CAPEEM's work results in landmark to expose Hinduphobics in California Department of Education

Important Post by Rajiv Malhotra. Visit the egroup for full details, updates, and discussion.

LANDMARK RULING IN US FEDERAL COURT AGAINST HINDUPHOBIC CABAL: The ruling is available at: https://t.co/JFo6HcEuYK
The background & my analysis is posted on my egroup at: https://t.co/iFFAuP8RRl

— Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) February 2, 2019

http://capeem.org/docs/OrderToUnseal.pdf

The above court ruling should be read after reading the following press release. My comments come after that press release.

FEDERAL COURT UNSEALS RECORDS OF CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S RELIGIOUS BIAS SCHEME

FREMONT, CA
02 FEBRUARY 2019


Judge Charles Breyer has unsealed emails showing Department of Education officials soliciting and coordinating professors’ anti-Hindu reports on 2016 drafts of the California-History Social Science Framework that were falsely presented as “public comment.”

Tom Adams, the Deputy Superintendent at the California Department of Education, who has a history of working behind the scenes with professors who create anti-Hindu curriculum content, secretly contacted a group of professors with whom he had worked in the past. One of the professors, Jonathan Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin, had co-authored a textbook the Curriculum Commission had rejected in 2005 for mocking Hinduism. Adams had then organized a group of professors who had not read this book to protest its rejection and used their protests to manipulate the State Board of Education into overruling the Commission’s decision to reject the textbook.

The scheme by Adams to avoid the process for retaining experts as contemplated by California Department of Education regulation and secretly recruit professors who could be relied upon to provide content derogatory of Hinduism during the Framework adoption process in 2016 was revealed through a subpoena on Kenoyer in the case of California Parents for the Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM) v. Torlakson, No. 3:17-cv-00635, pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The emails among the professors show they understood they were to use “smoke and mirrors” to address the input of Hindu groups and one of the professors recognized that “readers of our report can imagine that [the report] is meant to undermine the legitimacy of Hinduism as a religion (and Hinduism uniquely among religions, at that).” One comment that shows the hostility of the professors accuses Hindus of appropriating the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita and calling it the foundation of Hinduism.

The emails had been filed under seal until Thursday, when Judge Breyer agreed with the plaintiffs and ruled that neither the Regents of the University of California nor Professor Kenoyer had shown “compelling reasons” to keep the records under seal. “This is an important ruling that rejects the notion that government officials and professors can hide behind the label ‘academic freedom’ and allows all Californians to better understand how their government develops the public school curriculum,” noted Arvind Kumar, a board member of the Fremont-based CAPEEM. “Unfortunately, the emails reveal secrecy and doublespeak,” he added.

The court made clear that unsealed records may well be relevant to the claims brought by CAPEEM and Bay Area parents that the Framework is derogatory to Hinduism, since they argue that state officials coordinated with the professors to provide reports on the curriculum was falsely construed as public comment. “We knew that the content of the Framework treats Hinduism differently from other faiths but the emails show the bad faith by the officials who created that content,” said Glenn Katon, an Oakland civil rights lawyer representing CAPEEM and the parents. “This is another strong indication of the State’s violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

The Court has yet to rule on motions filed by both sides arguing they are entitled to judgment as a matter of law. The order and unsealed documents and can be found here.

For media inquiries, contact media@... or (510) 463-3350.

Rajiv: 

