Rajiv Malhotra's preliminary response to Shatavadhani Ganesh

Shatavadhani Ganesh reviewed The Battle for Sanskrit here.

Rajiv Malhotra's preliminary response to the review is as below. A more detailed response is to follow soon.

I just read Shri R. Ganesh's critique of my book closely. I am going to develop a detailed point by point response. But meanwhile, I wanted to say a few things for now:

I wish to start by thanking him for showing so much interest in my work. It is a very useful criticism for various reasons. For one thing, all such responses, regardless of their substance or reliability, serve to wake up the traditional scholars and compel them to pay attention to the prevailing intellectual battlefield. Furthermore, such criticisms also give me a chance to take my book’s debates deeper. His criticism is well-intended, and he seems to want to “outsmart” my purva-paksha of Pollock. That is most helpful and welcome.

However, there are numerous serious errors, misunderstanding and contradictions, both in substance and in the logic used by him.

For one thing, he does not seem to have read much (if anything) of Pollock directly, and uses my work as secondary access to the subject matter. (Ironically, he criticizes me for relying upon secondary works on Sanskrit texts.) This deprives him of the full context of Pollock's writings that I am evaluating. He also lacks an adequate understanding of the broader Western idiom and theories in which Pollock's work is couched. It is misleading (though a common bad habit) to surgically pluck out a sentence here and there and comment on it. Pollock's work has to be understood holistically first, and it becomes clear that Ganesh has not taken the time to do that. My detailed response will show this shortcoming of Ganesh in specific cases.

Nor does he seem to have understood my book correctly. He also cites one of my prior books, but misunderstands it on important issues. For instance, he asserts that I am against the diversity of Indian traditions. Nobody who has followed my work would say such a thing. In fact, my earlier book, Being Different, which he cites, says the exact opposite: it contrasts Indian diversity with the Western normative quality and Abrahamic emphasis upon "one truth".

Actually, a central highlight of Being Different is that it goes beyond the common platitudes we read about our diversity, and proposes a comprehensive theory on why this is so. The contrast between what I call history-centrism and adhyatma-vidya are key building blocks I have introduced to explain not just the diversity in our traditions, but more importantly why this diversity exists. This insight as to the underlying causes of diversity in one civilization and monoculture in the other civilization is worked out in considerable detail in my work. I doubt that Ganesh has understood the depth of this theory.

Later on, in my subsequent book, Indra's Net, I develop this thesis further into what I call the open architecture of dharma systems. Not only is there immense diversity, but at the same time there is profound underlying unity - hence there is no fear of chaos as in the case of the Abrahamic systems. There is no control-obsession in our culture to the extent of the West. I explain why this is not, whereas most writers have been content merely stating that this is so, without adequately asking why.

Given that this theory of our diversity has been one of my important areas of work, I find it disappointing that Ganesh not only remains ignorant of it, but that he misrepresents me in exactly the opposite direction.

Besides his inadequate understanding of both Pollock’s and my writings, Ganesh is also making some illogical statements. Ironically, these are made with the stated purpose of exposing "Malhotra's pseudo-logic". I will explain this in my detailed article.

I will also argue against Ganesh's understanding of our tradition in specific instances, the area where he should be much more qualified than I am. No doubt he has immense memory and citation expertise. I admire him greatly for these accomplishments. But just as an ipod machine can recite millions of things without always understanding them, I will show where he lacks proper understanding of our traditional worldview on the very topics he discusses very explicitly in this article.

Finally, I will address the issue he starts out with: whether I am qualified to do such a project. Our tradition has encouraged and even valorized innovative thinkers who seemed to lack formal training, but who successfully challenged those with eminent “credentials”. This is an instance of his arrogance, and I shall dwell upon the merits of a given individual’s background. I will explain what exactly the project here is about (which he does not seem to grasp properly), and my relevant experience and expertise in doing it; I will let the reader decide for himself.

In fact, I will question whether Ganesh has the required intellectual training in specific areas of competence that are necessary for this kind of work that I have undertaken. I doubt he has much real-world experience in the global intellectual kurukshetra, which is not to be confused with meetings of “like-minded people” sitting in India. For the global battlefield, what would be the relevant experience equivalent to his 1,000 avadhanas? I submit it is the experience of going into the line of enemy fire, surrounded by a hundred opponents or even more, and being able to hold one’s ground, and come out wiser for the next encounter. I have had these (well over 1,000) live experiences in audiences where I have been the only Indian or Hindu, where there is blatant intimidation and mockery, where every attempt has been made to belittle such attempts, and where I had nothing personal to gain and all my reputation and social credibility to lose.

These are two entirely different types of yajnas Ganesh and I have done. In my case, it entailed a sacrifice of my thriving professional life in order to dedicate myself for 25 years to do this with full intensity. I will explain what I have learned that is critical for the present undertaking, and how the lack of this capability is a handicap Ganesh is blissfully oblivious of. While I am aware of my shortcomings and explain in my book the necessity for qualified insiders like Ganesh to join as team players, he seems to lack the self-reflection required to appreciate his own limitations in this battle. So the appreciation and respect is one-way, unfortunately: I appreciate his value as an intellectual warrior.

