The Position of Hinduism in America's Higher Education

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Arial">The Position of Hinduism in America’s Higher Education

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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">By Rajiv Malhotra

italic">© The Infinity Foundation

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Arial">While the recent construct of Hindutva is the voice for many Hindus, it

does not speak for all Hindus. The West and India’s secular left have condemned

it, but have not offered an alternative that would be sympathetic to Hindu

identity nor proposed a non-threatening environment for ordinary Hindus to

regenerate their faiths after a thousand years of subversion. Rather, many

mainstream Hindus feel that an alliance by multiple subversive forces is

engaged in intimidation: Proselytizers in India fight hard for market share to

harvest the Hindu’s soul; leftists successfully secularized India’s education

system for 50 years to try and obliterate Sanskrit, Hindu epics, yoga,

meditation and other Indic traditions from India’s own education system; and

Western academicians spun new kinds of Orientalism in the garb of anthropology,

South Asian Studies and Religious Studies, and influenced a new breed of

‘honorary white’ Indian thinkers. Till this day, the West and India’s left have

failed to delve into the pre-Hindutva psyche of ordinary Hindus so as to

appreciate what led to the intellectual vacuum that Hindutva has tried to fill.

A deeply spiritual population felt cornered with few choices if it did not wish

to convert to Christianity, and did not wish to lose its religious expression

with respect in its own country. This intellectual vacuum in the Hindu

renaissance offered an opening for leadership built on populist sensationalism

in a reactionary sense.

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Arial">This essay focuses only on one aspect of the subversion – that by

America’s scholars - that facilitated this sense of being marginalized and

played into the hands of the very forces it now denounces. It does not go into

the preceding subversions of Hinduism by Islamic invaders, colonialists, or

India’s post-independence leftists, and nor the subsequent subversive revisions

by Hindutva itself. It examines how America’s higher education suppressed the

Hindu voice, reduced Hindu ideas to exotic anthropology, denigrated Hindu

practices, and neutralized or re-engineered Hindu identity. It attempts to

build a case for self-representation by Hindus that would be free from

political forces, proselytizers, and Western commercial or career interests.

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Arial">Most academic chairs on Hinduism, India Studies and Indic traditions,

and other faculty positions in these fields, as well as editorial boards in

university presses and scholarly journals are dominated and controlled by

scholars from outside these traditions. This is also reflected in the

asymmetrical representation on panels, and in journal articles and textbooks

about Indic traditions. No other tradition has such a low percentage of its own

scholars representing its portrayal than does Hinduism, even when compared to

Buddhism, but especially as compared to Christianity and Judaism. The result of

this imbalance has been to perpetuate the condition observed by W. Halbfass in

‘India and Europe’, First edition, p. 44: “In the modern planetary situation,

Eastern and Western “cultures” can no longer meet one another as equal

partners. They meet in a westernized world, under conditions shaped by Western

ways of thinking.”

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Arial">Indic traditions now seem poised on the response threshold as defined by

Eric J. Sharpe: “A ‘response threshold’ is crossed when it becomes possible for

the believer to advance his or her own interpretation against that of the

scholar. In classical comparative religion this was hardly a problem since most

of the scholars time was spent investigating the religions of the past and

often of the very remote past. Interpretations might have been challenged, but

only by other specialists working according to Western canons and conventions.

Today, by contrast, a greater proportion of study is devoted to contemporary or

at least recent, forms of living traditions. The study of religion often shades

into a dialogue of religions, in which the views of both partners are (at least

in theory) equally important. The response threshold implies the right of the

present day devotee to advance a distinctive interpretation of his or her own

tradition often at variance with that of Western scholarship and to be taken

entirely seriously in so doing.” (in "Study of Religion", in The

Encyclopedia of Religion [New York: Macmillan, 1987] Vol. 14, p. 85).