1. Infinity Fdn was the first to fund Capeem more than a decade back, and ever since they have persisted in their legal campaign to fight textbook biases. Others like Hindu American Foundation have come and gone, after declaring quick/superficial victories for publicity and fund raising. Such work takes decades of dedicated investment and Capeem has done this. Nobody else has done this to the same extent on the California matter.
2. I would like CApeem to quickly put up in the public domain the entire unsealed email archive containing toxic Hinduphobic material.
3. I know both the culprits named in the court order - Jonathan Kenoyer and Kamala Visweswaran, both professors in prominent US universities. Kenoyer speaks fluent Hindi with native accent and is competent, having been raised in one of India's hill station boarding schools - his parents worked for a foreign enterprise in India when he was young. So he is skilled at making Indians touch his feet and he can easily disguise himself as a desi man with fair skin.
4. Kenoyer is the one who convinced Baroda Univ to give US scholars full access to the Indus-Sarasvati archeological artifacts even before Indian scholars got to study them. Dilip Chakrabarti of Cambridge (recently won a Padma award) wrote letters of complaint to then CM Narendra Modi, explaining the loss of national heritage by letting these foreign scholars access the sensitive material and interpret it in their own biased way. He got no response. I then raised the same issue also with GOI but got nowhere. To the best of my knowledge the arrangement between Baroda Univ and US universities stands unchanged. (It reminds me of the recent move by CM Yogi Adityanath to invite foreign universities to study the Kumbh Mela. We have separate threads on that issue.)
5. I was shocked that Navin Doshi funded this Baroda Univ project to bring US archeologists & anthropologists like Kenoyer inside the Indus-Sarasvati excavation space. Shri Doshi is not concerned with my issues - even after the scandal where UCLA hired a radical Leftist to occupy the Indian history Chair funded by Doshi.
6. Amidst such rampant sellouts by Indians, from businessmen to government, it is rare to find dedicated folks like CAPEEM.
7. This is a milestone no doubt. Let us data mine this archive of emails quickly and responsibly.

Aravindan Neelakandan clarifies his positive relationship with Rajiv Malhotra

Posted here is the exchange between Aravindan Neelakandan and Rajiv Malhotra which took place so that the air could be cleared on what Maria Wirth on twitter insinuated with the following tweet.

Maria Wirth: just wondering @RajivMessage,u say "My book Breaking India.." Wud it not be fair 2 say "Our book"with Neelakandan as Co-author? @arvindneela

Well, the background to the above tweet was this tweet from Rajiv Malhotra

My book 'Breaking India' now ranks No. 1 on Amazon under International Relations: http://www.amazon.in/gp/bestsellers/books/1318179031/ref=zg_bs_nav_b_2_1318176031 …

That led Aravindan Neelakandan to issue these two tweets earlier today to clarify

@Sshankara @RajivMessage "does not want to work with u anymore" is WRONG. Working on BI has been a good learning experience.

@Sshankara @RajivMessage @mariawirth1 'doesn't want to work' is WRONG. Coauthoring BI has been a good learning experience.

Here is Aravindan Neelakandan's complete response to the above tweets along with Rajiv Malhotra's comments.

[Rajiv: Maria Wirth (angry because of some unrelated issue I had with her work some time back) has tried to create tension between me and Aravindan Neelakandan on twitter. Aravindan not only rejected her presumption on twitter, but also sent this post as a clarification of his position. He re-joined this egroup after a gap, in order to post this. I encouraged him to do so. Though the main purpose is to clarify the issue of our mutual relationship, Aravindan also takes this opportunity to disagree with my positions of certain unrelated topics - theism/atheism, Subramanian Swamy, and plagiarism by Sanyal. I give my responses below in highlight. Welcome back Aravindan.]

Let me state categorically that when we started the BI project I was not intended to be coauthor and was a research assistant with Infinity. It was Sri. Rajiv Malhotra who voluntarily offered me to be the co-author. [Rajiv: I did this towards the very end when the book was nearing completion; Aravindan at first said he did not deserve it, but later accepted.] It was a graceful gesture and am thankful for that.

I value his original scholarship, its depth and new insight. I do have my differences of opinion with him. But that does not in anyway diminish my respect and administration for him.  

Being an atheist myself I find his criticism of Darwinism ill-founded and have openly expressed my criticism of his saying 'intelligent design' being influenced by Hinduism. As a person who has been working in the field of environment and organic agriculture for more than a decade, I can say that Darwin is profoundly right and only Dharmic religions have the capacity to integrate Darwin in their worldview. Intelligent Design is a camouflage for creationism and the involution Swami Vivekananda talks about including the intelligence being involuted to expand as existence has more in sync with David Bohm's implicate order than the 'intelligent design'.
[Rajiv: 

• Aravindan is certainly entitled to his position as an atheist. 
• My views on Darwin mirror what Sri Aurobindo wrote, which is a much more detailed position than Vivekananda. This is explained in some of my writings - the importance of involution-evolution process, and not the one-way evolution by Darwin. So Darwin is incomplete, as there is no upward feedback loop, which is also important in systems theory. 
• Many Judeo-Christian digesters are now borrowing this Hindu tenet to bridge the gap between "science and religion", a gap that never existed between dharma and science. Bohm himself was learning these ideas from his extensive dialogs with J. Krishnamurti and others from the dharma traditions. 
• I feel Aravindan has seen both sides of the debate mainly through Western proxies (like Darwin, Bohm Intelligent Design), none of which properly capture the dharma position on the matter. This is a separate issue I am happy to debate in a suitable forum.]

