Countering Southasian/naxalite Organizations In US - 2

[Guest]

If you have been following the exploits of Wendy and her children you might find this hilarious..

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IndianCivili...on/message/8753
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IndianCivili...n/message/47467

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[Guest]

The interpretation of gods

[acharya]

The Endless Journal of Vaporous Scatology

This from our North American correspodent:

An illiterate farmer in California has deciphered an inscription on
a chariot (excavated in the Chinatown area of San Fransisco) which
conclusively proves that Aryans migrated to India from Germany.
The inscription on the axle ( made of iron, a metal still unknown to
Indians) has been deciphered as "Witzelvagen SUV"- written in a
dialect still spoken in the shores of the mighty Danube (the
original Ganga). Translated into modern scholarly English using
techniques of comparative historical philology it is
" Weasel Mobile SUV". The phrase "SUV" remains mysterious, but is
believed to be a religious totem-or perhaps a mysterious reference to
the diminutive reproductive organ of the Weasel ( see below).

It had already been established that the twenty ton iron and wood
construction was ridden by blue-eyed blond-haired Aryans across the
Khyber pass. At first it was assumed that it was pulled by horses.
This ran into trouble with comparative-scatological historians, who
know well that there have never been any horses in India. No horse
sh1t has ever been found in India even after decades of painful
search by legions of Indoscatologists. (FOOTNOTE: There was a claim
that a horse's ass had visited briefly from Germany but it has
since been established that this was just the drug-induced
hallucination of a hippy in Katmandu.)

The unemployed farmer's historic decipherment resolves the puzzle
brilliantly- the chariots were pulled by a rodent
called "Weasel". This rodent is known to be a feisty if irrational
creature, apt to make leaps of faith. When it inevitably falls on its
*tush ( a proto-Indo-Germanic word describing a sensitive part of
the rodent anatomy) it then tries to sneak across the logical divide
pretending to be a migrant. Who put this poor creature in charge of
pulling the twenty ton chariots of the Aryan invasion ( oops-
migration) across the rough terrain of the Khyber pass is the
repititive mystery still remaining unsolved.

The decipherment will be translated into the unscholarly dialects of
the unwashed Indians as soon as we can find an Indian graduate
student to do the translation. Look for publication in our sister
journal the PRAVDA-it will be copied on our SUSHKALINGA page and
posted and cross-posted ad nauseum to every newsgroup imaginable.
An important clarification by the great Stunaad will also appear-as
soon as he wakes up from his nap.

ALL ENQUIRIES WILL BE SUPPRESSED BY THE EDITORS.

[acharya]

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

Do leading religious scholars err in their analysis of Hindu texts?
photo: Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.
Wendy Doniger in her Hyde Park home.

Wendy Doniger didn’t see the egg fly past her head, but she heard it splatter against the wall behind her. Continuing a November 2003 University of London lecture on the Hindu Ramayana text, Doniger looked down, thinking perhaps she’d broken her water glass against the podium. When an audience member shouted, “It’s an egg!” she turned and saw the trickle of raw goop. The man who’d thrown the ovoid missile quickly exited the room.

During a post-talk discussion, an Indian woman took the microphone and quietly read a series of questions that went, as Doniger recalls: “From what psychoanalytic institution do you have your degree?”

“None,” she replied.

“Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think you have the right to psychoanalyze Hindu texts?”

They were questions that Doniger, the Mircea Eliade distinguished service professor of the history of religions, had heard before. At the November 2000 American Academy of Religion (AAR) annual meeting in Nashville, her former students marked her 60th birthday by producing a Festschrift, Notes From a Mandala, filled with essays assessing the state of Indology. A panel discussed the impact that her teaching (at Chicago since 1978) and scholarship (more than 20 books written, edited, and translated) has had on religious studies. During the after-panel Q & A a man raised his hand. Doniger called on him, and he asked her the same questions the softspoken woman repeated three years later in London.
photo: The interpretation of the gods

The man was Rajiv Malhotra, an entrepreneur and activist living in New Jersey. Malhotra, who studied physics at India’s St. Stephens College and computer science at Syracuse University, now works full time at the Infinity Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1995 to “upgrade the quality of understanding of Indian civilization in the American media and educational system, as well as among the English language educated Indian elite.”

Malhotra remembers the Nashville exchange differently than Doniger does. As he recounts in a 2002 online essay, “Wendy’s Child Syndrome”: “I...stood up and asked: Since you have psychoanalyzed Hinduism and created a whole new genre of scholarship, do you think it would be a good idea for someone to psychoanalyze you, because an insight into your subconscious would make your work more interesting and understandable?

“[S]he replied that there was nothing new that any psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not hidden anything. I...stated that most clients also tell their psychoanalysts that they have nothing hidden in their mental basement, but that such clients are precisely the most interesting persons to psychoanalyze. She...took it well, and said, ‘You got me on this one.’ I...predict[ed] that research on her own private psychology would get done in the next several years, and that it would become important some day to psychoanalyze many other Western scholars also, since they superimpose their personal and cultural conditioning on their research about other peoples.”

His 23,591-word (including 91 footnotes) essay, published on the Indian–community Web site Sulekha.com, has become a pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western Hinduism scholars—many of whom teach or have studied at Chicago—and some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere. Since G. M. Carstairs’s 1958 book The Twice-Born (Hogarth Press) scholars have noted Freudian themes in old Indian texts and stories, arguing, for example, that the god Ganesha can be read as having an Oedipus complex. More recently, with the Internet’s help, the Hindu diaspora—about 2 million in the United States, according to the Hindu American Foundation—has become better organized. Some members have begun to protest that Western scholars distort their religion and perpetuate negative stereotypes. They’ve raised questions about who should teach and interpret their texts, whether it’s appropriate to apply psychoanalysis and other Western constructs to South Asian culture, whether there is one correct way to teach religion, and how Hindus are portrayed in the West.

In two years Malhotra’s essay received more than 22,000 hits and generated 445 comments (several by Malhotra himself) and two response essays. Most readers agreed with his conclusion: “Rights of individual scholars must be balanced against rights of cultures and communities they portray, especially minorities that often face intimidation. Scholars should criticize but not define another’s religion.” Other readers took their anger farther, calling for the scholars’ resignations, sending hate mail, tossing eggs, or issuing death threats. The adamant, at times violent responses parallel a political movement in India, where conservative Hindu nationalists have gained power since the early 1990s. Though Malhotra’s academic targets say he has some valid discussion points, they also argue that his rhetoric taps into the rightward trend and attempts to silence unorthodox, especially Western, views.

For instance, in “Wendy’s Child Syndrome” Malhotra condemns “the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, who is un-doubtedly the most powerful person in academic Hinduism Studies today,” and “her large cult of students, who glorify her in exchange for her mentorship.” He notes that religious studies—a field that teaches about a religion without preaching its beliefs—is rare in India, making academic discussions of Hinduism a mostly Western conversation. “Under Western control,” he argues, “Hinduism studies has produced ridiculous caricatures that could easily be turned into a Bollywood movie or a TV serial.”

He cites, among others, two books for which Doniger wrote the forewords: Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (Oxford University Press, 1985), by Emory University interim religion department chair Paul B. Courtright, and Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (University of Chicago Press, 1995), by Rice University religious studies chair Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD’93.

Malhotra also quotes Harvard South Asian studies chair Michael E. J. Witzel, who has questioned Doniger’s Sanskrit translations and her proclivity for finding sexual meanings in ancient texts. Doniger, who was named Martin Marty Center director this year and whose appointments span the Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean World and Social Thought, and the College, knows that her work, including a retranslation of the Kamasutra (Oxford, 2002), can be controversial. “If people think sexuality is a shameful thing, then it’s embarrassing for them to have the texts that talk about it discussed,” she says. “A Sanskrit word can have ten different meanings. A translator must choose, based on her knowledge of the context. Choosing the sexual meaning,” she continues, “is not incorrect if that is one of the attested meanings. It’s a matter of, Did the author mean that? You can make a judgment, and another person can argue and say you chose the wrong meaning.”

After Malhotra’s essay hit the Web Doniger received a dozen negative e-mails. One person asked, “Were you raped as a child? Is that why you write such things?” At first, she says, she responded. When a critic argued, “Everything you’ve written about Hinduism is incorrect. You must have bought your degree from Harvard,” she asked to which books the protester was referring. “I would never read anything you’ve written,” came the reply. At that point, she thought, “That’s it. This is not a serious discussion,” and she stopped answering such messages and reading the online debates. After last year’s egg incident she canceled a lecture in Bombay.

Emory’s Courtright, meanwhile, faced harsher threats. His book, Ganesa, received little attention outside academia when it was first published in 1985. In it he uses several methods to interpret the story of Ganesha, the god created by his mother, the goddess Parvati, to guard the door while she bathed. When her husband, Shiva, came home to a stranger blocking the way to his wife, he beheaded Ganesha. Pavarti protested, so Shiva brought him back to life and replaced his head with that of an elephant. On page 103 of his book Courtright includes a psychoanalytic interpretation—“It would have been odd if I hadn’t done so,” he said in a Divinity School lecture this past April—noting the story’s oedipal theme of father-son confrontation and its alternative conclusion of the son being wounded rather than the father. He compares Ganesha, who is celibate in most versions, to a eunuch who stands at a harem doorway. And previous scholars, Courtright writes, have called Ganesha’s broken tusk and his trunk phallic symbols.

“I was approaching this story,” he said, “as belonging to the public domain, not just Hindus.” Some Hindus, however, didn’t see it that way. After Ganesa’s second edition in 2001 and Malhotra’s essay in 2002, the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Hindu Student Council collected 7,000 signatures on an Internet petition asking for a public apology, a recall of the book, and a new version changing parts the group found offensive. In India, where the conservative, recently defeated Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was still in power, the book was withdrawn from bookstores. Courtright received hate mail, including some threats. “You will get what you deserve from Lord Ganesha,” one read. “He should be tortured alive until he turns to ash,” went another.

