Transcript: Arun Shourie's Lecture on 'Indra's Net'

Credits

Sankhadip Das for coming up with the idea of transcribing Arun Shourie's main talk, writing the first draft, and sharing it with the forum. Others in the forum and then the HHG team have reviewed the material, which has gone through additional hours of editing. There remain tiny sections where the audio is unclear. We have highlighted certain key passages. The Youtube video is embedded at the end of this post. If a keen ear can spot key missing words, please add a comment and we will update the post.
[March 5: minor transcription updates]

Introduction

Arun Shourie delivered a thought-provoking and witty lecture on January 29, 2014 at the Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF-India) meet in New Delhi, while releasing Rajiv Malhotra's new book 'Indra's Net: Defending Hinduism's Philosophical Unity'. The written word is powerful and often remains embedded in our memory longer than the same information received by listening to a lecture. We hope this transcript will complement and amplify the experience of listening to Arun Shourie ji's video lecture on 'Indra's Net'.

[begin transcription]

Dear Friends, Mr. Rajiv Malhotra:

Just few days ago, I got a telephone call saying that “I would like to speak to Mr.Arun Shourie and I am Rajiv Malhotra speaking.” I said “How can I recognize you? You have to say I am The Rajiv Malhotra speaking.” [applause and laughter in the audience]

As in his earlier books, the three books, so also in this one, Rajiv has given us a pair of spectacles, a new pair of spectacles through which to understand, through which to see our own religions and our own tradition. He has done this with meticulous scholarship and with as much force, he has smashed the distorted lenses which were fabricated by so called scholars abroad and here and through which to our shame we had been seeing our religion and our tradition. So, it is a dual contribution he has made. And of course the book is full of facts, the book is full of documentation, but even more so it is suffused with very important argumentation. It is not citation mongering, just quotations from here and there or just alleging conspiracy theories. It is an argument that he gives us as to why it is that certain propositions which you and I may have taken innocently as just the findings of a scholar, why that proposition is being advanced.

For instance, why is it that the church is afraid of the notion of immanence. Most of us would not have thought about it, but he gives us a deep reason as to why this is like this.

Second is his plain speaking, because many scholars say things in convoluted ways. Very often they say it in such a soft way because they are still looking for careers or acclaim in the very circles that need to be exposed. Rajiv told me that his formulae, his attitude in this matter was, that what we do must be, to use this word ‘unignorable’. It is a wonderful word. But that does not mean abuse, that does not mean just a sort of torrent of strong words. It means that the kind of scholarship and documentation which he has provided.

And, third point about him before I get to the book, is why he is an example to us; that he is truly independent. He is not dependent on any institution, he is not dependent on acclaim from an audience. So, that true independence of an individual scholar is an example which we should always bear in mind because too often in India I found, as I had occasion to mention here, earlier on this very thing, and the last time you were kind enough to call me, [that] too many of us look for institutional purchase from which to do some work. But great work has been done, has been done by individual scholars working absolutely alone, unaided often unrecognized; on both sides. If you see [Kosambi]’s work on one side or if you see [P. V. Kane]'s work on the other side. So, we should take heart and follow the example of a person like him who labouring alone has been able to…

I know from scholars in the West that they are apprehensive if he walks into a room, in a conference on philosophy or religion or on Indic studies in the West. So, this book shows how tendentious his scholarship has been. 

Mr. Doval was just recounting some of these things but really he… if I may use the word, he shows that the scholars have really been sort of missionaries in mufti and how they have been insinuating certain notions in us, sowing the seed of that tree which will keep changing, but their tree also keeps changing in this way. And he documents the lengths to which they will go, if I may just read one passage. One of the chapters is devoted to a very famous scholar from whom,… who is very well cited in India by Indian scholars, Paul Hacker, and Rajiv tells us that when his collected writings were being published to mark his 65^th birthday. These were most... many of his writings were on India, Indian religion, Hinduism and so on. I’m quoting he says that “acting on Hacker’s wishes, the editor of his collected works excluded the author’s polemical Christian writings from the compilation”. I have found the same thing in the case of Max Muller. If we see the four volumes of his letters…It’s called Sparks from the Smithy's or something [like that], those writings are just not known in India, but they set out a clear agenda and their hope in Brahmo Samaj as how it will be the lever by which India would be converted and their great disappointment when the very person on whom they were relying, went to Shri Ramakrishna Ji, and Ramakrishnaji changed him and he became a follower of Ramakrishnaji.

So, Rajiv documents their tendentious scholarship and the lengths to which they will go. He documents so well the echo effect that they create.

