RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome | Sulekha Creative
RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome
“The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think…Throughout the Mahabharata ... Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war.... The Gita is a dishonest book …”
-- Wendy Doniger, Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago.
Quoted in
Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 November, 2000
Rajiv Malhotra /
Blog / 12 yrs ago /
In my previous Sulekha column[
ii ], I pointed out that whereas elite colleges in the West teach great respect for Greek and other Western Classics as being the bedrock of their civilization, it has become fashionable for elitist (i.e. Westernized) Indians to denigrate their own Indian Classics. Furthermore, these Indians see their education in Western literature as validating their Western identity (falsely equating modernization with Westernization), and go out of their way in putting down their Indian heritage.
The present essay deals with yet another important discipline, namely, Religious Studies, which is growing rapidly in the US and in many other countries. Unfortunately, this is not so in India, where a peculiar brand of “secularism” has prevented academic Religious Studies from entering the education system in a serious manner. Therefore, most Indians do not have the necessary competence in this academic field to be able to understand how it differs from both (i) religious instruction that one expects to find in a temple, church or mosque, and (ii) political or popular ideological depictions of religion in the media.
Article 28.1 of The Constitution of India reads: “
No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds.” However, the scholarship and teaching
about religion in the academic field of Religious Studies would not violate the intent of this Article, because academic Religious Studies does not
preach (i.e. does not “instruct”) any religion, and nor endorse or negate any religion's claims. Rather, it teaches
about the truth-claims[
iii ] made by a given religion, along with its history, its sociology, and so forth. This is an important separation enshrined in the US Constitution also. Nevertheless, “Indian secularism” has prevented the population from becoming educated about the diversity of religions so central to Indian life. This vacuum of authentic knowledge has been filled by unscrupulous elements in many instances.
This essay's thrust revolves around the portrayal of India's religions in the West. Being unable to appreciate how and why academic Religious Studies is different from other activities that might appear similar, most Indians are ignorant of the abuses being caused in the West as a result of (a) the negative stereotyping of Indic traditions, and (b) the misappropriation from Indic traditions while erasing the sources.
Here is a typical anecdote that illustrates my frustration: I sent an article to an Indian journal about how Hinduism was (mis)portrayed in American academe. The editor was very interested. But the reviewers' comments were incredibly naïve about the basic structure and nature of the field of Religious Studies -- one reviewer was confusing academic Religious Studies with something that Hindu temples or ashrams in USA were already teaching, while the other reviewer wondered why this field was so important in a secular age! When I showed it to Western friends in academics, they found this Indian thinking amusing.
As with any large academic field, Religious Studies in the US is highly organized, with prestigious journals, chairs and programs of study. To carry out the studies and research, there is a well-defined system that uses the tools and methods that have come to be known as “hermeneutics”. This is the theory of interpretation, especially of religious texts, using a process of deriving new interpretations from a body of text or knowledge, so that (hopefully) our insights about the text or subject keep growing.
To control and regulate this field pertaining to Indian religions, there is the association known as RISA (Religions In South Asia). RISA is a unit within The American Academy of Religion (AAR), which is the official organization of academic scholars of Religious Studies in the Western world.
Around fifty years ago, there was a partition of the guild of scholars who studied religion, and two organizations were created: AAR and SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). AAR and SBL maintain very close relations and influences, and hold their annual conferences jointly. While SBL members study and promote the insiders' view of Judeo-Christianity, AAR members are
supposed to pursue the objective view from outside a given tradition and to not promote anything. However, as I have noted many times, outsiders to Hinduism are insiders to Judeo-Christianity, and/or to Western Feminism, and/or to Marxism, and/or to other ideologies, and hence they are not “neutral” as advertised.
With a membership of over 10,000 scholars -- and growing -- the AAR has enormous clout over the future direction of Religious Studies, and indirectly, over the humanities at large.
Because the depictions of India in the West are inseparable from depictions of India's religious life (something that Indian secularists have tried to wish away unsuccessfully), the work done by RISA scholars has implications that go well beyond the discipline's boundaries. Religion is prominently featured in South Asian Studies, Asian Studies, International Studies, Women's Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, History, Literature, and Politics, and indirectly also influences Journalism, Film, and so forth. Therefore, the utter ignorance of Indians regarding such a discipline is a major gap that deserves attention and remedy.
Meanwhile, under Western control, Hinduism Studies has produced ridiculous caricatures that could easily be turned into a Bollywood movie or a TV serial. This Lila[
iv ] of the inner workings of RISA is the subject of this essay. (Readers who are unfamiliar with RISA and AAR should read this essay as a general account of Western academic engagement and control over India-related studies. While the examples given are RISA-specific, the message applies more broadly.)
Act 1 of the
RISA Lila deals with the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger[
v ], who is undoubtedly the most powerful person in academic Hinduism Studies today, and by others inspired by her. She is a former President of the American Academy of Religion, now leads Religious Studies at the University of Chicago, chairs many academic and powerful bodies, has two PhDs (from Harvard and Oxford) and is a prolific author. She was also a past President of the very influential Association of Asian Studies.
The most important leverage she has is that she has given more students their Ph.Ds in Hinduism than any other person in the world and has successfully placed these former students in high-leverage academic jobs throughout the Western world, to carry the torch of her theories and principles of researching Hinduism. There is no place one can go to in this academic discipline without running into the effect of her influence, through her large cult of students, who glorify her in exchange for her mentorship.
The BBC-linked site introduces her as follows: “
Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts…” (For a picture of Wendy Doniger, see the footnote.[
vi ])
In the Annual Convention of the AAR in 2000, Wendy (as she is affectionately known) was felicitated by her fans at a special session in her honor. She has enjoyed building her franchise and sees her own immortality through it[
vii ]. One speaker after another spoke about her great accomplishments. Many persons from the audience joined in -- presumably to ensure their tenure, or job, or promotion. Then I raised my hand, and when Wendy acknowledged me, 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?”
There was both uneasy tension and laughter in the audience, and she replied that there was nothing new that any psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not hidden anything. I stood up again, and 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 laughed again, took it well, and said, “
You got me on this one.” I concluded with a remark that I would predict 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.
This Act 1 of the
RISA Lila begins such an analysis. I wish to clarify that it is not intended to be a generalization applicable to all members of RISA. It deals specifically with one important phenomena in Religious Studies, that I have defined as
Wendy's Child Syndrome. The structure of this Act 1 is to first summarize four examples of recent RISA scholarship of this new genre that is being championed by Wendy's Children[
viii ]:
1.
Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th century Hindu saint, has been declared by these scholars as being a sexually-abused homosexual, and it has become “academically established” by Wendy Doniger's students that Ramakrishna was a child molester, and had also forced homosexual activities upon Vivekananda. Furthermore, it has become part of this new “
discovery” that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences, and indeed those of Hindu mystics in general, are pathological sexual conditions that need to be psychoanalyzed as such. Furthermore, these scholars have concluded that the entire Hindu society needs to be psychoanalyzed in terms of sexual deviance, in order to understand modern Indian society and politics objectively.
2. The
Hindu Goddess is described by these scholars as a sex maniac, with a variety of pathological conditions. Western scholars are busy debating which kinds of pathologies best apply in specific instances, and are hard at work to capture supporting data in the backwaters of Indian society.
3. Other conclusions by these well-placed scholars include:
Ganesha's trunk symbolizes a “limp phallus”; his broken tusk is a symbol for the castration-complex of the Hindu male; his large belly is a proof of the Hindu male's enormous appetite for oral sex.
Shiva, is interpreted as a womanizer, who encourages ritual rape, prostitution and murder, and his worship is linked to violence and destruction.
4. Hindus are being
profiled by these scholars, potentially setting them up for denial of the same human rights as the “civilized West.” For instance, anthropologists have concluded that nursing Hindu mothers do not bond with their babies the way white women do, that Hindus lack a sense of individuality because of their inability to perceive separation in space or time, and that the Mahabharata is best seen as Krishna's Genocide.