This past February eight members of a local Hindu organization, the Concerned Community of Atlanta, met with Emory College dean Robert Paul, AM’66, PhD’70, and other faculty. The group wanted the school to “reiterate their feelings of insult,” classify his interpretations “as acts of racial insensitivity,” have Courtright issue an apology, remove him from teaching Hinduism courses, and “find Hindu scholars to teach Hinduism.” After the meeting Paul wrote a letter explaining that Courtright’s book was not meant “to offend or provoke but to explore hidden connections.” He noted that using psychoanalysis was “widely controversial but widely accepted as scholarly work of good faith.” The group wrote back to say they weren’t satisfied, but the conflict has faded a bit since then.

“These things have a shelf life,” Courtright says in a November interview. “It’s moved on.” Still, Malhotra and his cohorts are “building a general case that American scholars of Hinduism are anti-Hindu,” he contends. Recently on Malhotra’s radar screen, Courtright notes, is David White, AM’81, PhD’88, University of California–Santa Barbara religious studies chair. White’s book Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago, 2003), Malhotra argues in a May Svabhinava.org entry, contends that the Hindu tantra tradition “was intended as South Asian decadent sexuality, without spiritual purpose, and that this decadence was the result of sociological suffering of Indian subaltern (lower castes) in classical times.” On the same Web site White’s former student Jeffrey S. Lidke counters that the writer “does not reduce the origins of tantra to anything other than the sphere of religion” and that rather than “decadent,” tantric sex in White’s account “was a primary means by which yogins and yoginis ultimately became immortal.”

Malhotra also argues that U.S. Hinduism scholars actively promote each other’s work. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours—this seems to be the modus operandi of this cult of scholars,” he writes. To Courtright, though, the academic study of Hinduism “works like anything else”: an author submits a book to a publisher, the publisher sends the text to expert scholars for review, and “on the basis of those opinions they’ll make a decision on whether to publish it.” The idea, he says, “that we all somehow get in a room and figure out who we’re going to publish and who we’re going to screw over is ridiculous.”
photo: The interpretation of the gods

While Courtright has answered critics in lectures and essays, Rice’s Kripal has gone further, writing a new introduction to Kali’s Child, fixing translation errors, publishing several essays including a Sulekha.com response to “Wendy’s Child Syndrome,” and setting up a Web site (www.ruf.rice.edu/~kalischi/) explaining his side of the story. In Kali’s Child, which won the AAR’s 1996 award for best first book in the history of religions, he analyzes an original Bengali text to glean new information about the 19th-century saint Ramakrishna, an important figure in modern Hinduism known for experiencing ecstatic states and visions and for inspiring the Ramakrishna Order. The title refers to the goddess Kali, whom Ramakrishna saw in his visions. Kripal translates one passage as saying that during his mystical experiences Ramakrishna often placed his foot “‘in the lap’ (kole)—that is, on the genitals—of a young boy disciple.” Interpreting that line and others through the lenses of both psychoanalysis and Hindu tantra, Kripal argues that the saint’s ecstasies were driven by “mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood.” In fact, Kripal writes, the experiences were “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic,” and Ramakrishna harbored unconscious “homoerotic” desires for “young, beautiful boys.”

Malhotra slams Kripal’s “scandalous conclusions,” his command of Bengali, and his psychological motivations. But he wasn’t the first to criticize the book. In January 1997 Calcutta’s English-language daily the Statesman published a full-page negative review, generating a flurry of even angrier letters to the editor and further media attention. “It morphed into a ban movement. The central government got involved,” and, he says, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation started a file on him.

Two Ramakrishna Order reviewers pointed out translation errors—Swami Atmajnanananda (born Stuart Elkman) in the International Journal of Hindu Studies and Swami Tyagananda in a self-published and online article. Kripal printed apologies and fixed the errors flagged in time for the 1998 second edition. Mistakes found after the new edition, he says, “are all minor and can be changed easily without changing the thesis.” Several items criticized as errors, he argues, “are issues of interpretation, not translation per se.”

In spring 2001 another ban movement germinated in India, this time escalating beyond the papers and into the upper house of Parliament, where it failed—not because Kali’s Child wasn’t offensive, according to newspaper accounts, but because “it would have given undue publicity” to the book. Then a letter-writing campaign tried to block his 2002 tenure at Rice. And though many readers liked the book—“I have received hundreds of appreciative letters, some from spiritual leaders, scholarly reviews that are extremely enthusiastic, and numerous enthusiastic responses from Hindu readers”—Kripal has “pretty much spent the last eight years responding to these critics.”

His response included another book, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001), which is “one long argument that most mystical traditions are homoerotic,” he says. There he applies “the same methods of Kali’s Child to Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, to the lives of Western scholars, and to my own life and thought, including my own experience of being psychoanalyzed.” In other words, he argues, it isn’t only in Hinduism but in many religions that Western scholars see hidden, often sexual, meanings.

[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.

[Guest]

More on Amy Braverman article.. A post by RM on sulekha..

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What Amy Braverman chose to ignore:

Before evaluating the politics behind her story, please read some of the letters from third parties who had written to Ms. Braverman when she first contacted me about her article. It is clear that she chose to mostly ignore what they and others like them had to say.

Furthermore, I sent her a list of about 30 contacts, mostly academic scholars, who had many years of involvement on this debate, but she chose to ignore them, except for one or two:

Here are 3 of the letters she got:


<b>From Dr. Krishnan Ramaswamy:</b>

Dear Ms. Braverman,

My name is Krishnan Ramaswamy, and I have several years of experience in research in the clinical and social sciences. I am particularly interested in methodological issues and how the quality of research and scholarship are harmed or helped by the methods, processes and safeguards (such as peer review) that are employed in research.

I am very glad that you are writing about an important issue which over the years has caused serious concern and discussion about the reputation of the University of Chicago among scholars and methodologists in the social sciences as well as many concerned Hindu-American taxpayers who support and care about our Public Universities. Mr. Malhotra definitely deserves credit for bringing this long simmering debate into the open. These issues - particularly to do with the 1) lack of intellectual rigor, 2) Lack of adequate scholarly preparation including language skills 2) a break down of the peer-review process, 3) a tendency to present biases and prejudices as ‘Proven’ research conclusions, 4) fads and personal predilections elevated to the level of systematic ‘methodology’ 5) Lack of transparency about personal affiliations or funding affiliations to groups that may have a religious /ideological agenda, among members of ‘Hinduism Studies’ Departments at Universities such as the University of Chicago - are very serious matters that potentially debase the very basis of liberal education in our country. In addition, Hindu-Americans, other Hindus and their children are often subject to Hate-crimes, denigration and Hindu-Phobia because of misunderstandings about their religion and culture- a situation not helped when some of the misunderstanding is the result of bad scholarship by our academics.

I believe that Alumni of the University of Chicago will be well served if you focus the attention of your article on these substantive issues, (many of which intellectuals like Rajiv Malhotra, Sankrant Sanu and even academics like Srinivas Tilak and Antonio de Nicholas have highlighted) rather than try to focus on personalities.

I note that you have asked about Mr Malhotra's background and funding, as well as his relationship with venues that have edited and published him over the years. So that you can a present fair and balanced account to University of Chicago Alumni, I am sure you will be asking similar questions regarding funding sources (particularly whether any of these funds come from
groups with a Religious or Political ideation) and about the relationship of Messers Doniger, Kripal and Courtright with the editors and referees of the Journals and publishers who publish their work. Are they related persons? Do they have financial and career ties to each other? If so how do we guarantee that they can critique and question without fear or favor? Mr Malhotra has been candid in answering your questions. I truly do wonder, if Doniger et al will provide you with succinct and honest answers to these important questions.

Another issue that distresses me as a person who values intellectual freedom and honesty is the reaction that some "Hindu studies scholars" have when their Scholarship is challenged on SUBSTANTIVE grounds: they respond with ad hominem attacks about the character and motivation of the critics, play the victim, they circle the wagons and claim they are being "attacked" by "extremists" - but NEVER get around to addressing the detailed, specific and
substantive issues, that in most other fields of academic would never be allowed to stand without a full scale review or peer investigation. Surely a big part of intellectual freedom is the freedom of all of us to scrutinize and question the works of other intellectuals without being demonized, and a
big part of academic and intellectual honesty is to be able and willing to examine and acknowledge substantive problems with one's work, methods and conclusions no matter who points these out?

I wish you all the best with your article. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or clarifications.

Best Regards,
Krishnan Ramaswamy PhD

"Civil dissent is conscience in action- the very basis of freedom" - Mahatma Gandhi


<b>From Prof. VV Raman:</b>

Dear Ms Braverman:

I understand you are planning to write an article based on your interview with Mr. Rajiv Malhotra. I am familiar with his work, and I am also aware of the jolt it has created in the world of Western scholarship on India. From what I know and what I have read in this context, the following are some of the things I would like to say. Mr. Malhotra is a serious and well-grounded scholar. He did not come to this field via the standard academic route, but his writings reflect more erudition and a greater grasp of important issues than many Ph.D.'s I know. His principal argument has been (as I see it) that Western scholarship has, in many instances, totally misunderstood, both intentionally and unwittingly, the essence of Indic culture, thought, philosophy, and religion. This has led to gross distortions and misrepresentations of India and Indic culture with serious and significant impacts on intercultural understanding. Mr. Malhotra has developed theories and models to explain and interpret this phenomenon. I am aware that he has generated much unpleasantness, even acrimony, among many scholars. Because of his firm stand and sometimes angry style, he has angered the Western academic establishment on Indology, and alienated a great many, including some Hindu scholars: the latter, because he comes out very strongly (sometimes unfairly, in my opinion) against Hindus who do not share his vision on these matters. But he has also shaken many to look deeper into the assumptions and unrecognized prejudices which shape their interpretations. And he has served as a bold and well-informed voice for many Hindus in the West as well as in India who have often felt hurt and insulted by some of the psychoanalytic interpretations of their culture and divinities. Personally, I don't agree with Mr. Malhotra's style and mode, and I don't always resonate with his demarcation lines between the East and the West, but I have great respect for his scholarship, much sympathy for the core of his theses, and I applaud his long-range goal. One more thing: To my knowledge, he is not affiliated with any Hindu ‘fundamentalist’ group. I trust that in your article you will present a balanced view of Mr. Malhotra and his work, and help heal the wounds that have been created on the whole issue of Western scholarship on India, whether at the University of Chicago or elsewhere. I believe that much good will come out of these wounds in the long run. When you write your article, please bear in mind that the goal is not to engage in battle, but to establish fairness, mutual understanding and respect not only among scholars, but also among the cultures and traditions of the human family. As you well know, this is urgently needed in the chaotic world in which we live today.