I am preparing a more detailed response to some of the glaring errors in Ganesh's article. I shall do this in the same spirit as the article by Ganesh – i.e. in keeping with the Indian tradition to debate opponents with mutual respect. We must set aside issues of personality, who is who in credentials or public image. Let us focus only on facts and arguments.

I will be back in a few days.

Regards,

Rajiv

Dharma is NOT the same as paganism

April 2014

In this post Rajiv explains how there is a common fallacy among people to equate Dharma with paganism and how it's very dangerous to do this since it becomes a step towards digestion into Western Universalism through first, digestion into paganism. A related topic where the holy spirit is equated to Shakti or Kundalini and how that is a complete misrepresentation can be read here.

Rajiv deals with fundamental differences between Dharma and Western Universalism in his seminal work Being Different. The book site can be accessed here and to join the discussion exclusively on the ideas contained in Being Different, please join this group.

A conversation with a fellow traveller on a flight to Delhi prompted Rajiv to clarify things through this post. He says:

The 10-hour brainstorm with someone sitting next to me in the flight to Delhi was interesting. This was a well-informed individual, yet not closed minded or fixated. So I became interested in explaining many things that he was keen on understanding. It became clear to me that too many Indian postcolonialists as well as Hindu thinkers are mixed up on the relationship between dharma and paganism.

Just because two entities each differ from something X, it does not follow that both entities are the same

​. An orange and mango each differ from a banana but it does not mean that mango = orange. This is the simple error with huge consequences that many thinkers make when they assume that since paganism and dharma each share the following characteristics of difference with christianity:

1. They got colonized and harmed by Christianity
2. They differ from christianity because they allow pluralism of deities, no central institutional authority
3. They differ from christianity because they did not seek to expand through evangelism.etc
4. They differ from christianity because they did not limit God to male form.
5. etc.

That therefore dharma = paganism.
This is devastating for dharma as it has the effect of digesting dharma into paganism.
Indeed many western digesters make the argument that same/similar ideas to dharma already existed in the Greco-Roman pre-christian faiths. This trick makes them digest dharma into the pre-Christian phase of Europe, which got later superseded by Christianity. So whatever dharma teaches them can be repackaged as part of early Europe before christianity.
In other words, many good cop western scholars equate dharma = pre-Christian Greco-Roman paganism and praise it profusely. Hindus foolishly celebrate this and thank them with rewards.
A good example of this error by a Hindu thinker is made by S.N. Balagangadhara, a  postcolonialist, whose main research has been on how "religio" (traditions of Greco-Roman pagans) got digested into "religion" (Christianity), and the former got wiped out. So far so good. (This is well known to historians of Christianity anyway.)
But the blunder comes when he assumes dharma =  paganism without even bothering to argue this. It is unconsciously applied. The result is that his decolonizing thesis is from a pagan perspective and not a dharma one. (All postcolonialists are not the same as they argue against western colonialism from different vantage points; for instance there are many Muslim postcolonialsits, Marxist postcolonialists, etc.)
He does not establish a dharma-specific framework, one that differs from both paganism and christianity.
Some key ingredients of dharma not found in paganism or at least not as developed in an integral manner are:

1. Rishis: The notion that rishis achieved the unity consciousness potential available to all of us and this was the empirical method of attaining ultimate knowledge. There are no pagan rishis in this proper sense, not just the term but the meaning.
2. Yoga: 1 is the result of a lack of yoga as systematic technologies for humans to attain higher states of consciousness.
3. Tantra: In paganism there is a lack of cohesive, comprehensive techniques married to theories of antah-karan/adhyatma-vidya, etc

Paganism never had a fully worked out metaphysics with the sweeping scope of dharma. In fact dharma has several such systems each far more sophisticated than anything paganism offers.
What is common among all "native faiths" including paganism, dharma, etc. needs to be celebrated; and there are important alliances needed to contain Christian and Islamic expansionism.
But be clear on whats different in dharma, what I have called non-negotiable. Do not slip into becoming digested into paganism. That is just another stomach leading to Western Universalism - in BD I point out the unresolved inner schisms in WU and hence why it is synthetic

Deconstructing the psychology of Wendy and her children using chakra hermeneutics-chapter 9

Go to Chapter 8-part 2

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

This chapter describes a model that uses the Chakra System as a theoretical framework on which to deconstruct the psychological orientations of scholars of Hindu traditions. Malhotra proposed this technique as one way of making sense of contemporary scholarly descriptions of Hinduism that appear unrecognizable to Hindu practitioners:

The Hindu-Buddhist Chakra framework has seven layers and may be used as a system of hermeneutics. Imagine each chakra as a template of contexts that are usable for multiple purposes. When a phenomenological experience is interpreted or processed from a given chakra, it provides a perspective corresponding to that chakra. The physical locations of the chakras are relevant to yogic or tantric transformative practices, whereas their archetypal meanings are of interest here.

The framework of Chakra Hermeneutics is summarized below.