After a brief review of this “scholarly” literature, there awaits a major bombshell in this essay -- reasonable doubts on whether these acclaimed scholars properly know the Indian languages in which they claim to be working.
After this background, I go on to define and analyze
Wendy's Child Syndrome, and analyze the anger my investigative research has triggered. The essay concludes with responses to criticisms that I have received from certain RISA members who commented on the draft of this “scandalous” report.
Before you dismiss the significance of the
RISA Lila to the Indian community at large, please bear in mind that college professors write most of the school textbooks in the US. These scholars' writings are also used to teach the next generation of journalists, political leaders,
and our own kids when they leave home and go to college. Wendy Doniger and her Children contribute to many articles on Hinduism and India in widely used resources such as Microsoft's Encarta and other encyclopedias. Therefore, if you wish to get to the bottom of figuring out how and why the American mainstream misunderstands India so pathologically, RISA is certainly one of the places to investigate.
I hope this essay begins a feedback loop to educate the Indian community, which is the subject of RISA's work, but which has so far been kept in the dark concerning what is being written and said behind its back.
Target: Sri Ramakrishna
Introducing One Wendy's Child:
As a student of Wendy Doniger at University of Chicago, Jeffrey Kripal did research on Sri Ramakrishna for his Ph.D. dissertation. He visited the Ramakrishna Mission for information and discussions on this research, and they helped him openly and enthusiastically. As one of the sisters of the Mission puts it, “
He seems to be such a nice and endearing young man that anybody would trust his intentions.” However, contrary to well-accepted academic ethics and common decency, he did not give the Mission's experts any chance to review his dissertation's draft in order to make sure that there were no factual inaccuracies in it.
The Ramakrishna Mission scholars found out about Kripal's scandalous conclusions only years later, after his book had come out and had immediately won enormous acclaim from Wendy Doniger's club. The book published by him on this work, titled
Kali's Child[
ix ], won him the
first book award by the AAR, a job at Harvard and a prestigious academic position at RiceUniversity. Encyclopedia Britannica listed his book as the top choice for reading about Ramakrishna. While the entire thesis was based on alleged misinterpretations of Bengali writings about the life of Ramakrishna (see details below), none of the persons who finally signed off on his PhD dissertation, or who were on the AAR Book Award Committee, or who glorified and endorsed his book, are, to the best of my knowledge, Bengalis with a familiarity with cultural nuances that are at stake here. Based on information given to me, and subject to being verified and corrected, the sole Bengali expert left before the conclusion of the project. But my main point is more general: If this Ph.D. dissertation (or book) had been based on sources in Hebrew or Greek -- in short, had it been in the Bible or early Christianity fields - would it have passed? The standards that prevail in those fields are indeed rigorous. This needs to be independently evaluated by someone in the field of Bible/early Church. Of course, as a fringe thesis, many things could be approved. But would an equivalent thesis, based mainly on Freudian psychoanalysis, be supported to a similar extent in the mainstream academy, if it were about the Bible? That should be the benchmark, and that should have been how such a bold new hermeneutics should have been academy-tested before attempting it on any far away neocolonized culture whose direct representatives were not even part of the process. In short, is this new fashionable hermeneutics of eroticisation of spirituality a form of Eurocentrism being projected upon “others”?
I started to complain that RISA had prematurely and incorrectly passed sweeping judgments on Ramakrishna, without even a proper representation of the opposing point of view (which happened to be the view of those who know Ramakrishna best). This seemed to me to be a blatant violation of academic due process and ethical norms. However, I was told many things by the
chowkidars and
sepoys of the academic fortress, that bordered on deception and intimidation.
First, I was told that Kripal is suffering from depression because of “threats” he received from critics, and that he regrets having written the book, and wishes to forget it completely. I found just the opposite to be true: Kripal very much enjoys the controversy as a way to advance academically and, when asked point-blank to produce any evidence of “threats,” he slips his way out of it.
Second, I was advised in person, by emails, and via other associates, that if I criticized Wendy, I would get personally attacked and blackballed, and my projects would be boycotted. Guess what? This intimidation is precisely what motivated me, even more enthusiastically, to continue my research into this incestuous cult. I felt like the investigative reporter who is on to something big. I wondered: why would they not take my critical investigations in their stride, given how they pride themselves on claims of being open-minded?
While at first the Ramakrishna Mission was reluctant to battle against the academic establishment on these blatant misportrayals, one of its monks, Swami Tyagananda, started to take the matter seriously. But this happened only after Kripal's thesis began to devastate Ramakrishna's reputation in the mainstream, including in American schools. This led Swami Tyagananda to write his 130-page rebuttal, that lists many serious errors in Kripal's work[
x ]. Kripal turned down my suggestion to include a summary of Tyagananda's rebuttal at the end of his book, in a new edition, and cited all sorts of technical and scholarly reasons that are illogical.[
xi ]
After summarizing a few of Kripal's glaring errors of scholarship below, I shall explain why such bogus scholarship, especially since it gets legitimized and popularized by sheer mafia-like politics, is very dangerous at many different levels.
How to Fabricate a Best-Seller:
This section summarizes some of the errors in
Kali's Child. The reader gets a good idea of the kind of scholarship at work.
1)
Lack of required language skills:
Swami Tyagananda and many other Bengali scholars have had extensive discussions with Kripal, and they have little doubt that
he simply does not know the Bengali language in which he claims to have read the documents on Sri Ramakrishna's life, these being the documents that Kripal cites as his references. When spoken to in Bengali, he does not understand, and when asked something about Bengali directly, he cannot respond. Swami Tyagananda explains:[
xii ]
“
Kripal's conclusions come via faulty translations, a willful distortion and manipulation of sources, combined with a remarkable ignorance of Bengali culture. The derisive, non-scholarly tone with which he discussed Ramakrishna did not help either… Kripal's ignorance of Bengali culture jumps right off the page. Many of the author's misrepresentations are due to a simple lack of familiarity with Bengali attitudes and customs… [Furthermore,] it's painfully clear that he also has little knowledge of Sanskrit…”
Prof. Narasingha Sil is a historian who is a Bengali language expert. He is not associated with the Ramakrishna Mission, and does not regard himself as a religious person. Here is his independent assessment:[
xiii ]
“
Jeffrey is very adept at using Bengali-English dictionaries and picking the most appropriate synonyms of words (disregarding the primary, secondary, tertiary meanings) he feels could make his point… [He] is unable to converse in Bengali (but very prompt at using dictionaries)… In order to fit the square peg of a Tantrika Ramakrishna into the round hole of a homosexual Paramahansa, Kripal manufactures evidence by distorting the meaning of sources.”
2)
Misinterpreting Tantra:
Kripal's central thesis is summarized in his own words as follows: “
Ramakrishna was a conflicted, unwilling, homoerotic Tantrika[xiv]… Tantra's heterosexual assumptions seriously violated the structure of his own homosexual desires. His female Tantric guru and temple boss may have forced themselves … on the saint… but Ramakrishna remained… a lover not of sexually aggressive women or even of older men but of young, beautiful boys.[
xv ]”
Responding to this charge, Swami Tyagananda replies: “
What is Kripal's understanding of the word, Tantrika?” He says it is a term associated with “
magical power, strangeness, seediness, and sex.” He dismisses the “
philosophical expositions” of Tantra as inauthentic because they are “
designed to rid Tantra of everything that smacked of superstition, magic, or scandal.”[
xvi ]
But given this predisposition, Kripal insists: “
Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were constituted by mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood.”[
xvii ]
Let us examine how Kripal develops his claims.