Best regards,

V. V. Raman, Emeritus Professor Rochester Institute of Technology


<b>From Prof. Antonio deNicolas:</b>

Dear Ms. Braverman,

I am Prof. Antonio de Nicolas writing to you in view of the Interview of Mr. Rajiv Malhotra in the above mentioned magazine, and the fact that my name is being mentioned in this connection. I have been a Professor of Philosophy at the University of New York, Stony brook, for over thirty-five years, and now Emeritus. I started the study of Indic texts as early as 1969 in the Philosophy Department of my University at a time when it was and continues to be customary to do it in Religious Studies' programs like the University of Chicago. In fact my first contact with the University of Chicago was then when one of the Professors at my University objected to the inclusion of Indic texts in a Philosophy Department for as he said: "There is no philosophy in Hindu texts." This same philosopher from Chicago abstained from voting any time the department had to make any decision on courses related to Indic texts or my own promotions up to the level of full Professor. Needless to say the rest of the Department always voted in favor of the courses, the program or my promotions favorably, for these courses I taught single-handedly had an attendance record of over one thousand students per semester for all those early uninterrupted twenty years, before I retired.

From my experience in Philosophy and teaching Indic texts I came to the conclusion, and my many books (see bn.com under my name) that the University of Chicago labored under a complete misreading of philosophical texts starting with Plato. For Plato to be considered a philosopher by that, and other Professors I know from the University of Chicago, he had to be as close as possible in methodology to Aristotle. In short: Plato was reduced to three mental acts that for these philosophers of the Chicago School consider philosophical and these are: names, definitions and theories. That is, one need only name, define and come up with a theory to be a legitimate philosopher and therefore analyzed any texts proposed for examination. But, Plato clearly said one, two, three, where is the forth?, (and the fifth). For for Plato, as in Indic (oral texts) the forth, memory/imagination and the fifth experience are essential to do philosophy. And this is the main methodological problem when dealing with Indic, Plato's, oral texts: the path includes memory, imagination and experience. And the same applies to the methodologies attributed to the scholars of the Chicago school mentioned in this debate. Otherwise the results are ridiculous and insulting.

My students used to pass around the following note to those doing religious studies at Stony Brook: "And Jesus said unto them: Who do you say I am?"

And they replied: "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of being, the kerigma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said: "What?"

Do the people we are talking about in our publications recognize themselves in our statements? Are we insulting them? And if so how does the academy consent to it?

I find it also insulting that Mr. Malhotra has been asked to disclose his financial ties, while the
individuals from the University of Chicago are not asked to do the same. Who finances them, who publishes them? What `are the ties involved? Why are these questions important with Mr. Malhotra and not with the others?

So far the debates involving the University of Chicago professors and graduates have managed to tell us what Hinduism is not, and we have wasted enormous amount on time with this negative stereotype. Can your interview help so that we go beyond this stagnant phase and proceed to mark the steps that define the memories and experiences that constitute Hinduism in the living bodies of those that practice it?

And finally, could you manage in your interview to avoid all ad hominen attacks and produce a coherent positive path of discovery based on methodologies and not on personal biases?

Please, count on my support in any way I can be helpful

Sincerely,

Antonio de Nicolas
Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus
State University of New York, at` Stony Brook <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

I find it also insulting that Mr. Malhotra has been asked to disclose his financial ties, while the
individuals from the University of Chicago are not asked to do the same. Who finances them, who publishes them? What `are the ties involved? Why are these questions important with Mr. Malhotra and not with the others?

[Guest]

Op-ed: Truth behind the MORI poll on Kashmir Akhila Raman

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Akhila Raman works as an independent consultant in Digital Signal Processing and Digital Communications in California, USA, and has researched the Kashmir Conflict extensively.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[Guest]

The Scholar Who Irked the Hindu Puritans

I guess its time for somebody's PhD defense or release of a book or something. The chamchas have come out with another plant -> Wendy ij choo chweeet.. "threatening emails", persecution complex, hindu-right-wing and the "egg" - its all there.. I think we should all keep a letter written - you know a standard one - whenever such an article comes out with the same cr@p repeated - we just copy-paste the same old letter and send it to editor.. <!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[Guest]

Rajiv Malhotra post on Sulekha regarding the current binge of chamchagiri in NY Times..

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>NEW YORK TIMES AND THE UCHICAGO CARTEL:</b>

To uncover the long reach of this cartel and how it placed the <b>recent New York Times article</b>, one starts with Prof. Martin Marty who is one of the most powerful scholars at UChicago’s Divinity School. (This school produces the largest number of PhDs on Hinduism Studies, through its faculty which includes Wendy Doniger.)

Martin Marty now runs the powerful institute of religion at UChicago named after him.
(See: http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/about/index.shtml )
It says, “The Martin Marty Center is the institute for advanced research in all fields of the study of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School.”

Who is Martin Marty and how does he fit into the Chicago Cartel? He is described on his own web page as <b><i>“an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.” </i></b> See: http://www.elca.org/about.html about this church.) On the question, “Is the Bible the inerrant word of God,” they explain clearly that they are what I would classify as History-Centric and literal. See: http://www.elca.org/questions/Results.asp?recid=16 . They believe that Christ is coming back to raise people from the dead. Furthermore, they assert, “Theories of reincarnation are the antithesis of Lutheran theology.” It is proudly a very “membership oriented” institution in every sense of that term, with a vast third world franchise to convert people.

His bio boasts that he was the senior editor of the magazine, <b>“The Christian Century.”</b> See more about this Christian-centric magazine: http://www.christiancentury.org/ He is described as the nation’s most prominent authors in the field of History of Religions. Along with Wendy Doniger and a few other colleagues, he has helped trained and get influential jobs for a whole generation of scholars and college teachers who now represent Hinduism’s portrayals.

Wendy Doniger and Martin Marty are part of the old boys/girls network and go way back. There is nothing wrong with them being very tight and standing up for each other. See both of these cartel big wigs featured at the Martin Marty Center’s web site:
http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/about/index.shtml

It is only natural that Wendy Doniger is putting her cartel to good use in this PR campaign to demonize Hindus and anyone who criticizes her. However, it is interesting to notice how blatantly these Christian fundamentalists are respected in the “secular” academy/media, because they tend to be well groomed, polished, articulate, with good pedigrees, and most of all, with a good network of contacts (read “cartel” membership).

Such fundamentalist Christians are the “expert” sources used by media to call us “Hindu Fundamentalists”! All evidence of their conflicts of interest, such as their churches’ aggressive proselytizing against Hindus in India, get airbrushed away as a sort of denial by the media and by the scholars who fail to highlight these conflicts when featuring their writings.

The following sequence of events is interesting to track:

1) First Marty Martin wrote a one-sided article in Beliefnet to hit at Wendy Doniger’s critics, titled, “Scholars of Hinduism under attack”. See: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/128/story_12899_1.html In typical Biblical style of martyrdom, it positions the “good” side as “victims” of the “bad” side.

2) But this got largely neutralized when others such as Sankrant Sanu wrote rejoinders on the same portal. See Sankrant’s rejoinder at: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/146/story_14684_1.html

3) <b>Now let us we come to the cartel’s links with New York Times. Edward Rothstein is co-author with Martin Marty in their OUP book.</b> See:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subj...a&ci=0195144619

4) Naturally, as co-authors it would be natural for them to be close and help each other, and to participate in each other’s networks. So Edward Rothstein wrote the recent New York Times article in which he headlines Wendy Doniger’s critics as “Hindu Puritans”. He goes on to brand those who oppose her as “Hindu fundamentalists” and so forth. Many persons have called the article things like “outright stupid and incompetent journalism”, “insulting to Hindus,” etc. The journalist failed to even contact those he criticized for an interview, presumably out of fear that the truth disclosed might work against his agenda.

<b>Do the higher ups at the Times even know what these hidden links and potential conflicts of interest are? How well-educated are they on the complex dynamics of our Hindu minority’s American situation? One wonders why the standards of journalism that even my son's undergraduate class at NYU learns were allowed to drop in the case of this article. What strings were pulled and for what considerations?</b>

So please stop being naïve about ‘educating’ these cartel folks, etc. They are intellectually and politically armed and dangerous.

Regards,
Rajiv <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[narayanan]

Yes, but that doesn't prevent us from pointing out that they are pornographers.

We can add these jerks to the "SouthAsia Circus" page on Jitnasa. I know someone suggested to Shri R.M. that they start a page, provide names of these media twerps, extracts from their articles, and publish our letters below them. Google will do the rest. Life is too short to spend railing at these idiots in THEIR media. Much sweeter to do it on media where we have fair access.

When people see themselves mentioned in kind, accurate factual accounts like

http://www.indiacause.com/columns/OL_040601.htm

they will start seeing that there is a cost. Well, they MAY see, considering how smart they are.

That article is there today and there tomorrow. NYT articles need registration after today.