Chakra Hermeneutics

• Lowest: The lower three chakras correspond to basic animal instincts. The lowest or first chakra, near the anus, is about security. The second chakra, located near the genitals, is about pleasure and reproduction. The third chakra, located near the navel, is about self control and power over others.

• Middle: The fourth, fifth and sixth chakras represent positive human qualities, such as love, interconnection and bonding, creativity, altruistic vision, and so forth. These represent the higher human/divine qualities that all religions espouse, and take us beyond basic animal instincts. Behaviorism or any other strictly mechanistic worldview, being devoid of spirituality, might not recognize these, and would limit itself to the human needs and desires corresponding to the lower charkas only.

• Highest: The seventh, or crown chakra, corresponds to non-dualism and transcendence—moksha, nirvana, self-realization and samadhi. Most Indic adhyatma-vidya systems culminate in such a state. In Abrahamic religions, many of the mainstream orthodox worldviews deny this possibility, although mystics, who are often considered fringe or heretical, achieve states compatible with the seventh chakra.

This psychological model may be applied to analyze various scholars. Depending on where a given scholar’s psychological state is located in this hierarchy of archetypes, she will experience the world corresponding to the template of the corresponding set of chakras. This means that the same reality may be experienced at many levels—a point that is stressed by Hindu spiritual traditions.

For instance, one may theorize that Wendy’s Children appear to reside predominantly at the lower two chakras while conducting their scholarship. In keeping with his own concepts of homophobia and homosexuality, and perhaps a deep insecurity about his Roma heritage, Kripal sees Hinduism from the anal perspective. This is undoubtedly one valid point of view, but by no means the only truth. It is certainly not the highest vantage point, nor is it a place where one should remain stuck.

Doniger and Caldwell appear driven partly by their personal sexual histories and partly by career ambitions; they seem to oscillate between the second chakra(genitals and pleasures) and the third chakra (power). This is why their interest in, and depiction of, Hinduism is what it is—ribald and racy and focused on being ‘marketable, fast-food style’, to modern consumers, as previously noted by Bakker, Kazanas and others. A telling illustration of a lower chakra mindset that marginalizes other possibilities is provided by David White, who in dedicating Kiss of the Yogini, thanks his own parents, not for their love or moral support or sacrifice over the years, but for contributing sexual fluids to conceive him! Doniger would have approved! Larson’s call to protect RISA’s turf—echoed and amplified by many other cartel bosses—may be seen as an indicator of the Roman gladiator archetype based in the third chakra of power projection.

On the other hand, more elevated and better-integrated RISA scholars see Hinduism from the middle chakras, and are able at least to theorize about the seventh chakra in an authentic manner. They examine the practices and rituals associated with these chakras—love, bhakti, and elimination of kleshas (negative conditions)—from the perspective of spiritual advancement. They look at the same things as do Wendy’s Children, but with different pairs of eyes.

All of the chakras are interdependent and interconnected. Any experience involves a combination of multiple chakras, and this combination changes from one experience to another. Furthermore, the use of chakras in this interpretive manner—as tools of literary and cultural theory—is a novel adaptation because conventionally they are used as transformational devices for spiritual advancement.

Malhotra notes that Freud spent his entire career studying European patients with pathologies in the lower chakras, hence his obsession in analyzing them solely in terms of their sexuality. Later, Jung studied Hinduism intensely and practised yoga, based on Patanjali’s texts. He claimed to have achieved states of emotional and spiritual consciousness associated with the fourth, fifth, and sixth chakras. This enabled him to break away from Freud (a significant historical development in Western thought) and thus help spiritualize Western science. He also reinterpreted Christian myths and their archetypes using a neo-Hindu worldview.

However, even Jung did not abandon Eurocentrism. Given his enormous influence over prominent Western thinkers for several decades, he helped to radically transform Western thought by appropriating Indic concepts. Malhotra notes that Jung’s followers erased the Indian influences on his works. And Jung, too, remapped Indian categories on to Greek-Abrahamic and his own original categories. Till the end, Jung denied the existence of the crown (seventh) chakra because non-duality and transcendence would refute the biblical reinterpretations he had developed. (For more on this, please read page 98 and 99, chapter 9)

Mircea Eliade, Doniger’s predecessor at the University of Chicago, after whom the chair she holds is named, was a friend and collaborator of Jung. Eliade was intensely interested in Hinduism until his own subsequent U-Turn. Thus, according to Malhotra’s Chakra Hermeneutics, many

Western anthropological and sociological dissections of Indic traditions focus on chakra 3—dealing with power plays between castes, genders, modern political movements, and so forth. The sanskaras (archetypes) of gladiators, and hence of many RISA scholars, are also located here. These depictions, just like the views from chakras 1 and 2, are not the crux of what many spiritual texts are trying to convey, but are often a caricature made to serve an agenda.

They essentialize Hinduism by reducing it to their own self-defined condition at the lowest chakras.