In my personal opinion he is a bit over anxious about people plagiarizing his works. I also feel he sometimes goes overboard on this account as in the case of Sanjeev Sanyal. Perhaps because he has had a few bad experiences in the past, and hence this anxiety over his works being plagiarized. I am afraid this attitude may actually be an impediment in his vision of building an institution and intellectual movement that will live for generations to come.
[Rajiv: Since Aravindan was not a member of this egroup, he is probably unfamiliar with the details written in: message 8655 (thread), message 8679 (Chronology of my interactions with SS since 2013 over my work), message 8700 and message 8761. As a good scholar, Aravindan knows the importance of studying the background evidence before passing judgment. SS has since then accepted this account and issued an acknowledgment. Plagiarism is a problem of dharmic ethics; of nurturing team work to create robust schools of thought and not random sporadic one-off blogs here and there; of encouraging hard work and discouraging the fast-food mentality of quickly jumping ahead present in many of our fellow Indians.]

I also find his endorsement of/association with Subramanian Swamy problematic, as in my personal opinion SS is also engaged in playing up the Brahmin vs Non-Brahmin binary in Tamil Nadu, apart from being pro-Chinese and pro-Sri Lankan against the Tamil-Hindu interest. Subramanian Swami's accusation of RSS in Coimbatore bomb blast in 1998 is something that has hurt me deeply as a Swayamsevak. [Rajiv: We agree to disagree on Dr. Swamy. I may not agree with 100% of issues with him. or anyone else for that matter. But I base my overall support seeing the big picture dynamics of the kurukshetra, and not get distracted by every instance and every stand of someone. I respect his tapas, long term persistence, ability to stick neck out and take risks, continue even when not rewarded formally...]    

But these are issues that do not affect my respect for his ingenious presentation of Indic Dharma, his hard work and intellectual integrity in fighting for the Dharmic-Indic civilization. He could well have chosen a happy retirement with occasional sideline charity towards Dharma. But that he plunged right into the center of the fire is something for which we as Hindus are indebted to him whether one agrees with him or not in all his stands. I will always feel it a honor to be invited to coauthor the sequel of 'Breaking India'. As a Tamil Hindu I specially feel indebted to him because 'Breaking India' had really stopped a grand plan of Christian appropriation in Tamil Nadu. Had he not come into the picture at best a few articles would have been written on the net and would have been used merely to gain some brownie points in the internet debates but only a field-worker knows what kind of effect 'Breaking India' had achieved in Tamil Nadu and the kind of awareness it had created. For this too we need to be thankful to him.

[Rajiv: I want to thank Aravindan for being more than a scholar, but also a true friend. We developed mutual interest in each other's personal well-being. That is important to bear in mind. Disagreeing on scholarly matters is not the end of a relationship.]

Paul Courtright on Ganesha and Shiva - chapter 5

Go to Chapter 4

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

In 1985, Paul Courtright, currently in the Department of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, published a book on Ganesha in which he employed particularly Eurocentric categories to analyze Hindu religion and folklore.

Scholarly books on Ganesha may be expected to emphasize stories, rituals, and their spiritual meanings and cultural interpretations. In art books or literature, or in the social sciences, Ganesha is depicted from various perspectives—theoretical, historical, religious and cultural. However, Courtright’s book includes another scheme and infers novel meanings using Freudian analysis. Unfortunately, despite the book’s many positive qualities, it also includes poorly evidenced and pornographic interpretive descriptions of Ganesha, such as the following excerpts:

[F]rom a psychoanalytic perspective, there is meaning in the selection of the elephant head. Its trunk is the displaced phallus, a caricature of Siva’s linga. It poses no threat because it is too large, flaccid, and in the wrong place to be useful for sexual purposes. . . . So Ganesa takes on the attributes of his father but in an inverted form, with an exaggerated limp phallus—ascetic and benign—whereas Siva is ‘hard’, erotic, and destructive.

