An Independent Review of Paul Courtright's book on Ganesa - Chapter 17 part 1

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Editors’ Note:

In this chapter, Vishal Agarwal and Kalavai Venkat provide a detailed review of Paul Courtright’s book, Ganesa, Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings. Their analysis raises very troubling questions about the quality and integrity of Courtright’s scholarship. Nevertheless, Courtright, Doniger, and her followers, continue to evade these questions about methodology by demonizing their critics.

Doniger has recently adopted an interesting new tactic to silence criticism while simultaneously appealing to American liberals. She has started comparing those who criticize her to fundamentalist Christians opposing the teaching of Evolution in schools. She casts herself in the role of Darwin, as a courageous ‘scientist’ being attacked by obscurantists who are unwilling to deal with empirical evidence. The allegation is that her critics are irrational. This charge is over and above her prior allegations that her critics—along with their deities and spiritual traditions—are violent and immoral.

To enlist liberal sympathies against the Indian–American minority, Doniger disingenuously positions the debate as between scientific reason, represented by her school, and unreason, represented by the Hindu diaspora.

Ironically, most Indian-Americans who have criticized Doniger’s scholarship are scientists or professionals with considerable technical training, while Doniger and her cohorts are typically trained in the humanities, and questionably, at that. In addition, many critics within the Hindu diaspora have had lifelong instruction in many Indian languages and in Sanskrit. They have, importantly, knowledge of multiple versions of narratives based on regional differences, chronology, or schools of thought, besides a culturally rooted understanding of texts.

In an interview with a local American newspaper, posted on UChicago’s public relations website, Doniger engages in undisguised us-versus-them branding and insinuation by misrepresenting her critics’ positions. The newspaper reported that Doniger:

sees some parallels with the debate in Kansas about how much teaching on creationism should be allowed in the classroom. ‘This same fight is going on in my field,’ Doniger says. ‘Not literally, of course, about Darwin and the Hebrew Bible and Genesis, but whether the scholarly attitude of the events in the history of Hinduism or the faith attitude to the history of the events in the history of Hinduism is the one that should be taught in school. There’s a very close parallel.’

The ‘fight going on in [Doniger’s] field ‘is not a battle between modern scientific approaches, represented by RISA et al, versus a tradition-bound obscurantist Hindu diaspora. It is a debate

between, on the one hand obscure, arbitrary approaches to Hindu Studies based on Eurocentric paradigms and poor evidence, which make unverifiable inferences about the meanings’ of the events in the history of Hinduism’ versus an approach to Hindu Studies that insists on rigorous training, accuracy in translation, independent peer-review and cultural authenticity. The reader should judge for herself whether Doniger is justified in calling her followers’ approach to Hinduism ‘scientific’, i.e. comparable with Darwin or even ‘historically accurate’. On the one hand, Courtright’s book, carrying Doniger’s endorsement, won a prestigious history prize. Courtright has also tacitly compared himself to noted historians and chroniclers like De Tocqueville and Myrdal, even though he is not trained as a professional historian. Courtright’s work was supposedly peer-reviewed by other Western academic scholars prior to publication to ensure scientific rigor in the use of evidence and theory. On the other hand, this chapter demonstrates the value of independent peer-review, when the academic peer-review system is broken. The reader can judge for herself whether Courtright’s book is, in fact, scholarly and evidence based; or relies upon fabricated data, shoddy research and arbitrary theorizing—dressed up with a scholarly gloss to disguise prejudice.

Introductory Remarks:

Background and Importance of Courtright’s Book

In the years 2003–2004, a fierce controversy involving Hindu- Americans on one side and certain Indologists on the other, broke out over Paul Courtright’s book on the Hindu deity Ganesha. The controversy gathered steam in November 2003 when a chapter of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, started an online petition criticizing the book. The petition reproduced several passages regarding Lord Ganesha from Courtright’s book that were deemed pornographic in nature. Within a matter of days the petition successfully attracted almost 7000 signatures. Unfortunately some anonymous signatories took advantage of the privacy that the Internet offered them and posted death threats to Courtright on the petition. The HSC members who started the petition immediately took if off the website before the situation got out of control. Meanwhile Motilal Banarsidass, which had published the Indian reprint of the book, withdrew it from circulation before the controversy reached Indian shores. The publisher also apologized to the protestors for hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus.

