Yvette Rosser - Kripal on the couch in Calcutta - chapter 15

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This chapter examines an essay written by Prof. Somnath Bhattacharyya called ‘Kali’s Child: Psychological And Hermeneutical Problems’, Bhattacharyya is emeritus professor and former head of the Psychology Department at Calcutta University. He has also been a practising psychoanalyst in Calcutta for over 30 years. He is uniquely qualified to present a substantial critical analysis of Jeffrey Kripal’s book, Kali’s Child, on at least four grounds: He is (i) personally familiar with the primary sources cited in the text, (ii) a long time student of Indian religion and philosophy, (iii) a professional psychotherapist, and (iv) fluent in Bengali.

While examining Kali’s Child from this vantage, Bhattacharyya was “struck by the numerous irregular and insinuating translations, factual misrepresentations and speculative innuendo”. After reading Vishnu on Freud’s Desk and Kali’s Child, he was asked to write a rejoinder that was published in the subsequent issue of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.

In the 12,000-word article that appeared on Sulekha, Bhattacharyya hones in on succinct examples of what he calls Kripal’s ‘catachrestic’ use of words and phrases selectively chosen to substantiate his overriding obsession with Ramakrishna’s hypothetical homosexuality. His detailed critique closely examines and contests several of Kripal’s translations. “The curious twists of translation, the typos, the ‘honest mistakes’ and unconscious errors that litter the text of Kali’s Child would literally force Freud to sit up in his grave and take notice”.

Bhattacharyya cites two examples that ‘clearly don’t require a gloss’. First, in one of Ramakrishna’s parables, a housewife tries to dissuade her husband from taking to the life of an itinerant begging monk saying: “Why should you wander about? If you don’t have to knock at ten doors for your stomach’s sake, go”, Kripal translates the passage as: “Why sleep in seven beds when you can sleep in one”?

Another example is from a line in ‘A song to the Divine Mother’: “Mother hold me to your bosom, covering me with the aanchal of your love”. Here is Kripal’s translation: “Hold me to your breasts. With affectionate love, hide me under your skirt, O Ma”! Bhattacharyya adds parenthetically: “The Western reader may note that aanchal refers to the end of the Indian sari covering the head, shoulders, and upper trunk”. He points out that Kripal’s hermeneutical style perpetuates, “the very patterns of textual misrepresentation and misinterpretation that he wishes to refute”.

Bhattacharyya interrogates the methodologies and motivations guiding Kripal’s radical reinterpretations of the life of Ramakrishna, providing examples of violations of scholarly discretion that have resulted in simplistic, culturally disconnected definitions and overly interpretive, free-association translations—fiction, if you will, but not history or ethnography. His article brings to the fore two essential components of the debate:

First, he identifies several psychoanalytical pathologies at work within the methods Kripal uses to defend himself. For instance, he notes that Kripal continues to brand Ramakrishna a pedophile even as he denies ever having consciously done so.

Kripal explicitly writes about Ramakrishna’s ‘obvious pedophilia’ and then, when things get hot [he] becomes amnesic. How does one explain that? Clearly deeper and more complex unconscious psychological forces are at work here, and any attempt to identify them in this short paper would be too inadequate to be regarded as meaningful.

Second, he demonstrates how Kripal’s understanding of a mystic such as Ramakrishna is not only a mishmash of psychoanalytic apples and oranges, but how Ramakrishna’s messages and symbols are exponentially more evolved—light years beyond Kripal’s cluttered Freudian slips and lower chakra titillations. The two realms hardly intersect. The directions of the gazes are fundamentally and irrevocably opposed. This renders Kripal’s obsessive and exclusive focus on Ramakrishna from the lower chakras irrelevant. It would be amusing if it hadn’t sadly caused so much sorrow and defamation.

Queer Hermeneutics a.k.a. Queermeneutics?

Like many others, Bhattacharyya asks, “Why this bizarre interpretation?” Certainly, it is naïve to solely blame “the author’s homosexual inclinations or gay agenda”. However, when “one puts Kripal’s obsession for ‘sexual abuse’ themes and deviant sexuality . . . alongside the recent spate of pedophilic scandals involving the clergy in the USA [One worries] what Kripal’s experiences at the Seminary were actually like.” In ‘Secret Talk: Sexual Identity and Politics of Scholarship”, Kripal frankly admits: “that his work proceeded from his personal experiences at a Benedictine Seminary and from his personal desire to heterosexually engage a female divinity”. Bhattacharyya notes that even the Projection Defense Mechanism: “with all its complexities, cannot adequately explain . . . the present controversy”.

