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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 11th 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
Please read the comic strip on page 94 and 95
Go to chapter 9
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