3)
Superimposing psychological pathologies upon Ramakrishna, with no basis:
Kripal posits with supreme confidence, but with no evidence whatsoever, some rather sweeping assertions about Ramakrishna, by merely superimposing generalizations out of some introductory textbook on psychology. He proclaims:
“
The literature on sexual trauma suggests that individuals who have experienced abuse often become adept at altering their state of consciousness …lose control of their bodily, and especially their gastrointestinal functions, experience visions and states of possession, become hypersensitive to idiosyncratic stimuli (like latrines), symbolically re-enact the traumatic events, live in a state of hyperarousal …become hypersexual in their language or behavior, develop hostile feelings towards mother figures, fear adult sexuality, and often attempt suicide. This list reads like a summary of Ramakrishna's religious life.”
However, as Swami Tyagananda responds:
“
None of the symptoms enumerated in the “literature on sexual trauma” is present in Ramakrishna's life. But since Kripal has approached his subject with a predetermined verdict, he resorts to specious reasoning in order to come up with the judgment he has in mind. Ramakrishna has “pronounced homosexual tendencies,” ergo he must have suffered childhood sexual trauma, ergo he must re-enact the traumatic events. This exercise in weak-link logic is reminiscent of kangaroo courts where the prisoner is convicted first and then the “evidence” is manufactured at a more convenient time.”[
xviii ]
4)
Mistranslating “lap” as “genitals,” and later as “defiled sexual space”:
In the first edition of Kripal's book, the Bengali word for “lap” was translated as “on the genitals.” In the second edition, Kripal changes it somewhat: “
It is clear that Ramakrishna saw 'the lap' as normally defiled sexual space.” [
xix ]
Tyagananda replies:
“
Why does the author consider the lap (kol) to be 'normally defiled'? In Indian culture – and Bengali culture in particular – the lap has an extremely positive and warm maternal association. For instance, the national anthem of Bangladesh, written by Tagore, contains the following line: “Takhon khela dhula sakal phele, O Ma, tomar, kole chute ashi”. Translation: 'After the day's play is over, O Mother, I run back to your lap.'”
5)
Mistranslating “head” as “phallus”:
Kripal justifies his translation that “head= phallus” in Hindu texts, because, according to him, “The head in the mystical physiology of yoga and Tantra [is] the ultimate goal of one's semen and so an appropriate symbol for the phallus.”[
xx ]
6)
Mistranslating “touching softly” as “sodomy”:
Based on his mistranslation of “softly touching” as being synonymous with sodomy, Kripal claims that Ramakrishna was “
uncontrollably rubbing sandal-paste on the penises of boys.”[
xxi ]
Tyagananda explains: “
I must admit that when I read Kripal's interpretation of “touching softly” (aste aste aparsha korchhen) as attempted sodomy I could only laugh.” In Indian culture, elders lovingly pat and caress children out of affection. There is nothing sexual in it. Perhaps, the scholar is superimposing his own culture's coldness towards kids.
7)
Mistranslating “tribhanga” as “cocked hips”:
The Bengali text used by Kripal refers to the term “tribhanga”, the characteristic curved pose that is seen in Indian sculpture and Indian classical dance (tribhanga = Sanskrit ' three bends'). This is also Krishna's common pose with the body bent in three places -- at the knee, waist and elbow -- with flute in hand. A common expression used for Lord Krishna in the Bhakti poetry is 'tribhangi-laal'.
However, Kripal translates this pose as “cocked hips” and uses this to conclude that “stunned by the cocked hips of the boy, Ramakrishna falls into samadhi.”[
xxii ] This is Kripal's “scholarly proof” that Ramakrishna's mystical states were homoerotic!
Since Krishna is commonly depicted as bent in three places, with flute in hand, it would follow from Kripal's psychoanalysis that any Krishna devotee's love for his form is a sign of the devotee's homosexual arousal by Krishna's “cocked hips.”
8)
Kripal's imagination runs wild:
Referring to Ramakrishna's meeting with a member of the Naga sect of
sanyasins, Kripal simply assumes that a lot was happening about which there is no record whatsoever:
“
[W]hat it must have been like for Ramakrishna, a homosexually oriented man, to be shut away for days in a small hut with another, stark-naked man. Vedanta instruction or not, it was this man's nudity, and more especially, his penis, that normally caught Ramakrishna's attention. How could it not?”[
xxiii ]
9)
Mistranslating “vyakulata” to give it a sexual spin:
Regarding the Bengali word “vyakulata,” Tyagananda confirms that “
there is nothing in the word to suggest 'desire', which, typically for Kripal, carries a sexual connotation… To load the Bengali words heavily with sexual innuendo is to completely distort the meaning of the text.” Yet, Kripal mistranslates this word to conclude: “
Ramakrishna's anxious desire was often directed to his young male disciples.”[
xxiv ]
10)
Mistranslating “uddipana” to give it erotic meaning:
Another Bengali word distorted by Kripal is “uddipana.” According to Tyagananda, the word's meaning is “enkindling” or “lightening up.” But Kripal arbitrarily gives it the meaning of homoerotic excitation, in his translation: “
Ramakrishna turns to the youth and says: 'Please don't leave today. When I look at you, I get all excited.'”[
xxv ]
11)
Special effects thrown in:
To spice up his research with erotic special effects, as if writing for a Bollywood screenplay, Kripal inserts the phrase “his nearly naked body” while referring to the
Lilaprasanga. However, Swami Tyagananda writes that, after carefully examining the entire
Lilaprasanga text, he can say that “
nowhere in the Lilaprasanga is there even a mention of the boy's nakedness.” Similarly, since Kripal wants to make the claim that the temple manager “sexually forced himself upon Ramakrishna,” he dramatizes by translating the “manager” of the temple as the “boss”.
There are many other amusing and outlandish remarks that Kripal interjects, without having done the rigorous due diligence to understand his subject matter in a genuine manner. For instance, Tyagananda explains: “
Kripal may be at his most laughable when he tells us that Ramakrishna's practice of Vedanta consisted of only taking the monastic vows and eating rice in the portico of the Dakshineswar temple.”
12)
Suppressing the facts:
The massive archive on the life of Ramakrishna has more than enough material to provide authentic accounts of his life and of the theory and practice of his teachings. However, since that would run counter to the conclusions that Kripal premises his work upon, he simply ignores the evidence that contradicts his thesis. Tyagananda charges:
“
Kripal has omitted portions of the texts he quotes in order to suppress information that would run contrary to his thesis…. Isn't this just a convenient form of censorship?”
Kripal's soft spoken and endearing demeanor has deceived many gullible Indians, who often find it hard to believe that he would make blatant attempts to falsify the
facts. But Tyagananda catches him red-handed several times. For example:
“
Kripal says that he has never argued something as simplistic as that Ramakrishna was a pederast [sexual lover of young boys]
… While Kripal may not have used those words in his book, that was certainly his conviction which guided his interpretations. How else can one explain his letter (14 August 1996) written to the secretary of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, Boston, in which he wrote that it was quite “obvious” that “Ramakrishna's mystical states were accompanied, and likely generated, by some ethically problematic acts, among them pedophilia.”[
xxvi ]
13)
The Kangaroo Court trial of Sri Ramakrishna:
Tyagananda summarizes Kripal's methods used in the name of scholarship:
“
Since Kripal wants to associate Ramakrishna with boys, no matter what, we shouldn't be surprised that he first suspects, then assumes, then presents as a fact that Ramakrishna was sexually abused as a child. That there is absolutely no evidence for this makes no difference to Dr. Kripal; we have the effect – Ramakrishna's “homoerotic impulses” – so now the cause must be found. Aha! Certainly he must have been sexually abused as a child. The spiritual ecstasies that Ramakrishna experienced as a child are thus reinterpreted as “troubling trances”[xxvii]. The only one “troubled” by them is Kripal who feels compelled to find sexual abuse somewhere in there.”
