Showing posts with label AAR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AAR. Show all posts

The strange case of the re-de-re-colonized Ananya Vajpeyi

The following blog post is the response from Rajiv Malhotra to a most mischievous write-up in the Hindu by Ananya Vajpeyi, and our followup study that tracks the ecosystem (the people, the nature of discourse, the institutions) that has nurtured and promoted Ananya Vajpeyi's anti-India and anti-Hindu activities.

A Brief overview of the ecosystem

Ananya Vajpeyi, now working with Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in India has been groomed by Sheldon Pollock, Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University, and others who have been associated with the Breaking India forces in a very organized manner. As Rajiv Malhotra has extensively researched, she is part of a large group of Indian "intellectuals" who have been carefully groomed by the western nexus that controls the discourse on Hinduism and by extension the dominant narrative about India in Indian media. This nexus aims to undermine Hinduism which is the civilizational basis for India in a slow and deliberate manner by focusing on issues like human rights, caste, women empowerment and the like and linking it with Hinduism in an aggressive yet persuasive manner with the result that the average Hindu reading such articles feels extremely conscious and in fact ashamed of his so called civilizational heritage. This then feeds further scholars riddled with inferiority complex into the university factories of this nexus to further strengthen the brain-washing. Sheldon Pollock has been so suave that he has managed to rope in people like Narayana Murthy of Infosys for his/his nexus project of first undermining the social fabric and then breaking/Balkanizing India. The other interesting fall out is the soul harvest, that pet project of Christianity that is made possible by the narratives generated by discourses like the ones generated by this nexus.

Here's a very important update on the thread from Rajiv where he has posted an excerpt from Breaking India, his deeply researched book on the nexus working mainly from abroad to undermine
and fragment India.

"The following excerpt from "Breaking India" is a small sample of what is wrong with hoisting Sheldon Pollock as the award-winning "Friend of India". He is now on a roll, rapidly taking control of Sanskrit Studies with massive funding from Indians who think they are helping "promote" their dharma::

Blaming Indian Civilization

Despite the fact that it was European scholarship which had misappropriated, distorted and abused Indian traditions for European identity politics, there is still a tendency among certain western scholars to put the blame for European racism and Nazism at India’s door. Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit at Coloumbia University promotes this view. According to Pollock "high Brahminism" as represented by the Mimamsa School contributed to the "ideological formations of precolonial India" and Nazism tried implementing this "at home" in Germany.[1] Pollock argues that it was this that ultimately led to the "legitimation of genocide".[2] Wilhelm Halbfass takes such ridiculous statements to ironic speculations,
"Would it not be equally permissible to identify this underlying structure as "deep Nazism" or "deep Mimamsa"? And what will prevent us from calling Kumarila and William Jones "deep Nazis" and Adolf Hitler a "deep Mimamsaka"?
We can se the implications of Western Indologists continuing to use the idea of the Aryan in the Indian context, with references to “Aryan invasions” and so forth. As will be shown in subsequent chapters, European racial ideas conveniently made their way into India, where they were reframed in terms of light skinned “Aryans” and dark skinned “Dravidians.” These distinctions were first promoted in colonial times, but remain powerful to this day in the study of India.





[1] (Pollock 1993, 77-78)

[2] Pollock will be discussed again in Chapter 14.


[3] (Halbfass, Research and Reflection; Beyond Orientalism 2007, 17)"

Following are some links on this very blog which have been the subject of past threads on the mentors/friends of people like Ananya: Sheldon Pollock, Narayana Murthy, Basharat Peer. Basharat Peer, Ananya's husband is a journalist based in New York who writes for NYT, Guardian etc. But Peer is more well known for his sympathy to the Kashmiri separatist cause. Read his interview on WSJ here. He was also head honcho for the virulently anti-India NYT India Ink blog that was recently shut down.

This is a thread which turns the spotlight on Narayana Murthy.

Here is a link which has a video talk by Sheldon Pollock (one of Breaking India nexus) currently currying much favour in Indian intellectual circles. This link also has discussions on various Breaking India forces at work in the USA with names.

Here's another thread on the Rajiv Malhotra discussion forum which discusses Sheldon Pollock.

Lit fests are another way for the Western nexus to operate and William Dalyrmple's Jaipur Lit Fest is one such place that attracts many of these Breaking India sepoys: the class educated and nurtured in the West for the furtherance of the West's own propaganda. Ashis Nandy is one such sepoy who created a furore at the Japiur fest in 2013 which immediately propelled the likes of Ananya Vajpeyi to lunge to his defence in her article here. In her article she says "One of India’s greatest living thinkers, who has written about some of the most sensitive fault-lines in our society with insight and compassion for over four decades, and supported countless social movements with his ideas and words, finds himself accused of hurting the self-esteem of the weak and the disenfranchized. The peculiarity of this situation bears some reflection. On the one hand, it could be argued that it is common knowledge that crime, corruption and venality are not restricted to any class, caste, religion or gender — a quick look at the scams that have surfaced just within this administration of the United Progressive Alliance government, since 2009, would bear out a minimal claim of this order." 