These two developments in turn raised a storm among a section of scholars of South Asian Studies in the American academic community. They went on to denounce the publishers and protestors as ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ bent on damaging freedom of speech in American Universities by intimidating the author of a ‘scholarly’, ‘sensitive’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘peer-reviewed’, and ‘excellent’ book.

Courtright’s book cannot be ignored and it is in fact a prominent yet controversial Indological publication for several reasons outlined below. First, the text bears a Foreword by none other than Wendy Doniger, who currently acts as the reigning Czarina of Indological Studies in the United States. She is a cult figure for a very large number of her students, who have a profound influence on how India and Hinduism are depicted at American Universities. Even those who are not her students, nevertheless feel proud of their association with her, such as Courtright. Second, the book has received a national award for its presumed excellence.

Third, the dissension actually prompted Oxford University Press, one of the most reputed academic printers in the world, to publish a 2003 reprint of the book in the West.

Fourth, its reprint in India was brought out by Motilal Banarsidass, the largest publisher, exporter and distributor of Indological books in the country. As a result, the book was also noticed and commented upon in India. We will refer to some of these reviews in our own extensive comments here.

Fifth, it appears that perverse descriptions of Ganesha from the book have started to creep into mainstream society in the West. For instance, in a recent exhibit on the Hindu deity Ganesha arranged by a museum in Baltimore, the book served as a seminal text that was quoted in citations accompanying the displays.

Sixth, since the publication of the book, Paul B. Courtright has been acknowledged as an authority on the subject of Ganesha. This is evident from the way in which numerous other writers of books on the deity not just acknowledge his help and guidance; they also often quote his text either approvingly or at least in a neutral manner. Conversely, the list of people whom Courtright acknowledges in his book for their help reads like a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ in the world of Hinduism studies in the United States.

Seventh, the book is derived, at least in part, from the author’s Ph.D. thesis and therefore should be considered a result of intensive research. The thesis was completed in 1974, eleven years before the publication of the book. It is reasonable to assume that the book therefore contains the fruits of his intensive research as a doctoral student, and perhaps a lot of other subsequent research in the eleven years thereafter. Moreover, the author has published several journal articles on themes related to the subject matter of his book.

Eighth, in the wake of this controversy, a number of professional scholars of Hinduism Studies and in related fields have actually gone on record with whole-hearted praise of the book. Such academic support not just defends Courtright’s right to free speech; it actually praises his book for its content and analyses.

Ninth, Courtright has done better professionally than most scholars in Hinduism studies. He is currently a tenured professor and former co-chair of the Department of Religion at Emory University; a feat attributable to the accolades his book has drawn in the past.

Tenth, a cursory search on WorldCat and other electronic catalogs shows that approximately 300 college and school libraries in North America alone have a copy of his book on their shelves. This is a large number for any Indological publication and attests to the widespread acclaim and popularity that his text has attained in American academia, almost to the point of canonization.

Finally, a sourcebook on Hinduism and Psychoanalysis cites long extracts from his book to explain the father-son relationship in the Hindu society! These citations actually constitute some of the most obscene and offensive sections of the book. Obviously according to the

editors of this sourcebook, Courtright’s psychoanalysis provides seminal understanding of family relationships amongst Hindus!

Being such an important book also means that the controversy raises many other issues besides the question of free speech and academic freedom. In our review, we restrict ourselves to the issue of Paul Courtright’s misuse of primary data from Hindu texts for developing his theses. (For more on the methodology, please read page 194 and 195, chapter 17)

Psychoanalysis and Indology in the United States: When the Cigar becomes a Phallus

Sigmund Freud had a lifelong relationship with cigars. He was rarely photographed without one between his lips. It is said that he enjoyed as many as twenty of them every day. When his friends suspected that he was addicted to cigars, he argued that they were a very private aspect of his life that should be insulated from psychoanalysis by others. This disagreement with peers supposedly gave rise to a statement at times attributed to Freud, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” The implication being that people should not see something else in his cigar since it really was just a cigar.

What we are referring to is the complete Freudianization of Indological parlance, or lingo, by a small band of academics. The phenomenon has advanced to such an extent that words and phrases like ‘castration’, ‘flaccid-penis’, ‘sexual-fantasy’, ‘erect penis’ and such have become a sort of lingua-franca through which the intellectual intercourse of closely-related scholars achieves effect in their academic publications.Wendy Doniger, the doyenne of academic studies on Hinduism has summarized the weltanschauung of these scholars in the following words:

Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all.

