Against the Book Insulting Lord Ganesha and Hinduism’ 467 Endnotes 473 Bibliography 525 Acknowledgements 535 Index 537 Foreword Non-white and non-Christian cultures will increasingly have a significant impact on the affairs of the humankind in this millennium. Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow will have to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange and grotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow- burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of European culture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkers in Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defending undesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha and our Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have but one task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible. VIII FOREWORD However, what if this portrayal is false? What if these basically Western descriptions of India are wrong? In that case, the questions about what India has to offer the world and what the Indian thinkers were doing become important. For the first time, the current knowledge of India will be subject to a kind of test that has never occurred before. Why ‘for the first time’? The answer is obvious: the prevailing knowledge of India among the English-educated elite was generated primarily when India was colonized. Subsequent to the Indian independence, India suffered from poverty and backwardness. In tomorrow’s world, the Indian intellectuals will be able to speak back with a newly found confidence and they will challenge European and American descriptions of India. That is, for the first time, they will test the Western knowledge of India and not just accept it as God’s own truth. This has not happened before; it will happen for the first time. Generations of Indian intellectuals have accepted these descriptions as more or less true. The future generations will not be so accommodating though: they will test these answers for their truth. I say this with confidence because I find that more and more people in India are gravitating towards this kind of research. These are not of mere academic interest to such people, whose numbers steadily increase. Many of them realize that Western explanations of their religions and culture trivialize their lived experiences; by distorting, such explanations transform these, and this denies Indians access to their own experiences. It can thus be said to rob them of their inner lives. But that is not all. More than most, they realize that answers to these and allied questions about the nature of Indian culture have the potential to ignite an intellectual revolution on a world scale. The essays and critiques of Western scholarship on India’s religions contained in this book must be seen as the early signs of this awakening, and of this questioning. It is thus an important chronicle of the beginnings of a shift. Some of the essays are critical surveys of what is still being purveyed as factual and veridical knowledge about India and Hinduism. These are often startling and shocking to the Indian reader, but serve the useful purpose of benchmarking the state of current Western ‘knowledge’ about India. Others are critiques of the application of European ideas like psychoanalysis to Indian culture. But all of them, at various levels, must ask the question—is the Western academia producing knowledge about India? The latter half of the book chronicles how key sections of the academic establishment in America have responded to these challenges, FOREWORD IX and tries to understand how they processed it as a threat rather than as a long overdue call for a dialog. The book suggests that the answers to some of these questions may lie in American culture and its European roots. In many ways, therefore, the book is an attempt to reverse the gaze on the West, and is sure to make for provocative reading. S.N. Balagangadhara University of Ghent, Belgium Blank page Preface I The relations between the academic community and the Hindu community in North America have recently come to be characterized by a sharp debate, which has also spilled over into journalism and on to the Internet. It was prompted by the reservations expressed by a significant number of Hindus in North America over the way Hinduism is portrayed in the Western academia and by the vigorous response of the academic community to such criticism. As an academic, who is also a Hindu; or conversely, as a Hindu, who is also an academic, I (along with some of my other colleagues) stand at the volatile point of intersection between these two communities. This makes my role in the debate particularly fraught but also, by the same token, also particularly sought at times. I was requested a couple of years ago by Mark Silk, Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, to address the issue through an article in Religion in the News.1 I am thankful to him for having provided me with the opportunity. That was in 2004. Now, after an interval of three years, I have been invited to write this preface to a book which documents an important segment of this ongoing controversy. It seems only fair that I should accept this request as well. It enables me to examine the issue once more and to tease out my thoughts on the issues further in this already tense narrative. This book singes with the sparks that flew as the psychoanalytic approach to the study of religion became the lightning rod of the grievances of the Hindus, particularly those residing in the United States, against a cross-section of the academic community in North America devoted to the study of Hinduism.