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Arial">To appreciate the implications of Indic traditions having reached the

response threshold, it is important to examine the conditions pertaining to its

scholarship in American academics. Western style academic study of India’s

traditions was started in the 19th century colonial era as the field called

Indology - the study of India by the West for the West. Even today, Indians

seeking to advance in the study of their own traditions face the conventional

power structures that survive decades after colonialism. They must at the very

least ‘prove’ their objectivity sometimes by alienating themselves from Indian

ways of thinking, including having to adopt the use of Western categories and

language for their work. Given the natural ambitions of many Indians to study

about India, numerous Indian scholars became ‘Macaulayites’; or if they already

had such latent tendencies these got enhanced, so as to enter, survive and

advance in the field of Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, or

Social Studies. Those who have tried to stand up to such a hegemonic situation

have often been blatantly declared as fundamentalists, or else marginalized in

subtle ways. There were many personal accounts of this at the AAR 2000

Conference, as explained by panelists on ‘coming out as a Hindu’. Hindus find

it appalling that the litmus test of India’s secularism is the level of

Christian proselytizing it can endure, and it is often subject to this burden

of proof. A good Hindu, it is portrayed, is an obedient one or at least is easy

to ‘manage’. Muslims have insisted on a fair and even positive presentation of

Islam in the Western academia with considerable success, but the same cannot be

said about Hinduism. If Judaism were subject to a mild version of the

Hindu-bashing that is normal on campuses, there would be charges of

anti-Semitism.

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Arial">Antonio de Nicholas, now retired as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and

Religion at SUNY writes: “Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, even Shinto

studies have found a place in the American Academy and are being taught by

scholars of those traditions. All

but Hinduism, the earliest of all ancient cultures recorded in writing, the

store house of our own internal habits of soul, mind, society, mortality,

immortality; the reference of later cultures and mystics, the mother,

literally, of our own human possibilities has neither found an autonomous voice

in the Academy nor have the children of this culture, Hindus, allowed to

represent themselves in the American Academy when Hinduism is taught by

non-Hindus, or patronized or vilified or simply ignored.”

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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Issues of this nature are

now beginning to be discussed openly by many kinds of Hindu scholars: (a)

American Hindus such as Ed Bryant, Ramdas Lamb, Stephen Philips, Antonio de

Nicolas and Yvette Rosser. (b) Young Hindu scholars being raised in the West

such as Deepak Serma, Paramil Patil and Sushil Mittal. © Senior academic

scholars such as Arindam Chakrabarti, Arvind Sharma and T. S. Rukmani. Also

important is the new trend among non-academic Hindus asserting their faith

through building temples in America, participating in public affairs, and

supporting activism against Hindu-bashing, while at the same time avoiding the

extremes so as to preserve the pluralism within the traditions.

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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">My definition of a Hindu is

liberal and fuzzy in the true spirit of the tradition, and includes those born

outside the tradition that embrace it as free spirited explorers. But I would

not include anyone bonded by allegiance to an incompatible historic dogma of

exclusivist claims, especially anyone linked to a proselytizing tradition

targeting Hindus. In claiming a dual identity, one must not have a conflict of

interest. Specifically, I have difficulty acknowledging as Hindus those whose

other affiliation include scriptures declaring Hindus (even by implication) to

be ‘damned’, ‘sinners’, ‘pagans’,

‘condemned’, ‘heathen’ and the like. That

would be analogous to inviting the wolf dressed in grandmother’s clothes to sit

at the head of the family dinner. This definition does not eliminate a liberal

Christian or Muslim whose Bible/Koran interpretation is not literal, who

rejects the exclusivity claims of dogma, and most importantly, rejects

proselytizing.

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Arial">Within India’s long tradition of debate amongst its darshanas, the

healthy encounter and skepticism was very constructive in shaping every one of

its systems. So it is certainly true that both the etic (outsider) and the emit

(insider) views are important to include in scholarship.

color:black">But here we have a competing religion, namely Christianity, with a

clear proselytizing agenda, controlling much of the criticism through use of

its categories and/or its scholars. Therefore,

10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"> the current asymmetry

between the positions of Hinduism and that of Christianity has two aspects:

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12.0pt;font-family:Arial">(i)

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Christian emit scholarship is large in quantity and

therefore is a strong voice in balancing the etic, whereas in the case of

Hinduism, the scholarship has been dominated by etic for the past 150 years.

The best evidence of this is that Indic traditions are commonly portrayed using

language and categories of the West rather than its own.