Who wrote the Mahabharata?

The Foreword to Courtright’s book is written by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty who, in her typical colloquial and superlative style, praises his book without apparently adding anything substantial. Except she does reveal undisclosed lore about the writing of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, “ . . . in which Ganesa dictates the epic to Vyasa” (Courtright, viii.)! Hindu tradition, however, is unanimous in informing us that it was the Sage Vyasa who dictated the epic to Ganesha rather than the other way around as Doniger states. No, this is not a slip of the tongue on Doniger’s part, unless it is some kind of a Freudian slip, because she actually constructs a pseudo-psychology out of her erroneous version of the tradition:

In Courtright’s defense, we must point out that he himself has correctly referred to the tradition about the authorship of the Mahabharata in his book (Courtright, pp.151–53). Doniger herself perhaps did not read the book thoroughly even though she wrote the ecstatic Foreword to it.

Lord Ganesha does not get to bask in the glory of his surprise, albeit ephemeral, promotion from a scribe to the narrator of the epic. Courtright brings Ganesha down from the heavenly realms to the earth and transforms him into something of a eunuch, an incestuous son, and a homosexual. Had Ganesha indulged in the ephemeral glory bestowed on him by Doniger then one must indeed pity his naivety, because Doniger had earlier forewarned:

Ganesa has everything that is fascinating to anyone who is interested in religion or India or both: charm, mystery, popularity, sexual problems, moral ambivalence, political importance, the works. [added emphasis]. (For more on this, please read page 197, chapter 17)

Misuse of Textual Sources

Courtright attempts to base his study on the contents of Hindu texts and then interprets them to derive a particular thesis. The two major classes of texts he deals with are the Vedas and the Puranas. The Tantras and the Upanishads are largely left out, except for a stand-alone translation of the Ganapati Atharvasirsa Upanishad in the appendix. In this section, we examine the validity of Courtright’s use of Hindu texts in his study.

Dubious Vedic Textual References

In Chapter I, titled ‘The Making of a Deity,’ he explores the evolution of Ganesha as a deity in the Hindu pantheon from a historical perspective. He begins with the antecedents of the deity in Vedic literature and proceeds to make dubious statements. For instance, while dismissing all Vedic references as evidence that the worship of Ganesha was known when the Vedic texts were the primary source of Hindu practice, he says:

A similar invocation in another Brahmanic text addresses ‘the one with the twisted trunk [vakratunda]’ (Tà 10.1.5), also leaving it uncertain whether it is Ganesa or Siva who is being addressed.

This is puzzling, because vakratunda is distinctly another name for Ganesha. Moreover, the last portion of the mantra (called the Vighneshvaragayatri in the Hindu tradition) reads—tanno dantih pracodayaat (Taittiriya Aranyaka 10.1.5), which is clearly a reference to the tusk of Ganesha. Courtright also mistakenly classifies the text as ‘Brahmanic’ or from the Brahmanas, whereas in reality it is a mantra. Another obvious reason why this mantra containing the word vakratunda refers to Ganesha and not to his father Shiva is that the preceding mantra is in fact addressed to Mahadeva and Rudra (other names of Shiva), and the mantra after the Vighneshvaragayatri is addressed to Nandin, the mount or vehicle of Shiva. Thus from the words of the mantra and its context as well, we should infer that this mantra is clearly addressed to the deity Ganesha and not to Lord Shiva. (For more on this, please read page 198 and 199, chapter 17)     

Finally, Courtright claims that ‘TB [Taittiriya Brahmana]10.15’ contains the word dantin. This reference by Courtright is problematic because Taittiriya Brahmana is divided into 3 books that are further divided into smaller sections. Therefore, the citation of TB 10.15 does not make much sense. The Vedic Word Concordance of Vishvabandhu also does not indicate any occurrence of the word dantin in the entire Taittiriya Brahmana. Courtright attributes the textual reference to a publication of Louis Renou. After referencing Renou’s article, however, we did not find any mention at all of the Taittiriya Brahmana in it. The reference in Renou’s article is in fact to

Maitrayani Samhita 2.9.1. The presence of so many erroneous and apparently invented textual citations in just one page of the book is simply unacceptable from an academic perspective.