Ananya in the above quote conveniently leaves out mentioning data to support her claim of the break up of people caste wise (or religion wise) of those involved in scams. This is standard procedure of this nexus. They are always short on hard data while extremely long on theories and continuously quote each other in a self serving circle of buddies and comrades slapping each other on their back for their excellent scholarship. The above is just one example from her article and there are many like this strewn throughout the article.

Rajiv Malhotra has also had a debate with William Dalyrmple on twitter where he corners Dalyrmple on his Lit Fest. One can assess the debate worthiness or the lack thereof of Mr. Dalyrmple here.

"private" email  allegedly written by Ananya trying to malign Arundhati Roy's essay on Ambedkar's landmark writing Annihilation of Caste has been around on the net for a while. The said email has also been referred to in another widely read blog Newslaundry. Incidentally, Arundhati Roy is also part of the very same Breaking India nexus and she has been discussed on the forum. One of the threads involving her can be found in this summary.

Discussion Thread

Rajiv writes:

The above article by Ananya Vajpeyi (now a prof at CSDS, Delhi) reminded me of the following memories from the past.The only time I met this young scholar in person was at an annual conference of the American Academy of Religion, where I was saddened by the heavily "caste, cows, sati, dowry" focus in her paper. The paper's title and abstract had fooled me into expecting something more balanced & sensible about Sanskrit. It was clear that this PhD student felt compelled to politicize Sanskrit - emphasizing mainly how it was abusive of caste and women.Later, I learned from her former JNU prof Kapil Kapoor that she had studied under him, and hence had become encouraged to go abroad for further Sanskrit studies. He mentioned this during my discussion on how Ferdinand Sassuere had used Pannini's Sanskrit grammar and other Sanskrit texts to formulate his theories on structuralism. He mentioned that Ananya had done her MA on this very  topic in UK - a topic inspired by him. But later she Uturned upon reaching USA for her PhD. In fact, she was reluctant to share her own MA dissertation once she went to USA, as its thesis [ran] counter to the anti-Sanskrit camp she had joined. Prof Kapoor promised me several times over the years to get her MA dissertation for my reference, but never managed to get this from his own former student. Now in this latest article she lashes [out] against him as someone in the Modi era -- she belongs in an anti-Modi camp. I also once met her father, a distinguished Hindi scholar, through a mutual friend in Delhi. I explained to him my work in exposing Hinduphobia and biases against our sanskriti. He confidently replied that his daughter was an example of young scholars who will counter such biases. He was so proud of her while she was still a student in USA. Little did he know. How naive parents can be regarding where their children are headed intellectually after leaving home.The story gets worse. Her network of contacts in Delhi lobbied with Sonia G's cabal to get a Padam Shree award for her PhD adviser, Sheldon Pollock. He is the author of the infamous book "The Death of Sanskrit". He more than any other individual has helped to reposition the study of Sanskrit into terms and filters of "caste abuse". While Indian leftists already hated Sanskrit, they lacked direct knowledge of the language or its texts. This is where Pollock has provided them ammunition by training a  small army of sepoys like Ananya, and got them jobs in India, from where they carry out the civilizational war far worse than the Brits ever could. With this background you can see through her article in The Hindu. She calls Sanskrit studies "biased" in India - parroting the predictable allegations about gender and caste. But here's the elphant in the room she misses: She has nothing to say about the massive biases against Sanskrit and sanskriti in the Western academy  of which she is a product. Why this silence? Why no honesty to critique her own peer group of western Indologists? What about this bias? Her article uses Dina Nath Batra merely as a straw man. But her real target is Sanskriti. Notice the nuanced praise for Sanskrit, while in fact ending up debunking its legitimacy -- seen as a scourge for human rights of the "downtrodden".Indians are exceedingly naive about praise for the likes of Pollock and their trained sepoy armies. What a slick move to title her article ""My Sanskrit". We are up against a large army of such "Made in USA" Indian scholars with expertise (but no shraddha) for Sanskrit/Vedas/Hindus.

Following the above response, the thread on the forum saw quite a lot of activity.

Narasimhan writes:

"Who can be more useful than some one who parades her Sanskrit? A great insider and mole - at least that's what she wants them to think. She is also a student of Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and other "anti-brahminism" poseurs. I wonder if Meera Nanda is jealous."

Come says:

"I have known Ananya for many years and have in fact written on her FB page to emit similar reservations and objections about her thesis in this latest article. I think she has become radicalised since she married Basharat Peer. However I think that she felt personally humiliated in her feminist convictions by some of her old sansrkit mentors in India who evinced traditional Brahminical prejudice against westernised young women eager to modernise and westernise indian society. She was thus reinforced in her conviction, nurtured in the USA, that Indian orthodox society is narrow-minded, bigoted and closed to reform. She was very well treated in honoured in the USA academic community and she is hence deeply loyal to Pollock, Doniger and other pillars odf American indology so that she takes personally any attack on their work and ideas."

