Are anthropological studies as carried out in the West a violation of Human Rights?

This post summarizes a thread on the Rajiv Malhotra yahoo discussion forum which asks some really valid and disturbing questions of the nature of anthropological studies on India carried out in the West, particularly in prestigious American universities.

Invading the Sacred is the first book by Rajiv Malhotra that deals with many distortions that are perpetuated by Indology studies carried out by Western scholars.

Here are two links to summaries of a couple of chapters/chapter sections available on this forum.

This link summarizes a victory that was achieved for Hinduism by challenging the distorted representation of the Hindu faith that was published in Microsoft Encarta. Microsoft eventually changed the section on Hinduism that they carried, as a result of this challenge. Read more about it here.

This link from the same book exposes the kind of scholarship Western scholars like Wendy Doniger indulge in to denigrate Hinduism on the one hand and project themselves as champions of the faith in public discourse. Read what she has to make of the spiritual practice of tantra here.

Back to the current thread.

Bhaskar wrote in with this:

I have heard Rajiv mention this a number of times but the following video really opened me up to the nonsense that gets studied under the subject of anthropological studies. In this video, the person talks about the Kamma caste in Andhra Pradesh. It is interesting to see how the discussion moves from Kamma pride to Kamma-Reddy rivalry to Hindutva to Narendra Modi to Dalit oppression. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vBvExh7-QY

There is no subtlety in discussion of this topic - when does self-esteem change to pride to majoritarianism? Why does self-esteem be seen as a case for oppression of another? I am not informed suitably in academics as I am a routine professional but the nature of discussion and the quality of intellect is deeply disturbing even to an uninformed me. This is also an interference in the India affairs of the sort that is unfortunately not seen that way. This made me wonder whether the nature of anthropology studies by its very construct is actually a human rights violation since it thrives on increasing divides and create fissures where there may be none. How can one make a legal case against this very discipline of study? Are such studies only on India and its caste system? When such type of "informed" people write books which in turn influence text books which in turn get into the minds of people through media or education, the damage to our society in this way can never be repulsed.... 

Ananth replies:

Please see Message 6344 [of the discussion group] as to how Benbabaali obtained her material.

I wondered how a young woman in France had heard of a caste called the Kammas in far-off South India.  Her PhD thesis advisor is a colleague of Christophe Jaffrelot.  Jaffrelot has connections with Marxist professors and journalists.  So that must be how she landed up in Andhra Pradesh.  As soon as she had a thesis to publish, the Hindu had an article on her. (These Marxist intellectuals behave in the same hegemonic way as a dominant caste!)

IBenbabaali said that Kammas have small families in order to preserve their inherited wealth.  For that statement to qualify as an intellectual argument, she must consider alternatives such as:

1. Kammas have small families because family planning is important in a heavily populated country
2. Kammas have small families because all over the world, upwardly mobile people have small families.

She needs to say why she rejects Items 1 and 2, in favor of the statement that Kammas have small families in order to preserve inherited wealth.  But I doubt that at the age of 28-30 she would have the introspective self-honesty to ask herself such questions.  Even if she were to, her professors wouldn't let her publish anything.

To the above message Rajiv responded. He said:

Jaffrelot was discussed in his egroup earlier because he became adviser to Ashoka University in Gurgaon, in chrge of setting up their comparative religion program. Many of the trustees in this univ are proud Hindus and passionate about helping us. But they are utterly ignorant of such details and too proud of accepting my help.

Shashi chimed in:

The Kammas are about 5 % in combined Andhra. It is not by intelligent design. I belong to the kamma community and we have maintained healthy averages before family planning era. The average number of kids a couple used have were between 5-12. Now kamma couples have between 1 - 3 kids.

The second reason why kammas are less in number is that a sisterly caste called velamas branched out of the kamma root caste reason being There was a civil war in Andhra called Palnadu Yudham in 12th century. Now these two are 2 separate castes.

I wonder why she missed out this Significant Era of Andhra and Kammas and key personalities of that era. From 3rd Century she skips directly to Vijayanagar Empire.

The Purpose of the Study is to just throw mud at the "Kammas of Andhra". It is laced with a Marxist narrative. She Frequently uses the term 'Capitalist Caste' in the video.

