Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America

564 Pages·2007·5.26 MB·English

by  Krishnan Ramaswamy

INVADING THE SACRED
An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America
Editors:
Krishnan Ramaswamy
Antonio de Nicolas
Aditi Banerjee
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. It documents the way these
1See Arvind Sharma, “Hindus and Scholars”, Religion in the News (7:1 (2004) pp.
16-17, 27.
XII PREFACE
grievances were articulated and ventilated, as well as the response from
the world of the Western academia and, to a certain extent, from the
media, as the issue came to a head.
II
It seems to me that the issue first needs to be viewed on the broadest
canvas possible, namely, that of history, before one turns to the
details.
Such a historical perspective is best developed by utilizing the
distinction regularly drawn in the study of religion between the insider
and the outsider, notwithstanding some problems of definition involved
in invoking this distinction. From the point of view of this distinction,
the study of religion, in the intellectual history of humanity, seems to
exhibit a fourfold typology in terms of the modalities of transmission
involved, in the context of the various religious traditions over the past
few centuries: (1) insider to insider; (2) outsider to outsider; (3) outsider
to insider and (4) insider to outsider.2 The various religions flourished
in relative isolation in the pre-modern era. Historians do warn us that
perceptions of such isolation may be somewhat exaggerated, but no
one has seriously challenged the view that the main channel of the
intellectual communication of a religious tradition was from insider to
insider during this period. This state of affairs began to change with
the rise of the West and the onset of the modern era. During this phase,
as the West became familiar with the religions of the Americas, Africa,
and Asia, one main mode of transmission about these religions became
that from outsider to outsider. Western scholars, outsiders to these
various religious traditions, began sharing their knowledge about them
with other Westerners, who were as much of an outsider to the religious
traditions they were receiving information about, as those who were
providing it. However, as the Western domination of the world became
institutionalized in the form of colonialism, the West began to control
the intellectual discourse in its colonies and the insiders to these traditions
began to be profoundly affected, even in their self-understanding of
their own religious traditions, by Western accounts.3 Thus another
dimension was added to the channeling of religious communication—
2Arvind Sharma, “Insider and Outsider in the Study of Religion”, Eastern Anthropologist
38(1985):331-33.