Sreedhar adds:

"[] It is clearly very inferior in terms of scholarship. All her
other writings are the same:

Look at her job title: 

Ananya Vajpeyi is an associate fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. []
Just a sepoy. Who gets to name these places??! Centre to study Developing Societies."

Rajiv responded to Sreedhar with these words:

"I have known and followed CSDS. It was set up as a sepoy training academy. I feel sorry for Madhu Kishwar who is working there but is now surrounded by people ganged up against her."

Ananya's profile at CSDS reads like this.

Rajiv then follows up with a post further elaborating the nexus that creates sepoys like Ananya. The very IMPORTANT observations are reproduced here.

Ananya is the face of what these new sepoys are looking like:
  • Like the prior ones, they can be: very sharp, intelligent, articulate, courageous, outspoken. But unlike before, the strategy has new qualities given below:
  • Unlike sepoys of the past, these new sepoys are Sanskrit educated in USA by the likes of Hawley, Pollock, Doniger, Witzel and a dozen other PhD factories.
  • In return, they get their mentors like Pollock big awards by Indian govt -- Padam Shree for Pollock about 2  or 3 years back is one example. Also, Narayan Murthy selected Pollock to be editor in chief of his $20 million grant to translate classical Indian works into English. You can imagine which translators he selects and what filters/biases they are required to utilize in their interpretation. [There is a link on HHG which refers to the funding given to Pollock by Narayana Murthy]
  • Most Indians get fooled because these sepoys can play both sides skilfully. Ananya looks like a sweet Indian girl who gets sympathy from the moron "uncle jis' and auntie ji's" at Indian gatherings."She is like our beti", is the type of sympathetic response the nexus wants to elicit in deploying such sepoys.They know the psychology of Indian morons.
  • About 100 - 250 such sepoys have been trained at PhD level in the past 15 years in the West, mostly in USA.
  • The raw material is brought to USA from places like JNU and other similar leftist universities, to make sure the person is vulnerable and ready for advanced training and brainwashing.
  • These people are now spread widely in India - universities, media, think tanks (like CSDS), etc.
  • The new govt lacks adequate screening of such folks as they try to sneal into important organizations where they will serve their masters in the West.
  • The game has become far more dangerous. I started monitoring this strategy around year 2000 when I had a big fight with Jack Hawley's "Indian team" of students at Columbia -- all from JNU, all doing PhDs in Hinduism. The reaction from Hindu activists and leaders in USA was pathetic. They had no clue. They came across like a bunch of unsophisticated and uninformed persons not interested in learning what I had to say.
  • My sources inform me that Sringeri mattha is likely to fund several million dollars to help these PhD factories. This is how ignorant our folks are. But who am I in their eyes to listen to? The white scholars are so smooth in impressing the Indian fools, using their skills with Indian languages and culture.
  • Nothing has changed since British colonialism. In fact, the Americans have upgraded their game considerably. Macaulay must be smiling in his grave.
Radhakrishnan responded with this:

"unfortunately the Vadakalai ( a vaishnavite Brahmin sect of Tamil Nadu) Iyengar owned "The Hindu" gives a prominent space to these anti-Hindu sepoys. Other favourites of this daily are Shiv Viswanath as if he is competent to write anything about Shri.N.Modi and or BJP, Harsh Mander, Teesta Setalvad, Markandey Katju, Jyoti Punwani etc.,"

Rajiv expressed his frustration at being unable to make Hindus look at the big picture with respect to the global Kurukshetra that confronts the often naive Hindu. He expressed his frustration thus:

" I have put this post through just to illustrate how some fools like to reduce every issue to one or two names items which they know. 
  • THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT THE HINDU NEWSPAPER OR ANY OTHER PERSON NAMED ABOVE.
  • Did you not read even one sentence about all the points in my posts on this thread? Are you content simply knowing about a few things and reducing all else to those?
  • Repeating again: This thread is about the nexus at places like Columbia U producing new young sepoys like Ananya, under the tutelage of senior scholars like Pollock.
Here is a partial list of issues I tried to raise very explicitly and directly in this thread, but this fool ignored every one of them. Please notice and discuss the following points I raised, and not what his above posts tries to do by sidelining all these:
  1. How Hindus in India get co-opted and taken for PhDs to centers where they get turned into sepoys.Did you get this, please?
  2. The parents in India might be well known Hindu/Hindi/Sanskrit scholars - that makes the young scholar even more valuable. Did you get this, please?
  3. Wealthy Indians like Murthy are doling out funds to help boost such western nexuses even further.Did you get this, please?
  4. GOI gives award to such scholars, making them even more famous. Did you get this, please?
  5. These young sepoys differ from the old guard leftists, because of their Sanskrit. Indian languages and Hinduism formal training. Also they are much more charming. Did you get this, please?
  6. A large number of such folks are now insiders within many influential places in India. Did you get this, please?
Did the person get any of this? 
Does someone know a better way to either get rid of such interference, or else boost their IQ? I tried for 20+ years to inject some tapas in them but failed. In every audience I address, the vast majority are over opinionated but uninformed, and quick to be reductive, and collapse whatever I say into some old, well known, simple form. I find this insulting to my hard work. Hence my frustration."