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12.0pt;font-family:Arial">(ii)

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Christian etic scholars are themselves Christians,

albeit assuming a ‘secular’ posture. The analogous situation would be if the

etic studies of Christianity were done mainly by Muslims and Hindus, rather

than by secular Christians. But Hinduism’s etic scholars are mainly Christians,

which is not the same thing as if they had been Hindus adopting a ‘neutral’ and

‘secular’ methodology, especially since Christianity and Hinduism are now

pitted as competitors for market share in intense campaigns in India. Scholars

of Hinduism are not merely outsiders to Hinduism, but even more importantly,

they are sometimes insiders of the tradition Hindus see as predator, namely

Christianity. It is also important to note that Christianity has not had a

history of giving any other religion a peer status. Because of historical

factors, Christianity has been to do its own criticism in its own environment

by Christians themselves, and this discourages non-Christians from criticizing

Christianity, as it is declared that Christians themselves have done whatever

criticism could be done and that no more would be possible or required.

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Arial">This situation might be compared to the study of Afro-American culture

and history, which until the civil rights laws of the 1960s was entirely in the

hands of whites. It was claimed that the portrayal was authentic as the white

scholars involved had excellent credentials. After civil rights were enacted,

Afro-Americans had to fight hard to get included in their own portrayal, and

they were told initially that they simply did not have the qualifications to be

able to do so. This was eventually remedied as Afro-Americans entered

faculties, wrote books, and participated in their own portrayals. Today, it

would be unthinkable to have a program on Afro-American studies dominated by

white scholars. It was whites such as Hubert Humphrey who helped blacks win

their civil rights, and likewise, there are many Jewish and Christian scholars

and leaders who express sympathy for Hindus gaining a greater voice in their

own representation.

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Arial">A similar situation also existed in the case of women in America prior

to the feminist movement. But once women demanded, they did receive their

legitimate position to control the discourse concerning women’s studies. One

would consider it unthinkable today to have a women’s studies department or to

have secondary school textbooks about women’s issues that were written mostly

by men. Yet, I clearly remember that in the 1970s in corporate America, even

highly educated women had to downplay their feminine identity and pretend to

enjoy the sexist jokes by men for fear that they might be labeled as extremists

or marginalized otherwise. Then came the other extreme of feminism, at which

time it became dangerous for a man to joke at all for fear of being labeled a

male chauvinist pig. But as women gained control over their own identities,

gender relations relaxed and matured as a result. Today, a woman can bring her

baby into the office with great pride – something unthinkable in the 1970s,

except in rare instances.

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Arial">Jews had to negotiate their position in America to be classified as ‘white

people’. Given their well-organized mobilization, today they control their

tradition’s portrayal very successfully. The best scholars, most faculty

positions, most powerful boards and committees concerning Judaism, and most

textbooks about their history, are largely in the hands of Jewish people.

Compare this with the situation today where Hinduism’s major scriptures, the

Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are now being translated by mainly non-Hindu

scholarly teams sponsored by powerful university presses and under the aegis of

well-entrenched academic interests. Can we imagine a hypothetical scenario in

which popular translations of the New Testament came mainly from Muslim, Hindu

or Buddhist scholars?

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Arial">It might be claimed by the current academic power structure that there

simply are not enough qualified Hindus in the field. However, that situation

also faced women, blacks and other minority groups not so long ago. India

gained independence earlier than Afro-Americans and women finally received

their equal legal standing, and yet Hindus have been unable to climb to

positions of importance in sufficient numbers to alter the discourse into their

own linguistic categories. The question asked should be why initiatives similar

to those found in the case of blacks and women were not implemented in the case

of Hindus in order to promote higher education, research and teaching from

within the community? Why are there no grants specifically designed to

encourage Hindus to advance in the higher education of Hinduism? There was a

time when American corporations’ response to pressure from minority groups was

to appoint one minority face to their top management symbolically as good

public relations in their annual report. But genuine self-representation makes

a community more responsible once it is respected in peer terms.

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Arial">Is it that while blacks and women are considered as American minorities,

Hindus are considered as a far away, exotic and foreign people with whom

Americans have little to do, except to pity. Did American scholars in positions

of power use the Hindus to construct their own superior self-image, as rational

Westerners compared to mystical Indians, and as progressive Judeo-Christian

people specially chosen by God as compared to world negating Hindus? But the two

million Hindus in America are in the classrooms where teachers are using

stereotypes to describe their traditions. They are in America’s offices as

engineers, doctors, scientists and businessmen, and are tired of being viewed

from a patronizing, self-congratulating and condescending attitude. In American

neighborhoods, they are asked to define their beliefs in the Judeo-Christian

categories of monotheism and polytheism – a dualism that does not exist in

Hinduism - and told that they are idol worshippers. They are anxious when their

children come home and ask whether they have been saved, when in fact Hindus do

not accept that they were damned to begin with.