<!--emo&:tv--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tv_feliz.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tv_feliz.gif' /><!--endemo-->

See for example:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Many persons have called the article things like “outright stupid and incompetent journalism”, “insulting to Hindus,” etc. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Forget the "insulting to... " part - after all that was the writer's intention, so why give credit? But for the rest, WHERE ARE THOSE LETTERS? WHY CAN'T I SEE THEM?

This is the issue we must correct. When u Google for "Rothstein" 6 months from now, if the descriptor "idiot" occurs in 6 of the top 10 hits, with detailed explanation why, THEN, heh, we've made the NYT article really pay off. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[Guest]

'An End to Suffering': Philosopher King

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->ONE night during the time I was reading this book, I had the odd experience of bumping unexpectedly into its author. At the lower Manhattan holiday party of a stylish magazine, I was briefly introduced to an <b>owlish fellow with a Brahminical beard </b> who smiled at me amid the din of a crowded sake bar. You occasionally hear of writers, especially when their books are of long incubation, coming to resemble their subjects, and my fleeting glimpse of Pankaj Mishra seems to offer uncanny proof of the phenomenon. For here, surely, was the young Siddhartha Gautama himself: a scholar-sophisticate, a personality both cosmopolitan and ascetic, at large and at home in the world.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

1. I didnt know there was something called a 'brahminical beard'.. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> 2. Pankaj Mishra is Buddha himself.. <!--emo&:blink:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /><!--endemo--> 3. Buddha was 'secular'. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[Guest]

Boy this sounds familiar.. <!--emo&:blink:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /><!--endemo-->

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/books/re.../13TELLERL.html?

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->'The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick': The Grift of the Magi

By TELLER

Published: February 13, 2005

THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK
How a Spectacular Hoax Became History.
By Peter Lamont.
Illustrated. 264 pp. Thunder's Mouth Press. $22.

WHEN John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ''Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,'' is that Wilkie's article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men's guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks -- as the British imagined -- frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors -- very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn't fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

This idea of genuine magic in a far-off place filled a void in the West. Physics, biology, geology and archaeology were challenging traditional beliefs, especially religion. Hungering for the unexplainable, but eager to consider themselves enlightened, Americans and Englishmen were turning to spiritualism, which promises ''scientific'' evidence of immortality, while providing satisfying shivers in a darkened seance room. Other new religions, like theosophy, proved their truth by citing the miracles that were supposedly commonplace in India. ''It was from this imagined India, rather than India itself,'' Lamont writes, ''that the legend of the rope trick would emerge.''

Stage magicians, at that time the stars of entertainment, either loved or hated this Orientalism. White conjurors smeared on brown greasepaint to perform under such names as ''The Fakir of Ava, Chief of Staff of Conjurors to His Sublime Greatness the Nanka of Aristaphae!'' Others, in particular John Nevil Maskelyne, the British magician and inventor of the pay toilet, made headlines by railing against fakirs, ''those oily mendicants,'' taking advantage of innocent imperialists.

In 1890 The Chicago Tribune was competing in a cutthroat newspaper market by publishing sensational fiction as fact. The Rope Trick -- as Lamont's detective work reveals -- was one of those fictions. The trick made its debut on Aug. 8, 1890, on the front page of The Tribune's second section. An anonymous, illustrated article told of two Yale graduates, an artist and a photographer, on a visit to India. They saw a street fakir, who took out a ball of gray twine, held the loose end in his teeth and tossed the ball upwards where it unrolled until the other end was out of sight. A small boy, ''about 6 years old,'' then climbed the twine and, when he was 30 or 40 feet in the air, vanished. The artist made a sketch of the event. The photographer took snapshots. When the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, just the fakir sitting on the ground. ''Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn't hypnotize the camera,'' the writer concluded.

The story's genius is that it allows a reader to wallow in Oriental mystery while maintaining the pose of modernity. Hypnotism was to the Victorians what energy is to the New Age: a catchall explanation for crackpot beliefs. By describing a thrilling, romantic, gravity-defying miracle, then discrediting it as the result of hypnotism -- something equally cryptic, but with a Western, scientific ring -- The Tribune allowed its readers to have their mystery and debunk it, too. Newspapers all over the United States and Britain picked up the item, and it was translated into nearly every European language.

Four months later, a letter to the editor forced The Tribune to come clean. The tale, the newspaper confessed, had not been reporting at all, but ''written for the purpose of presenting a theory in an entertaining form.'' In other words, it was phony. But where the original story had caused an international stir, the retraction attracted little notice.

How did Lamont, a research fellow at Edinburgh University, discover the identity of the story's anonymous author a century later? He found a long-overlooked article in a British weekly, People's Friend, whose editor had written to The Tribune to contact one of the Yale graduates in the newspaper article. In response, the British editor received a personal note from the author: ''I am led to believe,'' the writer admitted, ''that the little story attracted more attention than I dreamed it could, and that many accepted it as perfectly true. I am sorry that anyone should have been deluded.'' The letter was signed, ''sincerely yours, John E. Wilkie.'' It seems fitting that the same John E. Wilkie, then a cub reporter at The Tribune, should later make his mark as a director of the Secret Service renowned for ruthless disinformation and unstoppable self-promotion.

Wilkie's story had remarkable staying power. In 1904, for the first time, a living person claimed to have seen the Rope Trick. A young British gentleman, Sebastian Burchett, reported to the Society for Psychical Research that he recalled having seen the trick a few years earlier. After lengthy cross-examination, the society dismissed his testimony as illustrating ''once more the unreliability of memory.''

But once the possibility of actually seeing the Rope Trick had been established in the press, more people started to ''see'' it. A few months after Burchett's report, an unidentified woman announced that she too had seen the trick, but a much flashier version: after the boy had vanished, ''bits of his apparently mangled remains fell from the sky, first an arm, then a leg, and so on till all his component parts had descended; these the juggler covered with a cloth, mumbled something or other, made a pass or two, and behold! There was the boy smiling and whole before us.'' Sightings reappeared in flurries every few years. In 1919, The Strand Magazine published a photograph of the miracle in progress with a boy high atop a rope. That was a big hit until the photographer confessed that his picture actually just showed a child balancing on a pole. In 1925, the aptly named Lady Waghorn suddenly remembered witnessing the trick in Madras in 1891, although for 34 years she had somehow thought ''nothing about it.''

Magicians capitalized on the public's belief in the trick. Horace Goldin bragged about risking his life in India to wrest the secret from a fakir, but Goldin later admitted, ''All I cared for was . . . the profit. Having failed to discover anything . . . I decided that the only course left to me was to invent it myself.'' Of course, doing a version of the trick on a stage with overhead rigging and limited viewing angles was a far cry from open-air street performance. But that didn't stop Howard Thurston from advertising the ''World's Most Famous Illusion First Time Out of India'' with a lithograph of Thurston waving his hands at a boy on a rope rising into open sky, while a turbaned man prostrates himself before the miracle.

Other magicians saw the Rope Trick as a dangerous myth that ''gave the appalling impression that Indian jugglers were superior to Western conjurors.'' Members of Britain's magicians' alliance, the Magic Circle, systematically hunted down and discredited eyewitnesses, and even offered a 500-guinea reward for anyone who would actually perform the trick.

Naturally, the nuts emerged. ''His Excellency Dr. Sir Alex-ander Cannon'' offered to bring over his favorite yogi to perform the trick at the Albert Hall, if the Magic Circle would pay him £50,000, provide a shipload of genuine Indian sand and heat the Albert Hall to tropical temperatures. Karachi -- the exotic stage persona of a ''lamentable'' Plymouth magician named Arthur Derby -- offered to do the rope part of the trick in the open air, provided he could prepare the grounds 48 hours in advance and keep the audience at least 15 yards away. Karachi declined to make the boy vanish (that being the impossible part).

By 1934, historians were thoroughly confused. Some claimed that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, had scoured India for the trick in 1875 (he hadn't) and that same year Lord Northbrook had offered £10,000 for a performance (he hadn't). Antecedents of the trick, resembling it about as much as ''Jack and the Beanstalk,'' were found in Australia, Siberia, Germany and China. Researchers in India proudly quoted rope-climbing metaphors in eighth-century philosophical commentaries. But, Lamont argues cogently, though one or the other of these obscure references may have inspired Wilkie, the Indian Rope Trick as we know it did not exist for the world until the hoax of 1890.

Lamont relishes the bizarre theories suggested to explain the trick that's never been done. In the 1930's, Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler's secretly Jewish personal psychic, declared that the rope in the trick was actually a segmented pole made of sheep bones. In 1955 an American journalist, John Keel, went to India and came back with a ''simple explanation'' involving a boy and a fakir hanging on a rope suspended between two hills by means of a thread of human hair, and pretending to argue while the man throws to the ground pieces of dead monkey. In the 1960's, an Indian offered to teach a secret mantra of the trick to any penitent who would avoid eating meat and having sex for three weeks -- and who could prove that was true. In the 1970's, Uri Geller's biographer declared that the Rope Trick was a mass hallucination induced by telepathy. ''One could choose,'' Lamont remarks, ''between the views of a Jewish Nazi clairvoyant or those of an ambassador for psychic aliens, between chopping up a monkey or becoming a vegetarian celibate.''

ONE question haunts Lamont: did the various ''eyewitnesses'' actually witness anything or were they simply lying? He offers a plausible middle ground. Indian street repertory includes pole balancing and simulated child mutilation. Lamont detects a pattern in the eyewitness narratives: ''The longer the period between when the trick had been seen and when it had been reported, the more impressive the account of it.'' So, he speculates, perhaps the true secret of the Indian Rope Trick is the way the supple human memory combines events we've really seen with legends we've only heard, and shapes them into the best possible story to tell our grandchildren.