[Ganesa] 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

Ganesa is like a eunuch guarding the women of the harem. In Indian folklore and practice, eunuchs have served as trusted guardians of the antahpura, the seraglio. “They have the reputation of being homosexuals, with a penchant for oral sex, and are looked upon as the very dregs of society.” (Hiltebeitel 1980, p. 162). [...] Like the eunuch, Ganesa has the power to bless and curse; that is, to place and remove obstacles. Although there seem to be no myths or folktales in which Ganesa explicitly performs oral sex, his insatiable appetite for sweets may be interpreted as an effort to satisfy a hunger that seems inappropriate in an otherwise ascetic disposition, a hunger having clear erotic overtones. Ganesa’s broken tusk, his guardian staff, and displaced head can be interpreted as symbols of castration . . . 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 that 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.

These bizarre interpretations, wholly manufactured by Courtright, are far outside the tradition and even worse, they caricature and ridicule Hinduism. Because Courtright was confident that he would not be held accountable by peers for manufacturing offensive images about a revered deity of Hinduism, he could candidly admit that he has no evidence for what he says, and then proceed to pronounce his flights of fancy as valid, scholarly interpretations. In other instances, evidence is invented from non-existent textual sources. Such books are not presented as fiction, or even acknowledged as parochial, limited interpretations—they are received by the academy as authoritative scholarly works. They then percolate into the mainstream culture via textbooks, media images, and explanations of Ganesha in American art museums.

Courtright’s book had an unexpected impact when it became a catalyst for waking up the diaspora. One critic wrote a particularly sarcastic piece, mimicking Doniger’s approach but applying it in the reverse direction to interpret Christian symbols and narratives. Using evidence similar to Courtright’s, this anonymous writer offered the following tongue-in-cheek analysis:

Jesus was a filthy and indecent man. He learned some magic tricks from the visiting Persian merchants. The Romans often invited him to perform at their parties, and in exchange, they offered him wine. So he routinely got drunk, tried to be ‘a notorious womanizer’, and was a hobo all his life. Since Jesus’ mother was a prostitute, she did not want to announce the true identity of his father, and had to make up a story for the illiterate nomads. Therefore, Mary claimed that Jesus was born without physical intercourse. So all his life, Jesus guarded the myth of his mother’s virginity and hid the immoral activities of his father and other customers who visited her for sex. The Roman commander played a joke upon Jesus by crucifying him using the cross, symbolizing that the cross was the phallus which his mother must have used for his conception. Thus, his followers today carry a cross as the phallic symbol of his immaculate conception.

The sarcastic scribe then asked, “How would the above be considered if it were written by a non-Christian academic scholar in a country where Christianity is a small minority—just as Hinduism is a small minority in the US?” It is unlikely that it (such work) would be allowed to become the standard educational or reference text for understanding those figures. Multiple scholarly criticisms of such a work [against Christianity], backed by enormous funding from deep pocket Western foundations and organized religion in the West would bury the book. It is also unlikely that the scholar’s career would be enhanced and the scholar rewarded for creatively transcending the bounds of evidence.

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours

Doniger wrote a highly appreciative foreword to Courtright’s book. Stressing his affinity to her, Courtright wrote in an email to Malhotra, “You are using the term ‘child’ metaphorically, but I’m honored to be considered part of [Wendy’s] kinship group”.

Historically, scholars whose work is considered offensive to the ‘others’ have never seen themselves as consciously ‘hating’ or even disliking the ‘others’. The British always remarked how they ‘loved’ India. Malhotra points out the irony: “Christian proselytizers trying to ‘save’ heathens do it out of love for them; so do the multinationals who ‘love’ the countries where they are devastating local farmers and producers; and so do imperialists trying to eradicate indigenous cultures so as to ‘civilize’ or [provide] ‘progress’ [for] the poor natives.” Such ‘love’ for the ‘other’ absolves one of any guilt for one’s actions and perpetuates one’s presumed superiority. It became known as the ‘civilizing mission’.