Aurva brings in a very valid point highlighting why Westerners are able to exploit the faultlines in our system itself. He says:

Unfortunately, an average Kamma would feel pride that they are a topic of discussion in US ivy-league academia.

this is what I've seen among some Vaishnavites regarding Sheldon Pollock. the Hindu mind has been so thoroughly desensitized to the trauma of external intervention that we no longer even recognize it.

more importantly, we are taught a history that negates this intervention and teaches us to hate our own religion and Dharma. this merely hastens the departure of the Hindu mind from its senses.

The above observation from Aurva is clearly articulated in message 6344 and 6331 on the discussion forum where this issue was discussed previously too.

To follow this thread further please join up on the yahoo discussion forum. This thread can be found here on the group forum.

Dharma is NOT the same as paganism

April 2014

In this post Rajiv explains how there is a common fallacy among people to equate Dharma with paganism and how it's very dangerous to do this since it becomes a step towards digestion into Western Universalism through first, digestion into paganism. A related topic where the holy spirit is equated to Shakti or Kundalini and how that is a complete misrepresentation can be read here.

Rajiv deals with fundamental differences between Dharma and Western Universalism in his seminal work Being Different. The book site can be accessed here and to join the discussion exclusively on the ideas contained in Being Different, please join this group.

A conversation with a fellow traveller on a flight to Delhi prompted Rajiv to clarify things through this post. He says:

The 10-hour brainstorm with someone sitting next to me in the flight to Delhi was interesting. This was a well-informed individual, yet not closed minded or fixated. So I became interested in explaining many things that he was keen on understanding. It became clear to me that too many Indian postcolonialists as well as Hindu thinkers are mixed up on the relationship between dharma and paganism.

Just because two entities each differ from something X, it does not follow that both entities are the same

​. An orange and mango each differ from a banana but it does not mean that mango = orange. This is the simple error with huge consequences that many thinkers make when they assume that since paganism and dharma each share the following characteristics of difference with christianity:

1. They got colonized and harmed by Christianity
2. They differ from christianity because they allow pluralism of deities, no central institutional authority
3. They differ from christianity because they did not seek to expand through evangelism.etc
4. They differ from christianity because they did not limit God to male form.
5. etc.

That therefore dharma = paganism.
This is devastating for dharma as it has the effect of digesting dharma into paganism.
Indeed many western digesters make the argument that same/similar ideas to dharma already existed in the Greco-Roman pre-christian faiths. This trick makes them digest dharma into the pre-Christian phase of Europe, which got later superseded by Christianity. So whatever dharma teaches them can be repackaged as part of early Europe before christianity.
In other words, many good cop western scholars equate dharma = pre-Christian Greco-Roman paganism and praise it profusely. Hindus foolishly celebrate this and thank them with rewards.
A good example of this error by a Hindu thinker is made by S.N. Balagangadhara, a  postcolonialist, whose main research has been on how "religio" (traditions of Greco-Roman pagans) got digested into "religion" (Christianity), and the former got wiped out. So far so good. (This is well known to historians of Christianity anyway.)
But the blunder comes when he assumes dharma =  paganism without even bothering to argue this. It is unconsciously applied. The result is that his decolonizing thesis is from a pagan perspective and not a dharma one. (All postcolonialists are not the same as they argue against western colonialism from different vantage points; for instance there are many Muslim postcolonialsits, Marxist postcolonialists, etc.)
He does not establish a dharma-specific framework, one that differs from both paganism and christianity.
Some key ingredients of dharma not found in paganism or at least not as developed in an integral manner are:

1. Rishis: The notion that rishis achieved the unity consciousness potential available to all of us and this was the empirical method of attaining ultimate knowledge. There are no pagan rishis in this proper sense, not just the term but the meaning.
2. Yoga: 1 is the result of a lack of yoga as systematic technologies for humans to attain higher states of consciousness.
3. Tantra: In paganism there is a lack of cohesive, comprehensive techniques married to theories of antah-karan/adhyatma-vidya, etc