Woh kuch likhenge, yahan quote hoga, kyunki ab Indians bhi wohi kehe rahe hai, ya Hindu scholars bhi wohi kehe rahe hain, to woh Hindu scholar ko quote kar kar apni cheez ko aur bhi reinforce kar lete hain.

And much of it turns on definitions. They will define a religion as something and thereby say, as Doval was, sort of reminding us, that Hinduism is not a religion as it has no central authority, no book, no prophet.

Hamhari khasiyat hi yehi hai ki yey nehi hai. Kumbh mela hai, kisne start kiya hai, kaun uske piche hota hai. Pata nahin kitne 3 crores sey 10 crores log aa jate hain [Sabarimala mein 3 million go] or these kavadiyars.

Nobody knows who has started the yatra, nobody knows who organizes it and yet it continues and nobody has been able to erase it. Now for somebody to define a religion as one that must have central authority, director, an authority sort of Supreme Court, which can pronounce something is right or not right, then you say that this is not a religion. But then you are surprised that it continues. Then you have to say, no but it does not continue, it is not there, it is something new, which is being created. This used to be the same thing till even the 1970s, that India was actually not a nation. The nation was also being defined in same way that which is one race or one language or one religion or a contiguous territory and then it turned out that none of those things helped many other countries at all. So, Rajiv does this.

They can not comprehend and if I may quote a Western scholar whom Rajiv talks so well and about whom also I am sure he would have many things to educate us with . But Diane Eck in her wonderful work on ‘Pilgrimages of India’, she uses a sentence which is incomprehensible to many of the scholars. She says that India has been defined not by the writs and edicts of its Kings but by the foot falls of its pilgrims. Basically India was never united. Itne kingdoms the [Hindi], but, have you ever heard of a pilgrims procession being stopped at any border within it and those who are inside the tradition? Gandhiji, Ramakrishna Paramahansa soch bhi nahi sakte they ki aisa question [koi] puchega. Gandhiji ko dekh lijiye, Vinobha ko dekh lijiye unko – those who are steeped in the tradition, Vivekananda, they could see the essential unity and it is just the outsider who sees only the difference and in this Rajiv so well documents their double standards. You see the animosities among Christians sects, these Shias and Sunnis are killing each other. But Christianity, remains a religion, Islam, remains a religion, magar hamare yahan (in our case), when there is difference of opinion on things which are essentially unknowable, say between different ‘Sampradayas’ or between a ritual then, aise dekha nahin, ek religion hi nahi (this is not religion).

Achha ek taraf hai ki ek religion nahi hai, there is nothing like Hinduism magar agar ek inscription apko mil geyi jismey ki aap infer kar sakte ho jo inscription mein nahin likha kyunki kisine kise local sect nay, kisi local jain temple ko appropriate kar diya toh aapne to dekha nehi.

Hinduism is so intolerant that it took away the temples of the Jains; a religion which did not exist till just now! [laughter in the audience]. I’ve documented this in the case of many of these Marxist historians. Similarly Rajiv so correctly points out, this whole notion that of boundaries, boundaries between religions: that. these in our case are permeable. I mention here an example from a survey in Japan, in 1985. Writers have written, there is a book on this. People were asked what is your religion. So, 95% of them said we are Shinto, 76% of them said we are Buddhists. It couldn't be: because it was no different for them. It was completely Judaic, Christian, Islamic notion that you can either belong to this or to that. We are Hindus, many of the people, persons like me, all my reading is Buddhist, many of my practices would be from teaching of the Buddha but nobody would say that I am less of a Hindu or more of a Buddhist or vice versa and actually this notion was fomented in India and the first time this happened is in the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee Act. In that Act, ‘Who is a Sikh’ is defined. ‘Who is a Sikh’ – He who believes in the Granth Saheb, He who believes in the Ten Gurus. Most of us could be Sikhs from that point of view, therefore a new clause was added "..and who does not belong to any other religion". You and I may think it is just an administrative thing, but that seed is sown in 1925 and you see it in the agitations of Bhindranwale and others much later... as to what happens when these seeds come into being. And as Doval was just saying one of the essential things about that scholarship was that and…Rajiv does a wonderful job of documenting this that we can not do anything right. You see if we remain as we were, let us say we keep sacrificing animals, then we are fossilized. Hinduism is uncreative. If people come along and say no,no, sacrifice does not mean sacrifice of animals, it does not even mean sacrifice of your material assets alone, it means the sacrifice of your ego. That is Gandhiji’s Anashakti Yoga. Then…Neo Hinduism! This was never there. [laughter in the audience]. And as Rajiv points out that every Christian theology has actually been inventing a Neo Christianity, but nobody says that. So, if Vivekananda reformulates things so that it is relevant to the time, then he is just inventing. If they do something it is creative, it is renaissance, it is reformation.