It is disingenuous on the part of Kripal to issue public disclaimers on his gay or non-gay status in order to divert attention from the basic problems of his approach. This turns the issue of responsibility on its head by accusing the critics of homophobia—a classic case of aufgestellte

Mausdrek—a mouse-turd standing up on end. Consequently, there is a buildup of ‘sinister negative transferences’ on the ‘clean slate that is Jeffery Kripal’. Bhattacharyya’s trained eye saw signs of the reaction formation defense mechanism wherein the opposite impulse or behavior is taken up to hide true feelings by behaving in an exact opposite way.

Discussing the manner in which Kripal contradicts himself and appears to be in denial, Bhattacharyya writes:

The real key to this issue lies in what psychoanalysts call ‘selfanalysis’—a discipline that one has to rigorously undergo before one can start psychoanalyzing others. This practice was initiated by Freud himself and remains a desideratum for all analysts to this day.

Erik Erickson, in many ways the father of psychohistory, himself warns about the dangers of projections to which the psycho-historian is always prone. He pointed out that any psycho-historian ‘projects on the men and the times he studies some unlived portions and often

the unrealized selves of his own life.’ [Emphasis added]

Bhattacharyya suggests that the way out of this dilemma is through honest self-analysis. Bhattacharyya quotes from Roland’s critique of Kali’s Child:

Kripal [has a] penchant for facile speculative decoding and turning these into adamant conviction. He thus persists in insisting that Ramakrishna 1. ‘was very likely sexually abused by any number of actors who had power over him’, that his trance states were related to such abuse, that the direction of  2. the ‘saint’s desire [was] always directed towards males (deities or male disciples)’, [and] 3. ‘when a text uses sexual language it often, if not always, reflects real physiological and psychological analogues’ and that the materials of his thesis are 4. ‘by their very nature offensive.

Bhattacharyya examines the psychoanalytic considerations of several issues found in Kripal’s analysis, including sexual abuse, feminine identity, homoeroticism and misogyny. Under the subtitle Sexual Abuse, he writes:

Kripal insists that village people must have abused Ramakrishna presumably because he had states of absorption right from his childhood. But Ramakrishna’s own descriptions of his childhood suggest quite the contrary, e.g. ‘During my younger days the men and women of Kamarpukur were equally fond of me. No one distrusted me. Everybody took me in as one of the family.’

Under the subtitle, Feminine Identity? several loopholes in Kripal are pointed out:

It is easy to talk loosely with Masson about Ramakrishna’s transvestite activities, but dressing up in a feminine dress as a part of a legitimate and culturally accepted sadhana for a short period

of time does not amount to transvestism. Ramakrishna after all also dressed like a Shakta and a Vaishnava during his Shakti and Vaishnava sadhana days and like a Muslim during his Islam

sadhana—and these were male attires—only to try and make his identification with these cults complete. Moreover, contrary to Kripal’s thesis, most transvestites are heterosexual. [Emphasis

added]

He further suggests that Kripal’s claims about Ramakrishna’s ‘secondary trans-sexuality’ are also all too facile. He explains:

The American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV) defines trans-sexuality as strong and persistent crossgender identification, and not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex. It is a disorder always involving distress to the person, with a feeling of estrangement from the body and a felt need to alter the appearance of the body. If Ramakrishna sometimes talked about his femininity he was also clear about what he meant by it—‘Formerly I too used to see many visions, but now in my ecstatic state I don’t see so many. I am gradually getting over my feminine nature; I feel nowadays more like a man. Therefore I control my emotions; I don’t manifest it outwardly so much’. (For more on this, please read page 156 and 157, chapter 15)

To carry through his thesis of Ramakrishna’s feminine identification, Kripal resorts to erroneous documentation. Thus a whole section is devoted to bhagavatir tanu or goddess body that Ramakrishna is supposed to have possessed. The actual Kathamrita term however is bhaagavati tanu, which simply means divine body, and has no engendered connotation. (The term is actually a Sanskrit term, and grammatical and physiological genders don’t always go together in Sanskrit. E.g., the term daara, meaning wife, is masculine) Bhagavatir and Bhaagavati are two different words, and a person who reads the one for the other only reveals his lack of knowledge for that language. To assign a physical or even psychological sex to this category [Bhaagavati tanu which is identified as causal body by Ramakrishna] then is a reductive strategy, which robs the analyst of the possibility of deeper insight into human nature and its possibilities. Similarly, Ramakrishna’s wearing silken clothes (garader kapar) during puja is taken to mean feminine dress simply because Kripal doesn’t know that male priests in Bengal routinely wear silken clothes.