Paganism never had a fully worked out metaphysics with the sweeping scope of dharma. In fact dharma has several such systems each far more sophisticated than anything paganism offers.
What is common among all "native faiths" including paganism, dharma, etc. needs to be celebrated; and there are important alliances needed to contain Christian and Islamic expansionism.
But be clear on whats different in dharma, what I have called non-negotiable. Do not slip into becoming digested into paganism. That is just another stomach leading to Western Universalism - in BD I point out the unresolved inner schisms in WU and hence why it is synthetic

The children of colonial psychoanalysis - chapter 13 part 1

Go to Chapter 12

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

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

De-spiritualising tantra - chapter 8-part 2

Go to Chapter 8-part1

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

This kind of scholarship also reflects the U-Turn syndrome, wherein the scholarship facilitates appropriations while simultaneously denigrating the source traditions. Significantly, it provides theoretical legitimacy to the ongoing Christianization of meditation techniques in which Hindu and/or Buddhist mantras are removed and substituted with either meaningless words, as in Herb Benson’s ‘Relaxation Response’, or Christian words like ‘Christ’ or ‘Amen’.

Christian appropriators can rationalize that the Hindu mantras are made of meaningless sounds, and additionally, that their appropriation would ‘clean’ them from sounds of a woman having an orgasm. The White-Doniger thesis is among many that supply this kind of scurrilous ‘data’ to feed this appropriation.

The book’s political thesis seems to be that Tantra was a secret system used by Brahmins to dupe the lower castes and oppress them. White alleges that whitewashed or soft-core repackaging of Tantra “later came to be seized upon by high-caste Hindu householders throughout medieval South Asia as a window of opportunity to experiment with a double (or triple) religious identity”. White claims that this devious upper caste ploy was “a means to do what one said one was not doing...”. [Emphasis added]. In other words, the entire tradition was one big hypocrisy. Multiple identities, secret rituals and metaphysical hyperbole enabled Brahmins to exert political control via crafty mechanisms, which White compares with espionage:

A comparison with the world of espionage is a useful one: only those of the privileged inner circle (the heart of the Tantric mandala) have the highest security clearance (Tantric initiations) and access to the most secret codes (Tantric mantras) and classified documents (Tantric scriptures).

Lower castes emulated these pseudo-spiritual practices ‘as a means [of] social uplift’. Therefore, the tradition is not only not spiritual, it is also associated with trickery and social oppression across the vast subcontinent. These kinds of analyses are devastating to the Indic tradition’s progressive evolution and the self-concept of Hindus.

Abrahamic religions claim that they are the exclusive custodians of prophecies and canons documenting unique historical events. On the other hand, Indic adhyatmika spirituality, or inner science, tends to be non-history-centric and emanates from the enlightenment experiments of luminaries, of which Abhinavagupta is a very prominent example. Adhyatma-vidya methodology is similar to scientific empiricism, in that a legitimate spiritual tradition is the result of the actual experiences of spiritual masters and these experiences are reproducible by the rest of us in this very life. Therefore, White’s allegations of Abhinavagupta’s packaging of wild sex for the ‘soft-core High Hindu’ consumer market are as damaging as allegations would be against a Western empirical scientist that he fabricated laboratory data to substantiate a theory.

White’s and Doniger’s concepts of Tantra are implicated with ‘overcoding’, which is, according to the use of the word as found in White’s book, a euphemism for duplicity or whitewash. Doniger alleges that Hindus led a hypocritical double life.

Is a system of academic overcoding at work in such scholarship? Do certain scholars live double lives? According to Malhotra, they publicly position themselves as very Hindu-friendly in certain audiences, such as, (i) with pandits in India on whom they are dependent for translations; (ii) with gullible students from the diaspora to cleverly re-engineer them away from Hindu identities; and (iii) with diaspora parents/philanthropists for fund-raising. This overcoding is a mask to cover up their secretly building ‘ideological products’ to show patterns of Hindu decadence, violence, immorality and abuse.