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Arial">While icons of Western rational, scientific and progressive development,

such as Bill Gates, consider Indians to be amongst the finest rational and

progressive thinkers in the world, and they are putting their money on that

judgment, it is strange that religious studies scholars, who are not as

qualified technologically, scientifically or in rational training, view their

own culture as more rational than the Hindus’. By the West’s own standards and

history, religion experts would be the last persons considered qualified to

pass judgment on who or what comprises rationality. Why is it considered that Hindus

could not adequately do scholarship about their own heritage when they can do

so brilliantly in modern literature, on Wall Street, in medicine, and numerous

other intellectual disciplines that are more demanding analytically and

rationally than religious studies is? Amazingly, when I discussed this with a

well-respected Christian academic scholar of Hinduism, his response to me was

that ‘Hindus learnt their rationality only recently from the West’. The field

would be better served if religious studies scholars such as this professor

would learn the Indic darshanas more thoroughly before they are allowed to get

their PhDs. It seems that Orientalism continues to be spun in ever more

elaborate webs and under different guises.

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Arial">Thurman, Staal, Cordona, Tubb, Potter and many other eminent Western

scholars have rigorously documented that India originated a significant portion

of the world’s mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, linguistics, ethics,

psychology and technology until 1000 C.E. Yet, this is largely ignored by the

mainstream’s portrayal as it challenges the Western dominance narrative. India

made a heavy influence on the development of European and Asian languages and

linguistics. The entire field of linguistics in Europe was born when Europeans

found in India a highly advanced civilization with a rich language and

literature. Pannini’s grammar from 500 B.C. (with over 4,000 precise rules)

became the inspiration and model for the entirely new fields of philology and

linguistics in the West. In East Asia and South East Asia, India exerted great

influence on literature. Furthermore, India’s influence on modern and

post-modern literature in the West has included the famous works of Emerson,

Thoreau, Whitman, Browning, James, Eliot, Isherwood, Huxley, Hesse, Ginsburg,

Kerouac, diPrima, among others. This Indic influence, which was so

enthusiastically celebrated by these literary geniuses, now verges on being

subverted in the general curricula on American literature. Indic ideas have

profoundly shaped modern philosophy, psychology, Western spirituality and its

emerging worldview, including the influence on thinkers such as Schopenhauer

(philosophy), Schrodinger (physics), Jung (psychology), Teilhard de Chardin

(Christianity), among others. But most educated Americans are never told this.

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Arial">Many Western thinkers have gone through the four-stage U-Turn from Indic

traditions: (1) discipleship; (2) distancing and situating the know how into

‘secular’ language; (3) re-labeling it into Judeo-Christian tradition; and in

some cases, (4) denouncing the source Indic tradition to become ‘free’ from it.

I have been examining cases of such U-Turns from Jung on to contemporary

scholars, and have developed a few questions to help the process. For example,

might the stage 1 discipleship appear in hindsight to have been the

anthropologist’s method of getting close to and even inside the subject’s

culture so as to get a more intimate peek? Are these U-Turns the result of

blaming India’s poverty and social issues on its own tradition without adequate

understanding of its history of external oppression? Or are they the

manifestation of underlying samskaras of collective cultural identity of the

scholar, previously not expressed for lack of self-esteem, but later empowered

by the experience of Hinduism? Finally, might there also be the factor of

enhanced commercial success if Indic ideas are recast into a more popular

Judeo-Christian framework and/or into modern ‘Western’ science? Subversion

might have especially facilitated the plagiarism by this final category.

However, there is no single pattern or set of factors applicable to all cases.

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Arial">While Judeo-Christians have strategic control over the scholarship of

Hinduism in the West, Hindus have seldom been concerned about the scholarship

of Judeo-Christianity in Hindu categories. The result of this asymmetry has

been devastating. Under this control, which began during colonial times,

Hinduism has acquired the image of meaningless superstitious rituals. Kali and

other scary images are deployed to indicate a negative and violent religion.

Simplistic logic is used – Shiva is evil because he is the destroyer and

because destruction is evil. Animal symbolism is interpreted to indicate animal

worship, or worse still, some form of animism. The whole subversive enterprise

has been to depict an unscientific tradition lacking rational tendencies,

compared to European superior intellectual traditions.