In today’s media environment, Islam is often reinterpreted for Western audiences by emphasizing its higher levels of meaning. For instance, readers are often reminded that the word Jihad has a connotation of ‘inner struggle’—shifting the third chakra view of Jihad to a higher chakra spiritual view. This is being done despite obstacles from within Islam, where such interpretations are questioned by most clergy on the basis that the doctrine of Islam is closed to new interpretations. The Western academic repackaging and facelift of Islam is certainly a good project from the point of view of Islamic progress and inter-religious harmony. Unfortunately, a different standard is being applied to Hinduism, despite the fact that its history and library of texts cry out loudly and clearly in favor of multiple layers of meanings and interpretations. Hindus are also being denied their agency to interpret ‘upwards’ (in terms of higher chakras) when in fact this should be respected in the same way it is being done with Muslims and Christians.      

The different levels of consciousness represented by the chakras, along with the diversity of Hindu contexts, are well suited for interpreting not only the abstract symbolism of lingam, Kali, Tantra, and various ceremonies and rituals, but stories and narratives as well. For instance, when seen from the middle chakras, the head represents the ego, and cutting the head symbolically means getting rid of the ego. But, as Malhotra notes: “Wendy’s Children are taught to see the head as the phallus, and cutting is viewed as a message of castration, hence they remain stuck in the anal-genital chakras”.

Malhotra regrets the two-pronged cultural devastation:

While the higher chakra interpretations are being plagiarized rapidly into all sorts of New Age, Judeo-Christian and ‘Western’ scientific terminology, academic Hinduism is being reduced to the views from the lowest chakras. It is especially unethical for scholars to apply the lower chakra lens to interpret the higher chakra experiences—seeing mystical experiences as madness, weirdness, or as various sexual pathologies. Therefore, in keeping with Gadamer, Hindus obviously should be allowed to use the Chakra Hermeneutics.

The Myth of Objective Scholarship

As can be seen, many Eurocentric scholars of Hinduism end up virtually reinventing the religion in line with their own agendas, psychoses and cultural conditionings.

Malhotra shows how Wendy’s Child Syndrome emerges out of the following five pathological tendencies:

1. Psychological filters develop over decades through peer consensus and these limit the choices for research topics and what data gets in or out. There is a certain arbitrariness concerning what issues are investigated and a political correctness about the questions asked and not asked. This also applies to choosing the subsets of the Hindu texts relied upon, either salacious or dogmatic. For instance, in the Manusmriti, mostly the socially regressive verses are repeatedly highlighted while over a thousand more enlightened ones are ignored.

2. Various contexts are juxtaposed in an ad hoc cut-and-paste manner, and misleading translations are utilized, which are then adamantly defended as authentic and objective scholarship. These heady extrapolations are shielded from criticism by a compromised peer review process. The conclusions are defended, ironically, not on the intellectual merits, but by invoking freedom of speech.

3. Hindu intellectuals are excluded from the discourse except those Hindus or nominal Hindus who are securely under the control of the academic establishment. Native Hindus are positioned as ‘informants’. Representatives of specific sampradayas are not invited either as equal participants in the scholarship, or as respondents when conclusions are published about their traditions. This is illustrated by the ‘secret trial’ of Sri Ramakrishna that was held in absentia, after which the case was declared ‘closed’ by Kripal acting as the accuser, jury and judge.

4. Independent challengers are subject to hyperbolic ad hominem attacks, and important scholarly issues are dismissed through repeated fear-mongering allusions to ‘saffronized’ fascists. That ends the debate and the substantive criticisms are rarely addressed.

5. A controlled dose of criticism is encouraged from RISA insiders, who have been trained to know where to draw the line. This gives the false impression of peer-review objectivity and integrity. However, those who seek to spotlight academic weaknesses with evidence-based evaluations become objects of intense anger, especially when done in front of the diaspora whose children are sitting in the scholars’ classrooms.

A publicly projected, post-modern aura of ‘objectivity’ has empowered scholars to visualize Hinduism through the lenses of their own personal experiences, cultural biases, feelings, traumas and dramas.

Educated, Westernized Hindus have recently begun to engage the distortions that they have found in writings about their culture. However, when they raise their voices and take exception, they are attacked as triumphalists. (For more on this, please read page 102, chapter 9)

Pathologies of Wendy’s Child Syndrome

McKim Marriott opined that scholars cannot avoid unintentionally superimposing their own psychological and cultural conditioning onto their works. This happens when they select topics of interest, filter the data, and then view the data through their chosen linguistic and methodological lenses or theories that privilege a given agenda or belief or identity. This conforms to and confirms various a priori conceptual formulations.

Malhotra developed his model ‘Wendy’s Child Syndrome’ (WCS) partly in jest in order to make a point in a provocative way. He was convinced that after the articulation of the WCS Theory, scholars would hardly be in a position to resist this inquiry which merely turns the tables around. In his view:

To fully appreciate the academic portrayals of Hinduism, one must study Wendy Doniger’s influence playing out through her followers’ subconscious conditioning. Because Wendy wields far greater power in Western academe than does Kali, Wendy’s Child is far more important to deconstruct than Kali’s Child.

He postulated his theory as follows.

1. Western women, such as the famous Prof. Doniger herself, who are influenced by the prudish and male chauvinistic myths of the Abrahamic religions, find in their study of Hinduism a way to release their innermost latent vasanas, but they disguise their autobiography behind a portrayal of the ‘other’—in this case superimposing their obsessions upon Hindu deities and saints.