Rubbing his hands in glee, Jeffrey Kripal proclaims: “
The case of Ramakrishna's homosexuality… seems to be closed…. Kali's Child has been lauded by scholars… for being right.”[
xxviii ]
However, Tyagananda replies: “
One wonders if any of those praising the book have ever read its citations. Have any of those scholars who have given the book so much acclaim actually read the Bengali sources that he quotes? How many of them can actually read Bengali well, if at all?”
Huston Smith, perhaps the most widely read Western scholar of Religious Studies of all times, has severely criticized
Kali's Child in the
Harvard Divinity Bulletin, calling this type of scholarship, “colonialism updated.”[
xxix ] Granted that Wendy's team has got a head start because of stealth scholarship, but I am not prepared to concede that they shall have the final word.
14)
Evasive dismissal of criticism, by psychoanalyzing the critics:
Tyagananda rejects Kripal's attempts to put the spotlight on Hindus' alleged narrow-mindedness, as a shallow ploy to shift attention from his bad scholarship:
“
To say, therefore, that those who reject Kripal's thesis are doing so from their own homophobia is to completely miss the point…. To sum up: The problem I address in my critique is not the sexualized reading per se. The problem has nothing to do with homosexuality. The problem is with the evidence, and in particular the massive distortion and misuse thereof in Prof. Kripal's book. Where there is adequate evidence, let there be homoerotic, hetero-erotic, or otherwise erotic readings of the lives and motivations of saints – and scholars! But let not the evidence be manufactured.”[
xxx ]
And again:
“
To make the facile claim that the criticism leveled against Kali's Child was due to [the critics'] homophobia is to deflect from the real issue of shoddy and deceptive scholarship…. Kripal, in discussing the angry reaction to his book received in India and among Ramakrishna devotees, views their outrage as an expression of their fear of homosexuality. … Now with pious admonitions rising like the full swell of a church choir, Kripal pleads: 'I can only encourage them not to walk down this path, as so much of our humanity (and divinity) lies in a decidedly different direction.'”
Psychological Profile of the Scholar:
Kripal's Indian name comes from his father, whose family was of Roma (“gypsy”) extraction and lived inCentral Europe for many generations. Jeff admits to this only when asked point-blank, and identifies himself as a white man.[
xxxi ] It has not been psychoanalyzed as to what extent his Oedipal struggle to distance himself from his father might have compelled him to prove his alienation from Indic traditions by engaging in scholarly Hindu-bashing.
Furthermore, Prof. Sil explains Kripal's “psychosexual psychology”[
xxxii ]:
“
We learn that prior to joining graduate school at Chicago, Jeffrey was training to be a monk or a minister at a Catholic seminary, where he was “forced to explore the interfaces between sexuality and spirituality” and he felt “more than tortured by [his] own psychosexual pathologies.” By “psychosexual pathology” Kripal means, as he put parenthetically, anorexia nervosa. This means, as is well known, a pathological condition in which the patient cannot retain any food (or feces, if we choose to go by a Kripal-like psychoanalytic symbolism which he applied to Ramakrishna) in the body. He also writes that he felt his readings in Christian bridal mysticism somewhat unholy because of its apparent homoeroticism. However, upon further cogitations (or perhaps, meditations) on the subject Kripal “came to a rather surprising conclusion in regard to [his] own mystico-erotic tradition: heterosexuality is heretical.” He then tells readers that his “religious life was quite literally killing [him]” – his “body weight had sunk well below the normal.” It was at this juncture that the future biographer of Ramakrishna turned his attention to stuff Hindu and chanced upon the Bengali priest of Dakshineswar.”
Kripal's personal psychosis includes at least (i) his self-acknowledged homophobia, and (ii) his deep-rooted complex of being half Roma (and therefore wanting to prove his separation from that part of his roots in order to claim full-fledged white pedigree). This psychosis has entered his work, and become the driving force behind it.
Similar anecdotes of personal psychosis, that seem to infect this cult of scholars, or at least a large portion of it, became the basis for my interest in
Wendy's Child Syndrome. As the additional examples will show below, it is quite common for Western scholars to play out their private lives through their scholarship about “others”, in ways that are both positive and negative.
Conclusions:
Besides the numerous errors in translation, there are other methodological problems with
Kali's Child that the academy is refusing to investigate. For instance:
1. Western scholars in psychology departments no longer regard Freudian methods as being solid proof of anything serious. Hence, such misapplications by religion scholars, who are not formally trained in psychology, especially when applied to topics that are far removed from their familiar Western culture, is a case of the blind leading the blind.
2. Freud had ruled out the possibility of applying his methods either posthumously to dead people, or via native informants to third parties who are not directly engaged by the psychoanalyst. This alone makes
Kali's Child a bogus work.
3. Freud never had access to non-Western patients, so that he never established his theories' validity in other cultures. Wendy's school of scholarship universalizes Freudian methodologies and pathologies, and combines it with extreme and obscure Indic materials, to distort and weave these wild theories of Indian culture.
Notwithstanding all these issues, RISA scholars dare not challenge the work based on Wendy's theories, given the political power of her club.
To appreciate that this is not an isolated case, but rather the dominant variety of scholarship by certain important scholars, let us read how Wendy interprets Mahabharata (I.101) as symbolism of homosexuality and Indians' sexual pathologies:[
xxxiii ]
“
A sage named Mandavya is wrongly supposed to have participated in a robbery and is impaled on a stake. We may see masked homosexual symbolism in the impalement (a homosexual violation) and the cutting off of the long stake (a castration), though we should also notice what the Indian tradition makes of this episode: In a kind of reverse castration, Mandavya feels that he has gained something, has been given a stake that, however shortened, he still seems to regard as an extension of himself, a useful superpenis, as it were. The childhood guilt that inspired the episode of anal intercourse gives way to the fantasy of the large penis of the grown man.”
As Edward Said explained, the West's “other” and “self” are co-constructed intellectually, the construction of one being used to construct the other. This is why it pains Wendy and her Children to have their pet theories about Indians refuted, because their self-images rest on such Orientalist constructions.
An imagined and exoticised Indian culture, with its imagined pathologies, is the mirror in which these scholars define themselves and enact their deepest fantasies. This psychosis often drives the scholars work -- via the topics and questions selected, the data imagined and filtered, and the interpretation given. Therefore, the book
Kali's Child gives great insights into what is being defined here as
Wendy's Child Syndrome, rather than being a legitimate portrayal of Sri Ramakrishna.
Target: The Hindu Goddess
Goddess as symbol of sex and violence:
Sarah Caldwell is also afflicted by
Wendy's Child Syndrome[
xxxiv ], and is another powerful leader of RISA. She is a winner of the prestigious Robert Stoller Award for her scholarship on the Hindu Goddess, and is amongst the elite who decide which papers and topics get included at academic conferences on Hinduism. To judge for yourself as to whether scholars like her represent Hinduism in a balanced manner, below are a few excerpts from her recent research paper, titled, “
The Bloodthirsty tongue and the self fed breast, homosexual fellatio fantasy in a south Indian ritual tradition” for which she was given the award mentioned above:
“
This essay demonstrates that in Kerala, symbolism of the fierce goddess [Kali] does not represent abreactions of the primal scene fantasies of a Kleinian 'phallic mother' or introjection of the father's penis; rather, we will show that themes of eroticism and aggression in the mythology are male transsexual fantasies reflecting intense preoedipal fixation on the mother's body and expressing conflicts over primary feminine identity.”[xxxv]
“The essential rituals of the Bhagavati cult all point to the aggressive and fatal erotic drinking of the male by the female, the infamous orgy of blood sacrifice of male 'cocks' at the Kodugallur Bhagavati temple; the male veliccappatu's cutting of his head in a symbolic act of self castration…. [Kali] is herself, first of all, a phallic being, the mother with a penis, ... she is the bloodied image of the castrating and menstruating (thus castrating) female…. In this type of analysis the phallic abilities of the goddess disguise castration anxieties ultimately directed toward the father as well as homosexual desire for the father's penis. Following Freud, such analyses stress the father-son polarity of the oedipal conflict as the central trauma seeking expression.”[ xxxvi ]
“As Alter and O'Flaherty amply demonstrate, milk and breast-feeding are also symbolically transformed in the male imagination into semen and phallus…. The ascetic male who retains the semen becomes like a pregnant female with breasts and swollen belly; the semen rises like cream to his head and produces extraordinary psychic powers… Not only are the fluids of milk and semen, symbolic equivalents, but the act of 'milking' or breastfeeding becomes a symbolic equivalent to the draining of semen from the phallus in intercourse.”[
xxxvii ]
Notice how Caldwell uses the English word “cock” for the animal, so as to link the ritual with the phallus. Since the Keralites in the ritual are not superimposing this
English word onto their ritual, this is an example of how the scholar's own psychosis is entering her supposedly objective work. It shows how important it is to psychoanalyze these scholars in order to evaluate their work.