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Arial">These assumptions make the missionary activity and the economic hegemony

easier to justify morally. To dismiss Hinduism, it is often portrayed as 'world

negating' and socially backward, compared to the ‘rational’ West. It is said to

exploit the underclass. Karma theory is interpreted as fatalism and as

accepting one's plight rather than taking responsibility. Hindu society is

depicted as having been intrinsically poor throughout its history, without

factoring in the massive destruction its academic institutions suffered during

multiple foreign invasions and the decimation of its infrastructure by colonialists.

Women’s issues are common stereotypes that are politicized. They are often out

of context and are rarely compared to women’s conditions in poor Christian

countries or Western nations. Environmental problems in contemporary India are

seen as rooted in India's traditions, rather than a phenomenon over the past

150 years only. The focus is on caste, cows and curry rather than on Indic

ideas presented in a sensible respectful way. The motive is to justify the

Western case that globalization equals Westernization - the indigenous cultures

are positioned as chronically and systemically flawed.

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Arial">But such portrayals fail to delve into history, and to properly explain

the economic and ecological problems. Whereas the past 500 years of history of

the West has been a 'development' tale from the dark ages to modernity, India

for a thousand years was plundered, subjugated and drained of its economic

surplus, by those very civilizations that now proclaim their superiority over

it. Islamic and British records are emphatic and voluminous about the enormous

material wealth of India, its higher literacy rate than Britain's up to the

19th century, and its massive manufacturing export base that was later

transferred into Britain's industrial revolution. Many of India's social

problems have economic roots, which in turn originated or were exacerbated

during Islamic or colonial rule. The Western lens therefore presumes that

India’s condition today reflects its intrinsic civilization at its highest;

hence, its poverty, social issues and pollution are seen as chronic and

systemic problems unsolvable from within and in need of Westernization -

including Christianity - as cure.

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Arial">Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington writes in ‘The Clash of

Civilizations’ that in 1750, India had 25% of the world’s manufacturing output

while Europe and America combined had less than 18%. But in 1900, India’s

economy had collapsed to less than 2% whereas America and the West had 84% of

the world’s economic share. He writes: ‘The

industrial revolution of the West was done at the expense of

de-industrialization of the colonies’. The material wealth of India

and its industries were legendary for millennia, and were the very reason for

the obsessions of the Europeans, Arabs and Persians to go to India – they were

not desperate to go there to save souls. To survive, any society requires

self-renewal and growth through knowledge, institutions, values and resources.

In the case of India, these institutions and assets were systematically

destroyed, either by design or by neglect, and the harvested resources were

deployed to build empires elsewhere. But few educated Americans seem to know

any of this.

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Arial">Gandhi's statement in London, in October 1931, criticized the British

subversion of India’s traditional learning: “India is more illiterate than it

was fifty or a hundred years ago . . . because the British administrators, when

they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to

root them out.” Gandhi accused his colonizers of destroying the ‘beautiful

tree’ of the indigenous system of village schools by digging up the roots and

leaving them exposed. William Adam’s survey of the state of education in Bengal

in 1835, found “that almost every village in Bengal had a pathshala [school]

and estimated that there were about 100,000 such schools in existence at the

time in Bengal and Bihar.” He reported that pupils were taught mainly through

the oral tradition. Pathshalas were popular with all classes of people,

“irrespective of religion, caste, or social status,” as the “curriculum was

designed towards meeting the practical demands of rural society. Such

pathshalas had functioned for centuries, providing practical instruction to all

classes of children and meeting local needs by teaching traditional subjects in

the traditional way.”

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Arial">However, in 1854 the British initiated ‘modernizing’ the education

system. All pathshalas were provided British books, traditional gurus were

turned into bureaucratic administrators of attendance and standardized punishments.

Exams were instituted to evaluate the gurus as well as the pupils. These

changes “had a negative impact on the enrollment of the pathshalas. Pupils

belonging to the lower classes could not comprehend the utility and began to

drop out from the improved pathshalas.” This was noted in Government of Bengal,

Education Proceedings, General Department, no. 64, October 1860: “In the former

[original schools] I found the naked children of the cultivators, and boys of

the lowest class that has ever been reached by instruction of any kind with a

rare specimen of better class of villagers; in the latter [modernized schools]

I found (as a rule) only the Brahmin and writer-cast boys. To my enquires, made

from everyone I met, there was but one answer, namely that the lower-class boys

had retired altogether from the patshalas.”

