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4
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)
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
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