2. American lesbian and gay vasanas, also suppressed by Abrahamic condemnation, seek private and public legitimacy, and therefore, interpret Indian texts for this autobiographical purpose.

3. Western women, seeking an alternative to the masculine God in the Abrahamic religions, started a serious study of Hindu Goddess in the 1960s, initially with great respect and devotion. Eventually, though, their lower chakras took control and they U-Turned in two ways: They mapped the Hindu Goddess on to Mother Mary which allowed their ego to preserve its cultural supremacy and continuity of identity. And they used it for Hinduphobic agendas (such as evangelism), finding in the Hindu Goddess nothing more edifying than a symbol of female violence or a symbol of male oppression.

4. Given the Abrahamic God’s obsession with his enemy, Satan, the dualism of ‘us versus them’ is unavoidable. In this zero-sum game, Western women must fight men and displace them by becoming like them, as there is no honored place for the female in Western myths. Hence, this myth also plays out as a theory of ‘tutelage’ over ethnic women of color, as a sort of White Woman’s Burden. It is very fashionable for Indian women to get inducted into this by the lure of degrees, grants, publishing projects and other rewards. (For more on this, please read page 104, chapter 9)

Implications of Wendy’s Child Syndrome

1. Many scholars lack the full knowledge of the cultural context and/or the language skills to be able to legitimately override the native interpretations of a living tradition. Yet this is what they often do.

2. Insiders to the tradition are excluded from participating as equals in their capacity to speak with adhikara on behalf of the tradition. Instead, they are reduced to being ‘native informants’ of various sorts, or else they are brought in under the tutelage, supervision, or authority of Wendy’s Children. Those who resist do not advance in their careers. Controlling the membership of the intellectual cartel is crucial to its survival.

3. Many critical terms are simply mistranslated, or else are taken out of context. Words that have a wide range of meanings are collapsed into a simplistic meaning that is usually the most sensational option and fits the thesis of the scholar.

4. There is often complete disregard for understanding the tradition based on any other perspective than the lower chakras. This is because acknowledging the higher levels of interpretations would validate and legitimize the tradition and make it an attractive alternative for some students. Hence, there is sensational use of sexuality, social abuse, irrationality, etc. to marginalize the seriousness of the deeper tradition.

5. Certain Western scholars have mastered the art of cutting-and-pasting Indian texts and contemporary narratives, superimposing exotic imagery in order to fortify their claims. Onto this lavish landscape they sprinkle content from their imagination and from unrelated areas of Indian culture. The final product is coated with hyper-jargon to make it ridiculous or incomprehensible. It is brand managed through incestuous awards and promotions to capture the dominant market share.

6. Evidences that would refute the nascent thesis are ignored and suppressed. Competing views from within the tradition are dismissively ignored, or the challengers are vehemently attacked.

7. The subject matter to be studied is mapped by the scholar as though it was his or her personal property and therefore it ceases to belong to the community for whom it is a living tradition. As his property, the scholar will defend it fiercely, but at his own will or whim. This tentative loyalty is protected in a very patronizing manner and subject to potential U-Turns in the future.

8. Doctorate degrees, academic papers, academic press books, book awards, and jobs at prestigious institutions are doled out by committees who are part of the knowledge production establishment, and who often suffer from this Syndrome. There is no independent review or audit of RISA’s policies and practices.

9. The afflicted scholars emphatically ignore criticism by any one who is not under the umbrella of their power structure. If the criticism persists, they attack the critic, as if to say, ‘How dare you talk back this way? You, a mere native informant, or worse, you are an Indian computer geek who grew up practising Hinduism but never studied it at the graduate school level. Don’t you know your place?’ Swami Tyagananda’s scholarly response to Kripal’s shoddily researched book is a case in point: it has been virtually buried because distribution is controlled by the syndicate.

The Myth of the West

Wendy’s Child Syndrome reinforces the broader Western Myth by eroticizing the ‘other’. It reifies its supremacy while weakening the other culture in the eyes of naïve students and the public. Far from being independent thinkers, scholars afflicted with Wendy’s Child Syndrome

are subconsciously performing their roles within this myth. (For more on what Dilip Chakrabarti and Narasingha Sil have to say on this issue, please read page 106 and 107, chapter 9)

Read entire chapter 9 from page 96 to 107

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Go to chapter 10

De-spiritualising tantra - chapter 8-part 2

Go to Chapter 8-part1

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

This kind of scholarship also reflects the U-Turn syndrome, wherein the scholarship facilitates appropriations while simultaneously denigrating the source traditions. Significantly, it provides theoretical legitimacy to the ongoing Christianization of meditation techniques in which Hindu and/or Buddhist mantras are removed and substituted with either meaningless words, as in Herb Benson’s ‘Relaxation Response’, or Christian words like ‘Christ’ or ‘Amen’.

Christian appropriators can rationalize that the Hindu mantras are made of meaningless sounds, and additionally, that their appropriation would ‘clean’ them from sounds of a woman having an orgasm. The White-Doniger thesis is among many that supply this kind of scurrilous ‘data’ to feed this appropriation.