It has been reported that Caldwell was able to establish intimate “trusting relationships” with Indian men in Kerala, so as to extract useful “confessions” from them, presumably by paying them to perform services that could be classified as “native informant services.” One such 21-year-old is quoted by her to the effect that homosexual encounters are rampant in the society of Kerala. Many more similar “confessions” fill her work, and sweeping conclusions are drawn.
Recently, Caldwell has published another book titled, “
Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Mother Kali.”[
xxxviii ] To get a glimpse of what her latest book is all about, here is an excerpt from Cynthia Humes' critical review of the book:[
xxxix ]
“
…Caldwell documents numerous themes of sexuality, abuse, and vengeance in Keralite religion and culture. She concludes, "Mutiyettu actors who are particularly talented at playing the role of Kali might be traumatized individuals whose particular psychological propensities and histories compel them towards this form of performance" (259). I find this unconvincing. As she herself notes, Caldwell did not conduct a detailed study of or even collect the life histories of the individual Mutiyettu actors playing the role of Kali; so there is no direct evidence of even one individual fitting this typology (259). The implications she sees, while tantalizing and truly fascinating, are based on extended digging into and assembling a dispersed array of sensationalist and homoerotic mythological themes, combined with rumored sexual activity. The unlikelihood of the thesis is underscored by the fact that the role of Kali is only open to a handful of individuals, who must wait until the age of over fifty to even assume this coveted starring role, and further, they would need to evidence "particular talent.”
However, later in this review, Cynthia Humes agrees with certain aspects of the sexual interpretation of the ritual, even though she superimposes a different personal psychosis than Caldwell:
“
The lack of evidence is noteworthy, for it contrasts sharply with other trenchant psychoanalytic assertions based on detailed, sustained, and well-argued descriptions rooted in recorded male and female experience of the Mutiyettu. For example, Caldwell does convince me that "by coopting this power in transvestite possession performance, males reclaim the envied feminine procreative power within their own bodies, while denying actual social, sexual, and political power to women" (189). Yet I do not dismiss out of hand homoerotic themes in Mutiyettu. I find it likely and in keeping with the evidence that the audience consists largely of male Keralites exposed to homoerotic rumor and possible clandestine homosexual activity, as well as unwelcome sexual advances by older female relatives. It would take little to convince me, based onCaldwell's data, that such an audience could experience vicarious attraction to the male transvestite ritualists, especially in reenactment of their own fears of female sexuality and preferred company of men.”
Autobiography as Scholarship:
Later in the same review, Cynthia Humes confirms that Caldwell's work, as Kripal's, is largely autobiographical in nature -- a psychodrama that uncovers the scholar's own warped pathologies, often hidden beneath deep wounds of past trauma:
“
I do not doubt the sincerity of Caldwell's belief that the goddess was "somehow 'running my show'” or that her personal tragedies had "meaning and significance beyond my personal lusts, fears, neuroses, and confusions" (267). Abundant examples of Caldwell's lingering resentment are given free reign, deservedly in some ways toward her now ex-husband but less so toward her disapproving academic guide. This guide (despite his assistance in interviews, and arrangements to have one of his students aid her in settling in, and provision of some obviously helpful advice) she grills for his attempt to influence her research program. She further suspects him of avariciousness toward her grant and, ironically, belittles his suspicion of her possible infidelity (a suspicion that turns out to be justified) (54). These become examples of Obeyesekere's theories of "progressive orientation", underscoring how Caldwell's personal confession authorizes her broad psychoanalytic theories about a remarkably similar projected rage and resentment in the person of Bhadrakali. In so doing, Caldwell preserves and in important ways, I believe, even enlarges the power differential between author and reader that authorizes her participant-observer projections onto her subjects.”
The “personal confession” refers to Caldwell's writings about how she was abused sexually by her family, and the leading role she played in organizing a movement to attack the late Swami Muktananda for alleged sexual abuses of women in his ashram. While I have written extensively about U-Turns by Western scholars for the purpose of enriching their native Judeo-Christian traditions, one must not ignore the significance of U-Turns that are caused by personal trauma, such as alleged sexual abuse. This was the case with Caldwell.[
xl ]
This projection of the scholar's personal psychosis upon the subject matter, using very loose and arbitrary interpretations to stretch the facts and to seek similar pathologies elsewhere, is the very definition of
Wendy's Child Syndrome. One could, therefore, enjoy reading the book,
Kali's Child as an insight into one particular Wendy's Child, namely, Jeff Kripal. Caldwell's writings should, likewise, be seen as an autobiographical projection of a traumatized Western Feminist struggling with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.
Starting out as psychosexual deviants or other misfits in their own culture, many such scholars find hospitality and meaning in India, but later make U-Turns for various reasons, especially upon realizing that there is a lucrative market, both for negative exotica and for positive cultural loot. This empowerment of the scholar's ego, done at the expense of the source culture that gave them a dignified life to begin with, raises ethical and moral questions as well.
Having said this, I also feel that Hindus must show sympathy for the scholars' psychosis, as this would be a kinder and gentler way to let them know that their scholarship is about their own private lives, and is unsuitable for teaching about India.
Misleading Scholarship:
Hindus know that no single form of the Goddess represents all of her forms, and, therefore, any view of the Goddess is incomplete if it is not seen as one part of a wider and more comprehensive portrayal of her multiple forms. Therefore, the Western over-emphasis on her sensational forms, and especially sexual and violent ones, is a reductionism of the worst kind. This would be analogous to a textbook on Bill Clinton in which the entire presidency is depicted as being about Monica Lewinsky. Scholars should see this as misleading and irresponsible.
The argument that such works are only for scholars' internal consumption is false, because in this Internet age there can be no secrets from the public at large. My advice to scholars is that if they don't want to be embarrassed by people publicly quoting their writings and talks, then the best policy is not to utter such words in the first place. However, as is amply clear from examining the works of Wendy's Children, these writings are not incidental to their work, but comprise the very heart of their claims to original thinking, without which they would not have much else to say!
Psychologizing Popular Hindu Culture:
As expected, Caldwell supports Jeff Kripal's work, but she adds another important dimension to it: she interprets all complaints from the Hindu community as a sign of psychological disorder of the Hindu community, something that she strongly feels needs to be psychoanalyzed, in order to find out what is wrong with Hindu people. She writes:[
xli ]
“
The hostility with which Jeff's book has been attacked in India is due, I believe, not to what Jeff has to say about the real, historical Ramakrishna, but what his thesis implies about Vivekananda, and by extension, contemporary Hindu nationalism.