Hindu Images: Lascivious, Salacious, and Disheveled

In an introductory textbook on Eastern religions that is used extensively in undergraduate courses on World Religions and Asian Studies, Awakening: An Introduction to the History of Eastern Thought, Dr. Patrick Bresnan writes ‘authoritatively’ about Shiva. Note that the sensationalist prose and imagery he employs has now become a commonly accepted depiction of Shiva in academic circles:

Entering the world of Shiva worship is to enter the world of India at its most awesomely mysterious and bewildering; at least for the non-Indian. In Shiva worship, the Indian creative imagination erupts in a never-ending multiplicity of gods and demons, occult rituals, and stunning sexual symbolism . . . Linga/yoni veneration was not the whole of it . . . Young women, known as devadasis, were commonly connected with Shiva temples, and participated in the rituals, sometimes only in a symbolic fashion; sometimes not. In a degraded form the devadasi became nothing more than temple prostitutes. These extremes were more often to be found among the practitioners of Tantra, that enigmatic antithesis of conservative Hinduism that developed in northeastern India. Some Tantra temples became notorious for all kinds of extreme practices, including ritual rape and ritual murder. In Calcutta, at the Temple of Durga (one of the forms of Shiva’s shakti) there was an annual festival at which many pigs, goats, sheep, fowl, and even water buffaloes would be slaughtered and ritually burned before the statue of the goddess.

This sensationalized, extreme story of rape and murder at Shiva temples is described in an introductory textbook meant for common use. Most Americans go through life burdened with these kinds of stereotypes about exotic ‘others’ and India seems to be at the top of the list for such exotica. Misinformation and ignorance about Hinduism and other non-Abrahamic religions dominate the popular imagination.

Let us reverse the situation to make the point: A hypothetical book titled Introduction to the History of Western Thought that presented a similar discourse about pathologies inherent in Christianity would not be acceptable in college classrooms in India to teach Christianity to Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Sikh students. In that context, an introductory text would not delve at length into the Inquisition in Medieval Europe (or in Portuguese Goa) when thousands of women, and even children, were burned at the stake as heretics under the auspices of the Church. (For further expansion of this idea please read pages 57 and 58, chapter 5)

At the introductory stage of an American student’s learning, depictions and stories about Hinduism must be carefully put into proper context. For instance, discussions of Shiva/Shakti can explore symbolic ideals such as the transcendent meeting of the male and the female—as the Hindu equivalent of the Chinese yin/yang. It is more accurate for students to understand and remember Shiva as Divinity encompassing both male and female—a primary teaching about Shiva shared across India—rather than being bombarded by exotic obscurities that are not central to the religion’s practice. (For expansion of this idea please read page 58, chapter 5)

RISA Lila-1, Rajiv Malhotra’s seminal essay also points out yet another common essentialization

about Shiva in American and Western textbooks—Shiva as ‘Destroyer’. Shiva as an archetype for samhara or dissolution has numerous meanings, including the transcendence of human misery by the dissolution of maya (illusion)—which is why Shiva is associated with yoga. The common mapping of dissolution = destruction is reductionism; it is sensationalized all-or-nothing, black-or-white hyperbole.

Freud could not possibly have the experiential or empirical competence to interpret the multiple meanings of a village woman offering flowers at a humble shrine to Shitala Devi.

In conclusion, the approaches taken by Doniger, Kripal, Caldwell, Courtright, and others indicate that they are obsessed with selectively and rigidly interpreting Hindu images for the purpose of forcibly fitting them onto real and imagined problems of contemporary Indian society. This self-perpetuating, neo-colonial orientation feeds the specious and spurious while starving any real understanding of Hinduism. Add to this that scholars often incorporate their voices into the narrative and the result is a heady brew in which personal traumas and dramas play out in the name of Hinduism. These strip away its multifaceted colors as experienced by its practitioners and replace them with the dull, monochromatic hues of the psychopathologic voyeur.

Read the entire chapter from page 53 to 59

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Go to chapter 6