Doval saheb, burah nehi manenge, hamare senior log, burah nehi manenge, mera ek bihari dost ney muje ek muhawara unka bataya. woh kehte hai ki – ‘woh kare to chamatkar aur hum kare to balatkar’. yeh joh cheezein hay ~ not fair. [huge laughter in the audience]
 

Not only that you see, there are contemporary accounts. We have one of the best people I know, knowledgeable on Islam and Islamic history or history of Islamic rule. Islamic historians, contemporary historians, court historians, writing accounts contemporary with the events are full of slaughter, of destruction of temples and so on. So, how is that to be explained? The word that has been used, I was quite surprised. They say that this proves that this was not being done. The accounts claiming that all this has been done by our great king, is because he was not doing this [laughter in the audience]. Why then did you write it? Because it was trying to table verbal virtue for him. But if that one inscription shows that after losing a wager, the Jains had to vacate a particular temple for the local Shaivites then it will be Hinduism will be intolerant and the ridiculous lengths to which people will go… Rajiv documents this in Swami Vivekananda’s case or in the case of other when they make ANUBHAV, direct personal experience as the criterion or as the mode, then that we are only trying to ape the West and ape Western Science. He asked was Patanjali aping Western Science or West? Was Ramakrishna Paramhansha aping the West or Western Science or Ramana Maharshi? So, in every one of these things I could go on with the details. It’s a book which is a must for every Indian. We must see our tradition through the spectacles that persons and specially Rajiv Malhotra has constructed for us. And it was a particular education for me because I had focused only on the Marxist historians and felt that they were regurgitating, sort of swallowing and vomiting what had been written by some Soviet historians. But I then now realize after reading Rajiv’s books that they were actually swallowing and vomiting what many of these so called Western scholars in America and in Austria, or Germany had written with a purposive agenda. The main lessons from this book, I’ll spell out three and I’ll sit down after that.

One is, there is reason we should look to the future with confidence even in the religious sphere because in the case of Christianity, Rajiv points out, attendance is falling by the hour not even by the date. In places like Belgium, it has almost completely disappeared, the attendance in churches. Islam is tearing the Muslim world apart and even more important, it is a very important and a point of great insight which Rajiv has made that out of the religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, Indic religions are the closest to the spirit and substance of science. Just as the goal of science is the understanding of outer reality, its method is experimentation and peer review, its means is the laboratory, so also Indic religions are the science of the inner world. Their means is personal, direct experience and their peer review is unending and that is how the religion keep evolving and its method is entirely the scientific method of empirical verification through direct personal experience and the means… just that the means for those persons are laboratories and observations through instruments,... here a very good phrase Rajiv uses that the means, ours, was the living laboratories of these sages. They looked inside their own mind and came up with great formulations and great insights. So, time is on our side and we should do and we should work on these matters and practice our religion with great confidence. If something requires reformulation, we should reformulate it and say yes, we have reformulated it. Because this is the new formulation, this is what is required for the time. If we need to endow old words with new meaning we should do that with confidence. We must have and I am sure you will have after reading Rajiv’s book, a little contempt for these tendentious scholars. 
 

mujhe yaad hai, yahan Chandni [?] auditorium mein ek music festival chal raha tha. Siddheswari Devi ji gaane ke liye baithi thi. Taanpura tune ho raha tha, tabla tune ho raha hain, light dim ho gaye hai. Somebody got up from the audience, Siddeshwari Devi ji, nahin, nahin, raag yeh wala gayiye. She sang what she had planned to sing. Khatam ho gaya, log taliya baja raha hain. aab dushre gane keliye tune ho rahe hain. light phir sey dim ho gaye. wohi shaks phir sey utha, Siddheswari ji who to bahut accha tha, magar aap yeh gaayiye, She again sang what she wanted to sing. 3^rd time he got up and Siddheswariji told arre yeh hai kaun. Toh hamhe bhi yehi attitude hona chahiye – ki Yeh Hai Kaun? [applause and laughter in the audience]

And the main thing to do is to succeed. Even in intellectual things nothing succeed like success. Not one of these scholars will fabricate and propagate the type of nonsense that he does about India, he will never do it about China [audience concurs]. Because China has become strong and the scholars know if they write things about China they will lose their livelihood because they will lose their access to their sources. So, the important thing is to succeed and then everything will follow and one reason, final reason for being confident is that because of the work of Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, Rajiv Malhotra – because of the work of these persons, the corpus is now reaching a critical mass. So that we can think that within few years we will have two [series]

One, A library for India, and a library of India. We should aim for those but the prerequisite is that we should be like Rajiv Malhotra, we should know our tradition, we should know our religion. The reason on account of which this kind of fabrication has prevailed for so long is that we have not known our tradition, not known our religion and we have known these only through the eye, we have seen through the distorted lenses which were fabricated by these tendentious scholars, these missionaries in mufti.