The book’s political thesis seems to be that Tantra was a secret system used by Brahmins to dupe the lower castes and oppress them. White alleges that whitewashed or soft-core repackaging of Tantra “later came to be seized upon by high-caste Hindu householders throughout medieval South Asia as a window of opportunity to experiment with a double (or triple) religious identity”. White claims that this devious upper caste ploy was “a means to do what one said one was not doing...”. [Emphasis added]. In other words, the entire tradition was one big hypocrisy. Multiple identities, secret rituals and metaphysical hyperbole enabled Brahmins to exert political control via crafty mechanisms, which White compares with espionage:

A comparison with the world of espionage is a useful one: only those of the privileged inner circle (the heart of the Tantric mandala) have the highest security clearance (Tantric initiations) and access to the most secret codes (Tantric mantras) and classified documents (Tantric scriptures).

Lower castes emulated these pseudo-spiritual practices ‘as a means [of] social uplift’. Therefore, the tradition is not only not spiritual, it is also associated with trickery and social oppression across the vast subcontinent. These kinds of analyses are devastating to the Indic tradition’s progressive evolution and the self-concept of Hindus.

Abrahamic religions claim that they are the exclusive custodians of prophecies and canons documenting unique historical events. On the other hand, Indic adhyatmika spirituality, or inner science, tends to be non-history-centric and emanates from the enlightenment experiments of luminaries, of which Abhinavagupta is a very prominent example. Adhyatma-vidya methodology is similar to scientific empiricism, in that a legitimate spiritual tradition is the result of the actual experiences of spiritual masters and these experiences are reproducible by the rest of us in this very life. Therefore, White’s allegations of Abhinavagupta’s packaging of wild sex for the ‘soft-core High Hindu’ consumer market are as damaging as allegations would be against a Western empirical scientist that he fabricated laboratory data to substantiate a theory.

White’s and Doniger’s concepts of Tantra are implicated with ‘overcoding’, which is, according to the use of the word as found in White’s book, a euphemism for duplicity or whitewash. Doniger alleges that Hindus led a hypocritical double life.

Is a system of academic overcoding at work in such scholarship? Do certain scholars live double lives? According to Malhotra, they publicly position themselves as very Hindu-friendly in certain audiences, such as, (i) with pandits in India on whom they are dependent for translations; (ii) with gullible students from the diaspora to cleverly re-engineer them away from Hindu identities; and (iii) with diaspora parents/philanthropists for fund-raising. This overcoding is a mask to cover up their secretly building ‘ideological products’ to show patterns of Hindu decadence, violence, immorality and abuse.

Malhotra claims to remove the scholars’ pretence of being friends of India/Hinduism and exposes their Hinduphobia. He argues:

It is no coincidence that academic writings by David White, Sarah Caldwell, Jeffrey Kripal and many others apply the thesis of highcaste Hindu ‘double lives’ to a massive array of case studies which encompass Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Muktananda, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Hindu Goddess, among others. These case studies are filled with ‘data’ and convoluted logic. After winning awards their thesis is declared final and closed and those who dare criticize are attacked as being against intellectual freedom! (For expansion of this idea, please read page 83 and 84, chapter 8)

Hinduism, like all faiths, has its problematic aspects. Describing the religion multifariously from within an ecumenical orientation is not a problem for most Hindus. What is disturbing to them is that some high profile scholars allege that these abuses are the very essence of Hinduism, and not an aberration. In contrast, Abu Ghraib has not been framed by the media as a crime committed by Western culture caused by Biblical legends or original Biblical practices. An equivalent thesis would say that the original Biblical practices are essentially about hardcore sadomasochistic oppression and that a subsequent overcoding has been done to make the exploitation of non-Christian infidels and non-White peoples seem soft-core. Those who have dared to do such contrarian scholarship are from the margins—they are unlikely to win important awards and Ivy League chairs.

The charge of Tantra as a system of social exploitation is used by Doniger to frame India’s internal conflicts between ‘tiers’ of society—such as Dalits vs. Brahmins, Dravidians vs. so-called Aryans, women vs. men, minority religions vs. Hindus, and other Indic-specific dyads and contrasts. Malhotra interpreted Doniger’s conclusions in the review of Kiss of the Yogini, as ‘the triumphant tone of the white woman rescuing the native from their culture’. Doniger writes that White hopes by “reconstructing the medieval South Asian Kaula and Tantric traditions that involved sexual practices, [he can] restore the dignity and autonomy of the people who invented them and continue to practice them”. This is the Tarzan-Saving-Natives-from-Danger-in-Jungle trope, also known as the Missionaries-Saving-Heathens-from-Blindness trope.

Malhotra was moved to ask:

1. By what authority are White, Doniger, et al ‘in charge’ of such ‘restoration’ of Indian traditions?

2. By what justification are they privileged to frame the subject in a particular manner as opposed to the many other alternative frames possible?

3. For whose sake is this ‘restoration’ being done?

4. What is the track record of their Judeo-Christian controlled intellectual institutions in achieving ‘restoration’ for other peoples in the past?