Bhattacharyya’s footnote is telling of Kripal’s cultural biases:

“And why should [Kripal] not know? Don’t the Roman Catholic clergy use silken apparel during mass”? He refutes Kripal’s conclusions that tenderness between father and son is homoerotic, citing Bengali and Indian cultural nuances. He also shows numerous other records of Ramakrishna’s interactions with his women disciples of all ages and classes. These records were all studiously ignored by Kripal. (For more on this, please read page 157 and 158, chapter 15)

From the perspective of an elder scholar, he [Prof. Bhattacharyya] cautions Kripal that

he “would also do well to remember that the female is not a castrated male.”[Emphasis added]. As a trained professional, he finds Kripal’s amateurish speculations laughable: “Equally comical are [Kripal’s] attempts to weave in anal themes”. He observes: “Unfortunately, [Kripal] claims to be a historian of religion . . . not a novelist. If he got angry responses he surely has invited them”.

Bhattacharyya analyzes the manner in which Kripal selected the passages from the Kathamrita and concluded that Kripal’s critical selectivity “amply illustrates the basic problem in his handling of texts. Virtually any selected portion of his book is not just a matter of a few

dozen, easily correctable translation errors neither is it simply a question of textual relativism based on multivalent use of language.” [Emphasis added]

Some Empirical Issues

Bhattacharyya offers many arguments that refute Kripal’s thesis. The first study area that he investigates is the psychological impact of meditation and mystical experiences:

In Kripal’s own backyard, sociologist Andrew Greely of University of Chicago’s National Opinions Research Council (NORC) tested people who had profoundly mystical experiences, such as being bathed in white light. When these persons were subjected to standard tests measuring psychological well-being, the mystics scored at the top. University of Chicago psychologist Norman Bradburn, who developed the test, said that no other factor had ever been found to correlate so highly with psychological balance, as did mystical experience. (For more on this, please read page 159, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya adds:

Ramakrishna’s samadhi states were accompanied by very profound inward withdrawal of consciousness, and remarkable physiological changes, consistent with the highest stages of meditative absorption as documented in Hindu Tantra and Yoga as well as Buddhist literature. Thus the famous physician Mahendarlal Sarkar himself examined and found Ramakrishna without heartbeat and corneal reflexes during samadhi. These physiological changes (clinically

taken as signs of death) . . . were not metaphorical changes [and] are not known to occur in a dissociative trance. Medard Boss—an influential Swiss existential psychotherapist had this to say

about the holy men he met on his lecture-visit to India:

[T]here were the exalted figures of the sages and holy men themselves, each one of them a living example of the possibility of human growth and maturity and of the attainment of an imperturbable inner peace, a joyous freedom from guilt, and a purified, selfless goodness and calmness.... No matter how carefully I observe the waking lives of the holy men, no matter how ready they were to tell me about their dreams, I could not detect in the best of them a trace of a selfish action or any kind of a repressed or consciously concealed shadow life. (Boss 187–88)

Bhattacharyya discusses the dharmic perspectives of sex. He writes: “It is worth noting that although we commonly speak of a sex drive, sex does not fit the usual conception of drive, as a felt need that gets stronger and stronger, until it is satisfied”. He explains, referring to Masters and Johnson: “Indeed, sexual abstinence probably decreases sexual motivation over the long run. There is no evidence, despite myths to the contrary, [that] abstinence from sexual activity is detrimental to a person’s health”.

Hyper-Textual Sexualization

Bhattacharyya carefully investigates several instances where Kripal has homo-eroticized the heterosexual, hyper-sexualized the child, and ‘masculated’ the genderless. Through this methodology, she becomes he, and all signs point to penis envy or some equally loaded jargon.

Indeed, the female is not a castrated male.