10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Colonial documents such as

the Education Commission Report of the Bengal Provincial Committee (Calcutta,

1884), and the Report of Public Instruction in Bengal (Calcutta, 1863-64),

describe how the students were made to study the administration of Warren

Hastings, Lord Cornwallis and Lord William Bentinck. Under centralized control,

teachers had to teach what was deemed worthy by the colonial state, moving away

from indigenous knowledge which was intimately embedded in the local culture

and emphasizing the needs and deeds of a conquering elite. Education became a

hegemonic tool. Bayly concluded: “The knowledgeable man of the Indo-Islamic

order was remade in the course of a generation to become the 'native servant of

government' educated in Milton and Shakespeare, friend to Copernicus, and

reader of The Times.” Yet, few scholars reflect this history when explaining

why India has high illiteracy, jumping to the hasty blame on Hinduism.

Arial">Anthropologists fail to explain that, despite it poverty, India's crime

rate is small compared to the US’ on a per million population basis, in every

major category. India’s problems are labeled as ‘Hindu’, yet Western scholars

would not label the US' very high incidence of child abuse, rape, massive

prison population, drug and other addictions, and high incidence of clinical

depression as 'Judeo-Christian' problems. Western scholars emphasize caste as

the defining characteristic of Hinduism, often to the exclusion of other

qualities. However, if they called it 'class' rather than 'caste', it would

compel students to compare with the US' own racially segregated churches, white

supremacy groups, racial profiling, economic stratification, and civil rights

issues. In fact, the very foundation of the American prosperity has been

historically based on white and Christian supremacy over blacks and Native

Americans. America’s caste system is implicit and subtle rather than explicit

and publicly acknowledged, but it is no less harmful. Americans label their

social categories as demographic groups rather than castes, but this does not

make the problems disappear. Historically, the West’s encounters with other

ethnic groups resulted in genocide or slavery – an occidental method of resolution

rather than social hierarchy for co-existence. The West should not be exempt

from examination under the same microscope for a comparative analysis by

students. Often, social science and religious studies scholars place the West

above such ‘primitive’ practices so as to ridicule Indic traditions.

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Arial">Monotheism was practiced in India well before its articulation by the

Semitic religions. Ironically, Judeo-Christian ideologies, whose

distinctiveness is that they are monolithic and monopolistic, have claimed

monotheism as their gift to civilization. The monotheism vs. polytheism debate

needs to be re-phrased to more accurately describe the divide between

historically situated dogma vs. a religion that emphasizes freedom to

experiment with processes and direct experience. Rarely do educators mentioned

that this intellectual freedom to seek spiritual self-realization resulted in

the know how that gave rise to the world’s first universities, built in India.

Students from around the world flocked to India for higher education. When

invaders inspired by Islam destroyed the great cultural centers of India,

including its famous institutions of learning in Takshashila, Vikramashila,

Nalanda and other places, they also destroyed the expression of free-spirited

genius that was the basis for India's science. In Europe, Christian dogma

destroyed the great free-spirited Greek Civilization. The natural progression

in the historically frozen dogma-based West has been from canonical absolutism

to fanaticism - the result in the 20th century was Communism, Fascism, Nazism,

and Proselytizing. Ironically, Indic traditions are portrayed as being fixed in

fossilized texts and the West is shown to have the capability to renew itself,

to generate diverse ideologies and debate, without acknowledging the fact that

these open traditions existed in India since many millennia.

Arial">

Arial">It is sad to note that Indian kids in American colleges often tell of

being embarrassed in class when their heritage is portrayed in a demeaning

manner. Many choose to deny their identity, just as Jews did a century ago in

Europe. What is ironic is that these Indian kids are often majoring in

‘rational’ disciplines such as science, finance, law, medicine, or business.

The religious/social studies teacher looking down below the glass ceiling at

these ‘less rational’ people might often have less academic training in

rational disciplines. Furthermore, many such kids come from highly educated

Indian families and find it nonsensical to see their heritage downgraded.

Arial">

Arial">There seems to be an obsession on the part of many Western scholars and

Westernized Indians to select precisely those issues about India which enable

them to develop a posture of pity and patronizing sympathy from above the glass

ceiling, while filtering out rational, progressive and superior elements of

India’s civilization under the excuse that these would not represent the ‘real’

India? Could it be that the scholarly emperor is without clothes - and the empress

too? Might this be some scholars’ way to boost their own self-esteem, using

cultural membership to compare themselves with poorer and lower others? Many

scholars are disinclined to interact with well-educated, economically mobile

and assertive Hindus, as they do not fit the stereotypes that have become so

central to the scholarship.