''The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick'' is a labor of love. Lamont disentangles the gargantuan knot of lies and sets the record straight with a joyful vengeance. Plainly he relishes the irony of writing history about bogus history. He includes a thoughtful quotation on the subject of annotations from Oxford University's George Matlock. Then Lamont confesses that Matlock and his quotation are his own fictitious creations. This, he says, clearly demonstrates why he must include footnotes -- particularly in this story, because ''many of the events and characters in this book are so bizarre that you, the reader, might wonder . . . whether I can be trusted. And that would hurt my feelings.'' Some might find such shenanigans insolent, but that's just the way I like my historians. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[narayanan]

B.Raman, probably sensing the need to educate the public about AID:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->    Paper no.1251



    14. 02. 2005

    Maoists Gain Momentum in India

    by B.Raman

    (As in Nepal, in India too, the Maoists  have been waging a People's War in 13 States of the Indian Union. Indian policy-makers and  media refrain from calling them Maoists, possibly due to a fear that characterising them as Maoists might create negative perceptions of China in the minds of the public, at a time when the relations between the two countries are improving. They, therefore, choose to refer to them as Naxalites, originating from the word Naxalbari, which is the name of a village in the State of West Bengal, where this movement was born  four decades ago. )

    The late Mao Zedong and his Thoughts have been responsible for more deaths of innocent civilians in acts of terrorism in Indian territory outside Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and in Nepal than Osama bin Laden and his Thoughts as expressed in his periodic fatwas, broadcasts and telecasts.

    2. Last year, there was no death in the Indian territory outside J&K as a result of acts of jihadi terrorism committed by pro-bin Laden Pakistani jihadi terrorist groups, belonging to the International Islamic Front (IIF). This stood in sharp contrast to the mayhem which the Maoists continued to cause under the pretext of waging a People's War against their class enemies and the  Governments representing them.

    3. According to the media, replying to a question in the Indian Parliament on December 14, 2004, Shri Sriprakash Jaiswal, Minister of State for Home Affairs, Government of India, stated that till November 30, 2004, 420 civilians and 98 security forces personnel were killed in Naxalite violence in 10 States, as against 410 civilians and 94 security forces personnel during 2003. From the media reports of the reply, it is not clear whether the figures given for 2003 covered the entire year or only till November 30, 2003.

    4. According to the Minister, Bihar with 155 deaths reported the largest number of killings, up from 128 the previous year. It was followed by Jharkhand with 150 deaths as against 117  the previous year. The other States, which recorded an increase in the number of fatal casualties were Uttar Pradesh from eight to 23,  West Bengal from one to 14 and Chattisgarh from 74 to 75.Andhra Pradesh recorded a steep decrease  from 139 to 74. Other States, which recorded a decrease were Maharashtra from 31 to 15 and  Orissa from 15 to eight. There were three deaths in Madhya Pradesh and one in Karnataka. In respect of individual States, the reply, as given in the media, did not  indicate how many of those killed were civilians and how many were security forces personnel.

    5. Of the five  States, which recorded an increase, four----Bihar, Jharkand, Uttar Pradesh and  West Bengal ---  are in the proximity of India's international border with Nepal/Bangladesh. Only Chattisgarh is away from the border, but the increase there was marginal as contrasted with the steep increase  in the remaining four . Of these five States, the general public perception is  that the level of economic development, economic and social justice and the quality of governance  are weaker in Bihar, Jharkand and Chattisgarh than in the other States of India.

    6. What are the reasons attributable for the increase? Continuing economic and social backwardness and injustice. Poor governance. A State machinery insensitive to the grievances of the deprived sections of the population.  An inadequately performing law and order machinery. External linkages in Nepal and possibly  Bangladesh. Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, which are generally  perceived as better governed with  a better-performing state machinery, registered an increase too.  From this,  one can suspect   that the impact of the external linkages factor in the spread of  the Maoist movement is probably stronger than is generally believed to be.

    7. All the five States, which recorded a decrease or where the violence was marginal, are away from the international borders. In Andhra Pradesh, the significant decrease could be attributed to the mutual suspension of operations by the State Government and the Maoists, which has since practically collapsed due to the refusal of the Maoists to lay down arms while negotiating with the Government for a political solution.

    8. How does one characterise the Maoist movement in India --- understandable though not justifiable political violence due to economic and social injustice against the  deprived sections of the population? Ideological insurgency? Ideological terrorism? If it is just political violence, how does one explain instances of indiscriminate killing of civilians through the use of land-mines and improvised explosive devices and targeted assassinations of political leaders such as the  attempt in 2003 to assassinate  Shri Chandrababu Naidu, the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh? It would be more appropriate to describe it as  a mix of insurgency and terrorism as in the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an ethnic and not a Marxist or Maoist organisation. as one saw in the case of the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)  of Sri Lanka, a Marxist organisation, and as one has been seeing in the case of the Maoists of Nepal.

    9. The post-Word War period saw the eruption  of  Marxist/Maoist insurgencies and terrorism in a number of countries in Asia, West  Europe and South America. Among the Asian countries affected were the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Barring the case of the JVP in Sri Lanka, it was largely an insurgent movement mainly directed against the State machinery and those associated with it. The insurgency has since withered away in Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar. The withering-away in Malaysia and Thailand could be attributed partly to effective counter-insurgency by the security forces and partly to the general economic progress in these countries.

    10. Myanmar is a remarkable case of  the withering away of the insurgency  despite the lack of any economic progress in the country. This was partly due to ruthless suppression of the insurgents by successive military governments and partly due to the drying -up of sustenance from China post-1979. In Sri Lanka, the insurgents-cum-terrorists of yesterday have become the mainstream political players of today. This transformation from insurgency to the political mainstream came about after the JVP apparently realised the futility of violence to achieve its ideological objectives, following a ruthless suppression of the insurgents/terrorists  by the State.

    11. In West Europe, what one saw was  pure and simple ideological punishment terrorism practised by organisations such as  the Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction of the then West Germany, the Red Brigade of Italy, the Action Directe of France, the Carlos' group of International Revolutionaries etc. They had no pretensions or illusions of being able to capture political power through terrorism. They just wanted to punish their perceived ideological adversaries. The movement withered away  after the rapid economic progress of the countries affected and the drying-up of external sustenance following the collapse of the USSR, Yugoslavia and other Communist States of East Europe.

    12. In South America and in the Philippines, India and Nepal in Asia the violent Marxist/Maoist  movement---whether one calls it political violence, insurgency, terrorism or a mix of insurgency and terrorism--- still thrives. In Nepal, the Maoists' motivation and determination to achieve their objectives show no signs of declining despite ruthless counter-insurgency measures by the Government. In India, over the years, there has been a geographical spread of  the areas affected by the Maoist movement.

    13. There are certain common characteristics of the Maoist movements in India and Nepal:

        * An educated leadership, not necessarily coming from the deprived classes, and often motivated by the ambition  to achieve political power through the barrel of the gun. To what extent is their motivation genuinely due to their sense of outrage over the prevailing economic and social injustice and their perception of an uncaring State and to what extent is their outrage merely a facade for their political ambition?
        * A cadre largely drawn from the deprived classes---many little educated----- motivated by genuine economic and social grievances, but without any political ambitions.
        * Networking to achieve their political ambitions.
        * The continuing influence of Mao Zedong's Thoughts on the thinking of the leadership even though China itself has discarded them, while pretending not to have done so.

    14. In India, we are rightly concerned over the continuing jihadi terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory and over the depredations caused in J&K by the jihadi terrorists belonging to the IIF. There is considerable public knowledge on this subject and attention has been paid by the Government to strengthening the capability of our Police and other security agencies to deal with them.

    15. There was not similar  articulation of our  concerns over the spreading  Maoists' Peoples' War infrastructure right across India till February 12, 2005, when the Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, gave open expression to his concern. Talking to journalists at Bangalore, he reportedly stated: " The Union Government is concerned, particularly as the Naxalites have emerged in the hilly areas of central India, where are our mineral and hydel resources. The Naxalite movement is gaining momentum and  the Centre (the Central Government) is concerned."

    16. What made him come out with such an open and clear-cut expression of concern was a worrisome attack by the Maoists on a police camp in Karnataka on the night of February 10, 2005, which spoke disturbingly of their motivation, capability and infrastructure. One needs to reproduce in full a report on the attack carried by the "Hindu", the prestigious daily, on February 12:

    "Six Karnataka State Reserve Police (KSRP) personnel and a civilian were killed and five injured when a group of 200 Naxalites, which included about 50 women, attacked a KSRP camp in a school at Venkatammanhalli in Pavagada Taluk of Tumkur District  late on Thursday night. The village borders Andhra Pradesh and the 9th Battalion of the KSRP had been stationed there for a year in the wake of reports that Naxalites were active in the area. The attack comes within days of the police shooting dead a top Naxalite leader, Saketh Rajan, and his associate in Chikmagalur District. Police said that the Naxalites arrived at the camp a little before midnight in five vehicles---three mini lorries, a van and a jeep. They shot dead the sentry at the gate and fired at another sentry on the roof of the building who was not hit. The gang threw bombs on the roof of the two class rooms where the KSRP personnel  were sleeping, killing one poiceman. Four others were shot dead  when they came out of the rooms. It is said that the women in the gang shone powerful torches on the policemen  while their comrades targeted them from behind the compound wall of the building with guns and grenades. Six unexploded bombs and some grenades were found inside the compound. One unexploded bomb  had been placed next to a ground-level water tank. A landmine was spotted by a police rescue team  under a bridge on the main road leading to the spot, where a tractor had been parked to block the rescue teams."

    17. What do the details speak of the Maoists? Good training. Good tactics. An ability to operate in such large groups. An ability to move by road in vehicles undetected by the police. A good stock of arms and ammunition of different kinds. An ability to retaliate at short notice while concealing their preparations from the police. Good local knowledge of the village where the police camp was located.