Kripal often feels that a passage is ‘hyper-sexualized’ and demands a sexual reading. ‘Hypersexualization’ is not a term that is found in the standard corpus of psychoanalytic literature [unlike] ‘sexualization’, which is defined as “endowing an object or function with a sexual significance that it did not previously have . . . in order to ward-off anxieties associated with prohibited impulses”. Bhattacharyya examines several of Kripal’s writings and also looks at the articles written by Kripal’s critics, such as Tyagananda. As a result, he writes lucidly across numerous theoretical subheadings. (For more on this, please read page 161 and 162, chapter 15)

Kripal and Bhattacharyya are culturally miles apart regarding the manner in which each of them viewed Ramakrishna’s use of the terms yoni and lingam. Bhattacharyya observed that Kripal is troubled by the use of yoni and lingam and, perhaps, because of shame or shock, he sexualizes, sensationalizes, eroticizes. In contrast, Bhattacharyya sees worshipping a lingam or yoni as a cosmic symbol. Ramakrishna said they are symbols of fatherhood and motherhood so that one may not be born into the world again. Bhattacharyya advises: “If Kripal is bothered about the moral implications of such worship then he clearly needs to associate with the traditions that place a high moral value on this ritual”. Kripal takes the easy road—first by discovering a new twist on the exotic Other, then asserting absolute authority to theoretically describe that entity. Bhattacharyya is a bit dismayed:

Incidentally, when citing texts and arguments in support of his own claims, Kripal insists that things are ‘crystal clear’, while the other texts are all ambiguous (‘simultaneously concealing and revealing’). Well! This is hermeneutics of convenience for sure!

Catachresis and the Hermeneutics of Convenience

Kripal’s textual mishandling is particularly grave because his primary claim is that he is a historian of religions. Professionally, Bhattacharyya cautioned: “Large scale distortions of source material in an ill attempted effort at establishing a thesis, is certainly not academically acceptable”. He compared this tactic to what is known in scientific research as ‘the sharp-shooter’s fallacy’—analogous to the way a gunslinger might empty his six-shooter into the side of a barn and then draw the bull’s eye around the bullet holes. He warned: “Citing fringe works and material of equally dubious value doesn’t help in salvaging the case”.

Throughout this debate, Kripal has tried to place his critics in the Hindu obscurantist camp, and he is keen on playing identity politics as well. Bhattacharyya reminds him:

[C]ritics of his methodology include noted academics like Huston Smith, Alan Roland and Gerald Larson among others; and they are neither Hindus nor Indians.

Since Kripal states that his ‘hermeneutical’ strategy is inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work Truth and Method, Bhattacharyya quotes from the noted Indologist Fritz Staal whose lengthy analysis of Gadamer’s internally contradictory methodology, explained that, ultimately:

Either one disagrees with what Gadamer says, in which case one must agree with what he means; or one agrees with what he says by disagreeing with its meaning. One must in all cases agree and

disagree, and Gadamer’s originality lies in this combination. He has adopted from the positivist-empiricist tradition its most monumental error—the caricature of the scientific method—and

failed to heed its most valuable contribution—the critique of meaninglessness. (For more on this and Bhattacharyya’s critique of Kripal’s methodology of advanced historio-critical studies, please read page 163 and 164, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya points out that Kripal also violates rules of Bengali grammar, by confusing the gender structure of character, and linguistic genders with sexual function. Agreeing with Tyagananda, Bhattacharyya writes:

The vocabulary of Kripal’s desire is also very problematic [because] Kripal wishes to have his readers believe that anxious longing (vyakulata), charismatic attraction (tana), and associative reminder (uddipana) among other terms, and also of course Ramakrishna’s love for his male disciples, all carry sexual meanings, the contextual structure not withstanding. Now, besides the textual problems documented by Tyagananda, some very real psychological issues are also at stake here . . . Freud’s conception of love as ‘aim-inhibited sex’ stands repudiated at present on empirical grounds. Love and sex are not synonymous. There can be love without sex and vice versa . . . Thus, when Kripal summarily characterizes all these different shades of love as erotic he commits what may be termed a ‘category error’. (For more on this and Kripal’s tendency to sexualize the sacred, please read page 165 and 166, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya sees Kripal’s manuscript as irreparably tainted by predetermined motivations: “His invariable need to distort texts is proof enough against his agenda”.