The same frustration with people not seeing the big picture is felt when one reads the article on the Ananya issue at CRI, a RW blog today. 

While Shibu said:

"What saddens me most about this is not the fact that she is showing sanskrit in poor light through a vulgarised lens ( leftiist sati caste dowry bias ) , but the fact that they took one of our own intelligent bright young daughter of a scholar and turned her into a sepoy.

This is violence of the most ugly form and amazing how parents cannot be aware of such violence."

Rajiv responded by saying that it was more saddening that parents have a false sense of pride regarding the scholarship of the progeny in the West without understanding that the situation is no different from the time when the British grew and nurtured zamindars and brown sahibs for their own interests.

He also added:

"And what about the fact that Narayan Murthy donated $20 million to this gang's headquarters (Pollock in Columbia) to control the translation of classical Indian texts into English?

And what about the rumors that some prominent Adi Shankara mattha followers are about to donate millions to empower the gang even further?


Why are the "Hindu leaders in north America" sleeping on such matters that require brains and hard work - the same folks who will line up on stage with Modi to get limelight in India? Why does the Hindu community fail to apply standards of leadership on such persons before showering them as netas?"


Ashok observed:

"What I would like to know is what I can do to change this absurd situation of Indians needing to go to the USA and UK to earn PhDs in Sanskrit of all things!
I have been bringing up these points (which I was ignorant of until I joined this group) with the few rich philanthropic friends that I know, in the hope of sowing the seeds of them providing monetary support towards such further education becoming available in India, and it being prestigious enough that our youngsters don't feel they have to go to The USA to learn Sanskrit. 
What I do not have access to is the real powers who can make things happen, i.e. the educational politicians. 
The political environment however could not be better for such lobbying, and I am sure most in our group would provide support for this in their own 'yatha-shakti'."

To which Rajiv replied thus:

I suggest that you focus where you DO have influence stop scattering where you do not.

Since wealthy philanthropists are your contact base, you should work on: 

  • why are such folks funding the wrong projects in USA costing millions of dollars per chair? 
  • Why are they not consulting me before doing this, in order to get due diligence before spending their hard earned money?
  • Why not instead fund our research which has a proven track record, and where we can produce a lot of concrete output with small budgets compared to the typical $3 million to $5 million being given for one chair in USA?
More on Ananya from Rajiv:

"Twitter folks theorize that Ananya uturned only after she married Bashrat Peer, a Kashmiri journalist notorious for his anti-Modi writings in places like New York Times. This is false.I met Ananya in 2005 when she was already very Hinduphobic under the influence of Sheldon Pollock. He is the Sanskritis who wrote "The death of Sanskrit" but has been very successful impressing Indian donors with his "love for Sanskrit".The issue is this: There must be shraddha and sadhana to ground the student. This was always a requirement. People like Pollock by "secularizing Sanskrit" have removed the development of the antah-karana in the student. So "anything goes" in a person's lifestyle in their approach to teaching Sanskrit. This is meant for bookworms as in the case of Abrahamic religions where "hermeneutics" is strictly a matter of text analysis through mental gymnastics.When you throw away the injunctions requiring inner practice, you encourage Sanskrit becoming both distorted and digested.Ananya is a product of this approach."

The team at HHG invite you to become a member of the Rajiv Malhotra discussion group to learn and understand the true nature of the Kurukshetra that confronts a Hindu in this day and age. You can access this particular discussion thread here after you have signed up on yahoo groups.


Challenges to Wendy Doniger's Sanskrit - chapter 7

Go to Chapter 6

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Malhotra’s article RISA Lila-1also investigated instances of Doniger’s own questionable  scholarship. It proposed that a logical criterion is that a translation must be acceptable as authentic by the community whose tradition is in question—in accordance with the key Indian concept known as purva-paksha. If the intention of the text’s translator is to overrule the practitioners’ interpretations then there should be a rigorous burden of proof on the scholar’s part. Ultimately, a ‘correct’ translation is inseparable from the applicable contexts.

RISA Lila-1 was not written as a criticism of the entire academic work of Doniger, but only specific parts. But it was troubling that there was not a single comprehensive critical evaluation of Doniger’s work, nor any plans to produce such a criticism, despite the enormous importance being given to her work, and the fact that what is at stake is the legitimacy of the insider’s view of the world’s oldest literary tradition. Doniger’s translations of Hindu texts are widely available in paperback publications and serve to inform the layperson’s image of Hinduism.