“Anyone who has seen Anand Patwardhan's "Father, Son, and Holy War" film series (particularly part 2, "Hero Pharmacy") understands the deep connections between male sexual prowess, virility, and Hindu nationalist violence that are so explicitly presented therein. Ramakrishna's tantric "madness" easily fits a South Asian understanding of the behavior of saints; many gurus and saints display anti-social or inverted tendencies (and Ramakrishna's open and active rejection of heterosexuality, even more than his homosexuality, was a deeply antisocial act in Ramakrishna's social world); and the tantric use of sexuality as reversal (both social and spiritual) goes back deep into Hindu tradition, as we all know….
“To get back to the point, I suggest it is not really the problematic of Ramakrishna that underlies the hate mail Jeff has received. Implications that Vivekananda, who reformulated Ramakrishna's message into the masculine, cleaned-up reformist Hinduism that first presented itself to the world stage in presentable form a century ago, was the passive homosexual object of his guru's lust is deeply threatening. Such an image raises spectres of the "feminine" male of India that was so much a part of colonial discourse, and that pervades contemporary Hindu nationalism. I suggest we view this entire debate in a broader perspective than simply that of religious studies and hermeneutics. We need to consider issues that Ashis Nandy has explicated in THE INTIMATE ENEMY, and that Joe Alter has written about eloquently as well, vis a vis, the role of male sexual potency and masculine identity in the nationalist struggle…. Homosexuality in contemporary Indian political discourse is not a sign of individual sexual proclivities but a symbol of weakness and dominance relations between males. Lawrence Cohen has written about this in a provocative article about Holi political cartoons, showing political rivals homosexually penetrating one another, etc.”
Caldwell continues to stretch her thesis further, and claims that these alleged sexual pathologies of Hindus, their saints and their Goddess, are the window to understand their public culture and politics as well:
“
In short we need to be careful to examine what "homosexuality" means in the rhetorical and personal contexts in which it is being used, and the historical and political background of the discussion of masculinity in South Asia, and not to focus exclusively on the personal domain as is common in Europe and America. We need to psychologize public culture as well as the private sphere. Jeff's book, while providing a nuanced and empathetic account of an individual life, invites us to broaden our lens to understand the reception of that life and its distortion in a century of highly contested religious posturing. With the current election of a BJP-led government, such careful analysis is timely and essential.”
To “psychoanalyze a public culture” is a politically correct way of stereotyping and ethnic profiling. Note how she separates out the “personal domain as is common in Europe and America” because she gives white people individuality and agency, whereas Indians, and especially Hindus, are being denied individuality and agency.
Caldwell 's scholarship may be summarized as reaching the following conclusions:
1. Sexual “madness” in Hindu saints and in the Goddess is common and expected.
2. To hide this pathology from the West, Vivekananda (who Caldwell claims was Ramakrishna's “passive homosexual object”) repackages Hinduism into a masculine image.
3. The alleged sexual deviance and hyper-masculinity resulting from #2 applies not only to Hindu individuals but also to the social culture of Hinduism.
4. Hence, there is urgency in her mind to study contemporary Hindu culture in this fashion, especially since the BJP-led government came to power.
Ergo, academic Religious Studies must now get into contemporary Indian politics! This thesis legitimizes and gives cover to Prof. Gerald Larson's U-Turn[
xlii ] -- from being a serious scholar of Samkhya for decades, to his new career in deconstructing “Hindu Nationalist” politics.
You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours -- this seems to be the
modus operandi of this cult of scholars. Jeff Kripal, the editor of the book in which Caldwell's psychoanalysis of the Hindu Goddess appears, gives the following legitimization of this cutting-edge scholarship:
“
… Hindus sometimes find the conclusions of psychoanalysis so offensive to their own self-perceptions and cultural understandings; given the psychoanalytical attempt to crack the codes of the social and intra-psychic censors and its explicit desire to reveal secrets and uncover hidden truths, it would be very surprising indeed if they reacted in any other way. In short, psychoanalysis is a method that expects to be rejected. Psychoanalysis, then, goes well beyond the anthropologist's field study and the Sanskritist's text and the historian of religions' phenomenological study to answer questions that no interview, text, or phenomenological study is willing to ask, much less answer."[
xliii ]
The Myth of Objective Scholarship:
The reader should note how many of these Eurocentric academic scholars who specialize in Hinduism, virtually end up reinventing the subject (for instance, the Goddess), in line with their own agendas, psychoses and cultural prejudices. (For my bibliography on
Criticisms of Eurocentrism, see the endnote[
xliv ].) This is achieved largely by:
1. Arbitrarily selecting the topics and questions, the subsets of the texts to be used, the filters and lenses applied.
2. Superimposing false translations -- all in the name of authentic objective scholarship.
3. Excluding the community of Hindus, or representing them by proxy, or reporting upon them as “native informants.” For instance, the representatives of specific sampradayas are not invited to be respondents when the conclusions are discussed or published. This is illustrated by the secret trial of Sri Ramakrishna
in absentia, as discussed earlier.
4. Attacking any
independent challenger with the worst
ad hominems imaginable. Minimal criticism by RISA insiders, who know where to draw the line, is encouraged, so as to give the aura of peer review and integrity. As a case of
defense by offense, those who put the spotlight on the skeletons in the closet become objects of intense anger, especially when this is done in front of the Diaspora, whose kids are sitting in classrooms where the RISA scholars teach.
Target: Ganesha and Shiva
In an undergraduate textbook authored by Paul Courtright, a Professor of Indian religions atEmoryUniversity, Ganesha's stories and rituals are depicted from various perspectives, including the following psychoanalysis[
xlv ]:
“
[F]rom a psychoanalytic perspective, there is meaning in the selection of the elephant head. Its trunk is the displaced phallus, a caricature of Siva's linga. It poses no threat because it is too large, flaccid, and in the wrong place to be useful for sexual purposes. ... So Ganesa takes on the attributes of his father but in an inverted form, with an exaggerated limp phallus - ascetic and benign - whereas Siva is “hard”, erotic, and destructive.”[xlvi]
“He [Ganesa] remains celibate so as not to compete erotically with his father, a notorious womanizer, either incestuously for his mother or for any other woman for that matter.”[ xlvii ]
"Ganesa is like a eunuch guarding the women of the harem. In Indian folklore and practice, eunuchs have served as trusted guardians of the antahpura, the seraglio. “They have the reputation of being homosexuals, with a penchant for oral sex, and are looked upon as the very dregs of society.” (Hiltebeitel 1980, p. 162). ... Like the eunuch, Ganesa has the power to bless and curse; that is, to place and remove obstacles. Although there seem to be no myths or folktales in which Ganesa explicitly performs oral sex, his insatiable appetite for sweets may be interpreted as an effort to satisfy a hunger that seems inappropriate in an otherwise ascetic disposition, a hunger having clear erotic overtones. Ganesa's broken tusk, his guardian staff, and displaced head can be interpreted as symbols of castration…. This combination of child-ascetic-eunuch in the symbolism of Ganesa – each an explicit denial of adult male sexuality - appears to embody a primal Indian male longing: to remain close to the mother and to do so in a way that will both protect her and yet be acceptable to the father. This means that the son must retain access to the mother but not attempt to possess her sexually.”[
xlviii ]
Many Indians wrote angrily against this to an Internet list. One man, who said that he respected Jesus, wrote a “fictitious distortion” of Christian symbols and narratives, using Prof. Courtright's genre of hermeneutics, as an analog for feedback to the scholars:
“
Jesus was a filthy and indecent man. He learned some magic tricks from the visiting Persian merchants. The Romans often invited him to perform at their parties, and in exchange, they offered him wine. So he routinely got drunk, tried to be “a notorious womanizer,” and was a hobo all his life. Since Jesus' mother was a prostitute, she did not want to announce the true identity of his father, and had to make up a story for the illiterate nomads. Therefore, Mary claimed that Jesus was born without physical intercourse. So all his life, Jesus guarded the myth of his mother's virginity and hid the immoral activities of his father and other customers who visited her for sex. The Roman commander played a joke upon Jesus by crucifying him using the cross, symbolizing that the cross was the phallus which his mother must have used for his conception. Thus, his followers today carry a cross as the phallic symbol of his immaculate conception.”