Errors of Vedic citations are seen in other parts of the book as well. For instance in Chapter II of his book, Courtright claims: “The association of the thigh with the phallus in the Indian tradition dates from the Rig Veda (RV 8.4.1).” The mantra in question reads:

yadindra praagapaagudam nyag vaa uuyase nrbhih

simaa puruu nrshuuto asyaanave.asi prashardha turvashe

Ralph Griffith’s translation reads—

Though Indra, thou are called by men

eastward and westward, north and south,

Thou chiefly art with Anava and Turvasa,

brave Champion! urged by Men to come.

There is no reference to the penis or thighs here. We therefore question what Courtright was thinking. A majority of references to Vedic texts by Courtright in Chapter I of his book and others in subsequent chapters are either interpreted incorrectly, or they are non traceable. Thus we question if Courtright even had a first hand, or even a reasonable second hand, knowledge of Vedic texts when he wrote his book.

Mythology of Ganesa and Abuse of Puranic Texts

Chapter II of the book, titled ‘Mythology of Ganesa,’ deals with the different ways in which academics studying religion can approach the mythology of the deity. Courtright lists five such levels, of which Wendy Doniger is credited for explicating the first four while the fifth is Courtright’s own contribution. This particular chapter seems to focus on the first or ‘narrative’ level, in which the story of the deity is stated in all its versions. Varying divergent and convergent versions of the story of Ganesha are scattered throughout a diverse set of Hindu texts belonging to different centuries. Courtright treats these texts in a combined, holistic manner to explore the thematic, structural, and interpretative dimensions of these myths. Courtright says that he has treated all Puranic accounts as belonging to a single ongoing tradition in order to paint his picture of Ganesha. We believe that this is not a sound approach, because each of the Puranas catered to the needs of a particular Hindu sect and some of them are known to display sectarian rhetoric against other sects and their deities.

Winternitz presents a very relevant example to demonstrate this sectarian bias, bordering on the absurd, as reflected in the Puranas regarding the deities of a rival sect. (For more on this, please read page 201, chapter 17)

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The children of colonial psychoanalysis - chapter 13-part 2

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Phallocentric Circles

Freud seriously questioned humanity’s dependence upon religion, even though he was proud to be ethnically Jewish. One thing he pathologized in religions was the belief in a supreme being. He felt that the concept of religion in the ‘final form’ taken by present-day Christian civilization was fatally flawed. He was highly critical of Christianity and saw it as an expression of infantilism.

Though Freud may have had revulsion to religion, the origins of psychoanalysis are deeply rooted in encounters with Biblical religious traditions. The Bible is among the primary sources where Freud extracted his symbols and myths, and from where all of his patients were situated, upon whom he based his prognoses, Ipso facto, the entire corpus of his knowledge or experiences of religion and spirituality were extracted from within the Judeo-Christian context.

Although much of Freud’s work serves as a critique of religious feelings, psychoanalysis nevertheless employed and carried forward the core themes of the Bible. Judeo-Christian tropes dominate psychoanalytical concepts, as Freud mined Biblical literature to extract analogies for his favorite phobias. The ‘primal scene’. which Freud associated with Original Sin, signifies the experience when a child sees the parents engaging in sex, which means, according to Freudian

psychoanalysis, that the child will be traumatized for the rest of his or her life, or until properly psychoanalyzed.

In Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, Richard Webster explains how the ‘cryptic Judeo-Christian ethos’ was the very foundation of what was touted to be a scientific theory. Webster notes that Freud misdiagnosed several of his early patients as traumatic hysteria when they were “actually cases of injury-related brain damage and epilepsy”. He called psychoanalysis a “crypto-theological system” which encompassed “a modernized reworking of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, sexual realism, and restraint”.

Its very structure was church-like, in that psychoanalytic treatments in Freudian practice were modeled after the Catholic confessional. The psychoanalyst replaces the priest, who is relatively invisible to the patient just like the priest is not visible during confession. The patient confides the traumas he or she has experienced just like the Catholic confides sins. In so doing, the patient is relieved of a burden, and redeemed into good mental health just like the sinners who confess are saved from their sins. (For more on this, please read page 141, chapter 13)

Freud brought phallic symbolism intimately into our lives. In A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, David Friedman notes how psychoanalytic interpretations have enduringly placed the penis and associated anxieties at the center of society. Friedman suggests that: “attitudes toward the penis have been instrumental in mapping the course of both Western civilization and world history”. He notes that through the centuries, “the penis has been deified, demonized, secularized, racialized, psychoanalyzed, politicized and, finally, medicalized.” This extreme cultural focus on the phallus, codified (overcoded?) by Freud, brought concepts such as ‘castration anxiety’ and ‘penis envy’ into popular discourse.