Malhotra claims to remove the scholars’ pretence of being friends of India/Hinduism and exposes their Hinduphobia. He argues:

It is no coincidence that academic writings by David White, Sarah Caldwell, Jeffrey Kripal and many others apply the thesis of highcaste Hindu ‘double lives’ to a massive array of case studies which encompass Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Muktananda, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Hindu Goddess, among others. These case studies are filled with ‘data’ and convoluted logic. After winning awards their thesis is declared final and closed and those who dare criticize are attacked as being against intellectual freedom! (For expansion of this idea, please read page 83 and 84, chapter 8)

Hinduism, like all faiths, has its problematic aspects. Describing the religion multifariously from within an ecumenical orientation is not a problem for most Hindus. What is disturbing to them is that some high profile scholars allege that these abuses are the very essence of Hinduism, and not an aberration. In contrast, Abu Ghraib has not been framed by the media as a crime committed by Western culture caused by Biblical legends or original Biblical practices. An equivalent thesis would say that the original Biblical practices are essentially about hardcore sadomasochistic oppression and that a subsequent overcoding has been done to make the exploitation of non-Christian infidels and non-White peoples seem soft-core. Those who have dared to do such contrarian scholarship are from the margins—they are unlikely to win important awards and Ivy League chairs.

The charge of Tantra as a system of social exploitation is used by Doniger to frame India’s internal conflicts between ‘tiers’ of society—such as Dalits vs. Brahmins, Dravidians vs. so-called Aryans, women vs. men, minority religions vs. Hindus, and other Indic-specific dyads and contrasts. Malhotra interpreted Doniger’s conclusions in the review of Kiss of the Yogini, as ‘the triumphant tone of the white woman rescuing the native from their culture’. Doniger writes that White hopes by “reconstructing the medieval South Asian Kaula and Tantric traditions that involved sexual practices, [he can] restore the dignity and autonomy of the people who invented them and continue to practice them”. This is the Tarzan-Saving-Natives-from-Danger-in-Jungle trope, also known as the Missionaries-Saving-Heathens-from-Blindness trope.

Malhotra was moved to ask:

1. By what authority are White, Doniger, et al ‘in charge’ of such ‘restoration’ of Indian traditions?

2. By what justification are they privileged to frame the subject in a particular manner as opposed to the many other alternative frames possible?

3. For whose sake is this ‘restoration’ being done?

4. What is the track record of their Judeo-Christian controlled intellectual institutions in achieving ‘restoration’ for other peoples in the past?

5. To whom are they accountable?

There is an obvious inconsistency when White and Doniger are promoting this ‘restoration’ to some ‘imagined original past’ in which ‘Tantra equals sexual magic’, and yet any attempts by Hindus to recover a positively ‘imagined past’ is severely condemned as being chauvinistic and disingenuous.

Malhotra argues:

The hypocrisy cries out for notice: Why is a return-to-the-past that is supervised by Western institutions a good thing, while on the other hand, internally generated perspectives [by Indians] ‘chauvinistic’? This question gives rise to another: Does the difference have to do with who exerts power and for what agenda? In this scenario, when the West controls the agenda, selects the topics and frames the issues, then it’s positioned as positive ‘restoration,’ but when Indians outside Western institutions do the same thing, it is condemned by those in the Western institutions as inauthentic or invalid.

Academic Transgressions Excused in the Name of Saving Civilization

In her review of Kiss of the Yogini, Doniger raises some issues concerning White’s findings, to wit—that they are based on assumptions that cannot be rigorously proven. She asks: “How do we know that the original, supposedly hard-core school was not also interpreting their texts metaphorically”? (For more on what Doniger said, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger acknowledges that a mere possibility of meaning does not imply certainty of meaning. She also points out that White adopts literal meanings inconsistently. (For more on this, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger ends up with a George Bushism (as Witzel would put it) when she claims that White has proven a ‘definite maybe’. But then Doniger suddenly exonerates White’s intellectual transgressions and justifies his thesis on the basis that she finds it politically expedient, even after showing that his hypothesis is inconsistent and unproven. Doniger now argues that, regardless of its scholarly shortcomings, Kiss of the Yogini ‘has a political importance that eclipses reservations of this kind’. She writes:

In arguing for the sexual meaning of the texts, White is flying in the face of the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that began in the eleventh century, was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition from the nineteenth century onwards, and prevails in India today. The contemporary Indian view is complicated by a new political twist. Right-wing Hindu groups, in India and in the diaspora, have increasingly asserted their wish, indeed their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism.