Arial">

Arial">The history of India’s encounter with European traders who turned into

colonialists demonstrates that control over the distribution of goods turned

into control over production. In this age, intellectual property is often the

currency for competitive success. Hence, it is the control over the

distribution of ideas that would result in eventual control over the

production, packaging and branding of ideologies. Therefore, educators in USA

should be charged to take seriously their role in engineering young minds and

public opinion, including the subversion of Hinduism. As one example, Indian

students who go through American campuses often transform their identity into

‘South Asian’ and some have even defined their religion to be ‘South Asian’.

Study about India is found across many diverse departments in American

Universities - South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Indology, Anthropology,

History, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, and Philosophy. In general,

few Indians have gone into higher studies for the humanities, preferring

sciences and more lucrative fields instead. Most Indians who have entered the

humanities as a serious career have had an ideological agenda, and over the

past 50 years, this was almost exclusively Marxist and/or Indian Christian. In

fact, it is amazing to see such a large number of Indian Christians in the

academic study of Hinduism, whereas Hindus seldom bother to study Christianity.

Here are some observations about specific university departments:

Arial">

Arial;font-weight:bold">Indology:

Arial">

Arial">With its origins in colonialism, this field is shrinking in size, the

more sophisticated Orientalism now being done by other humanities departments

noted below.

Arial">

Arial;font-weight:bold">Philosophy:

Arial">

Arial">Except for University of Hawaii and Austin, major universities'

philosophy departments do not offer a PhD in Indian Philosophy and many do not

acknowledge its existence. Those who attempt to approach philosophy from an

Indic perspective are aggressively attacked

yes"> - as happened in Rutgers University’s philosophy department

in 1996 to four eminent philosophers who dared to present an Indic view. The

American Philosophical Association has many special interest groups within it,

but not one on Indian Philosophy.

Arial">

Arial;font-weight:bold">South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Social Studies, and

History:

Arial">

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">To contain Soviet influence, the US government

allocated spy money to American universities for studying the non-Western

world, and the new field was called ‘Area Studies’. Under this rubric, the notion

of a ‘South Asia’ was born, along with far reaching consequences of balancing

India with Pakistan, and trying to ‘South Asianize’ the identity of Indians.

This grouping of countries is a politically correct way of referring to former

British colonies. It is the American equivalent of colonial Europe’s field of

Indology. Within these area studies, there are somewhere between three and five

faculty positions for East Asia (China, Japan, etc) studies, for every one

position for South Asia. The government’s funding was based on geo-political

importance at a given time based on its strategic interests.

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Japan understood the leverage of endowing chairs for

Japan studies to give its view at major universities, and today these Japan

chairs proliferate. They also endowed many influential institutions such as the

Asia Society, and hence controlled or at least influenced the selection process

of scholars and topics. While there is a Tibet House in New York, and similar

entities for so many countries’ or civilizations’ promotion, there is not even

an India House in New York. Funds for South Asia studies are very low compared

to China/Japan even in think tanks such as Brookings Institute.

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">

Arial">The Pakistan government is very active in such educational

interventions, whereas India has not yet learnt the game. As one example, the

government of Pakistan announced in May 2000 that it is endowing the

Quaid-I-Azam Chair in Pakistan Studies at Berkeley in the South Asian Studies

department. A similar chair is also being created at Columbia.

Arial">

Arial">Partly as a result of this neglect by India, much of the coverage of

India in these departments is about social problems facing women, caste,

religious conflicts, nuclear bombs, pollution, …They are hardly the place where

a student would get a deep appreciation about the gifts of India's civilization

to the world, past, present and future potential. The mentality and agenda seem

to be of social re-engineering based on the scholar’s ideology rather than of

social studies. These departments are seeping with leftist and/or social

anthropological portrayals – India is seen as a land of problems with every

kind of strange and backward phenomenon. Academic Indians have not fought

against this and sometimes even facilitate it. It has become especially

fashionable for Indian women to trash India's heritage as being responsible for

all sorts of women's problems, thereby alienating many young Hindu girls from

their own heritage as a way to get liberated from its evils. Indian Christians

often co-opt these women to help trash Hinduism, perhaps for their own agendas.