In this regard, Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard University is a rare exception. Witzel has claimed that Wendy Doniger’s knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit is severely flawed. Malhotra opined that given Doniger’s stature, “Witzel’s claim seemed as audacious as saying that the Pope was not a good Catholic.” When Witzel was publicly challenged to prove his claim, he published examples of Doniger’s ‘Sanskrit mistranslations’ on the Web.118 An anonymous source noted:

Witzel was privately reprimanded for being so critical of the latter day ‘Queen of Hinduism’. He was blackballed in disregard of his right to criticize such blatant blunders, especially given the clout and power enjoyed by Wendy. If Gods, Goddesses, and saints can be deconstructed by her, then why should her work be exempt from criticism?

This anonymous scholar led the diaspora to Witzel’s critiques that had previously been known only within a small section of Sanskrit scholars. The scholar hoped to bring this to wider public attention in order to broaden the debate. A firestorm erupted from Doniger’s camp when RISA Lila-1 merely summarized one scholar’s online criticisms of her translation capabilities. Witzel’s criticisms of Doniger’s Sanskrit translations are reproduced below so that the readers can decide if such criticisms should be taboo, and whether or not critics are entitled to point out the shortcomings of the powerful without being denounced as blasphemers.

Witzel on Doniger’s Translation of the Rig Veda (For more on this please read page 67, chapter 7)

Witzel on Doniger’s Translation of the Jaiminiya Brahmana (For more on this please read page 68, chapter 7)

Witzel on Doniger’s Translation of the Laws of Manu (For more on this please read page 68 and 69 and Endnote specified in the section, chapter 7)

There was a feeling expressed in many comments to RISA Lila-I that RISA scholars should have taken up these criticisms more seriously, given that RISA and the AAR support critical inquiry with open minds. At the very least, a panel of scholars, whose careers are outside her influence, should have critiqued Doniger’s work because of her enormous power in academe. Regretfully, and much to the detriment of the field, no further open-minded analyses occurred.

Hushing up criticisms of powerful scholars’ works is not an approach that demonstrates academic rigor and fair-mindedness. Shutting critics up is inconsistent with academic freedom. Unfortunately, the power structure vested in the establishment has thus far prevailed. The messengers are shot and the abuses continue garrulously.

Androgynous One-Legged Goats and Other Unmanifest Beasts

Prof. Antonio de Nicolas offers a humorous review of Doniger’s translations: Wendy […] wrote her Rg Veda putting my translations next to hers. By giving ‘maska lagao’ to me, she avoided a bad review . . . The theoretical headings she uses for the Rg Veda are arbitrary . . . the jewel is her translation of ‘aja eka pada’. Literally it means ‘aja’ = unborn, unmanifest, ‘eka’ = one, ‘pada’ = foot, measure. It is the unmanifest one foot measure of music present in the geometries of the ‘AsaT’, meaning, the Rg Vedic world of possibilities where only geometries live without forms. Well, Wendy translates it as ‘the one footed goat’ because ‘aja’ in Hebrew means goat. What is a one footed goat doing in the Rg Veda?

Nicholas Kazanas, a European Indologist, examined Doniger’s obsession with sexual connotations. Referring to her book, Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, Kazanas writes that she seems to be obsessed with only one meaning—the most sexual imaginable:

O’Flaherty [a.k.a. Doniger] seems to see only one function . . . of fertility and sexuality, copulation, defloration, castration and the like: even bhakti ‘devotion’ is described in stark erotic terms including incest and homosexuality (1980: 87–99: 125–129). Surely, erotic terms could be metaphors for spiritual or mystical experiences as is evidenced in so much literature?

Similarly, RISA Lila-1 also points out how she intentionally destroys any shades of meaning in deference to her preferred one:

Doniger claims to be championing the diversity of literary interpretation. In actual fact, given her cartel’s power over the legitimizing of her interpretations and turning them into canons of ‘theories’, the opposite effect has resulted: Her approaches have become more than just trendy speculations and are being propagated as the hard facts about Hinduism. In Asceticism and Eroticism in the Myth of Siva, problematic translations and glamorous gimmicks help to sell books, such as this alluring description advertising the book in bold font, “One myth tells of how Siva and Parvati make love for a thousand year . . . ”

RISA Lila-1 cites as examples three specific terms or concepts that are commonly and fabulously confounded by Doniger. These distortions then get widely disseminated by her supporters.

Tantra Equated with Sex

Tantra has far more complex meanings than simple sexual connotations, yet the standard depiction by the Doniger school suggests that Tantra equals sex. (For more on this please read page 70 and 71, chapter 7)

Linga = Phallus

Doniger defines linga as ‘the phallus, particularly of Siva’. She makes no attempt at nuance or to explain the diversity of interpretations, and the levels of meanings in different contexts or at various stages of practice. (For more on this please read page 71, chapter 7)

Maithuna Essentialized as Sexual Intercourse

Doniger’s glossary over-simplifies other Sanskrit terms by giving them reductionist definitions. For example, the term maithuna, like its English equivalent ‘intercourse’, has social as well as sexual connotations. (For more on this please read page 71 and 72, chapter 7)

Read the entire chapter from page 66 to 72

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.