Freud had visions of grandeur,and his personality and ideas certainly achieved immortality. He

shared with Karl Marx a belief that religion is an illusion—neither man believed in a soul or life after death.

E.M. Thornton wrote in The Freudian Fallacy:

Freud’s concept of the unconscious must be attributed to his cocaine usage. Death wishes, infantile incestuous desires and perversion are not the pre-occupations of the normal mind. Constantly recurring throughout the drug literature are the same words and phrases used by Freud and his followers to describe his concept of the unconscious mind. In both psychoanalysis and this literature the same metaphors of looking down into an abyss occur.

Sometimes a Saint is Only a Saint

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud portrays religion as a fantasy that fulfills “the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind”. In 1927, Freud sent a copy of his controversial book to his friend Romain Rolland, the renowned French Nobel laureate and humanitarian. Rolland, who was a student of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, began a thirteen-year correspondence with Freud. (For more on this, please read page 142 and 143, chapter 13)

Women, Infants, Hindus and the Irish

There were many similarities between the writings of these two colonial officers, [Berkeley-Hill and Daly] who were self-educated in what could be called pop psychoanalysis. Hartnack notes that they both had a derogatory style and an exclusive focus on negative content. Both consistently failed to note any achievement or positive aspect of Indian culture. Hartnack elaborates:

Instead, they compared the behaviour of Indians with other dependent people, with women, infants and the Irish, and time and again with European neurotics. They tried to explain group behaviour by attributing it to psychopathological defects of individuals, a procedure quite common in the international psychoanalytical discussion of their time.

Hartnack notes that this work had clear colonial overtones. Several contemporary works use parallel approaches to Indian Studies. Both [Daly and Berkeley-Hill] identified themselves fully with British colonialism. Indians were a threat and had thus to be fought, and resistance had to be smashed not only on a military but also on a cultural level. Unlike Orwell, who left Burma in order not to cope with the dual identity of a colonial bureaucrat by day and a questioning and critical human being by night, Daly and Berkeley-Hill worked to abolish these scruples and contribute to a properly functioning colonial world.

One critic in the Hindu diaspora in the USA, when reading an earlier draft of this chapter, asked “Is Doniger’s anxious eagerness in accepting Kripal’s and White’s astounding theses a symptom of the same colonial mindset?” Hartnack continued:

Contemporary psychoanalytical thought offered Daly and Berkeley-Hill models to legitimize their degradation of, and thus their separation from Indians: If one were not a healthy adult British male, one was in trouble, for all other human beings were looked down upon. They [the Hindus] were in the majority and there was the potential of hysteria, violence, revolution, sexual seduction and other supposedly irrational acts, which would be difficult to control. Therefore, it was the white man’s responsibility to keep them under surveillance, if not behind iron gates. In this context, psychoanalytical investigations offered structures of explanation, the first step toward a mastery of the perceived threat.

Contemporary professional psychologists, such as Alan Roland and Salman Akhtar, distance themselves from and disapprove of this reductionist, infantilizing approach. Some of the caveats and foibles in what has been called the Wendy’s Children genre of scholarship are also found in Freud’s work. The psychoanalytic movement at the turn of the century has been compared to that of a religious cult, disdainful of its critics and hyper-attached to a particular hyperbole. Many

similarities are in evidence.

In The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, Frederick Crews, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, describes the coercion of clients by Freud to fulfill the mission of his institute. As a result of this, and other examinations of Freud’s methodologies,

his data gathering has been shown to have been less than authentic—a charge similar to what has been leveled against some members of the RISA school of thought.

Ninety years ago, the innovative thinkers who challenged Freudianism, such as Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, among others, were ex-communicated from the psychoanalytical society. Similarly, in RISA and other associated venues, not much dissent is allowed. (For more, please read 144, chapter 13)

Today a number of scholars rely on applied psychoanalysis to create new and ever more exciting research, even though they are not competent in psychoanalysis. This methodology has found its way into History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Religious Studies, among other disciplines.

