Pdf of the book is available for free
download here.
Courtright’s ‘Limp Phallus’
not attested in texts of Ganapatya Sect
Anyway, his fiction of limp trunks and phalluses is not exactly
supported by the Hindu texts. For instance, the
Ganesha Purana (Upasana
Khanda 12.38) states that the trunk of
Ganesha is so strong that it is more powerful than that of Airavata and other
elephants who are guardians of the eight quarters of the Universe. Courtright thus misses a good opportunity to discuss
‘Penis-Envy’. The Tantric texts, which
Courtright ignores, distinguish clearly between the trunk and his phallus, and the latter does perform its intended functions
according to these texts. In short,
data from the texts ignored by Courtright completely negates his own fantasy
about Ganesha’s trunk.
Numerous depictions of the
deity actually show him with a raised or an erect trunk. Courtright has ignored
the diversity of the Hindu tradition with regard to the deity and has chosen
only those aspects that fit his predetermined thesis.
Courtright should have considered the fact that in Indian
culture, the lifted trunk of an elephant represents a salute by the animal. The
deity is not really supposed to salute us, which is why He may have a lowered
trunk in most of His iconic representations so as to symbolize His benevolence
and omnipotence.
Ekadantin of Hindu
Tradition—Courtright Castrates Ganesha Thrice
Now we have another curious fact regarding Lord Ganesha. One of the
tusks of the deity is broken, or missing. How does Courtright unravel this
mystery? As expected, under the subject ‘The Tusk’ in
his book, all kinds of disjointed, unrelated, disparate Puranic narratives are
brought together in an artificial manner by Courtright to lay the ground for
discussions on beheading, decapitation, amorous play and all such sexual,
Freudian materials in Chapter III. Ignored of course are the mystical and
spiritual interpretations of his single tusk in Hindu tradition (e.g., Mudgala Purana 2.52.13–14)
wherein the tusk is related to maayaa.
It is definitely worth investigating what meaning Hindu
tradition itself accords to the broken tusk of the deity. To determine the
traditional meanings of the broken tusk, we explored a wide range of Hindu
texts, from Kaavyas to the Puranas, and found the following explanations. In a
major Purana text, Lord Vishnu explains the word ekadanta as
follows: The word eka means ‘supreme’ or pradhana, and the
word danta denotes strength. “To Him (Ganesha) who is supremely
powerful/strong, I (Lord Vishnu) offer homage”.
Far from being a castrated phallus, the broken tusk of Ganesha is
a potent weapon. The Ganesha Purana, Kridakhanda (chapters
62–70) describes a battle waged between Devàntaka and Ganesha, the latter
assisted by his spouses. Devàntaka uproots the tusk of
Ganesha, but the deity uses this very broken tusk to penetrate the demon’s
chest and thus kills him. (For more on this please read page 230, chapter 17)
Courtright considers Ganesha’s beheading as a castration, his
trunk as a symbol of a limp phallus and now his broken tusk as another
castration. It is therefore legitimate to
ask if one person can
be castrated and emasculated thrice! And from a psychoanalytical perspective, one may
wonder who it is that has actually demonstrated a Penis Envy in this entire
episode!
Indian Males in relation to Ganesha’s Sexuality,
Celibacy and Incest:
Courtright summarizes his Freudian interpretations on Ganesha in
the following manner:
Iconographically Ganesa’s body is that of a plump infant.
Although at least one Puranic source has an account of his marriage, Ganesa is
generally represented as celibate, a celibacy suggested visually and perhaps
caricatured by his exaggerated but perpetually flaccid trunk. Finally, his
insatiable appetite for sweetmeats [modaka]—a source of many amusing
tales—raises the question (from a psychoanalytical perspective) of whether this
tendency toward oral erotic gratification may not serve as compensation for his
arrested development at not reaching the phallic stage as well as the severing of
the maternal bond he underwent at the beheading hand of his father. Gananath
Obeyesekere interprets Ganesa’s celibacy, like his broken tusk, as the
punishment he receives for incestuous fixation on his mother.
This generalization of Ganesha is preceded by something even
more sinister. Indians as a whole are force-fit into a stereotypical category by
Courtright, and then this stereotype is subjected to a demeaning Freudian
analysis. Courtright is not alone in
treating the stereotyped Indian male as a subject of Psychoanalyses. In fact,
he draws upon the works of Sudhir Kakar and the like repeatedly in this
chapter.
Courtright says:
Ganesa’s celibacy links him both to his father and his mother,
but for opposite reasons. He remains celibate so as not to compete erotically
with his father, a notorious womanizer, either incestuously for his mother or
for any other woman for that matter.
There is nothing in the tradition to defend this portrayal of
Ganesha as an incestuous son. So,
anecdotes that none can verify, are used to bolster the case.