Wendy's child Jeffrey Kripal on Sri Ramakrishna - chapter 3

Go to Chapter 2

Targeting Sri Ramakrishna

This chapter and the ones that immediately follow, quote directly and explicitly from the writings of the scholars under review, and give equally direct rejoinders. Many readers who are not used to academic writings about Indian culture and religion find such language shocking. They have suggested that we should avoid being so explicit, and that such an analysis might even be in bad taste. However, we offer the following reasons for this open style:

1. Our children have to face such educational materials, so we should be courageous to deal with it, in order to ensure more authentic portrayals.

2. Without explicitly citing exact quotes and examples, such scholarship seems unbelievable to many lay persons. When a milder and indirect approach has been applied to critiquing such work, many readers have regarded it as our opinions not based on fact. They have rightfully demanded hard evidence, which is why we have adopted the direct approach.

3. Just about every facet of Hindu sacredness is under direct and systematic attacks by these scholars. Hindu deities (including Ganesha, Devi, Shiva, etc.), Hindu pre-eminent gurus and Hindu society itself are depicted as pathological and dangerous. Therefore, it is essential to be equally direct in documenting this bias.

4. The freedom to analyze and understand the ‘other’ psychologically must go both ways. Just as the academic scholars have their intellectual freedom to depict our sacredness through their lenses, their critics have similar rights.

Under the guidance of Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago, Jeffrey Kripal did his PhD dissertation on the eighteenth-century Hindu mystic, Sri Ramakrishna. During his research, Kripal visited the Ramakrishna Mission in West Bengal. Several people at the Ramakrishna Mission recall enthusiastically helping him during his research. One of the sisters of the Mission said, “He seemed to be such a nice and endearing young man that anybody would trust his intentions.”

Consequently, many at the Mission helped him with his work. However, contrary to what most people would consider to be academic ethics and common decency, Kripal did not afford anyone in the Mission an opportunity to make sure that there were no factual or linguistic inaccuracies in the dissertation he was preparing. Later, Kripal himself acknowledged that the well-known American scholar of Religious Studies, Gerald Larson, had admonished him for not vetting the manuscript with the Ramakrishna Mission before publishing it.

The scholars at the Ramakrishna Mission learned about Kripal’s rather sensational conclusions only years later, after Kripal’s book had come out and had won great acclaim. The book, Kali’s Child, was based on his PhD dissertation. It won the First Book Award from the American Academy of Religion, an organization in which Doniger and her colleagues hold powerful positions. Kripal soon landed a job at Harvard, which was followed by a prestigious academic chair at Rice University at a very early stage in his career. The popular and prestigious reference source, Encyclopedia Britannica, listed Kripal’s book as its top choice for learning about Ramakrishna—indicating the immense impact such factually questionable portrayals can have. This goes to show that even a shoddily researched and hastily peer-reviewed work, if accepted and promoted by the academic establishment, can swiftly become authoritative. This is dangerous, especially when the readership consists largely of persons who are ignorant about the tradition, and, worse still, when the readers have Biblical or race-based stereotypes passed on through mythic images of folkloric ‘others.’

Kripal’s work hinges on his translations of old Bengali texts along with the application of Freudian psychology. It has been shown that much of his thesis was based on mistranslations of Bengali writings about the life of Ramakrishna and sweepingly ignorant misinterpretations of Bengali culture. This was independently established by several Bengali language experts. It was reported that the sole Bengali language expert on Kripal’s thesis committee was absent when the dissertation was accepted. Significantly, none of the scholars on the AAR committee who glorified this book by awarding it the prestigious First Book Award, were fluent speakers of Bengali. Yet, accuracy of translation was considered to be a defining aspect of this particular ‘prize-worthy’ product. The exotic ‘other’ was up for grabs and not entitled to the same agency or voice that the scholars would have afforded to a similarly important Western icon.

Different Standards for Different Religions

It is difficult to imagine that such a PhD dissertation, if it were based on sources in Aramaic or Hebrew, would emerge full-blown in the field of Biblical Studies or early Christianity without an independent and thorough cross-checking of sources. The standards that prevail in writing about Judeo-Christian culture are more rigorous and demand a greater burden of proof before a scholar can overthrow long-established views with his/her convoluted interpretations. The issue is thus not with any particular conclusion which a scholar might reach, but about the processes employed, and the lack of rigorous quality control.