‘State of the Child’ and the ‘Psychology of Being’

While defending his controversial thesis, Kripal has shown a certain proprietorship—claiming that: “psychoanalytic paradigms are his cultural inheritance”. Sudhir Kakar has said that, “Psychoanalysis occupies an ill-defined zone between the arts and the objective sciences.”

Bhattacharyya further explains, “Kripal claims his work to be in line with the writings of Sudhir Kakkar [whose own work on Ramakrishna] though avowedly Freudian and reductionist in nature, is much more sophisticated. Kakkar is careful to suggest that the feminine identification of mystics is best interpreted as circumvention of drives and instincts, or in other words as an ‘experience of being’.” (For more on this, please read page 166 and 167, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya explains:

Ramakrishna’s characterization of this ‘state of the child’ remarkably anticipates the findings of the classic studies on ‘peak experiences’ (which included mystic experiences) of ‘self actualizing’ people by Abraham Maslow, nearly four decades ago. Maslow noted selfactualizing

subjects, picked because they were very mature, were at the same time, also childish. [He] called it ‘healthy childishness’, a ‘second naiveté’. He considered a god-like gaiety (humor, fun, foolishness, silliness, play, laughter) to be one of the highest . . . values of the state of Being . . . i.e. ‘being one’s real Self’.

Bhattacharyya notes that it is specifically Ramakrishna’s ‘state of the child’ (matribhava, antanabhava), which is the very psychological state that Kripal studiously avoids or distorts into amorphous or polymorphous sexuality. Bhattacharyya finds this especially ironical because this book bears the title Kali’s Child. He laments:

If only Kripal had not ignored this central theme of Ramakrishna’s personality—‘the state of the child’—he could have made much better sense of Ramakrishna’s samadhi, his uninhibited dealings with his devotees, his love and concern for his disciples and their reciprocation of the same . . .

The practices of Tantras are informed by deep psychological insights into the workings of the human nature. Bhattacharyya notes:

If these basic psychological principles underlying the tantric practices are not ignored it becomes much easier to make sense of Ramakrishna’s own eminently successful tantric practices and experiences, his criticism of some of the tantric sects and their practices, as well as his open-hearted espousal of many tantric techniques . . . without having to pigeon-hole the tantras into the ‘sexy, seedy and strange’, and paint a conflicted, ambivalent Ramakrishna through extended skewed and speculative glosses.

To Bhattacharyya, Kripal’s iconography of Kali bears a striking resemblance to the New Age and feminist appropriations of Hindu goddesses in the USA. This is in stark contrast to Ramakrishna’s own perceptions of Kali. Bhattacharyya sees Kripal as an ingénue, who catches a phrase or two, then based on erroneous knowledge of India and Hinduism creates a static essentialized icon of goddess worship. Bhattacharyya concludes, “This says more about the fertile and wounded imagination of its Western authors than it does about deity veneration

in India.”

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It's all about power - chapter 10

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Kripal defended his creative bending of the meaning of Bengali texts by quoting from Gadamer’s theories of interpretation. Gadamer’s ‘fusion of horizons’ is a method by which today’s scholar can reinterpret classical texts in ways that were not part of the original author’s intent and meanings. Such new interpretations are deemed legitimate by this theory. They expand the orthodox meanings with new possibilities. The theory says that the contemporary horizon (i.e. Kripal’s attitude) fuses with the past horizon (i.e. the tradition’s view) and produces a third text that ‘goes beyond its author’ and leads to new meanings. This is how Kripal justifies his application of parochial and Eurocentric lenses, to create new meanings.

Malhotra seizes Kripal’s method of analysis and wishes to apply it in the pursuit of constructive and progressive Hindu theology:

Agreeing with his principle, let us ask why, then, are Hindu scholars denigrated when they apply ‘probes or techniques of analysis’, such as the use of astronomical data in classical Indian texts, to bring about ‘fusions of horizons’ and ‘radically new visions’ pertaining to Indic traditions? Are these fresh conclusions ‘a bit shocking to someone locked into only one horizon of meaning’—namely, are RISA cohorts boxed-in mentally? Why don’t they critically examine these new claims, instead of rushing to condemn such scholarship as neo-fascist, fundamentalist, Hindu Nationalist and other assorted abuses, without any basis? Or is it that Gadamer’s theory of new hermeneutics works only in the direction chosen by the dominant culture, imposing itself to overrule the interpretation indigenous to the colonized culture? [Emphasis added]

Taking this point further, why are Hindus’ own new religious reinterpretations not given credence and why are such interpretations dismissed as being inauthentic—often by this very cult of scholars? Do non-white people have the same rights of re-reinterpretation, without supervision by the dominant culture, and not as mere proxies? Furthermore, why am I attacked when I use a method to deconstruct certain RISA members, when they use the very same methods themselves? Could it be that my conclusions are a bit shocking to someone locked into only one horizon of meaning?