Once Parvati asked Ganesa whom he would like to marry; he replied,
‘Someone exactly like you, Mummy.’ And Mummy got outraged by such an openly
incestuous wish and cursed him with
everlasting celibacy.
Courtright quotes A.K. Ramanujan, who doesn’t name his source. In any event, Ramanujan’s version is very different
from those that other South Indians are aware of. In that version, when Ganesha tells Parvati that he would want
a bride just like her, she laughs at him, and jokingly tells him that he may
never get married in that case, implying that there is none comparable to
Shakti. It seems that Ramanujan has added his own
spin to this tale in his amateurish attempt at psychoanalysis. The fact is that in a vast country such as India,
with more than a billion people (or 700 million people in 1980s when Courtright
wrote his book), there are literally thousands of tales and stories about
different deities floating around orally amongst the Hindu masses. Should one bring together these stories with
passages of older texts and then construct a psychoanalytical theory on them? Is
this methodology sound?
Even though in this unverifiable tale, the child Ganesha alone
is pronounced guilty of harboring incestuous thoughts, Courtright is quite
eager to indict Parvati too on this count. He has no hesitation in invoking a
tale that, by his own admission, does not find any mention in published
editions of the Varaha Purana, but is
only to be found in the writings of Abbe Dubois, the missionary that never concealed
his hatred for Hinduism. In this invented and
disparagingly
presented tale, the beauty of the newborn Ganesha fascinates all
women and this triggers a supposedly incestuous jealousy in Parvati, who curses
his beauties to vanish.
It is very common in India for sons when asked, what kind of
girl they want to marry, to say that they would marry someone like their own
mother. The Indian ethos emphasizes sacrifice, and the mother is often
the embodiment of sacrifice.
Having unfairly declared Ganesha an incestuous son, Courtright proceeds
to present even the most innocent events of Ganesha’s life as sordid tales of
incest. In a Sri Lankan legend, Ganesha competes with his brother Skanda for a
mango. While the latter circumambulates the world, Ganesha simply circumambulates
his parents and wins the mango. Courtright
quoting Obeyesekere concludes that the mango is a symbol for the vagina, and
hence this episode of Ganesha eating the fruit symbolizes his incestuous
possession his mother. (For more on this please read page 232 and 233, chapter 17)
In the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, the breasts of a woman are
likened to bunches of grapes. Should we, following Courtright-Obeyesekere
‘methodology’, see hidden meanings every time a Christian or a Jew offers wine?
There is a Maharashtrian folk tale that narrates the intrigues
between a Mahar soldier and a woman of the palace under Peshwa rule. The illicit
liaison is exposed and the soldier, whose name is Ganapati, is punished by
death. His spirit, according to the folklore, haunted the king. To propitiate
it, he installed the effigy of the slain soldier at the gate of the palace in
the form of the deity Ganapati and required everyone to pay obeisance to it.
There is nothing in this story to compare with the legend of the deity Ganesha,
except the name and the fact that the Mahar’s effigy was installed in the form
of the deity, but Courtright sees striking parallels in this tale with
the supposed incest of Ganesha with his mother. Such meaningless parallels
promote
neither an understanding of the
deity, nor do they promote knowledge. Instead they offer an insight into
Courtright’s perverse mind.
Ganesha as a Eunuch
Several sacred stories pertaining to Ganesha describe him as a
doorkeeper or guard outside his mother Parvati’s inner chambers. Courtright sees in this a parallel to an old Indian
practice of posting eunuchs as guards of the doors to harems. He then quotes an
Indologist to the effect that
these eunuchs had a reputation of being homosexuals, with a penchant
for oral sex, and that they were frowned upon
as the very dregs of society, implicitly ascribing the same qualities to the
charming Ganesha and reducing his symbolism to ‘an explicit denial of adult
male sexuality’. (For more on this please read page 233 and 234,
chapter 17)
Courtright then quotes Edmund Leach, an anthropologist, in support
of his own interpretations:
This combination of child-ascetic-eunuch in the symbolism of Ganesa—each
an explicit denial of adult male sexuality—appears to embody a primal Indian
male longing: to remain close to the mother and to do so in a way What will both
protect her and yet be acceptable to the father. This means that the son must retain access to the mother but
not attempt to possess her sexually. As a child, a renouncer, or a eunuch, he
can legitimately maintain that precious but precarious intimacy with his mother
because, although he is male, he is more like her then he is like his father.
This may explain why Ganesa takes on these qualities through his own choice or
why he willingly accepts them as mutilations from others—even from Parvati
herself—so long as they will guarantee his continued proximity with her.