So, Rajiv, certainly on my behalf, and I’m sure on the behalf of every one, and on behalf of all of your readers Thank You.


[prolonged applause. The main lecture ends here. Arun Shourie then has some interesting observations on how Indians misinterpret "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" (the whole world is one family). The HHG team has transcribed this portion for the sake of completeness and also because this segment has a very important message for the millions of gullible Indians wallowing in the myth of sameness].

It is not anti-christianity, anti-Islam or anything like that. It is, the book is, it's a wonderful thing both about cosmos and life, this metaphor of Indra's Jaal and also about Hinduism. Every part reflecting every jewel all other jewels. Therefore if anything is changed [or disturbed], it is reflected all over, etc.  But he also makes a very important point in the end. Which illustrates... Rajiv illustrates both his style and forcefulness of his argument. It [is an illustration of what he was] telling us in the end. In our anxiety to be liked. we keep repeating words without understanding their implications. Humne Sabse pehle kaha 'Vasudhiva Kutumbakam' [comment on India's tolerance] .... Sari duniya to humne ek mana. So I will read to you where actually says where this word comes from [reading from pages 295-296 of Indra's Net].

"In one story in the Hitopadesa, a cunning jackal, trying to create a place for himself in the home of a naive deer says ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ in his appeal to the deer. The deer ignores warnings from other animals, who caution that it is unwise to trust someone at face value without first ascertaining his history, nature and intent. Upon deceitfully acquiring the deer’s trust and moving in his home, the opportunistic jackal later tries to get the deer killed. Indeed, the moral of this story is that one should watch out for cunning subversives . Blindly trusting those who preach ‘universal brotherhood’ can lead to self-destruction. 
[a brief comment here before continuing] 
The Panchatantra encodes this same message in a different story. In this version, the man who utters ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ is described as a murkha (‘idiot’). He is determined to bring a dead lion back to life, and disregards a wise man’s warning about the dangerous consequences of such an act. The idiot and his accomplices feel moved to resurrect the lion after citing this sentiment of universal brotherhood among all living things, and hence end up being eaten by the lion they help. The wise man lives to tell the tale.  Clearly, the lesson taught in these stories is not one of blind adherence to a policy of unilateral disarmament." [appreciative applause]

...Bahasa is a creation of the Indonesian freedom movement in the 1930-40s. Mother country Italy ke bare me baat kar le [laughter in the audience]. Modern Italian is [Anderson] says modern Italian is a creation of the television age. But we are on the defensive ki saab, Instead of celebrating the fact, that yes, we have so many languages, we get defensive, and that's how this book is so invaluable. It takes us to the root of our defensiveness and that is ignorance about [our own systems]. Aur isi liye, bahut important hai ki Poison pill bhi fabricate karni chahiye, magar jo poison, jo dusron ki pills humne swallow kar li hai, aur repeat karte rehte hai Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, uska bhi meaning asli mein dekhna chahiye!

[end of transcription]

Original Youtube Video Sources

Yvette Rosser - Kripal on the couch in Calcutta - chapter 15

Go to Chapter 14

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

This chapter examines an essay written by Prof. Somnath Bhattacharyya called ‘Kali’s Child: Psychological And Hermeneutical Problems’, Bhattacharyya is emeritus professor and former head of the Psychology Department at Calcutta University. He has also been a practising psychoanalyst in Calcutta for over 30 years. He is uniquely qualified to present a substantial critical analysis of Jeffrey Kripal’s book, Kali’s Child, on at least four grounds: He is (i) personally familiar with the primary sources cited in the text, (ii) a long time student of Indian religion and philosophy, (iii) a professional psychotherapist, and (iv) fluent in Bengali.

While examining Kali’s Child from this vantage, Bhattacharyya was “struck by the numerous irregular and insinuating translations, factual misrepresentations and speculative innuendo”. After reading Vishnu on Freud’s Desk and Kali’s Child, he was asked to write a rejoinder that was published in the subsequent issue of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.

In the 12,000-word article that appeared on Sulekha, Bhattacharyya hones in on succinct examples of what he calls Kripal’s ‘catachrestic’ use of words and phrases selectively chosen to substantiate his overriding obsession with Ramakrishna’s hypothetical homosexuality. His detailed critique closely examines and contests several of Kripal’s translations. “The curious twists of translation, the typos, the ‘honest mistakes’ and unconscious errors that litter the text of Kali’s Child would literally force Freud to sit up in his grave and take notice”.