    18. What do the details speak of the police? Failure to  anticipate    a reprisal attack.  Consequent lack of alertness in the camp and failure to look for intelligence about possible preparations for a reprisal attack. Poor intelligence. Lack of public support. During the entire duration of the Maoist raid, not a single villager ( the village has about 400 families) dared to come out to help the police.

    19. The Maoist attack, the most spectacular in Karnataka territory carried out from bases in Andhra Pradesh, came almost five months after the Communist Party of India (Maoist) came into existence on September 21, 2004, through the merger of the Maoist Communist Centre of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist--People's War ). A statement issued by the CPI (Maoist) on October 14, 2004, said: " We  hereby declare that the two guerilla armies of the CPI (ML)[PW] and MCCI—the PGA (People's Guerilla Army) and the PLGA—have been merged into the unified PLGA (Peoples’ Liberation Guerrilla Army). Hereafter, the most urgent task i.e. principal task of the party is to develop the unified PLGA into a full-fledged People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and transforming the existing Guerrilla Zones into Base Areas, thereby advancing wave upon wave towards completing the New Democratic Revolution. The formation day of the PLGA is to be December 2."

    20. The statement also said: " The new party will also continue to support the struggle of the nationalities ( My comment: the Kashmiris and the tribals of India's North-East) for self-determination including their right to secession and condemn the brutal state repression on these movements. It will pay special attention to mobilizing and organizing the women masses as a mighty force of the revolution, and will fight against all other forms of social oppression, particularly untouchability and casteism. It will continue to expose, isolate and defeat the more dangerous Hindu fascist forces, while exposing all other fundamentalist forces. It will continue to do so while keeping the edge of the people’s struggles directed against the new Congress rulers in Delhi along with the CPI (Communist Party of India)/CPM (Communist Party Marxist) and their imperialist chieftains.

    21. "It will continue to expose and resist the expansionist designs of the Indian ruling classes along with their imperialist chieftains, particularly the US imperialists. It will more actively stand by the side of the Nepali people led by the CPN (Maoist), and vehemently oppose the Indian expansionists and US imperialists from intervening in Nepal with their military might. It will also continue to support the people’s war led by the Maoist parties in Peru, the Philippines, Turkey and elsewhere. It will continue to support all people’s struggles directed against imperialism and reaction. It will also support the working class movement and other people’s movements the world over. It will continue to stand by the side of the Iraqi and Afghan people in their mighty struggle against the US imperialist-led aggression and occupation.:"

    22. It further said: "The Unified Party will continue to hold high the banner of proletarian internationalism and will continue to contribute more forcefully to uniting the genuine Maoist forces at the international level. Besides, it will also establish unity with the oppressed people and nations of the whole world and continue to fight shoulder to shoulder with them in advancing the world proletarian revolution against imperialism and their lackeys, thereby paving the way towards realizing socialism and then Communism on a world scale."

    23. A document on "Strategy & Tactics of the Indian Revolution" adopted by the CPI (M) at its founding conference on September 21, 2004, inter alia said:" The character of Indian society is semi-colonial, semi-feudal. The Indian revolution would have to pass through two stages. The task of the first stage is to change the semi -colonial semi -feudal society into an independent new democratic society.

    24."The targets of the revolution would be the imperialists, the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the big landlord classes. The enemies of the revolution are imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucrat capitalism. The motive forces of the revolution are the workers, peasants and petti-bourgeoisie, with the national bourgeoisie being vacillating allies.

    25."The immediate basic programme is to overthrow the semi-colonial, semi-feudal rule of the big landlord-comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie classes, and imperialism that backs them, through armed struggle and to establish a people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat- by smashing the reactionary autocratic state.

    26."The new democratic revolution is to be achieved through the path of protracted people’s war. To carry on and advance the people’s war, the basic, principal and the immediate task of the present stage of the revolution would be to arouse and organize the people, in a planned way, for an agrarian revolutionary guerrilla war in the countryside - specially in the remote countryside (which is most favourable for the building up of the guerrilla war, the people’s army and the base areas), and to build up the people’s army and the rural red base areas through guerilla warfare. In this process, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) will advance and develop into a full-fledged People’s Liberation Army (PLA) while the guerrilla zones will transform into Base Areas.

    27."In India the parliamentary system was imposed by British imperialism from above. Moreover, the  bourgeois democratic revolution too has not been completed here. Hence no bourgeois democracy ever came into being here. Actually, no viable solution of the fundamental problems of the people can be sought through using any parliamentary institution. Besides this, the experience of the  last 55 years has amply confirmed the fact that whoever tried to participate in the elections in the name of tactics of using it, most of them got entrenched in the mire of the parliamentary system and revisionism, sooner or later. In fact, the tactics of participation in the election in the name of using it is tantamount to abandoning the tasks of building and advancing the armed struggle.

    28."The three weapons of the revolution will be the Party, the Army and the United Front. A correct understanding of these three questions and their mutual relations will give the accurate direction for the entire Indian revolution. It is extremely imperative for us to grasp the importance of the construction of each of these weapons from the very beginning as well as the masterful application of these to the concrete practice of the Indian revolution based on the teachings of MLM (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism)." (End of citation)

    29. On December 5, 2004, about 60 to 100 members, both men and women,  of the CPI (Maoist)'s  People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) triggered landmine blasts at Kokrajhore in Belpahari of the Midnapore District in West Bengal  blowing up three guest houses meant for tourists. Leaflets left behind at the scene by the attackers alleged that the guest houses  were being used for the sex-trade. However, there were no fatalities in this daring operation, which reportedly caused considerable confusion in the local police, which allegedly reached the place of occurrence 18 hours after the blasts.

    30. The  Communist Party (Marxist),the ruling party in West Bengal, which supports the Congress (I) led Government in New Delhi, accused the Maoists of  trying to create an atmosphere of terror to make their existence felt and described them as  anti-development and anti-people. It alleged that the Maoists were worried that the development of tourism would improve the standard of living of the people and thereby prevent the flow of unemployed youth to the ranks of the Maoists. Ridiculing its contention, the CPI (Maoist) replied: "The so-called ‘terror’, which the CPM deplores, is in response to the white terror of  the State machinery and the CPM  party that have spread in the countryside. It is the revolutionary Red Terror to counter the counter-revolutionary white terror— the Red Terror hailed by Mao in 1927 in his Hunan Report and throughout the period of revolutionary struggles. In reality, a spectre is haunting the Indian ruling classes — the spectre of a People’s War. This war is to be led by the revolutionary party of the people — the Communist Party of India (Maoist) by unleashing the creativity of the masses and forging unity among the peasants, workers, petty bourgeoisie, national capitalists and other toiling people oppressed for ages. It is the politically-conscious People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army or the ‘People's  Army’ — led by the CPI (Maoist)--- that would make India free from feudal oppression and imperialist domination. The New Year truly holds the promise of still greater victories."

    31. The CPI (Maoist), which projects Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Shri P.Chidambaram, the Finance Minister, as stooges of the World Bank, is determined to intensify the People's War and spread the revolution and the Red Terror all along central India's tribal belt, the source of much of India's mineral wealth and water resources in order to asphyxiate India's urban centres by surrounding them with hundreds and thousands of Hunans and unleash from there the final march to their victory.

    32. Its analysis of the prevailing situation in India's rural areas and particularly in the tribal belt, marked by abject poverty, misery and literal servitude of the landless and the lower castes of Hinduism, is frighteningly lucid and the strategy and tactics, which it has formulated for itself, are drawn from the experiences of China. The Maoists are convinced that what worked in China before 1976 can be made to work again in India and that they could make the India-Nepal region the beacon of Maoism to guide the toiling masses in the rest of South Asia and then the world.

    33. It would be suicidal to underestimate their motivation and determination and to dismiss  their political analysis and strategy and tactics as empty rhetoric. By their success in keeping their movement sustained and in spreading it to 13 States, they have shown that they mean business and have convinced themselves that they can succeed.

    34. Unfortunately, the Maoists' analysis and strategy have not been matched by a superior analysis of the threat posed by them  by the State and by the formulation of a workable strategy by the State to counter them. Our newly-emerging Silicon Valleys, industrial centres and booming stock markets have become the opium of our ruling class, which is unable to comprehend that beyond the dazzling shine of an urban India awake, there are vast tracts of poverty, misery and economic and social injustice, which are the spawning grounds of a new breed of revolutionaries, inspired by the thoughts of Mao and Lin Biao.

    35. India, which has been able to effectively counter the Pakistani  jihadi terrorists sponsored and infiltrated by Pakistan, finds itself clueless before its own sons  and daughters of the soil, who have taken to the Red Terror not for the sake of a territory or religion as the Pakistani jihadis have done, but for their right to have two meals a day, to have a plot of land, which they can call  their own and to have a job and for their liberation from the servitude under the feudal landlords and rural money-lenders.

    36. Unless the State attends to their wants, it would not be able to counter the Maoists' People's War effectively. Fortunately, even in the tribal belt, not all people have been won over by the Maoists and have joined the People's War. There are still millions, who have kept away from them, despite their poverty and misery and continue to stay on the right side of the law. The first priority of the State has, therefore, to be a crash programme for the economic development of the rural areas and those sections of the tribal belt, which have not yet come under the sway of the Maoists.

    37. How to deal with the Maoists in the areas which they already control and how to wean  the people in those areas away from their influence? How to spread the fruits of economic development to those areas when the State's law and order machinery has an ineffective presence in those areas?

    38. Ideas there have been in plenty, but workable ones have been scanty. Engage the Maoists in a political dialogue, instead of confronting them with arms and ammunition and make them take the parliamentary road to power, say many. A beautiful idea, but will it work when one sees the cynical and contemptuous attitude of the Maoists themselves to parliamentary democracy? Their attitude to parliamentary democracy is as contemptuous as that of the jihadi terrorists though the two cite different reasons for their contempt.