The senior academicians in power, who are usually Americans, have encouraged

this, and in many instances, have pressured PhD students and even junior

faculty members against scholarly conclusions that run counter to the

stereotypes. Rarely are students encouraged to research the invasions by Islam

and colonialism as factors that caused or exacerbated India’s social problems.

Yet, these very scholars often don the human rights cloak to condemn other

cultures.

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">

Arial;font-weight:bold">Religious Studies:

Arial">

text-autospace:none">

Arial">These departments are enjoying immense growth, as religion becomes more

popular among students. Unfortunately, despite Hinduism's pre-eminence as the

fountainhead of Buddhism and therefore much of Asian civilization, and its

intellectual contributions in the realm of religion in general, it is amazing

that THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE HINDUISM STUDIES CHAIR in USA and the only one in

North America is in Concordia (Canada). There are a few specific chairs on

Sikhism, many on Buddhism, and of course literally dozens on Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam. There are now even chairs for such obscure religions

as ‘Shintoism’, but still Hinduism has none.

text-autospace:none">

Arial">

text-autospace:none">

Arial">Most teachers of Hinduism in Western academic departments are

non-Hindus: the only major world religion with little representation from

within. I am told that the situation in UK is similar, and that the only person

from a Hindu background holding a post in Religious Studies at a major

university in the U.K. is Ram-Prasad Chakravarthi at Lancaster University.

Recently, Indians in Indiana raised money to endow a Rabindranath Tagore Chair

for India Studies. Its occupant is a well-respected scholar of Indian

philosophy and Hinduism, and is also a Christian minister. Lately, his support

for young scholars challenging the integrity of Hinduism (e.g. Richard King's

new book) has disappointed many who were surprised to see his U-Turn away from

being Hindu friendly. As one consequence of this situation analysis, we need to

re-evaluate the criteria of what it means to be ‘qualified’ for academic

positions in Hinduism: the Western religions’ notion is sometimes that texts

are fixed fossils to be interpreted in isolation, whereas Indic traditions

would also place great emphasis on the practical and experiential credentials

of a good yogi, or pundit, or bhakta.

text-autospace:none">

Arial">

Arial;font-weight:bold">Psychology:

Arial">

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">This discipline holds the greatest promise for

scientific and authentic portrayal of Indic thought in intellectual circles, as

many psychologists have begun to appreciate yoga, meditation, various

philosophies of India, Kundalini, tantra, charkas, and some even appreciate

bhakti in this context. The problem here is plagiarism, as nobody wants to be

associated with a tradition having such a bad social reputation. Therefore,

most Indic contributions are camouflaged as being recent Western discoveries by

‘science’ and/or syncretised into Judeo-Christian narratives. Since the

evidence of appropriation is still fresh in this field, the scholars can be

caught red-handed and made to acknowledge. It would be a very important task to

introduce Indian thought into psychology books explicitly as Indian thought.

This would bypass the Judeo-Christian religious language and the social/anthropology

stereotyping. It would position India’s heritage as the science of

consciousness rather than as ‘religion' in the Judeo-Christian sense. But

disappointingly, at every conference on consciousness studies that I have

attended over the past four years, the Indian participation is nominal, whereas

now there are hundreds of Judeo-Christians and secular psychologists in the

fray rapidly appropriating Indic ideas as newly discovered ‘science’ or as

liberal Judaism/Christianity.

Arial">

12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Without active participation, Hindus are merely

abandoning the scholarship in the hands of others, especially Christians who

are from a faith that is aggressively proselytizing against Hinduism and who

are very active in promoting their position in the interpretation and distribution

of Hindu scriptures. Hindu thinkers have failed to understand the importance

and power in ‘academic’ scholarship about religion, and continue to confuse it

with religious teachings to the community. Many Hindus sit on ivory towers

refusing to get involved, sometimes justifying this based on quoting some lofty

shlokas, or proclamations about being spiritual and not religious, or about all

religions being the same. Those who take the time to understand the situation

often think that it should be someone else’s task to remedy it. The situation

in America’s academics is the ultimate glass ceiling that Indians must

negotiate, having already pierced through other glass ceilings in scientific,

technological, business, medical, and many other fields. Academic Religious

Studies, being rooted in the historical dogma methodologies of

Judeo-Christianity and the narrative of Westernism, is fortressed as amongst

the last bastions of the superior West.

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