5. To whom are they accountable?

There is an obvious inconsistency when White and Doniger are promoting this ‘restoration’ to some ‘imagined original past’ in which ‘Tantra equals sexual magic’, and yet any attempts by Hindus to recover a positively ‘imagined past’ is severely condemned as being chauvinistic and disingenuous.

Malhotra argues:

The hypocrisy cries out for notice: Why is a return-to-the-past that is supervised by Western institutions a good thing, while on the other hand, internally generated perspectives [by Indians] ‘chauvinistic’? This question gives rise to another: Does the difference have to do with who exerts power and for what agenda? In this scenario, when the West controls the agenda, selects the topics and frames the issues, then it’s positioned as positive ‘restoration,’ but when Indians outside Western institutions do the same thing, it is condemned by those in the Western institutions as inauthentic or invalid.

Academic Transgressions Excused in the Name of Saving Civilization

In her review of Kiss of the Yogini, Doniger raises some issues concerning White’s findings, to wit—that they are based on assumptions that cannot be rigorously proven. She asks: “How do we know that the original, supposedly hard-core school was not also interpreting their texts metaphorically”? (For more on what Doniger said, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger acknowledges that a mere possibility of meaning does not imply certainty of meaning. She also points out that White adopts literal meanings inconsistently. (For more on this, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger ends up with a George Bushism (as Witzel would put it) when she claims that White has proven a ‘definite maybe’. But then Doniger suddenly exonerates White’s intellectual transgressions and justifies his thesis on the basis that she finds it politically expedient, even after showing that his hypothesis is inconsistent and unproven. Doniger now argues that, regardless of its scholarly shortcomings, Kiss of the Yogini ‘has a political importance that eclipses reservations of this kind’. She writes:

In arguing for the sexual meaning of the texts, White is flying in the face of the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that began in the eleventh century, was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition from the nineteenth century onwards, and prevails in India today. The contemporary Indian view is complicated by a new political twist. Right-wing Hindu groups, in India and in the diaspora, have increasingly asserted their wish, indeed their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism.

Doniger seems to be suggesting, that evidence or no evidence, we should accept White’s thesis because it shows the devious revisionism practised by Hindus for a long time and because it is useful in deflating and denigrating dangerous Hindus today. Bapat criticizes Doniger severely on this point as well, calling her position vitandavada or argumentation that ignores reason in favor of establishing pet theories by repetition. (For more on what Prof. Bapat had to say, please read page 87, chapter 8)

The Dalit Card and Other Expediencies

Tantra practitioners and scholars know that one ancient movement within the tradition sought embodied enlightenment through sexual means. It had two parallel strands, one focusing primarily on consciousness and the other utilizing bodily techniques. (For Rajiv Malhotra’s elaboration on both strands, please read page 88, chapter 8)

White alleges that all this (Abhinavagupta’s reformulation of tantra in the 11^th century) was simply a political tool for the upper castes to control the masses. While the upper castes made spiritual claims to cover up their ‘sexcapades’ behind the mask of spiritual language, the lower castes dumbly practised Tantra as wild sexual orgies. The spiritual claims were a mechanism by which high-caste people duped and oppressed the Dalits. By invoking the subaltern tribal or Dalit identity, White and Doniger can claim to be exposing aspects of the Tantric tradition that have been used to exploit the oppressed.

Doniger has insulated herself from valid critiques, written by people such as those featured in section II, who possess modern, well-educated and liberal voices. She claims that the contemporary Hindus who are critical of her are ‘of the Hindutva persuasion’. She carefully identifies her tormentors, as “followers of the recently ousted Hindu Nationalist BJP, with its repressive and purity-obsessed policies”. In short, she dismisses her critics as repressed and obsessed puritans.

She expresses concern about the negative impact on Religious Studies from ‘Hindu fundamentalist attacks on Freudian interpretations’. The Hindu attackers, she writes: “argue that none of these [psychoanalytical] characterizations has any scriptural validity according to Hindu tenets or eminent Hindu scholars”. Doniger notes:

“This position finds some support in Western scholarly traditions [such as] Cantwell Smith [who] argued that no historian of religions should ever make a statement about any religion that some members of that religion would not recognize and accept”. She mentions, mockingly that, “This view is still honored by many conscientious scholars who follow the take-a-Hindu-to-dinner, Parliament-of-world-religions approach.” She adds, emphatically, “It is not, however, the only approach.”

Highlighting the comments used to endorse Kiss of the Yogini is revealing. The first endorsement on the back cover is written by Lee Siegel, who invites the reader to look at the book in terms of ‘magic and sorcery’—words suggestive of inferior cognition and irrationality in the modern Western context. Jeffrey Kripal also applauded the reductionist bias in Kiss of the Yogini for reminding us ‘once again that South Asian Tantra really is about sex, bodily fluids and all’.