Thus, these asymmetries of power can also lead to Western cultural hegemony rather than greater diversity. Ultimately, who, and on what basis, should determine which interpretations are valid and which are not?

It cannot simply be a matter of prior usage or acceptance by the power structure, for that would perpetuate hegemony and go against the very innovation that Kripal espouses. In practice, how does one avoid adhikara (authority) being usurped by a dominant coterie based mainly on power? RISA scholars have evaded debating these methods openly, with their critics. […]”

Multiple Competing Worldviews

In defending himself in Evam, Kripal noted:

I do not honestly believe that the many important differences that have become apparent through this controversy can be fully resolved here or in any other format, as many of us are clearly operating out of radically different worldviews, moral values, and understandings of human sexuality and language.

Kripal here displays a culturally myopic perspective. His principle, stated above, accepts that different views will not get fully reconciled. The problem then is that only a very tiny percentage of the core information and perspectives about Hinduism gets presented in classrooms. Given the limited time available in classrooms, it is impossible to explain Hinduism completely. Hence, critical choices are made about the academic lenses through which Hinduism is presented.

Malhotra raises a serious question:

Which of the divergent views available in the marketplace of ideas ends up dominating in the classrooms? This is where the power of the dominant culture—in controlling the distribution of scholarship, media, and classroom teaching—has resulted in Hinduism being reduced to the lower level in the spectrum of meanings.

As an example of resolving this asymmetric power over distribution, Kripal was given the opportunity to respond to Swami Tyagananda in Evam, a new journal funded by Malhotra’s Infinity Foundation. However, the diaspora did not receive equivalent access to give their views using the channels of knowledge that are controlled by the academy.

[Kripal] categorically refused to allow Swami Tyagananda’s rejoinder to get published on par with his own work, which would have enabled Tyagananda’s work to also get catalogued, indexed and distributed to the same extent as his own. This attitude is driven by 3rd chakra power obsession and is also found in many Christian positions that ‘tolerate’ other religions, but cannot ‘respect’ them, because the latter would be tantamount to legitimizing them. (For more on this, please read page 110 and 111, chapter 10)

The Khyber Pass of the distribution of Hinduism scholarship in academics consists of journals, university presses, appointment committees, curricula development, and conferences. This is carefully controlled by sepoys and chowkidars who work for a small handful of well-entrenched scholar titans.

Because of this hegemonic control over distribution channels, Doniger’s books are amongst the most widely prescribed in the college curricula on Hinduism. She is also the editor of an influential encyclopedia of world religions. And she authored Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, which after being on the market for several years, was analyzed by Sankrant Sanu and shown to be so full of bias and stereotypes, that it was withdrawn by Microsoft.

The Colonizer’s Mentality

RISA scholars condemn their Indian-American interrogators using no holds-barred hyperbolic terms to label and silence them. They are accustomed to dealing only with certain categories of Indians, and when they meet Indians outside of these boxes, their attempts to apply their standard tools of domination fail, leading them to great frustration. Malhotra notes:

1. Many Western scholars of Indian religions are adept at manipulating and dealing with poor villagers in India, whom they term ‘native informants’, and from whom they extract research data using their own precontrived filters. This has often been done with the collusion of Indian scholars, NGOs and intermediaries. The native informants feel obliged to dish out what is expected of them by the foreign scholar, who has a lot of grant money to spread around in the data gathering process.