Doniger seems to be suggesting, that evidence or no evidence, we should accept White’s thesis because it shows the devious revisionism practised by Hindus for a long time and because it is useful in deflating and denigrating dangerous Hindus today. Bapat criticizes Doniger severely on this point as well, calling her position vitandavada or argumentation that ignores reason in favor of establishing pet theories by repetition. (For more on what Prof. Bapat had to say, please read page 87, chapter 8)

The Dalit Card and Other Expediencies

Tantra practitioners and scholars know that one ancient movement within the tradition sought embodied enlightenment through sexual means. It had two parallel strands, one focusing primarily on consciousness and the other utilizing bodily techniques. (For Rajiv Malhotra’s elaboration on both strands, please read page 88, chapter 8)

White alleges that all this (Abhinavagupta’s reformulation of tantra in the 11^th century) was simply a political tool for the upper castes to control the masses. While the upper castes made spiritual claims to cover up their ‘sexcapades’ behind the mask of spiritual language, the lower castes dumbly practised Tantra as wild sexual orgies. The spiritual claims were a mechanism by which high-caste people duped and oppressed the Dalits. By invoking the subaltern tribal or Dalit identity, White and Doniger can claim to be exposing aspects of the Tantric tradition that have been used to exploit the oppressed.

Doniger has insulated herself from valid critiques, written by people such as those featured in section II, who possess modern, well-educated and liberal voices. She claims that the contemporary Hindus who are critical of her are ‘of the Hindutva persuasion’. She carefully identifies her tormentors, as “followers of the recently ousted Hindu Nationalist BJP, with its repressive and purity-obsessed policies”. In short, she dismisses her critics as repressed and obsessed puritans.

She expresses concern about the negative impact on Religious Studies from ‘Hindu fundamentalist attacks on Freudian interpretations’. The Hindu attackers, she writes: “argue that none of these [psychoanalytical] characterizations has any scriptural validity according to Hindu tenets or eminent Hindu scholars”. Doniger notes:

“This position finds some support in Western scholarly traditions [such as] Cantwell Smith [who] argued that no historian of religions should ever make a statement about any religion that some members of that religion would not recognize and accept”. She mentions, mockingly that, “This view is still honored by many conscientious scholars who follow the take-a-Hindu-to-dinner, Parliament-of-world-religions approach.” She adds, emphatically, “It is not, however, the only approach.”

Highlighting the comments used to endorse Kiss of the Yogini is revealing. The first endorsement on the back cover is written by Lee Siegel, who invites the reader to look at the book in terms of ‘magic and sorcery’—words suggestive of inferior cognition and irrationality in the modern Western context. Jeffrey Kripal also applauded the reductionist bias in Kiss of the Yogini for reminding us ‘once again that South Asian Tantra really is about sex, bodily fluids and all’.

White confidently presumes that “much of the Tantric terminology makes sense only if it is read literally”. Malhotra asks a crucial question: “It makes sense to whom?” To contemporary scholars, who reject the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions in the first place? Or to contemporary practitioners, who inherently accept the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions? An equivalent methodology in the reverse direction, as often asserted by critics of Christianity, is one in which Christian rituals and the doctrine of the Eucharist is reduced to a cannibalistic feast of eating flesh and drinking blood. However, Malhotra notes:

White quickly and assertively rejects doing this to Christianity by using the argumentation strategy of reductio ad absurdum—he rejects this because he says that it would make Christians cannibals. But when it comes to Tantra, he not only accepts what to a contemporary Hindu would be an absurdity, but insists that this is the only way to make sense of it.

He then asks a perplexing question, articulated over and over again within the Hindu-American community: “Why are such unsympathetic academicians, conditioned within biblical traditions, in a position to decide which portions of a text on Hinduism are literal and which ones are not”?