Hindu-Americans who question scholarship written about their religion are perceived as invalid, inferior. They are not considered ‘legitimate intellectuals’. Those who write articles on websites such as Sulekha are spoken of as ‘dangerous’, perhaps capable of irrational acts and as Berkeley-Hill also described Indians a hundred years ago, ‘difficult to control’. Some scholars of Hinduism Studies are threatened by this contemporary challenge to their established paradigms. They have furiously begun to psychoanalyze the Hindu diaspora as the first step toward a mastery of the perceived threat. Simultaneously, Hindu-Americans have turned the ‘surveillance’ inside-out, and are gazing back with their own tools—such as the Chakra Hermeneutics described in Chapter 9—to better understand those who control the narrative about Hindu traditions.

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The children of colonial psychoanalysis - chapter 13 part 1

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Since Freud first formulated his theories a century ago, practitioners and enthusiasts have considered psychoanalysis to be more than merely a humane therapeutic treatment for psychiatric disorders. Freudian interpretations have been variously applied to entities as diverse as  corporations, nations, and religious traditions. In a study of the use of psychoanalysis in colonial India, Christiane Hartnack wrote:

“Beyond healing individuals, [psychoanalysts] also hoped to provide an understanding of complex and threatening cultural phenomena that would be a first step towards the solution of social problems”.

Chapter 18 of this volume describes how non-Whites, or people of color, were often depicted as untamed, innocent children, whom white Americans could benevolently train to become civilized and socialized. During different phases of America’s history, different peoples were identified as the savage de jour, such as Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Filipinos, including today’s ‘illegal aliens’. By the late nineteenth century, such blatant racism was sugarcoated with an icing of ‘race sciences’. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics applied psychoanalysis to the fields of archeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. Published by Freud in 1913, it provided yet another quasi-scientific theoretical veneer, lending credibility to such ideas as eugenics.

Freud classified cultures and societies based on developmental schema. Natives or primitives were likened to children through a twofold process. First, different cultures of the world were classified into a hierarchical model of developmental stages of historical and cultural progress. Since Europeans formulated the scale, naturally they placed themselves at the top. Secondly, these societal stages were seen as an externalization of individual, biological development. Therefore, due to their culture’s position on the scale, it was scientifically justified to classify any individual belonging to a non-European culture as being inferior to Whites. This assumption was amplified if the nation or culture of the native had been colonized, because that label came with an automatic and morally convenient justification of being in need of Western tutelage.

In the context of applied psychoanalysis, when Abrahamic monotheism is placed at the apex of religious hierarchy or cultural potential—as it has been for millennia of Eurocentric thinking—then both dharmic thought and the polytheistic lens through which Hinduism is perceived, by many outsiders, become fertile and exotic fields for psychoanalytic searches dredging for pathologies.

Post-modern deconstruction theories have legitimized analyses that dislocate symbols from their sources, making them available for ‘slippery’ meanings that are often antithetical to the tradition and irrelevant to mutually understood referents. (For more on this, please read page 133, chapter 13)

Freud’s theories have been applied to Indic themes since the early twentieth century. Hartnack explains how two British officers in the colonial army, Owen Berkeley-Hill and C.D. Daly, were inspired by reading Freud’s theories in psychoanalytical journals such as Imago and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. On this basis, they “attempted to analyze and interpret some of those elements of Indian culture, religion, sexuality and politics that they apparently found strange, puzzling, uncanny or even frightening”. Hartnack adds that “psychoanalytical interpretations of Hindu religious rituals” were particularly fascinated by “the imagery of Kali”.

Under the subtitle, Hindu as the White Man’s Burden, Hartnack describes the early use of psychoanalysis in the Indian context. Hartnack mentions Berkeley-Hill’s 1921 essay, The Anal-Erotic Factor in the Religion, Philosophy and Character of the Hindus, published in the

International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

In this work, [Berkeley-Hill] gave a range of examples of what he considered to be a sublimation of, or reaction formations against, anal-erotic impulses among Hindus. According to him, reverence for deities such as Agni, Indra and Surya shows anal-erotic fixations, as these deities are associated with passing enormous amounts of wind. The singing chants of classic Hindu liturgies also appeared to him to be related to the same flatus complex. He further pointed to classic Vedic texts that indicate a preoccupation with control over the sphincter muscles, and discussed hatha yoga in this respect ‘breath exercises are really efforts to direct flatus into a most elaborate quasi-philosophical system’.