2. In more recent times, these scholars have also had to deal with a second category of Indians—the semi-informed and naïve diaspora youth, called ‘heritage students’. Some scholars have been able to adjust their teachings to not seem blatantly anti-Hindu. Given the power and knowledge imbalance, they often adopt deceptively friendly demeanors and portrayals and succeed in fooling the youth into imagining that these scholars genuinely respect their traditions. They convince them that what they teach must be authentic. Duplicity and ambiguity are used as strategic tools by some, because it is widely believed that Hindus are non-confrontational by nature. (For more on how other scholars like John Keay, Antonio de Nicolas, Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak And Dilip Chakrabarti look at this situation, please read page 112 and 113, chapter 10)

Under the subtitle We are Not Native Informants Any More! Malhotra explains how the power structure is shifting:

The specific kind of Indian that certain RISA scholars are most uncomfortable with, is the Indian who is already successful in a Western organization, and especially one who has managed over a large number of Westerners for an extensive period of time. Such a person is not likely to idolize them, or be easily taken for a ride. Any Indian who has succeeded in dealing with Westerners on their own turf must have enough insight into the Western mind, its strengths and weaknesses, and must be self-confident. Scholars can neither exploit such a person as a ‘native informant,’ nor patronize him in the same manner as a young NRI student looking for a good grade. For one thing, any such Indian is bound to challenge them, rather than accept their scholarship at face value, and is likely to be skilled at debate and negotiation.

An additional dimension stems from over-specialization, and the systematic exclusion from the peer-review process of experts such as traditional Indian pandits and other indigenous subject matter or language scholars. Within the Western academy, the more specialized a scholar is the less oversight and due diligence is possible, because there are fewer and fewer others who are able to challenge within that ultra specialized field. This breeds the cults of micro-specialties.

When assertive and knowledgeable Indians show up, the tables are suddenly turned. Malhotra describes three factors that work to preserve this power structure:

1. Western scholars like to prey upon uneducated Indians: The Western scholar of the humanities is sometimes unable to deal with the reality that she or he is lower on the West’s scale of rational training as compared to successful Indians who are well-educated in science, engineering, medicine, finance, management, entrepreneurship or other areas where analytical skills are critical. This business of depicting the Indian traditions as somehow irrational or backward is unsustainable in front of modern Indians . . . It is ironic that some scholars hide behind their ‘dense writings’ with great pride. Frankly, far too many writings from Religious Studies are poorly structured, loosely argued, and sometimes outright illogical. They have no

grounds for their arrogance about intellectual rigor.

2. The RISA Establishment has neutralized the most threatening Indian dissenters: Eurocentric scholars are accustomed to exerting power over Indians when they are in PhD programs, when they are seeking jobs in the academy, seeking to be included in conferences or publishing projects, and seeking favorable recommendations for tenure. Many Indians thus get reprogrammed as sepoys. However, when facing a successful Indian who neither wants nor needs their favors, many Eurocentric scholars feel powerless and threatened.

3. Empowered executive/entrepreneurial Indians are ignorant of this: Most Indians who have purely by chance encountered the kind of scholarship described in this chapter, and who are successful and assertive professionals independent of the academy, are inadequately informed and unable to deal with the scholars. This is why, from 1995 through 2000, I had to first prepare myself by devoting almost all of my time to reading extensively in a wide variety of humanities subjects. Most scholars are too busy with administrative and other routines, and their own particular line of research, to do this. This academic isolation makes any knowledgeable challenger especially threatening to their sense of superiority.

Many of these scholars of Indian Studies would love to silence the ‘threatening’ voices that call out their shortcomings. This reminds one of some corporate men who find it hard to respect a female boss. Revisiting the overblown anger of Gerald Larson and his colleagues regarding the alleged ‘hijacking’ of Hinduism Studies by Hindus, Malhotra observes:

Any attempt by Hindus to claim agency, or to take charge of their own affairs—be it looking after their own people without Western guidance, or be it doing scholarship to interpret and reinterpret their dharmas as they choose—is seen as an attack on the Eurocentric person’s domination of the world. This includes the Eurocentric person’s right to license those neocolonized persons he chooses to appoint under terms and conditions and under supervision ultimately controlled by Eurocentric people. One has to psychoanalyze the strange behavior of many neo-colonialized Indian scholars in this light.

The article ‘RISA Lila-1: Wendy’s Child Syndrome’ generated a tremendous response. Hundreds of comments were posted on Sulekha and the essay was discussed on numerous scholarly forums, including RISA. The Internet is diminishing the differential between the people on the plains (the Hindu laity) and the elite scholars of Hinduism Studies who inhabit the heights of the highly touted Ivory Towers. A paradigm shift is upon us.

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

Go to Chapter 8-part 2

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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

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