Neither Kripal nor Doniger are trained as psychologists. Numerous experts in psychology have raised serious issues about Kripal’s understanding and application of psychological theory. Would an equivalent dissertation in Biblical Studies, based on amateur Freudian psychoanalysis, be supported and valorized to a similar extent in the mainstream academy, if, for instance, its core thesis was to prove incest in the Bible or a lesbian Mary? The RISA Lila-1 article deliberately provoked controversy by asking, “Is this fashionable hermeneutics of eroticization of Indian spirituality simply another form of Eurocentrism being projected upon the ‘other’?”

It is especially troubling that forthright challenges from within academia are discouraged for political reasons. Another disingenuous tactic used to discourage criticism is to pose the scholar as the victim of violent and obscurantist forces.

Eventually one of Ramakrishna Mission’s scholarly monks, Swami Tyagananda, began addressing the matter seriously when Kripal’s thesis began to tarnish Ramakrishna’s reputation in mainstream society, including American universities. This inspired Swami Tyagananda to write a 130-page rebuttal to Kali’s Child that moves point-by-point through a list of many serious errors in Kripal’s work. Kripal turned down suggestions to include a summary of Tyagananda’s rebuttal at the end of the new edition of his book, in spite of the fact that such a move would have restored some semblance of objectivity to it.

The Making of a Best-Seller

The section below gives just a brief summary of some of Kripal’s glaring errors of scholarship, followed by an explanation of why this sort of scholarship is dangerous on many different levels, especially since it gets legitimized and popularized by the politics in the academy.

1. Lack of required language skills: (For more on this please read page 30 and 31, chapter 3)
2. Misinterpreting Tantra: (For more on this please read page 31, chapter 3)
3. Superimposing psychological pathologies upon Ramakrishna, without basis: (For more on this please read page 31 and 32, chapter 3)
4. Mistranslating lap as genitals, and later calling it a ‘defiled sexual space’: (For more on this please read page 32 and 33, chapter 3)
5. Mistranslating ‘touching softly’ as sodomy: (For more on this please read page 33, chapter 3)
6. Mistranslating tribhanga as cocked hips: (For more on this, please read page 33, chapter 3)
7. Mistranslating vyakulata to give it a sexual spin:  (For more on this, please read page 33 and 34, chapter 3)
8. Mistranslating uddipana to give it erotic meaning: (For more on this, please read page 34, chapter 3)
9. Kripal lets his imagination runs wild: (For more on this, please read page 34, chapter 3)
10. Special effects thrown in: (For more on this, please read page 34 and 35, chapter 3)
11. Suppressing the facts: (For more on this, please read page 35, chapter 3)
12. The Kangaroo Court Trial of Sri Ramakrishna: (For more on this, please read page 35 and 36, chapter 3)
13. Evasive dismissal of criticism by psychoanalyzing the critics: (For more on this please refer page 36 and 37, chapter 3)

Psychological Profile of the Scholar

RISA Lila-1 employs an innovative device that reverses the gaze upon the scholars. It applies the same psychological techniques on scholars that they use to analyze ‘others’. For instance, it utilizes ‘psychoanalysis’ in the reverse direction, as an American minority gazing at the dominant white culture, and in Kripal’s case gazing at the fascinating process by which non-whites assume whiteness to gain upward mobility [and] social capital. This exercise may make some of the objects of this reverse psychoanalysis angry even though my case is well backed by the evidence cited, whereas Kripal used a postmodern approach that eschews responsibility.

One may use the data provided by the scholars themselves to accomplish this. At the 2000 AAR conference, Kripal mentioned that his father was a dark-complexioned man whose family was of Roma (‘Gypsy’) extraction and had lived in Central Europe for many generations. (Roma are the target of racial bias in much of Europe to this day.) His father had married a woman of Germanic descent.

Malhotra wonders whether a thorough psychoanalysis of Kripal’s Oedipal struggle to distance himself from his father, and to be White, might illuminate Kripal’s compulsion to prove his alienation from Indic traditions.

Prof. Sil also interprets Kripal’s psychosexual psychology:

We learn that prior to joining graduate school at Chicago, Jeffrey was training to be a monk or a minister at a Catholic seminary, where he was ‘forced to explore the interfaces between sexuality and spirituality’ and he felt ‘more than tortured by [his] own psychosexual pathologies.’ By ‘psychosexual pathology’ Kripal means, as he put parenthetically, anorexia nervosa. This means, as is well known, a pathological condition in which the patient cannot retain any food (or feces, if we choose to go by a Kripal like psychoanalytic symbolism which he applied to Ramakrishna) in the body. He also writes that he felt his readings in Christian bridal mysticism somewhat unholy because of its apparent homoeroticism. However, upon further cogitations (or perhaps, meditations) on the subject Kripal ‘came to a rather surprising conclusion in regard to [his] own mystico-erotic tradition: heterosexuality is heretical.’ He then tells readers that his ‘religious life was quite literally killing [him]’—his ‘body weight had sunk well below the normal’. It was at this juncture that the future biographer of Ramakrishna turned his attention to stuff Hindu and chanced upon the Bengali priest of Dakshineswar. 