Another critic, the philosopher Sitanshu Chakravarti, has raised questions about several of David White’s ‘literal’ translations. For instance he points out that White reduces the Sanskrit word dravya (meaning material, object or thing) as fluids, particularly sexual fluids. All Hindus, not just Tantrikas, use dravyas ranging from flowers to sweets to clothes, wood and ghee and sandal paste in their pujas and havans—these are all homogenized by White into ‘fluids’. Chakravarti cites a few such suspect translations and their page numbers in White’s book: (For more on this, please read page 90, chapter 8)

Madhu Khanna’s Critique

Malhotra had conversations with a bold critic of such abusive scholarship, Madhu Khanna, a renowned scholar-practitioner of Tantra based in India, and she extensively quoted from her paper, ‘Paradigms of Female Sexuality in the Hindu World.’ She describes four different representations of female sexuality in Hinduism and emphasizes that these cannot be reduced to any one category to the exclusion of the rest. In describing the Tantric paradigm, she explains the ‘non-dual unity of life’ as follows, “Tantra concerns itself with the series of relationships between the transcendent and real, the macrocosm and the microcosm, the sacred and the profane, the outer and the inner, and weaves them within the framework of its values.”

She explains that each pair of opposites is to be held in mutual tension and neither side of the pair may be collapsed into the other, as that would be a dualistic reduction. This is why both radical realism and pure idealism are considered incorrect ways of understanding Tantra.

Criticizing the reductionist tendency of those stuck in Abrahamic dualities (into which White appears to have slipped), Khanna remarked:

The Western approach that splits the erotic from the sacred appears short sighted and deficient . . . White uses his profane-only lens to collapse the sacred-profane pair into profanity, with the spiritual aspect of the pair getting postured as a deceptive cover for hedonism by corrupt Brahmins. His core theory is that [Hindu] spirituality is a derivative from profanity and was intended for ulterior motives from the beginning. [Emphasis added] (For more on Madhu Khanna’s explanation, please read page 91, chapter 8)

White asserts, “I am a historian of South Asian religions and not a Tantric practitioner . . .” This calls into question his qualifications as a reliable restorer of the tradition. “Would a person who is deaf to certain tones be qualified to restore music played in the past based on simply reading the music scores, and to reject the music as played by maestros as invalid?”

Conclusions

According to many members of the Hindu diaspora, the implication of the White-Doniger thesis for the study of India and Indic traditions has been disastrous. Malhotra summarizes the impact:

1. White gives ammunition to those who attack Hinduism as being a collection of barbaric practices.

2. He reinforces the reduction of Hinduism as fodder for anthropological and psychopathological studies.

3. He tries to undermine Hinduism’s spiritual claims and renders its philosophical texts as fake or hypocritical.

4. He feeds Hinduphobia in the minds of mainstream Americans who see everyday Hindu symbols as weird and/or as representing immoral practices.

5. He provides a template with which to legitimize further data hunting-gathering about Hindus’ alleged violations of human rights, by claiming to have proven that such violations were the original intent and very purpose behind Hindu practices.

6. He plays into India’s caste conflicts by theorizing that Tantric spirituality was a ploy by upper castes to control the masses.

7. He tries to de-legitimize Tantra as a means for Dalit spiritual empowerment.

8. He tries to de-legitimize women’s empowerment through Tantra, a unique and major claim in contrast with the Abrahamic religions, and, hence, a perceived threat to male-dominated

Abrahamic religions.

One of the more interesting asides about Kiss of the Yogini is the fact that Doniger uses the book as an opportunity to discredit any attempts at Hindu constructive theology by attacking it as a project of Hindu nationalists who have “increasingly asserted . . . their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism”; and who think theirs is “the only acceptable view”. Her basic view of her opponents is false. Doniger’s critics neither insist that the spiritual-only view is the only acceptable one, nor that Indians should be the only ones doing Indic Studies. What they do criticize is the attempt to reduce Hinduism to pornography and to wish away the profound spiritual component in Hinduism. As Bapat and Malhotra have noted, Hindu insiders do have the right to constructive theology, as do people of all faiths. Terming this a ‘cover up’ or ‘fascism’ based on speculative findings is clearly intended to delegitimize Hindus’ rightful access to such processes.

Read chapter 8 part 2 from page 81 to 93

Please read the comic strip on page 94 and 95

Pdf of the book is available for free download here.

Go to chapter 9