    39. As pointed out earlier, the CPI (Maoist) says: "The experience of the last 55 years has amply confirmed the fact that whoever tried to participate in the elections in the name of tactics of using it, most of them got entrenched in the mire of the parliamentary system and revisionism, sooner or later. In fact, the tactics of participation in the election in the name of using it is tantamount to abandoning the tasks of building and advancing the armed struggle. "

    40. To what extent one can trust them when they offer to suspend their operations and enter into a political dialogue with the Government? Are such offers genuine or  tactical pauses to win for them time to further strengthen their terrorist and insurgent infrastructure?

    41. Use the law and order approach and  make it clear to them that they will never be able to win through recourse to arms, say others. Easier said than done. The law and order approach can be effective only if the political class is prepared to give the necessary powers and capability to the security forces and does not follow a policy of on again, off again.

    42. The bane of our counter-Maoist strategy is the lack of  lucidity in analysis and  the lack of consistency in formulating and implementing a viable strategy based on a national consensus and a national determination to deal with this problem before it becomes uncontrollable as it has in Nepal.

    43. Our politicians should not be under any illusion that India is not Nepal and that this cannot happen here. It can, if we do not wake up in time and act.

    (The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. E-mail: itschen36@gmail.com ) <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

Received in email..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Infinity Foundation Call For Grant Proposals:
Research and Education on Challenges Facing Hindus in America
Background:

The West's awareness and understanding of Hinduism is relatively recent, the tenor of which was set during the British Empire. In the United States, the conceptions and understanding of the religious tradition have been colored, often inaccurately, by a variety of factors that were actually peripheral to the tradition. Today, global and domestic reasons make it important for Americans to have an accurate understanding of Hinduism, a world religion centered in a nation that is increasingly having an impact and with which America must seriously engage.

Domestically, there are two million Americans of Indian ancestry, the vast majority of whom are Hindus. This number is forecast to increase significantly over the next several decades. The estimated number of non-Indian Americans who have adopted Hinduism as their religion is approximately one million. Additionally, nearly twenty million Americans have incorporated Hindu-influenced practices in their lifestyles, including yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and other body- mind-spirit practices. Most of these individuals are stakeholders in an authentic portrayal and understanding of Hinduism. The portrayal of Hinduism should no longer depict an alien society half a world away, but reflect the fact that the tradition is a part of our very own American multicultural tapestry.

Governmental policies in pluralistic America necessitate policymakers, law enforcement, and think tanks to have a proper understanding of its non-Christian religious traditions. Educators, the media and institutions of higher education also would be well served by access to textbooks and research that provide accurate and relevant information consistent with the manner in which Judeo- Christian religions are treated and respected.

Most Americans are open-minded and are curious to learn about other religious and cultural traditions. However, the information accessible by them needs to be fair and unbiased and must include the indigenous and the practitioners' understanding to be complete and truly informative. Seeing this, many minority diaspora communities in the United States, assisted by various governmental agencies, have been proactive in helping to facilitate such an understanding of their respective cultural traditions rather than leaving this important task to outsiders. Foundations such as the Japan Foundation, China Institute, Korea Foundation, Tibet House, and several Jewish and Islamic foundations have each successfully operated for many years with the mission to participate proactively in the interpretation of their respect native cultures. The Indian Diaspora, however, has done very little in this regards and has no equivalent foundation. This has left the job of explaining Hinduism to a variety of external institutions and individuals, resulting in uneven and often misleading portrayals.

Various sources that one would expect to be staunch defenders of scholarly rigor and fairness towards an American minority have often failed in this task. These include many intellectuals and journalists who project India's complex domestic politics in their work. Frameworks developed for the study of Biblical religions are often uncritically applied. Some assume inter-religious relationships to be a zero-sum game and this political correctness leads to antagonism towards the majority to help the minority. They also ignore that the majority in India is a minority in USA. When challenged by legitimate criticism, their responses have often been to brand and defame their critics and thus poison the well of innovative alternatives.

Leading institutions which are seen as authorities on Hinduism are largely silent on this matter. The American Academy of Religion and various South Asian Studies programs, departments and organizations across USA have not acknowledged the existence of Hinduphobia as an issue: these groups have no surveys of the American public's attitudes on Hinduism, no ombudsmen to resolve issues of prejudiced portrayals, no systematic reviews of school textbooks, no mechanisms to complain about media misrepresentations, etc.

Furthermore, the Hindu clergy and teachers have mostly abandoned this issue of public representation. Many of them have failed to differentiate between teaching their followers and public education, the latter of which must comply with established institutional standards. By retreating into the former exclusively, they have ignored the lack of quality and accurate information in the sphere of public education and have not prepared their followers to face mainstream non-Hindu society confidently. The situation has been exacerbated by the lack of institutional stability and continuity within most American Hindu groups. Thus, the American Hindu community is currently underserved by its own leadership in a manner that assumes greater significance after September 11, 2001.

Research Overall Goals:

The broad objective of this project is to research the social, political, cultural and economic contexts which help shape the works of US academics who specialize in Hinduism, and others who write on the subject and distribute knowledge and information in contemporary US society. Its primary benefit would be to foster a broader and richer understanding among intellectuals, media, teachers, research scholars, community leaders, policymakers and the general public about the range of issues involved.

The successful candidate is expected to be an independent, creative thinker and to use the highest standards of rigor and professional integrity. He/she should objectively evaluate the premises stated in this CFP and may choose to disagree with many aspects of the background presented here. It is also expected that the researcher will use the same critical eye in examining the academic and popular discourse and also the system in which these discourses are generated.

The candidate may be of any race, ethnicity, religion, nationality or gender, and must have a PhD in a directly relevant discipline. The successful candidate must be comfortable and capable to discuss in public and professional venues the topics discussed herein.

The following is an illustrative list of topics of research and is not intended to be definitive:

1.      Survey of how Hinduism has been researched and studied in the US in the last 40 years.
a.      This might involve examining at least four influential approaches used in the US:
i.      Premodern: Christian theology approach (Hindu-Christian Studies at AAR, for example, and various evangelical scholarship);
ii.      Modern: Anthropology and colonial discourse (which focuses on caste, sati, dowry based research etc);
iii.      Postmodern: Freudian and other trendy theories for deconstructions of Hindu texts, symbols and communities; new age appropriation is the pop culture's equivalent of this discourse;
iv.      Geopolitical: South Asianism (top-down) and Sub-Nationalism (bottom-up) lenses feeding the subcontinent's geopolitics and the cleavages among its fragments.
b.      Identification of major sources of funding and sponsorship in the study of Hinduism, their goals and an analysis of key trends.
c.      Comparisons between the state of Hinduism and other minority American religions (most notably Islam, Judaism and Buddhism) in terms of how they are represented in the academy, and in K-12 schools and media.
d.      Compilation of a research archive of printed and electronic Hinduphobic materials.

2.      Survey of views on biases, including views of Indians, non- Indian Hindus, and quasi-Hindus (these being Americans who engage in various Hindu practices without adopting the Hindu identity). This also includes data from other sources, including two other Infinity Foundation projects - (i) the Dotbusters research project and (ii) the survey of attitudes towards Indian culture in America. It would be desirable to develop a bibliography on various criticisms of Hinduphobia.

3.      Learning from other minority communities.
a.      Survey of the intellectual discourses known as anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and Islamophobia, each of which is a well-defined term and part of the UN discourse on Human Rights. Analysis of whether Hinduphobia has received comparable attention in UN and US federal bodies such as the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
b.      Historical research into previous instances of atrocities such as those against Jews, Blacks, Roma, Native Americans, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans to identify possible linkages with prejudices resulting from asymmetric intellectual and popular discourse.
c.      What lessons could be learned from this research? Conceptual exploration of early warning indicators of potential hate crimes against a minority today and a system to monitor Hinduphobia today. (For instance, since it has become respectable in certain academic, journalistic and literary circles to display Hinduphobic attitudes and behaviors, and to attack those who point out such biases, is this a danger signal?)

4.      Engagement with potential users of the research produced, including community, education, research, policymakers and media.

Terms:
The previous section is not intended as a definitive list of topics, nor is such an ambitious research project feasible by one scholar in a short time. The first set of reports should scope the broad field and establish a framework and terms of reference. The proposal should be realistic about the topics to be researched, methodologies to be used, and deliverables anticipated in the first 18 months.

The grant will be for up to $50,000/year for an initial period of 18 months, payable in monthly installments. The grant will be subject to a written agreement signed by both parties. The grantee will not be an employee of the Foundation, and will be an independent scholar responsible for his/her health insurance and other benefits. There will be a quarterly report submitted by the grantee summarizing all the accomplishments and the plans for the following quarter. A team of advisors will be created to serve as a sounding board for the researcher and to evaluate the work.

Interested persons should apply via an email attachment, including curriculum vitae, personal statement of purpose, location preferences/restrictions, and a proposal of approximately 5 pages. All materials submitted by applicants will become property of The Infinity Foundation. The deadline to apply is March 15th 2005. The proposal should be sent to:

Ms. Anjani Gharpure, Vice President � Legal and Administration
The Infinity Foundation
66 Witherspoon Street, Suite 400
Princeton, NJ 08542.
Email: anjani@gharpure.us
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[Guest]

When did this 'pisko'-analysis of Hindu texts start in US? 90s? 80s? Is there some history to this? Motives? Implications? Can someone (more knowledgeable) lay out a detailed timeline on this?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-rajesh_g+Dec 13 2004, 03:04 PM-->QUOTE(rajesh_g @ Dec 13 2004, 03:04 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> More on Amy Braverman article.. A post by RM on sulekha..
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Letters...but in all the shouting, no one’s listening.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->MALHOTRA’S CHALLENGE

A blind spot in Amy M. Braverman’s “The Interpretation of Gods” (December/04) and in Wendy Doniger’s camp is that they give no consideration to education’s ethical consequences. The propagation of caste, cows, and curry stereotypes of India is a disservice to Chicago’s students, many of whom will hold globalized careers. The times demand a radical departure from the prejudiced constructions and dubious scholarship peddled by segments of the old guard of the American intellectual establishment and transmitted through a Eurocentric core curriculum.