Bhattacharyya cites two examples that ‘clearly don’t require a gloss’. First, in one of Ramakrishna’s parables, a housewife tries to dissuade her husband from taking to the life of an itinerant begging monk saying: “Why should you wander about? If you don’t have to knock at ten doors for your stomach’s sake, go”, Kripal translates the passage as: “Why sleep in seven beds when you can sleep in one”?

Another example is from a line in ‘A song to the Divine Mother’: “Mother hold me to your bosom, covering me with the aanchal of your love”. Here is Kripal’s translation: “Hold me to your breasts. With affectionate love, hide me under your skirt, O Ma”! Bhattacharyya adds parenthetically: “The Western reader may note that aanchal refers to the end of the Indian sari covering the head, shoulders, and upper trunk”. He points out that Kripal’s hermeneutical style perpetuates, “the very patterns of textual misrepresentation and misinterpretation that he wishes to refute”.

Bhattacharyya interrogates the methodologies and motivations guiding Kripal’s radical reinterpretations of the life of Ramakrishna, providing examples of violations of scholarly discretion that have resulted in simplistic, culturally disconnected definitions and overly interpretive, free-association translations—fiction, if you will, but not history or ethnography. His article brings to the fore two essential components of the debate:

First, he identifies several psychoanalytical pathologies at work within the methods Kripal uses to defend himself. For instance, he notes that Kripal continues to brand Ramakrishna a pedophile even as he denies ever having consciously done so.

Kripal explicitly writes about Ramakrishna’s ‘obvious pedophilia’ and then, when things get hot [he] becomes amnesic. How does one explain that? Clearly deeper and more complex unconscious psychological forces are at work here, and any attempt to identify them in this short paper would be too inadequate to be regarded as meaningful.

Second, he demonstrates how Kripal’s understanding of a mystic such as Ramakrishna is not only a mishmash of psychoanalytic apples and oranges, but how Ramakrishna’s messages and symbols are exponentially more evolved—light years beyond Kripal’s cluttered Freudian slips and lower chakra titillations. The two realms hardly intersect. The directions of the gazes are fundamentally and irrevocably opposed. This renders Kripal’s obsessive and exclusive focus on Ramakrishna from the lower chakras irrelevant. It would be amusing if it hadn’t sadly caused so much sorrow and defamation.

Queer Hermeneutics a.k.a. Queermeneutics?

Like many others, Bhattacharyya asks, “Why this bizarre interpretation?” Certainly, it is naïve to solely blame “the author’s homosexual inclinations or gay agenda”. However, when “one puts Kripal’s obsession for ‘sexual abuse’ themes and deviant sexuality . . . alongside the recent spate of pedophilic scandals involving the clergy in the USA [One worries] what Kripal’s experiences at the Seminary were actually like.” In ‘Secret Talk: Sexual Identity and Politics of Scholarship”, Kripal frankly admits: “that his work proceeded from his personal experiences at a Benedictine Seminary and from his personal desire to heterosexually engage a female divinity”. Bhattacharyya notes that even the Projection Defense Mechanism: “with all its complexities, cannot adequately explain . . . the present controversy”.

It is disingenuous on the part of Kripal to issue public disclaimers on his gay or non-gay status in order to divert attention from the basic problems of his approach. This turns the issue of responsibility on its head by accusing the critics of homophobia—a classic case of aufgestellte

Mausdrek—a mouse-turd standing up on end. Consequently, there is a buildup of ‘sinister negative transferences’ on the ‘clean slate that is Jeffery Kripal’. Bhattacharyya’s trained eye saw signs of the reaction formation defense mechanism wherein the opposite impulse or behavior is taken up to hide true feelings by behaving in an exact opposite way.

Discussing the manner in which Kripal contradicts himself and appears to be in denial, Bhattacharyya writes:

The real key to this issue lies in what psychoanalysts call ‘selfanalysis’—a discipline that one has to rigorously undergo before one can start psychoanalyzing others. This practice was initiated by Freud himself and remains a desideratum for all analysts to this day.

Erik Erickson, in many ways the father of psychohistory, himself warns about the dangers of projections to which the psycho-historian is always prone. He pointed out that any psycho-historian ‘projects on the men and the times he studies some unlived portions and often

the unrealized selves of his own life.’ [Emphasis added]

Bhattacharyya suggests that the way out of this dilemma is through honest self-analysis. Bhattacharyya quotes from Roland’s critique of Kali’s Child:

Kripal [has a] penchant for facile speculative decoding and turning these into adamant conviction. He thus persists in insisting that Ramakrishna 1. ‘was very likely sexually abused by any number of actors who had power over him’, that his trance states were related to such abuse, that the direction of  2. the ‘saint’s desire [was] always directed towards males (deities or male disciples)’, [and] 3. ‘when a text uses sexual language it often, if not always, reflects real physiological and psychological analogues’ and that the materials of his thesis are 4. ‘by their very nature offensive.