The author then asked: “
How would the above be considered if it were written by a non-Christian academic scholar in a country where Christianity is a small minority - just as Hinduism is a small minority in the US?” While there exist many criticisms and negative caricatures of Christianity, the point is that in introductory courses, and especially if the audience is non-Christian, such caricatures are not used.
Wendy wrote the foreword to Courtright's book, even though he did not get his Ph.D from her. Courtright differs from Kripal and Caldwell, because his use of psychoanalysis is suggestive and not definitive. He says that he does not put the psychoanalytic material at the center of his project, but as one angle of interpretation.
Regarding his affinity towards Wendy, he wrote[
xlix ]: “
You are using the term 'child' metaphorically, but I'm honored to be considered part of her [i.e. Wendy's] kinship group.”
Courtright also considers Wendy to be good for Indic traditions: “
Wendy has been influential in raising the visibility of Indian civilization through a presentation of the liveliness of its mythic tradition and shifting it away from a more bland and pious and negative image that came through a lot of the Orientalist and missionary scholarship that you rightly take issue with.”
In response, I must say that no scholar whose work is considered offensive by Hindus regards himself/herself as hating India or Hinduism. The British also loved India, so do the Christian proselytizers who try to 'save' Hindus, so do the multinationals who are devastating local farmers and producers, and so do Marxists who try to eradicate indigenous culture so as to “progress” the poor. My concern is precisely that Wendy raised the “visibility of Indian civilization” and “liveliness of its mythic tradition,” but in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons. She has turned it into stereotyped exotica and erotica, trivializing its rationality and its spiritual truth-claims as fodder for psychoanalysis, and hiding its relevance for today's world.
Courtright also praises that “
Wendy has worked hard at Chicago to recruit Indian graduate students (as we have here at Emory) because we are concerned that there is an imbalance between 'insider' and 'outsider' -- whatever that means -- in the field.” But I have personally seen both kinds of Indian students in Hinduism Studies from Chicago: those who got reprogrammed into neocolonized sepoys, and those who remain loyal to their heritage despite the pressures.[
l ]
Another scholar, Dr. Patrick Bresnan, writes about Shiva in a manner that is now considered a common depiction of Shiva in certain Western academic circles[
li ]:
“
Entering the world of Shiva worship is to enter the world of India at its most awesomely mysterious and bewildering; at least for the non-Indian. In Shiva worship, the Indian creative imagination erupts in a never-ending multiplicity of gods and demons, occult rituals, and stunning sexual symbolism …Linga/yoni veneration was not the whole of it …Young women, known as devadasis, were commonly connected with Shiva temples, and participated in the rituals, sometimes only in a symbolic fashion; sometimes not. In a degraded form the devadasi became nothing more than temple prostitutes. These extremes were more often to be found among the practitioners of Tantra, that enigmatic antithesis of conservative Hinduism that developed in northeastern India. Some Tantra temples became notorious for all kinds of extreme practices, including ritual rape and ritual murder. In Calcutta, at the Temple of Durga (one of the forms of Shiva's shakti) there was an annual festival at which many pigs, goats, sheep, fowl, and even water buffaloes would be slaughtered and ritually burned before the statue of the goddess.”
It may well be true that many of these things happen in some situations and contexts. But my point is different. The typical American student uses his/her pre-existing Eurocentric biases as the context for interpretation. This depiction of Shiva gets filtered through Eurocentric lenses, consciously or unconsciously, into the student's life-long worldview about Indian culture. These biases are usually loaded with tremendous ignorance about Indic culture and non-Abrahamic religions. There would be nothing wrong with such depictions if they were contextualized properly, derived from valid evidence, and were not essentialized as the primary teaching about Shiva -- but there is hardly enough time in the typical American curriculum to properly build a foundation first.
Consequently, the spiritual ideas of Shaivism are often lost, because the erotic-exotic image assumes center stage. At its best, the tradition is seen as not having anything positive to offer to a serious and rational young person. At its worst, Shiva is denigrated as the cause of all sorts of social ills such as rapes, sexual irresponsibility, violence, and so forth -- in other words, depicted as a criminal cult god, but without saying it in so many words in order to remain politically correct.
Billions of dollars have been spent on Western scholarship to gather field data about Indic culture, so as to “scientifically prove” various theories. Why have these scholars failed to gather data on how ignorant Americans are about Indic culture, on how anti-Hindu prejudices harm American society, and especially on how Americans' prejudices are correlated with what the scholars have written and taught?
Here is yet another example of how the cut-and-paste academic scholarship collapses important Hindu ideas into one simplistic bundle of meanings, to produce a distortion:[
lii ]
“
The myths of 'Hindu tolerance' and 'Indian inclusiveness' have been questioned before, but have become increasingly difficult to maintain in the light of contemporary conflicts. Those familiar with Indian myths know that destruction as well as creation and preservation has been a recurring theme. If the god Brahma is thought of as the creator and Vishnu as the preserver, it is also true that Siva and Kali are thought of as destroyers.”
This is a common but dangerous and false superimposition of classical Indian texts to over-interpret contemporary society. Dissolution by Shiva has numerous context-sensitive meanings, including transcendence out of human misery by dissolution of maya -- which is why he is associated with yoga. The reductionist mapping “dissolution = destruction” is incorrect. Likewise, Kali's meanings are multifaceted, and depend on the context and level of the practitioner.[
liii ]
Academic Profiling
Stanley Kurtz, an anthropologist of India, uses psychoanalysis to conclude that Hindu mothers do not have “a Western-style loving, emotional partnership” with their babies:[
liv ]
“
The special relationship between the Hindu mother and her son appears here as a variation on a distinctive Hindu pattern rather than as a mere intensification of a style of intimacy found in the West… Nursing is not therefore, an occasion through which mother and child cement on an emotional union. The child is frequently fed, yet the mother seldom lingers to mirror the baby's satisfaction. Thus, while the child no doubt develops a strong emotional attachment to the mother as a result of the physical gratification she provides, the mother does not respond by setting up a Western-style loving, emotional partnership.”
This is utterly false, namely, that Hindu mothers do not see nursing the baby as opportunity to cement emotional union, the way white women supposedly do. This kind of racial, ethnic and cultural profiling and denigration has replaced what used to be blatant racism. Today, this racism is justified as “objective” research findings, and is especially dangerous because many Indian scholars have sold out to join this movement.
In yet another book, “
All the Mothers Are One,”[
lv ] Stanley Kurtz has constructed a new model for the psychology of Hinduism, based on his studies into Indian social and family structures, and interviews with devotees of Santoshi Ma. Claiming that Durga symbolizes the castrating Mother Goddess, he has propounded the Durga Complex to explain “
the characteristically Hindu form of conflicts over unconscious incestuous strivings,”[
lvi ] in which “
castration symbolism at the most mature level represents transformative self-willed sacrifice signaling the abandonment of infantile attachments…”[
lvii ]
To deny Hindus their sense of individuality, he writes: “
Their notion of the divine knows neither boundaries of time, place, substance, nor identity.”[
lviii ] And therefore claims: “
Individualism is built into our psychic structure but not into that of the Hindu.”[
lvix ]
Besides finding many technical flaws in his methodologies, Humes criticizes his work severely as
“
a method which in the end borders on racism: despite arguing for greater sensitivity to cultural difference in psychology, “those people” over “there” are actually all alike – but not like “us”…Kurtz psychology excludes Hindu women…they are, after all, “mommies” whose psychology can be dispensed with in a few words and a note.”