RISA Lila-1 identified areas of Kripal’s personal psychology that may be relevant in interpreting his work, including:

(i) his self-acknowledged homophobia generated by his apprehension of homoeroticism, resulting in his fear or confusion over his own trans-gendered repulsions and tendencies, and

(ii) his complex about being half Roma, and perhaps a subconscious push to prove his separation from the Indian part of his roots, in order to claim a full-fledged white American pedigree.

This raises a very important issue about objectivity and reflexivity in the representation of Hindu themes in the academy.

RISA Lila-1 raises the issue of how many in this scholarly cult allow their personal psychoses to color their scholarship: “It is quite common for Western scholars to play out their private lives through their scholarship about ‘others’, in ways that create both positive and negative results and, when misused, can be self-serving, insensitive and quite low-brow”. Indeed, an examination of additional examples provided by the article does strongly suggest that for many RISA academics, objectivity and scholarly rigor are easily sacrificed

Conclusions Concerning Kripal’s Craft

Besides the numerous serious errors in translation that the academy failed to investigate, three methodological problems have become evident with the award-winning book, Kali’s Child:

1. Scholars in psychology departments do not rely upon Freudian methods to dish out serious allegations against a person. Such applications, by religion scholars who are untrained in psychology,
to targets that are far removed from their familiar American culture, run the risk of the blind leading the blind.

2. Freud himself seems to have questioned the propriety of applying his methods to third parties via native informants or posthumously. The analyst was required to directly engage the subject of inquiry.

3. Freud never had access to non-Western patients, so he never established the validity of his theories in other cultures. This is a point emphasized by Alan Roland, who has researched and published extensively to show that Freudian approaches are not applicable to study Asian cultures.

To illustrate that Kripal’s work is not an isolated case, but rather the dominant variety of scholarship, one may examine Doniger’s psychopathological interpretation of the Mahabharata.

For instance, she wrote:

A sage named Mandavya is wrongly supposed to have participated in a robbery and is impaled on a stake. We may see masked homosexual symbolism in the impalement (a homosexual violation) and the cutting off of the long stake (a castration), though we should also notice what the Indian tradition makes of this episode: In a kind of reverse castration, Mandavya feels that he has gained something, has been given a stake that, however shortened, he still seems to regard as an extension of himself, a useful superpenis, as it were. The childhood guilt that inspired the episode of anal intercourse gives way to the fantasy of the large penis of the grown man.

As both Edward Said and Ronald Inden have elaborated, the West’s ‘other’ and ‘self’ are co-constructed intellectually; the construction of one being used to construct the other. Ironically, perhaps, this is why it pains RISA-related academicians to have their pet theories about India refuted—because their self-images rest on neo-Orientalist constructions belying their bellicose claims of having already deconstructed all those nineteenth-century Orientalists.

This awareness of scholars’ self projection on to the ‘other’ has solid academic precedence.
Anthropologists have long been aware that scholars’ private lives get unintentionally superimposed on to their work. As an introductory Anthropology textbook explains, In the 1930s some American anthropologists even went so far as to undergo psychoanalysis before fieldwork in an attempt to ‘calibrate’ the instrument of data collection, a practice quickly abandoned.

Doniger’s followers bring too much of their personal baggage with them. Their private psychological predilections are let loose by their privilege to imagine Hindu religious texts and traditions as they please. The resulting interpretations are often less a product of the text than a window into the exoticized mind of the writer/researcher.

Scholars are drawn to the field of anthropology, as with other related disciplines such as South Asian Studies and Indology, often by powerful philosophical movements that color their worldviews and interpretations. Ultimately, as many critics have pointed out, Kali’s Child offers more insights into the psychoanalytical elements of Wendy’s Children than any legitimate insights into the life and work of Ramakrishna.

The self-criticism of contemporary anthropologists about their discipline provides a model of humility, as noted by Monaghan and Just:

[S]ome anthropologists have argued that ‘objectivity’ is a false issue. Our bias—that is, our social and historical situation—is what gives us a point of view, and hence constitutes a resource we should openly draw upon in our interpretations. Others contend that any form of representation is an exercise in power and control […] All the same, isn’t it an act of extraordinary hubris for someone to propose to present a definitive account of another people, even when it is based on long-term ‘participant observation’? And isn’t it problematic that the vast majority of ethnographers are Westerners when the vast majority of their subjects have been non-Western? [Emphasis added]

Scholars of Religious Studies are trained to use a system of tools and methods known as hermeneutics. These are methods that enable new interpretations from a body of knowledge or a text, with the intention of expanding insights about the materials beyond what the practitioners of the given faith have traditionally maintained. But how does one prevent hermeneutics from becoming an arbitrary and ad hoc methodology driven and shaped by a scholar’s own psychosis?

Read the entire chapter from page 27 to 41

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

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