Bhattacharyya examines the psychoanalytic considerations of several issues found in Kripal’s analysis, including sexual abuse, feminine identity, homoeroticism and misogyny. Under the subtitle Sexual Abuse, he writes:

Kripal insists that village people must have abused Ramakrishna presumably because he had states of absorption right from his childhood. But Ramakrishna’s own descriptions of his childhood suggest quite the contrary, e.g. ‘During my younger days the men and women of Kamarpukur were equally fond of me. No one distrusted me. Everybody took me in as one of the family.’

Under the subtitle, Feminine Identity? several loopholes in Kripal are pointed out:

It is easy to talk loosely with Masson about Ramakrishna’s transvestite activities, but dressing up in a feminine dress as a part of a legitimate and culturally accepted sadhana for a short period

of time does not amount to transvestism. Ramakrishna after all also dressed like a Shakta and a Vaishnava during his Shakti and Vaishnava sadhana days and like a Muslim during his Islam

sadhana—and these were male attires—only to try and make his identification with these cults complete. Moreover, contrary to Kripal’s thesis, most transvestites are heterosexual. [Emphasis

added]

He further suggests that Kripal’s claims about Ramakrishna’s ‘secondary trans-sexuality’ are also all too facile. He explains:

The American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV) defines trans-sexuality as strong and persistent crossgender identification, and not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex. It is a disorder always involving distress to the person, with a feeling of estrangement from the body and a felt need to alter the appearance of the body. If Ramakrishna sometimes talked about his femininity he was also clear about what he meant by it—‘Formerly I too used to see many visions, but now in my ecstatic state I don’t see so many. I am gradually getting over my feminine nature; I feel nowadays more like a man. Therefore I control my emotions; I don’t manifest it outwardly so much’. (For more on this, please read page 156 and 157, chapter 15)

To carry through his thesis of Ramakrishna’s feminine identification, Kripal resorts to erroneous documentation. Thus a whole section is devoted to bhagavatir tanu or goddess body that Ramakrishna is supposed to have possessed. The actual Kathamrita term however is bhaagavati tanu, which simply means divine body, and has no engendered connotation. (The term is actually a Sanskrit term, and grammatical and physiological genders don’t always go together in Sanskrit. E.g., the term daara, meaning wife, is masculine) Bhagavatir and Bhaagavati are two different words, and a person who reads the one for the other only reveals his lack of knowledge for that language. To assign a physical or even psychological sex to this category [Bhaagavati tanu which is identified as causal body by Ramakrishna] then is a reductive strategy, which robs the analyst of the possibility of deeper insight into human nature and its possibilities. Similarly, Ramakrishna’s wearing silken clothes (garader kapar) during puja is taken to mean feminine dress simply because Kripal doesn’t know that male priests in Bengal routinely wear silken clothes.

Bhattacharyya’s footnote is telling of Kripal’s cultural biases:

“And why should [Kripal] not know? Don’t the Roman Catholic clergy use silken apparel during mass”? He refutes Kripal’s conclusions that tenderness between father and son is homoerotic, citing Bengali and Indian cultural nuances. He also shows numerous other records of Ramakrishna’s interactions with his women disciples of all ages and classes. These records were all studiously ignored by Kripal. (For more on this, please read page 157 and 158, chapter 15)

From the perspective of an elder scholar, he [Prof. Bhattacharyya] cautions Kripal that

he “would also do well to remember that the female is not a castrated male.”[Emphasis added]. As a trained professional, he finds Kripal’s amateurish speculations laughable: “Equally comical are [Kripal’s] attempts to weave in anal themes”. He observes: “Unfortunately, [Kripal] claims to be a historian of religion . . . not a novelist. If he got angry responses he surely has invited them”.

Bhattacharyya analyzes the manner in which Kripal selected the passages from the Kathamrita and concluded that Kripal’s critical selectivity “amply illustrates the basic problem in his handling of texts. Virtually any selected portion of his book is not just a matter of a few

dozen, easily correctable translation errors neither is it simply a question of textual relativism based on multivalent use of language.” [Emphasis added]

Some Empirical Issues

Bhattacharyya offers many arguments that refute Kripal’s thesis. The first study area that he investigates is the psychological impact of meditation and mystical experiences:

In Kripal’s own backyard, sociologist Andrew Greely of University of Chicago’s National Opinions Research Council (NORC) tested people who had profoundly mystical experiences, such as being bathed in white light. When these persons were subjected to standard tests measuring psychological well-being, the mystics scored at the top. University of Chicago psychologist Norman Bradburn, who developed the test, said that no other factor had ever been found to correlate so highly with psychological balance, as did mystical experience. (For more on this, please read page 159, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya adds:

Ramakrishna’s samadhi states were accompanied by very profound inward withdrawal of consciousness, and remarkable physiological changes, consistent with the highest stages of meditative absorption as documented in Hindu Tantra and Yoga as well as Buddhist literature. Thus the famous physician Mahendarlal Sarkar himself examined and found Ramakrishna without heartbeat and corneal reflexes during samadhi. These physiological changes (clinically

taken as signs of death) . . . were not metaphorical changes [and] are not known to occur in a dissociative trance. Medard Boss—an influential Swiss existential psychotherapist had this to say

about the holy men he met on his lecture-visit to India:

[T]here were the exalted figures of the sages and holy men themselves, each one of them a living example of the possibility of human growth and maturity and of the attainment of an imperturbable inner peace, a joyous freedom from guilt, and a purified, selfless goodness and calmness.... No matter how carefully I observe the waking lives of the holy men, no matter how ready they were to tell me about their dreams, I could not detect in the best of them a trace of a selfish action or any kind of a repressed or consciously concealed shadow life. (Boss 187–88)

Bhattacharyya discusses the dharmic perspectives of sex. He writes: “It is worth noting that although we commonly speak of a sex drive, sex does not fit the usual conception of drive, as a felt need that gets stronger and stronger, until it is satisfied”. He explains, referring to Masters and Johnson: “Indeed, sexual abstinence probably decreases sexual motivation over the long run. There is no evidence, despite myths to the contrary, [that] abstinence from sexual activity is detrimental to a person’s health”.

Hyper-Textual Sexualization

Bhattacharyya carefully investigates several instances where Kripal has homo-eroticized the heterosexual, hyper-sexualized the child, and ‘masculated’ the genderless. Through this methodology, she becomes he, and all signs point to penis envy or some equally loaded jargon.

Indeed, the female is not a castrated male.

Kripal often feels that a passage is ‘hyper-sexualized’ and demands a sexual reading. ‘Hypersexualization’ is not a term that is found in the standard corpus of psychoanalytic literature [unlike] ‘sexualization’, which is defined as “endowing an object or function with a sexual significance that it did not previously have . . . in order to ward-off anxieties associated with prohibited impulses”. Bhattacharyya examines several of Kripal’s writings and also looks at the articles written by Kripal’s critics, such as Tyagananda. As a result, he writes lucidly across numerous theoretical subheadings. (For more on this, please read page 161 and 162, chapter 15)

Kripal and Bhattacharyya are culturally miles apart regarding the manner in which each of them viewed Ramakrishna’s use of the terms yoni and lingam. Bhattacharyya observed that Kripal is troubled by the use of yoni and lingam and, perhaps, because of shame or shock, he sexualizes, sensationalizes, eroticizes. In contrast, Bhattacharyya sees worshipping a lingam or yoni as a cosmic symbol. Ramakrishna said they are symbols of fatherhood and motherhood so that one may not be born into the world again. Bhattacharyya advises: “If Kripal is bothered about the moral implications of such worship then he clearly needs to associate with the traditions that place a high moral value on this ritual”. Kripal takes the easy road—first by discovering a new twist on the exotic Other, then asserting absolute authority to theoretically describe that entity. Bhattacharyya is a bit dismayed:

Incidentally, when citing texts and arguments in support of his own claims, Kripal insists that things are ‘crystal clear’, while the other texts are all ambiguous (‘simultaneously concealing and revealing’). Well! This is hermeneutics of convenience for sure!

Catachresis and the Hermeneutics of Convenience

Kripal’s textual mishandling is particularly grave because his primary claim is that he is a historian of religions. Professionally, Bhattacharyya cautioned: “Large scale distortions of source material in an ill attempted effort at establishing a thesis, is certainly not academically acceptable”. He compared this tactic to what is known in scientific research as ‘the sharp-shooter’s fallacy’—analogous to the way a gunslinger might empty his six-shooter into the side of a barn and then draw the bull’s eye around the bullet holes. He warned: “Citing fringe works and material of equally dubious value doesn’t help in salvaging the case”.

Throughout this debate, Kripal has tried to place his critics in the Hindu obscurantist camp, and he is keen on playing identity politics as well. Bhattacharyya reminds him:

[C]ritics of his methodology include noted academics like Huston Smith, Alan Roland and Gerald Larson among others; and they are neither Hindus nor Indians.