Arriving at more accurate, balanced representations of Indian culture requires the participation of noncareer intellectuals, not bound by academic cronyism or prepackaged “theories” by which Chicago’s PhD factory churns out India “experts.” Academicians should dialogue with public intellectuals like me, rather than caricaturing us as political “activists” and psychoanalyzing us as native informants under the white gaze.

Reversing the gaze—allowing the Indian gazer to anthropologize and psychoanalyze the dominant white culture—is a prerequisite to the honest intellectual debate evaded by Doniger and her ilk. Unfortunately, the article re-reverses the gaze upon the dissenters personally. The whole affair is choreographed as a violent conspiracy in which Doniger plays the innocent victim. Are Doniger and Braverman subconsciously applying the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in which white supremacy was legitimized by framing others as violent, irrational, and unfit to self-govern?

The article’s credibility is also compromised by lumping together unrelated Indian political antics with legitimate intellectual challenges by the Hindu American minority. Poli-tical correctness has superseded journalistic rigor.

<b>I introduced Braverman to 30 knowledgeable scholars, many of whom e-mailed their views to her and expressed willingness to be interviewed. She ignored almost all of them. Instead, Vijay Prashad, AM’90, PhD’94, who does not pretend to be a religious-studies scholar or a spokesman for practicing Hindus, is used as a loyal proxy for the establishment. Prashad scored political brownie points by demonizing me, although my dissent is against the very imperialistic system he frequently attacks to prop up his own brand value as a Marxist.</b>

Will the incumbents in control of institutionalized discourse on India respect the challengers’ rights to intellectual freedom, including the right to a Gandhian satyagraha (campaign for truth)? Or will their teachings produce more Abu Ghraibs?

Rajiv Malhotra
Princeton, New Jersey
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[Guest]

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1...050001.htm

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->“Modi has a 10-year multiple entry visa for US. We are not sure whether the State Department will do anything to prevent the visit,” says Ashwini Rao of the Coalition Against Genocide. There has been no word yet on the subject from the State Department.

The latest to join the wave of protest are some 40 Indian academicians teaching in American universities, who have separately written to Rice, urging her to revoke Modi’s US visa. The signatories include Arjun Appadurai,  Provost of New York’s New School University, Anjali Arondekar of University of California, Santa Cruz, Srimati Basu of DePauw University, and Rajesh Bhaskaran of Cornell University.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Who is this Ashwini Rao dude(tte) ?

[acharya]

Foilers - I am copying below the OY and YSS joint statement on Indicorps which we read out after Sonal Shah's Keynote address at the South Asia Conference Committee's conference at Yale on February 5, 2005. Sindhu Srinath and I represented OY and Ayaz Ahmad was there from YSS. Sonal Shah had time for a rebuttal, after which we engaged in a fairly heated and important debate with her and Indicorps volunteers on the issues the statement brought up.

Best,
Saadia

Questioning Indicorps: A Joint Statement by OY! and YSS

What is Solidarity? For us at OY! and YSS [1], Solidarity has always meant a coming together for a common vision of global justice. At OY! and YSS, we see solidarity as an inclusive form of building society. We consider secularism and pluralism—defined as equality regardless of religious, cultural, and ethnic belonging—in the US and South Asia as our beginning point. We also seek to promote human and civil rights of people everywhere.

As you move forward in your life, I ask you to stop for a moment and ponder the fullness of such a vision. Volunteering for a cause, a vision, a belief is one of the
most inspiring and meanigful ways to enrich the lives of many around the world. Volunteering is an excellent way to express solidarity and to contribute to a vision for justice. Being South Asian Americans one of the first places we turn towards are the countries of our common heritage, the countries of South Asia. In this regard, we applaud the inspiring work of Indicorps and its volunteers in the many
organizations in India.

However, we have some serious reservations about Indicorps' involvement with organizations in India that preach a racist and segregationist outlook towards Indian society and culture.

We have taken a strong position against the Hindu Supremacist politics of groups such as the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP in India. These organizations, commonly referred to as Sangh Parivar, closely coordinate their policies and political actions in order to usher an overall vision of Indian society as Hindu society, where minorities - be they Muslim, Christian, dalit lower caste—are relegated to the status of second class citizens. Through seemingly innocuous front organizations such as schools, hospitals, and community organizations, the Sangh Parivar advances its cause of a narrow, segregationist, and exclusionary ideology. The ideology of Sangh Parivar, known as Hindutva, is fashioned after the cultural supremacist ideologies of Nazism and Fascism. One of the early leaders of the RSS, Golwalkar, who is still revered today by these Hindutva organizations, wrote [2]: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole—a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn
and profit by.”

Well, the Sangh Parivar have truly profited from this lesson. They have systematically indulged in violence against minorities. Human Rights Watch has identified them as being primarily responsible for the genocidal pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 [3]. In the aftermath of that carnage in Gujarat, over 2000 people were killed and nearly 150,000 made homeless. Equally reprehensible was the large scale violence against women.

Hence, we believe that associating with any Sangh organization provides respectability to the RSS and turns a blind eye to the violence wrought by it and its affiliates. This brings me to our concerns about Indicorps, which arise from their association with the different facets of the Sangh Parivar:

Over the years, Indicorps has teamed up with many Sangh Parivar groups in India, all of them self-acknowledged projects of the RSS [4]. Here in the US, Sonal Shah herself has been a National Coordinator with the VHP of America [5], and Indicorps lists India Development and Relief Fund as an Institutional Supporter [6], working with them closely on several projects. IDRF is a Maryland based group that primarily raises funds for the RSS groups in India, many of which have been directly linked to anti-minority violence in India [7].

In Gujarat, today, the Sangh organizations create an atmosphere of uncivil political pressures and human rights activists are threatened from continuing their causes for social justice [8]. Within such hostile conditions perpetuated by the Sangh-led state government, Indicorps' accepted an award from the very same state government [9]. Indicorps decision showed an absolute apathy and inconsiderateness towards the many human rights acitivists who continue to risk their lives. It is our responsibility, our duty to stand in solidarity with the activists who to speak up for their ideals despite the adverse conditions in Gujarat.

We would like Indicorps to explain why it chooses to associate with the Sangh Parivar. Is Indicorps simply not aware of their RSS connections, or does Indicorp consider itself sufficiently immune to continue working around the hateful vision of the Sangh organizations? We do not wish to imply that by working with Sangh organizations Indicorp is guilty of the same hateful vision. Nor do we suggest that Indicorps volunteers are themselves engaging in the hateful, violent ideologies of the Sangh. We do, however, believe that any association with such groups serves to advance the Sangh’s Hindutva ideologies.

Finally, in an interview last year, Ms Shah tried to explain away Indicorps' reticence in taking any stance. “It is vital the group avoids taking sides, whether it comes to religious politics or the communalism in Gujarat, where much of Indicorps' work takes place.” Ms. Shah dismissed all talk about the hate ideology saying, "I'm not interested in the ideology." [10] This is where we at OY! and YSS would beg to differ. As you consider your choices of how you can express your solidarity and play a positive role in this world, don’t forget to examine things a little more closely. Each and every action takes place in a political context, every aspect of life is imbued with political choices, and it would be highly irresponsible of us to pretend otherwise. Accountability means that we try to understand the political facets of the situation and ensure that our actions are aligned with our core beliefs.

And that is why we are asking Indicorps to explain its association with the Sangh Parivar, and questioning its commitment to a plural, mutli-ethnic, mutli-cultural society.

Notes:
1) OY! is Organizing Youth!, and YSS is Youth Solidarity Summer. Both are political education programs for South Asian youth. Please check out www.youthsolidarity.org for details.

2) M.S.Golwalkar, `We. Our Nationhood Defined', Bharat Publications, Nagpur 1939, p.35, 1947 reprint of 2nd ed., p.43)

3) “We Have No Orders To Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, Human Rights Watch, New York, 2002, Vol 14, Number 3 ©, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/

4) Among Indicorps’ projects with clear RSS links are EkalVidyalaya, Jnana Prabodhini and Dr. Ambedkar VaidakeeyaPratishthan, Maharashtra.

5) Sonal Shah is listed as the National Coordinator for VHP-America,
http://www.vhp america.org/dynamic/modules...=article&sid=13

6) IDRF is listed as a grant-making “Supporter” onIndicorps website http://www.indicorps.org/index.cfm?functio...porters&level=1

7) IDRF’s connections with the RSS are detailed in the report “The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the America Funding of Hindutva” available at
http://stopfundinghate.org/sacw/index.html. According to this report, over 80% of IDRF’s discretionary funding goes to RSS programs including the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad and Sewa Bharati, both of which have been implicated in anti-
minorities violence.

8) Many of HRW reports have documented the continuing harassment of secular activists and lawyers in Gujarat. See, for instance “DISCOURAGING DISSENT: Intimidation and Harassment of Witnesses, Human Rights Activists, and Lawyers Pursuing Accountability for the 2002 Communal Violence in Gujarat”,
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/india/gujarat/

9) 19 young Indicorps volunteers are felicitated in Gujarat, Indo-Asian News Service—a news article in News India Times, Nov 19, 2004 gives an account of Indicorps volunteers receiving felicitation from Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat and also the chief architect of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 according to the Concerned Citizens
Tribunal, http://www.sabrang.com/tribunal/

10) Indicorps: The Saga Continues, Rediff, Dec 2003
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/dec/18spec1.htm

[Guest]

Check this out : http://www.geocities.com/aid_india_info/AI...html#aid_appeal