The Modaka as a (Sexual) ‘Toy’
Hindus fondly depict Lord Ganesha as devouring a sweetmeat
called modaka. Courtright applies the ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ paradigms
of Freudian ideology to interpret this in a sexualized manner:
The perpetual son desiring to remain close to his mother and having
an insatiable appetite for sweets evokes associations of oral eroticism. Denied
the possibility of reaching the stage of full
genital masculine power by the
omnipotent force of the father, the son seeks gratification in some acceptable
way. As long as he remains stuffed full he is content and benign, like a
satisfied infant at its mother’s breast. If Ganesa should go hungry because of
the devotee’s failure to feed and worship him first before all other gods, then
his primordial hostility is aroused, to the detriment of all. Feeding Ganesa
copious quantities of modakas, satisfying his oral/erotic desires, also keeps
him from becoming genitally erotic like his father . . . Ganesa’s impatience
for food suggests an anxiety, a hunger that is never completely fed no matter
how many modakas he consumes. He is the child forever longing for the mother’s
breast—that fountain of life-giving elixir he once enjoyed without distress in
infancy but is now denied because of the father’s intrusion . . . Ganesa’s
story is, in part, the story of maternal attachment, loss, and indirect but
incomplete compensation. As a celibate child, and resembling the ambiguous
figure of the eunuch, Ganesa is one whose masculinity remains partial, trimmed,
and contained. Unable to take full possession of his mother in the face of his
father’s beheading/castrating power, Ganesa lives a threshold existence—near
but nor far enough— seeking his own fulfillment in dutiful service to his
parents and taking pleasure in an endless flow of sweetmeats from adoring devotees.
He is the mythical expression of the male wish for maternal intimacy denied in
real life in the course of growing up, a fantasy in which the defeats of the
son must suffer at the hands the father are compensated indirectly by an orally
erotic celibate proximity to the mother. (For story on the moon and
Ganesha’s tusk please read page 235 and 236, chapter 17)
As we extracted these and similar passages from Courtright’s
book for our review, we felt a lot of mental agony seeing that he could use words
such as ‘limp-phallus’, ‘castration’, ‘orally erotic’, ‘eunuch’, ‘amorous play’
and so on in the context of a child, even if it be mythical
for a Christian such as Courtright (but Divine for us). Our
American readers could perhaps feel our pain by imagining a situation in which Courtright
would use such language for the baby Jesus, or if you are not religious, an
all-American anthropomorphic child-character such as Mickey Mouse.
Hindus invoke the presence of and blessings of Lord Ganesha at the
start of all our prayers. Mickey Mouse is not worshipped of course, but he
continues to delight millions of adults and children all over the world with
his delightful antics. If someone were to obsessively
and insistently see genitalia and other kinds of sexual stuff in the character or
persona of the baby Jesus or Mickey Mouse, we would normally conclude that he
is suffering from some pathological disorder requiring medical attention. While reading his book on Ganesha, the thought that
kept repeating in our mind page after page was—how could he have written this?
Why did he do this?
Sexualizing the Hindu Child: The Initiation
Ceremony (Upanayana):
In her two-page Foreword, Wendy Doniger refers to the use of
Freudian analysis in the following words:
The episode of beheading by the father cries out for (and has
been given by others) a party-line Freudian analysis; Courtright does, indeed,
sail through this particular strait, but though he listens with unwaxed ears to
the song of the psychoanalytical sirens, he is not seduced. He offsets the
Freudian analysis with his own striking model of the parallels between the
Ganesa story and the Hindu ritual of the initiation of a young boy . . .
And what are these parallels that deserved a special
acknowledgment by Wendy Doniger? While
describing his sexualized version of Ganesha and the stories associated with
Him, Courtright takes a step forward and transplants erotica onto the solemn
Hindu ceremony of upanayana
in which young Hindu males are initiated into their student life. In effect, after demeaning the Hindu male,
Courtright targets the innocent Hindu child. The upanayana ceremony involves a symbolic transformation of the
would-be teacher of the student into his new father. This father-son
relationship between teacher-student is maintained for a lifetime and does not
sever the relationship of the student with his biological father. However, Courtright sees something sexual in this whole affair.
This new father/son, guru/disciple. Acarya/brahmacarin
relationship creates a new bond of affection in the context of absolute
domination by the authority figure and utter dependence of the disciple. The sexual
nuances of this relationship are well hidden, but it is significant that in the
myth Siva gives Ganesa his weapons and in the ritual the acarya gives the
brahmacarin the ascetic’s staff [yogadanda]—symbols,
like the broken tusk, of the detached phallus. Carstairs notes further ‘There
is also a powerfully repressed homosexual fixation on the father. This is shown
. . . in indirect and sublimated form, in a man’s feeling toward his Guru—in
one context in which a warm affectionate relationship (although a passive
and dependent one) is given free expression.’