In other words, the intention of a Hindu, while chanting mantras, is to pass wind as an expression of reverence for Agni, Indra, or Surya—the hot air presumably being indicative of the nature of Hindu devotion. In this colonial version of the use of applied psychoanalysis in the interpretation of Hinduism, breathing exercises such as pranayama are relegated to elaborate exercises in passing gas. The earliest use of psychoanalysis to interpret Hinduism focused almost exclusively on flatulence, in all its audible forms. Such early psychoanalytical approaches were Eurocentric, phallocentric, and profoundly naïve.

Freud viewed all human possibility through the lenses of the first (anal) and the second (procreative) chakras. In contrast, Indic thought aims to put the focus on higher chakras that represent more elevated or evolved states of consciousness. Moreover, Freud encouraged the

application of these anal-oriented perspectives to entire societies, not just individuals. (For more on Freud’s views, please read page 134 and 135, chapter 13)

The psychoanalytic discipline’s traditional purpose is a methodology through which a trained analyst and his or her paying patient discuss the patient’s problems and work together to ameliorate neuroses by analyzing dreams and childhood experiences. There is a strong, peer enforced, ethical covenant between the two which the psychoanalyst only violates at great professional peril. However, when a psychoanalyst—trained or untrained—embarks on an ethnographic study of an entire social unit or civilization, rather than an individual, he or she is dealing with many layers of abstraction—each one of which can be manipulated at will. Instead of the analyst working with the patient to achieve optimum mental health, the ethnographer simply records data obtained through paid or unpaid native informants and interprets the alien culture based on ad hoc use of psychoanalytic theories. Such imagined data is exemplified by Kripal, and carelessly woven into Courtright’s work on Ganesha. The native informant’s role is not as an equal who should be accorded the dignity of being a partner in the search for understanding. Ultimately, the subject has no role in shaping the context, much less a right to critique the final product of the research. The very idea of such ownership is repugnant to most contemporary researchers.

Susantha Goonatilake in his book, Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure, points out that it is doubtful if any of the informants will read their own ethnographies because they are usually only published in European languages. Hence, the informers do not even get a chance to talk back. Certainly, there is no chance of giving a rejoinder. Ethnographic psychoanalysis may claim to enhance the understanding of non-Western cultures, but in actuality, it simply imposes Eurocentric constructs to describe the Other.

Hinduism as Flatulence

Hartnack’s description of early attempts to use psychoanalysis as a tool to interpret Hinduism exposes stark examples of abusive scholarship:

Berkeley-Hill further claimed that the essence of the notion of atman is that in Brahmanism, the flatus complex masquerades as a metaphysical spirit. What he saw as the excessive ritualism of

Brahmanism is also an indication of classical pedantic-compulsive, anal-erotic components. To prove this point, he gave detailed descriptions of repetitive elements in Brahmanic rituals, for example eighteen rules for answering the call of nature, and nine for cleaning the teeth. Berkeley-Hill also discussed the enormous units of time in Hindu myths, e.g., thousands of golden ages, millions of years within each yuga, and the extremely high numbers associated with deities, such as ten million royal deities. He saw in this propensity to juggle with large arithmetical quantities an expression of the moulding capacities characteristic of early anal activities.

Thus, as explained in Chapter 8, David White’s reduction of Tantra to a weird sex-cult of hypocritical Hindus consuming each other’s sexual fluids is based on the colonial-era psychoanalytical precedents. It is a genuine coin of the colonial regime.

Not surprisingly, quite a few colonialists had serious cases of Kali-phobia. Hartnack wrote:

Daly pointed out that Kali is worshipped as the all-embracing mother, but that she is also considered to be the goddess of death, destruction, fear, night and chaos, as well as the goddess of cholera and of anti- and asocial groups, such as thieves and prostitutes, the symbol of cemeteries, the destroyer of time—in short, the source of all evil. (For more on Daly’s iconographic representation of Kali, please read page 136 and 137, chapter 13)

This image of the Hindu Goddess as a bloodthirsty, phallic being is faithfully echoed to this day. In Caldwell’s description, Kali is “first of all, a phallic being, the mother with a penis . . . she is the bloodied image of the castrating and menstruating (thus castrating) female . . . ”

Of course Caldwell ‘updates’ the thesis by attributing newly fashionable homosexual psychopathologies to Hindus who worship the Goddess. Her stated ambition is to “show that themes of eroticism and aggression in the mythology are male transsexual fantasies reflecting intense preoedipal fixation on the mother’s body and expressing conflicts over primary feminine identity”.