Since Kripal states that his ‘hermeneutical’ strategy is inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work Truth and Method, Bhattacharyya quotes from the noted Indologist Fritz Staal whose lengthy analysis of Gadamer’s internally contradictory methodology, explained that, ultimately:

Either one disagrees with what Gadamer says, in which case one must agree with what he means; or one agrees with what he says by disagreeing with its meaning. One must in all cases agree and

disagree, and Gadamer’s originality lies in this combination. He has adopted from the positivist-empiricist tradition its most monumental error—the caricature of the scientific method—and

failed to heed its most valuable contribution—the critique of meaninglessness. (For more on this and Bhattacharyya’s critique of Kripal’s methodology of advanced historio-critical studies, please read page 163 and 164, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya points out that Kripal also violates rules of Bengali grammar, by confusing the gender structure of character, and linguistic genders with sexual function. Agreeing with Tyagananda, Bhattacharyya writes:

The vocabulary of Kripal’s desire is also very problematic [because] Kripal wishes to have his readers believe that anxious longing (vyakulata), charismatic attraction (tana), and associative reminder (uddipana) among other terms, and also of course Ramakrishna’s love for his male disciples, all carry sexual meanings, the contextual structure not withstanding. Now, besides the textual problems documented by Tyagananda, some very real psychological issues are also at stake here . . . Freud’s conception of love as ‘aim-inhibited sex’ stands repudiated at present on empirical grounds. Love and sex are not synonymous. There can be love without sex and vice versa . . . Thus, when Kripal summarily characterizes all these different shades of love as erotic he commits what may be termed a ‘category error’. (For more on this and Kripal’s tendency to sexualize the sacred, please read page 165 and 166, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya sees Kripal’s manuscript as irreparably tainted by predetermined motivations: “His invariable need to distort texts is proof enough against his agenda”.

‘State of the Child’ and the ‘Psychology of Being’

While defending his controversial thesis, Kripal has shown a certain proprietorship—claiming that: “psychoanalytic paradigms are his cultural inheritance”. Sudhir Kakar has said that, “Psychoanalysis occupies an ill-defined zone between the arts and the objective sciences.”

Bhattacharyya further explains, “Kripal claims his work to be in line with the writings of Sudhir Kakkar [whose own work on Ramakrishna] though avowedly Freudian and reductionist in nature, is much more sophisticated. Kakkar is careful to suggest that the feminine identification of mystics is best interpreted as circumvention of drives and instincts, or in other words as an ‘experience of being’.” (For more on this, please read page 166 and 167, chapter 15)

Bhattacharyya explains:

Ramakrishna’s characterization of this ‘state of the child’ remarkably anticipates the findings of the classic studies on ‘peak experiences’ (which included mystic experiences) of ‘self actualizing’ people by Abraham Maslow, nearly four decades ago. Maslow noted selfactualizing

subjects, picked because they were very mature, were at the same time, also childish. [He] called it ‘healthy childishness’, a ‘second naiveté’. He considered a god-like gaiety (humor, fun, foolishness, silliness, play, laughter) to be one of the highest . . . values of the state of Being . . . i.e. ‘being one’s real Self’.

Bhattacharyya notes that it is specifically Ramakrishna’s ‘state of the child’ (matribhava, antanabhava), which is the very psychological state that Kripal studiously avoids or distorts into amorphous or polymorphous sexuality. Bhattacharyya finds this especially ironical because this book bears the title Kali’s Child. He laments:

If only Kripal had not ignored this central theme of Ramakrishna’s personality—‘the state of the child’—he could have made much better sense of Ramakrishna’s samadhi, his uninhibited dealings with his devotees, his love and concern for his disciples and their reciprocation of the same . . .

The practices of Tantras are informed by deep psychological insights into the workings of the human nature. Bhattacharyya notes:

If these basic psychological principles underlying the tantric practices are not ignored it becomes much easier to make sense of Ramakrishna’s own eminently successful tantric practices and experiences, his criticism of some of the tantric sects and their practices, as well as his open-hearted espousal of many tantric techniques . . . without having to pigeon-hole the tantras into the ‘sexy, seedy and strange’, and paint a conflicted, ambivalent Ramakrishna through extended skewed and speculative glosses.

To Bhattacharyya, Kripal’s iconography of Kali bears a striking resemblance to the New Age and feminist appropriations of Hindu goddesses in the USA. This is in stark contrast to Ramakrishna’s own perceptions of Kali. Bhattacharyya sees Kripal as an ingénue, who catches a phrase or two, then based on erroneous knowledge of India and Hinduism creates a static essentialized icon of goddess worship. Bhattacharyya concludes, “This says more about the fertile and wounded imagination of its Western authors than it does about deity veneration

in India.”

Read entire chapter 15 from page 152 to 168

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

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