White confidently presumes that “much of the Tantric terminology makes sense only if it is read literally”. Malhotra asks a crucial question: “It makes sense to whom?” To contemporary scholars, who reject the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions in the first place? Or to contemporary practitioners, who inherently accept the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions? An equivalent methodology in the reverse direction, as often asserted by critics of Christianity, is one in which Christian rituals and the doctrine of the Eucharist is reduced to a cannibalistic feast of eating flesh and drinking blood. However, Malhotra notes:

White quickly and assertively rejects doing this to Christianity by using the argumentation strategy of reductio ad absurdum—he rejects this because he says that it would make Christians cannibals. But when it comes to Tantra, he not only accepts what to a contemporary Hindu would be an absurdity, but insists that this is the only way to make sense of it.

He then asks a perplexing question, articulated over and over again within the Hindu-American community: “Why are such unsympathetic academicians, conditioned within biblical traditions, in a position to decide which portions of a text on Hinduism are literal and which ones are not”?

Another critic, the philosopher Sitanshu Chakravarti, has raised questions about several of David White’s ‘literal’ translations. For instance he points out that White reduces the Sanskrit word dravya (meaning material, object or thing) as fluids, particularly sexual fluids. All Hindus, not just Tantrikas, use dravyas ranging from flowers to sweets to clothes, wood and ghee and sandal paste in their pujas and havans—these are all homogenized by White into ‘fluids’. Chakravarti cites a few such suspect translations and their page numbers in White’s book: (For more on this, please read page 90, chapter 8)

Madhu Khanna’s Critique

Malhotra had conversations with a bold critic of such abusive scholarship, Madhu Khanna, a renowned scholar-practitioner of Tantra based in India, and she extensively quoted from her paper, ‘Paradigms of Female Sexuality in the Hindu World.’ She describes four different representations of female sexuality in Hinduism and emphasizes that these cannot be reduced to any one category to the exclusion of the rest. In describing the Tantric paradigm, she explains the ‘non-dual unity of life’ as follows, “Tantra concerns itself with the series of relationships between the transcendent and real, the macrocosm and the microcosm, the sacred and the profane, the outer and the inner, and weaves them within the framework of its values.”

She explains that each pair of opposites is to be held in mutual tension and neither side of the pair may be collapsed into the other, as that would be a dualistic reduction. This is why both radical realism and pure idealism are considered incorrect ways of understanding Tantra.

Criticizing the reductionist tendency of those stuck in Abrahamic dualities (into which White appears to have slipped), Khanna remarked:

The Western approach that splits the erotic from the sacred appears short sighted and deficient . . . White uses his profane-only lens to collapse the sacred-profane pair into profanity, with the spiritual aspect of the pair getting postured as a deceptive cover for hedonism by corrupt Brahmins. His core theory is that [Hindu] spirituality is a derivative from profanity and was intended for ulterior motives from the beginning. [Emphasis added] (For more on Madhu Khanna’s explanation, please read page 91, chapter 8)

White asserts, “I am a historian of South Asian religions and not a Tantric practitioner . . .” This calls into question his qualifications as a reliable restorer of the tradition. “Would a person who is deaf to certain tones be qualified to restore music played in the past based on simply reading the music scores, and to reject the music as played by maestros as invalid?”

Conclusions

According to many members of the Hindu diaspora, the implication of the White-Doniger thesis for the study of India and Indic traditions has been disastrous. Malhotra summarizes the impact:

1. White gives ammunition to those who attack Hinduism as being a collection of barbaric practices.

2. He reinforces the reduction of Hinduism as fodder for anthropological and psychopathological studies.

3. He tries to undermine Hinduism’s spiritual claims and renders its philosophical texts as fake or hypocritical.

4. He feeds Hinduphobia in the minds of mainstream Americans who see everyday Hindu symbols as weird and/or as representing immoral practices.

5. He provides a template with which to legitimize further data hunting-gathering about Hindus’ alleged violations of human rights, by claiming to have proven that such violations were the original intent and very purpose behind Hindu practices.

6. He plays into India’s caste conflicts by theorizing that Tantric spirituality was a ploy by upper castes to control the masses.

7. He tries to de-legitimize Tantra as a means for Dalit spiritual empowerment.

8. He tries to de-legitimize women’s empowerment through Tantra, a unique and major claim in contrast with the Abrahamic religions, and, hence, a perceived threat to male-dominated

Abrahamic religions.

One of the more interesting asides about Kiss of the Yogini is the fact that Doniger uses the book as an opportunity to discredit any attempts at Hindu constructive theology by attacking it as a project of Hindu nationalists who have “increasingly asserted . . . their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism”; and who think theirs is “the only acceptable view”. Her basic view of her opponents is false. Doniger’s critics neither insist that the spiritual-only view is the only acceptable one, nor that Indians should be the only ones doing Indic Studies. What they do criticize is the attempt to reduce Hinduism to pornography and to wish away the profound spiritual component in Hinduism. As Bapat and Malhotra have noted, Hindu insiders do have the right to constructive theology, as do people of all faiths. Terming this a ‘cover up’ or ‘fascism’ based on speculative findings is clearly intended to delegitimize Hindus’ rightful access to such processes.

Read chapter 8 part 2 from page 81 to 93

Please read the comic strip on page 94 and 95

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Go to chapter 9