So, the scholarly pair of Carstairs and Courtright have debased
even the ‘teacher–student relationship’ in Hindu society (perhaps privileging the
Western version indirectly) by imparting perverse sexual connotations to it. We are
indeed curious to know how Courtright would
psychoanalyze his relationships with his own
students. (For more on this please read page 237, chapter 17)
In the Indian ascetic tradition, there is a long-standing
controversy on whether the staff should be single or if it should be a
triple-staff (tridanda). One wonders what would be Courtright’s
perspective on this controversy. Hindu tradition sees the danda as
a symbol of chastisement or discipline, whether inflicted or self-enforced.
When a young student assumes a danda, he is in effect vowing that
he will live according to the prescribed rigors of student life.
It may be pointed out here that Hindus have been performing the upanayana
ceremony for their children, often aged five to eight years, for several
thousand years now. If there is any reality to Courtright’s imaginative
interpretation that danda = penis, then the inescapable conclusion is that
millions of Hindu children have been subjected unconsciously (or consciously)
to sexual abuse by being handed a pseudo-penis in their hand by a male elder
during the ceremony. While we find such sexualized
interpretations of the upanayana defamatory and degrading, Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty finds it so apt and insightful that she made
a special mention of it in her Foreword to Courtright. The consequences of such essentializing can indeed be
grave for an American minority. One wonders how Doniger and Courtright (and the
Prize committees that lionize these scholars) view Hindu-American parents who
have celebrated their seven year-old’s upanayana—as potential perverts who should
be kept away from white children? (For more on the
upanayana ceremony please read page 238 and 239, chapter 17)
This interpretation is supported by explanations in numerous traditional
commentaries.The staff is seen to be a reminder and a symbol of Dharmic authority,
or Dharmic discipline with which the teacher invests the student and motivates
him to pursue his divinely ordained duty of studying the sacred texts
before he gets married.
The staff is widely used to symbolize authority and discipline
in numerous cultures all over the world, and Hindu texts are no exception. Perhaps Courtright could explain to us what the
staff of Moses, which parted the Red Sea, stands for in his Freudian world.
Courtright does not even make the pretense of acknowledging how the
Hindu tradition itself interprets the staff of a celibate student, something
that he could have found out by referring to even basic works on Hindu samskaras or
sacraments. He would have found that according to some authorities, studentship
was considered as a long sacrifice, and therefore, a student was expected to
bear the staff just as a scholar would in a long sacrifice. Paraskara Grihyasutra 2.6.26 suggests that the purpose of the staff was to
protect against human and non-human attackers. According to Manava Grihyasutra 1.22.11, the student is a traveler on the long road
of knowledge. When this paradigm is considered, the staff assumed by the
student then becomes reminiscent of the staff used by a traveler. According to the Varaha Grihyasutra, the staff was the symbol of the watchman. Apararka
in the Yajnavalkya Smriti 1.29 states that bearing the staff makes the student
self-confident and self-reliant when he goes out to the forest to collect
fire-sticks for yajnas, for tending the cattle of his teacher, or when he
travels in darkness. In other words, while the Indian tradition takes the staff as a symbol
of authority, discipline, protection and so on, Courtright sees just a Penis.
Marriage of Ganesha
Hindu tradition is not uniform on the marital status of the
deity. While the dominant view depicts him as a son devoted to his mother and
as a bachelor, other traditions state that he has two wives. Courtright expends
a lot of energy in depicting the ‘eunuch’ and ‘oral’ nature of Ganesha, in
keeping with his Freudian paradigms. So when conflicting textual evidence
relating to his marital status emerges, it has to be explained away in some
way. Courtright does this with the following
words:
Iconographically he is sometimes represented sitting between
Siddhi and Buddhi, but there is little in the way of mythology about his marriage
in the textual tradition. These women
appear more like feminine emanations of his androgynous nature, saktis rather
than spouses having their own characters and stories. (For
more on this please read page 240, chapter 17)
Courtright continues:
The celibate character of his marriage is evoked by the seventh century
poet, Bana, who wrote of Ganesa and his bride as the fusedandrogyne, lacking
sufficient separateness from one another to
engage in the erotic possibilities of marriage. ‘May the single tusked
Ganesa guard the universe, who imitates his parent’s custom in that his bride,
it seems, has been allowed to take that half of
him wherein his face is
tuskless.’
Banabhatta is in fact referring to the concept of ardhnaariishvara283 that depicts Siva and Parvati (who definitely are
not a celibate couple) as two halves of one deity, and suggests that the wife
of Ganesha, being tusk-less, represents a similar conception with her
constituting that side of his which does not have the
tusk (since one of his tusks is broken). (For more please
read page 241, chapter 17)
Read chapter 17 part 4 from page 229 to 241
Pdf of the book is available for free download here.