Hindus are thereby classified as a community dominated by obsessive compulsive traits. Hinduism is seen as a societal neurosis, or perhaps a collective pathology exemplified by the Goddess Kali. Among today’s scholars, Doniger brings it home with her sweeping statements to the press about ‘bloodthirsty’ goddesses and ‘inverse ratios’ between worship of the Goddess and the status of women in Hindu society. Describing this strategically implemented use of psychoanalysis from a particularly colonial point of view, Hartnack wrote:

Daly pointed out that, whereas with regard to Ireland, one might understand a favorable identification with a lovely virgin, in India the identification was with the dreadful Kali, which seemed perverse to him. He therefore considered the Hindus’ behaviour to be beyond even the broadest margins of normality and summarized his analysis of revolutionary tendencies with the following words: ‘we have a psychology which differs considerably from the European, its

equivalent with us being found only in pathological cases. They are a race who fail in their rebellion against the father and as a result of this failure adopt a feminine role with feminine character traits. There results, so to speak, a split in the male personality, the aggressive component undergoing repression, which accounts for the childlike and feminine character traits of the Hindu as a whole, and the fact that they thrive only under very firm and kindly administration, but if allowed latitude in their rebellious tendencies are quick to take advantage of it.

Handy political uses of psychology are still uppermost in the minds of many Western researchers in dealing with Indians, as can be seen from Caldwell’s call to psychoanalyze Hindu culture as a whole. For Doniger, too, this overwhelming desire to discredit any political identity for Hindus—leads to her eager approval of David White’s reductionist thesis on Tantra, not because she finds his evidence entirely convincing—she doesn’t—but because of the immense political and civilizational value of degrading uppity Hindus and taking them down a notch or two. Both Daly and Doniger seem to share a common anxiety about putting the Hindus in their proper place, lest their rebellious tendencies threaten the world order and/or academic stability.

Hartnack explains that the dominant view in Europe at the Hartnack explains that the dominant view in Europe at the time was a commonly held theory, derived from Enlightenment thought,

that the “development of the individual is structured according to the development of mankind”. She points out that Freud also adhered to this perspective. Results of this theory were racial sciences, such as eugenics in the nineteenth century, which led to institutional discrimination in America and Europe. (For more on this, please read page 138, chapter 13)

Scholars whose work have recently been critiqued by the diaspora apply this 1920s’ era reasoning to all Hindus, seeing them as stuck in infantilism and incapable of understanding sophisticated jargon.

While defending Kripal’s creative interpretation of homoerotica, Caldwell suggests to her fellow RISA researchers, that they should contextualize the ‘distorted masculinity’ of Hindu culture, and the ‘confused sexuality’ of the Hindu male. She sees this mangling of the male as the catalyst that set off a highly contested, socially emasculated politicized century of dangerous nationalistic posturing. Thus what starts as tentative, poorly evidenced, and speculative research is quickly elevated as a way of making sense of those dangerous Indians and their psychologically corrosive culture.

Regarding the article by Berkeley-Hill, The Anal-Erotic Factor in the Religion, Philosophy and Character of the Hindu, Hartnack states that “Hindus did not receive [the] article enthusiastically [when] the original English version . . . was read at the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. Perhaps what is most discomfiting to the Donigers, Courtrights and other latter-day Berkeley-Hills is that the Indians of today, particularly in the diaspora, are not shy or beaten down. They would rather debate these alleged ‘analyses’, and ask inconvenient questions, than defer them for some future debate.

Hartnack elaborates in terms that could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the particular school of contemporary scholars under review in this book:

Though some theory is tagged on to it, the essay remains a conglomeration of densely presented images and associations, wild ideas, and racist attributions. Daly freely converted prevalent

psychoanalytical concepts that explained psychopathological defects of individuals into explanations for all those aspects of Indian culture that appear strange to Europeans to substantiate his belief in the European culture’s superiority over Hinduism.

The basic interpretive view of the Judeo-Christian experience is in total contrast to Hinduism. On

the surface, Freudianism may be able to attach a few untenable meanings onto Hindu symbols, but the results are unreliable.

Read chapter 13 part 1 from page 132 to 140

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Go to Chapter 13 part 2