Countering Southasian/naxalite Organizations In US - 2

[acharya]

The interpretation of gods
By Amy M. Braverman
Photography by Dan Dry

Do leading religious scholars err in their analysis of Hindu texts?


ALTHOUGH ACADEMICS FREQUENTLY INTERPRET religions through a sexual lens (see, for example, Theodore W. Jennings Jr.’s The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament [Pilgrim Press, 2003]), for some Hindus such scholarship has hit a sensitive chord. Online writers complain that psychoanalysis has been discredited in psychology, and applying it implies that Hindus are “sick.” But “historians of religion are not doing therapy; they’re interpreting texts,” Kripal argues. “A model can be accurate and therapeutically unhelpful” (though for him personally, he says, psychoanalysis has been an effective therapy). “People use psychoanalysis or Foucault because it’s the most sophisticated language we have in the West to talk about the questions we have.” In Kali’s Child, he says, he doesn’t apply a strict Freudian analysis but also interprets Ramakrishna’s story through the Hindu tantric tradition. “Both are languages,” he says, “that turn to sexuality as the key to human religious experience.”

Even so, many Jewish or Christian studies scholars were born into the religion they study, giving them, as Barnard College religion professor John Stratton Hawley puts it, “some sort of perceived right to speak. That’s not the case for people like us [Doniger, Kripal, Courtright, himself] who have come to Hinduism only later in life.”

Hawley, who also has scuffled with Malhotra, acknowledges the need for more Hindus in the field. “As a secular academic discipline, religious studies scarcely exists in India,” he notes. “What theology meant in the British academy was Christian studies.” Hence India’s educational landscape is different than in the United States. Although students of Indian descent often take up history, literature, anthropology, or the sciences, “that hasn’t happened in religion. It’s going to take a generation for people who are Hindu by background to enter religious studies in large numbers.” Meanwhile, Hawley says, “newly immigrant famili


es have encouraged sons and daughters to enter fields that seem more meaningful, more mainstream”—not to mention more lucrative. So while few Hindus have gone into religious studies, “the injustice isn’t caused by someone like me, but by the long history of what has happened. We train Hindus to enter the field alongside non-Hindus, and are very eager to do so. It takes time for the numbers to even out on the other side of the Ph.D.”

It’s a problem Malhotra also laments. In “Wendy’s Child Syndrome” he notes that “a peculiar brand of ‘secularism’ has prevented academic religious studies from entering [India’s] education system in a serious manner.” Therefore, unlike other religions, he writes in an e-mail interview, “there is a lack of Indic perspective that would...provide equivalent counter balance” to Western scholars’ theories, creating an “asymmetric discourse.” Further, he says, most of the Hinduism scholars are “either whites or Indians under the control of whites. One does not find Arabs, Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, etc., engaged in this kind of Hinduphobia racket.” He’s begun to research “whiteness studies,” which analyzes the “anthropology of white culture and uncovers their myths. ... I am researching issues such as white culture’s Biblical based homophobia, deeply ingrained guilt of sex (Garden of Eden episode) and condemnation of the body. ... I posit that many white scholars are driven into Hinduism studies by their own private voyeurism or fantasy, or an attempted escape from white culture’s restrictions. This is what I earlier called Wendy’s Child Syndrome because my sample was a few of Doniger’s students. But now the sample is much larger...”

The Indian/white, or insider/outsider, issue has been debated in both academia and the Hindu community. In September 2002 Sankrant Sanu, a former Microsoft manager and freelance writer, argued in a Sulekha.com essay that Microsoft’s online Encarta encyclopedia article on Hinduism—written by Doniger—put forth “a distinctively negative portrayal of Hinduism,” especially when compared to the entries on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Sanu recommended that someone “emic” to the community rewrite the Hinduism entry, as had been the case for the other religions. Microsoft obliged, exchanging Doniger’s essay with one by Arvind Sharma, a McGill University professor of comparative religion.

For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray. “Both the insider and the outsider see the truth,” he writes in an e-mail interview, “but genuine understanding may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At this intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the icon of the god Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by outsiders but rarely by Hindus themselves, or that the Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic ritual to outsiders but not to Christians.” He continues, “If insiders and outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions of intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the other’s bluff.”
photo: The interpretation of the gods

There’s a fine line, some scholars say, between legitimate Hindu concerns and the right-wing political wave that has recently hit India. Although Malhotra, for example, condemns the violence and threats, he has acknowledged in a Washington Post article that the Hindu right has appropriated his arguments. Just as he points to certain Western academics, arguing they perpetuate what he calls the “caste, cows, curry, dowry” stereotypes, in India, says Vijay Prashad, AM’90, PhD’94, a Trinity College assistant professor of international studies, “the Hindu right has taken education as an important field of political battle,” trying, for instance, to install conservative textbooks in schools.

Malhotra’s goal is to “rebrand India,” says Prashad, a self-described Marxist who studied history and anthropology, not religious studies, at Chicago, and who has debated Malhotra in online forums. But “scholars, to me, are not in the business of branding.” Malhotra and others “have created the idea that there is one Indic thought,” Prashad says, but “there are so many schools of thought within Hinduism.”

He does, however, agree with Malhotra about Western educational institutions. “The U.S. academy is totally insular,” he says. “We don’t engage the public often enough.” Religious-studies professors, he argues, should write editorials and otherwise engage the public as often as political scientists. “The oxygen in public opinion is being sucked by people like Rajiv [Malhotra]. He’s the only one pressing so hard. He uses that silence to say that people are arrogant and they don’t have any answers.”

For Doniger it’s a matter of considering multiple explanations. Both Courtright and Kripal, she says, “applied psychoanalysis in a limited way, and they found something that is worth thinking about. They said this could be one of the things that’s going on here, not the only thing.” She understands that Indians are sensitive to postcolonial threats to their culture. “For many years Europeans wrote anything they wanted and took anything they wanted from India,” she says. “Even now so much of Indian culture is influenced by American political and economic domination. And India is quite right to object to that.” The protesters, however, have transferred that concern to an intellectual level, arguing “that Western scholars have pushed out Indian views the same way Coca-Cola has pushed out Indian products.” But, she argues, “it’s a false model to juxtapose intellectual goods with economic ones. I don’t feel I diminish Indian texts by writing about or interpreting them. My books have a right to exist alongside other books.”

Though Doniger often (but not always) focuses on sexuality, the current protests derive from more than a Victorian sense of decorum, says Prashad. The issue seeps deeper, he says, stemming from the Hindu right’s “protofascist views.” Recent events demonstrate the lengths to which some nationalists have taken their protests. This past January a group looted India’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute because it was where James W. Laine, Macalester College’s humanities dean, had researched his book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003)—which suggests that the revered parents of Shivaji, a Hindu nationalist icon, may have been estranged. A month earlier another group attacked Indian historian Shrikant Bahulkar, tarring his face, because Laine had thanked him in his acknowledgements.

Though such violence hasn’t occurred in the United States, Western scholars have felt the effects of India’s new politics. In her Hyde Park home Doniger displays her Indian art collection—colorful tapestries, bronze sculptures including dozens of Ganeshas, and paintings adorn every surface. “A lot of these things you couldn’t buy in India now,” she says, noting that some pieces she bought in the 1960s have become antiques, which today India, like many countries, protects from exportation. But unlike art, ideas don’t get stopped at the border.