The new editor of the major 15-volume critical edition of Mahabharata being published by The University of Chicago Press, said at the Mahabharata Conference in Montreal, that MB is “
God's Genocide,” the main theme being “
Krishna commanding the destruction of mankind,” and that this should be the overarching theme of the entire translation. So what do we have here? Islamic scholars are busy trying to clean up the image of Islam. On the other hand, Hinduism scholars are trying the opposite -- appearing to demonize it, and thereby causing, intentionally or otherwise, Hindu shame amongst the youth.
History shows that genocides have been preceded by the denigration of the victims -- showing them as irrational, immoral, lacking a legitimate religion, lacking in compassion towards others and love towards their babies, etc., i.e. not deserving of the same human rights extended to white people. Notice how these so-called practices of mothers are labeled as “a distinctive Hindu pattern” per se. This is also why “dowry murders” have been very aggressively put on the dominant culture's agenda, to be prosecuted specifically as “a Hindu problem,” even though the scholarship of Veena Oldenburg and others clearly establishes that it is not a “Hindu” problem.[
lx ]
The time has come to ask: How does today's scholarship compare with the Eurocentric scholarship in earlier times about Native Americans, African slaves, Jews, Roma, and others, who were subsequently victims of genocide in various ways? Are certain “objective” scholars, unconsciously driven by their Eurocentric essences, to pave the way for a future genocide of a billion or more Hindus, because of economic and/or ecological pressures of over-population later during this century?
Even in those instances where the scholar might be criticizing genuine social problems within “Hindu society,” Dave Freedholm explains how Hinduism is not being given the same treatment as Christianity:
“
When scholars examine the world's religions they usually attempt to distinguish between their 'universal' theological/philosophical foundations and the particular historically and culturally bound social structures of societies that practice those religions. To take Christianity as an example, biblical scholars, using a sophisticated hermeneutics, extract a 'universal' Pauline theology from the social context of Paul's letters that presumed slavery, the subjugation of women, etc. Pauline statements that seem to support this social order are reinterpreted in light of passages that are deemed to reflect more universal values.”[
lxi ]
How Reliable is Wendy Doniger's Sanskrit?
There are many ways to define “correct” translation. My criteria is that it must be accepted by the mainstream community whose tradition is in question -- in accordance with the concept known as
purva-paksha. If the text's authors' intentions and the practitioners' interpretations are to be over-ruled, then there should be a rigorous burden of proof on the scholar's part. I also feel that a “correct” translation is inseparable from the culture and the contexts applicable. I am not criticizing the
entire academic work of Doniger, but merely those items that are specifically discussed here. However, I was unable to find a single comprehensive critical evaluation of Wendy's work, nor any plans to produce such a criticism, despite the enormous importance given to her work, and the fact that what is as stake is the legitimacy of the insider's view of the world's oldest literary tradition. One must also bring into this discussion the hermeneutics of power -- especially since there is a concentration of control over the distribution of academic knowledge. Finally, one cannot defend the criticism of her work X by showing the greatness of another work Y, nor by psychoanalyzing the critics, and nor by disqualifying the critics.
Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard was once publicly challenged to prove his claim that Wendy Doniger's knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit is severely flawed. Witzel's claim seemed as audacious as saying that the Pope is not a good catholic. Therefore, Witzel quickly published on the web several important examples of Sanskrit mistranslations by Wendy Doniger.[
lxii ]
It is said, that Witzel was privately reprimanded for being so critical of the Queen of Hinduism. Witzel was unfairly demonized and blackballed -- it was certainly his right to criticize such blatant blunders, especially given the clout and power enjoyed by Wendy. If gods, goddesses and saints can be deconstructed by her, then why should her work be exempt from criticism? The following three examples raise some doubts over whether she should be the Queen.
Witzel on Doniger's Mistranslation of the Rig Veda:
With due respects to Doniger's scholarship and insights, it must be pointed out, because it is not universally known even among Indologists, that the depth of the professor's knowledge of Sanskrit has been called into question by Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard University. To quote Witzel, Doniger's “
rendering of even the first two paadas [of Rig Veda] is more of a paraphrase than a translation,” and her style “
is rather a stream of unconnected George-Bush-like anacoluths.” He goes on to illustrate his point by referring to Doniger's translation of one verse, “
He will shed tears, sobbing, when he learns,” and commenting that “
there is no sobbing here,” and that she simply made that up to give the desired effect.
But it is not just in translation that Doniger fails. Her interpretations are also flawed. Witzel charges that Doniger “
denies the possibility of male/female friendship -- perhaps a current local cultural bias -- but certainly not a Rgvedic one.” He also reveals that in her translations, “
Sakhya is completely misunderstood, as is usual in such cases with Indologists not very conversant with Vedic; it is understood on the basis of Epic/Classical sakhi "friend" and thus the whole point of the apparent saying is missed. A Vedic sakhi is not just any friend…”
Astonished, Witzel concludes: “
In this hymn (of 18 stanzas) alone I have counted 43 instances which are wrong or where others would easily disagree.”
Witzel on Doniger's Mistranslation of the Jaiminiya Brahmana:
Regarding Wendy's translation of “Jaiminiya Brahmana,” Prof. Witzel remarks: “
And of course, the translation, again is a 're'-translation” of others' works” in which she has “merely added a fashionable(?) Freudian coating…”
Witzel continues: “
The trouble again is that [Doniger] did not follow up the secondary literature well, not even with the help of the students she mentions…if the sec. lit. had been used -- the translation would have turned out much better.”
Witzel exposes “
her predilection for street language colloquialisms,” such as “
balls of cowshit, balls of shit” and “
balls of Indra”, which Witzel considers to be “
Vedic slang” not found in the Sanskrit texts. Furthermore, he charges, there are “
many gaps in the translations where words or whole sentences have been forgotten…”
Even more seriously of concern to Witzel are Wendy's errors in what he calls the “
serious grammatical business,” for which he scolds her for “
misunderstanding the 'first-year Sanskrit'.” “
Difficult sentences,” writes Witzel, “
are simply left out without telling us so.”
Witzel concludes: “
Simple question: if 'that' much is wrong in just one story (and this is a small selection only!) -- what about the rest of this book and her other translations?… It might have been better to have used the old translations and to have added her Freudian interpretation to them... In sum: The “translation” simply is UNREALIABLE.”
Witzel on Doniger's Mistranslation of the Laws of Manu:
Reviewing this translation by Doniger, Witzel writes: “
I give just one example which shows both wrong (rather, lack of) philological method and lack of simple common sense.” (See endnote for the rather technical example.[
lxiii ])
Furthermore, Witzel criticizes Doniger for using only a small selection of the available variations. She does not invest serious energy in selecting what variations to use where and why. Therefore, concludes Witzel, her scholarship is not of the standard required by Harvard: “
In view of all of this, I wonder indeed whether D's translation would have been accepted in the Harvard Oriental Series rather than in Penguin…”
Witzel's Conclusions:
This brief but devastating review of the Queen's scholarship was just the tip of the iceberg of what Witzel could have done, had he not been asked to stop. His overall remarks about the above three examples of her mistranslation:
“
Note that all 3 translations are RE-translations. Mistakes of the type mentioned above could easily have been avoided if the work of our 19th century predecessors (and contemporaries!) had been consulted more carefully… Last point: Looking at the various new translations that have appeared in the past decade or so: Why always to RE-translate something done 'several' times over already --- and why not to take up one of the zillion UN-translated Skt. texts?”
Witzel is also critical of the heroic proclamations by Wendy's cronies about her books: “
And a little less hype would also do: 'a landmark translation, the first authoritative translation in this century' (cover); 'to offer to more specialized scholars new interpretations of many difficult verses.' (p. lxi) -- I doubt it.”
The claim of critical inquiry with an open mind would require that RISA should have taken up these issues seriously. At the very least, there should be panels of scholars, whose careers are outside her influence, to critique Wendy's work, because of her enormous power in academe.
