Washington Post Publishes Article on Disputes in Hindu Studies in America

[krsna]

Washington Post Publishes Article on Disputes in Hindu Studies in

America

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A334-2004Apr9.html

 

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 10, 2004: The Washington Post, one of America's

leading newspaper, published this informative article on several

disputes in the academic arena regarding the study of Hinduism. There

is a growing movement in the US for Hindus to gain control of the

academic treatment of Hinduism at the university level, just as women,

Jews and African Americans have so done over the last 40 years. One

excellent model is Emory University's Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for

Jewish Studies (http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/JewishStudies/index.html)

which has a faculty of thirty, including three ordained rabbis. The

Hindu-American community can explore means of funding chairs in Hindu

studies and even entire institutes of Hindu studies.

 

We reproduce the article in full below:

 

By Shankar Vedantam

Washington Post Staff Writer

 

Folklore has it that elephants never forget, and Paul Courtright has

reason to believe it. A professor of religion at Emory University, he

immersed himself in the story of Ganesha, the beloved Hindu god with

the head of an elephant. Detecting provocative Oedipal overtones in

Ganesha's story -- and phallic symbolism in his trunk -- he wrote a

book setting out his theories in 1985.

 

Nineteen years later, thanks to an Internet campaign, the world has

rediscovered Courtright's book. After a scathing posting on a popular

Indian Web site, he has received threats from Hindu militants who want

him dead.

 

"Gopal from Singapore said, 'The professor bastard should be hanged,' "

said Courtright, incredulous. "A guy from Germany said, 'Wish this

person was next to me, I would have shot him in the head.' A man called

Karodkar said, 'Kill the bastard. Whoever wrote this should not be

spared.' Someone wanted to throw me into the Indian Ocean."

 

Other academics writing about Hinduism have encountered similar

hostility, from tossed eggs to assaults to threats of extradition and

prosecution in India.

 

The attacks against American scholars come as a powerful movement

called Hindutva has gained political power in India, where most of the

world's 828 million Hindus live. Its proponents assert that Hindus have

long been denigrated and that Western authors are imposing a

Eurocentric world view on a culture they do not understand.

 

That argument resonates among many of the roughly 1.4 million Hindus

in North America as well.

 

In November, Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago professor of the

history of religion who has written 20 books about India and Hinduism,

had an egg flung at her by an angry Hindu when she was lecturing in

London. It missed.

 

In January, a book about the Hindu king Shivaji by Macalester College

religious studies professor James W. Laine provoked violent outbursts:

One of Laine's collaborators in India was assaulted, and a mob

destroyed rare manuscripts at an institute in India where Laine had

done research. The Indian edition was recalled, and India's prime

minister warned Laine not to "play with our national pride." Officials

said they want to extradite the Minnesota author to stand trial for

defamation, and the controversy has become a campaign issue in upcoming

parliamentary elections.

 

Doniger, a 63-year-old scholar at the center of many controversies, is

distressed to see her field come under the sway of what she regards as

zealots.

 

"The argument," she said, "is being fueled by a fanatical nationalism

and Hindutva, which says no one has the right to make a mistake, and no

one who is not a Hindu has the right to speak about Hinduism at all."

 

 

U.S. Cradle of Backlash

 

The recent controversy began not in New Delhi but in New Jersey.

 

In an essay posted on a Web site called Sulekha.com, New Jersey

entrepreneur Rajiv Malhotra argued that Doniger and her students had

eroticized and denigrated Hinduism, which was part of the reason "the

American mainstream misunderstands India so pathologically."

 

Malhotra criticized in particular a book for which Doniger had written

the foreword -- Courtright's "Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of

Beginnings." The book drew psychoanalytic inferences about Ganesha,

also known as Ganesa or Ganpathi, the son of the Hindu god Shiva and

his wife, Parvati.

 

Malhotra's critique produced a swift and angry response from thousands

of Hindus. An Atlanta group wrote to the president of Emory University

asking that Courtright be fired.

 

"The implication," said Courtright, "was this was a filthy book and I

had no business teaching anything." He said the quotes had been taken

out of context and ignored the uplifting lessons he had drawn from

Ganesha's story.

 

Salman Akhtar, an Indian American psychoanalyst, said the disagreement

sprang from different worldviews. "Are religious stories facts or

myths?" he asked. "Facts cannot be interpreted. Stories can be

interpreted."

 

The book was withdrawn in India, where the local edition's book jacket,

which Courtright had neither seen nor approved, depicted Ganesha as a

child -- in the nude.

 

"It was very painful reading," said T.R.N. Rao, a computer science

professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who advises the

university's branch of the Hindu Student Council, a national group with

Hindutva roots. "It makes Ganesha a eunuch . . . It was very vulgar."

 

Rao and the council started an Internet petition against the book.

Seven thousand people signed within a week -- and among their comments

were 60 threats of violence.

 

The petition was swiftly removed. "We condemn any threats to the

author and the publisher," said Rao. "We wanted to get the book

corrected and replaced. . . . We are not asking for banning the book. I

am a professor and I know the value of academic freedom."

 

 

Insider vs. Outsider

 

Courtright was not the first to find Oedipal overtones in the Ganesha

story. But his book became a rallying point for devout Hindus in the

United States who say the academic study of their religion is

completely at odds with the way they experience their faith.

 

"For the past five years, our field has been in turmoil," said Arvind

Sharma, a professor of comparative religion at McGill University in

Montreal, who sides with the critics even as he disavows the violence.

"There may be a Hindutva connection in what happened in India and the

death threats and the person who threw the egg, but there also is a

Hindu response."

 

Sharma was asked to write an essay on Hinduism for Microsoft's Encarta

encyclopedia to replace a previous essay written by Doniger. The switch

came after a Hindu activist, a former Microsoft engineer named Sankrant

Sanu, charged that Doniger's article perpetuated misleading stereotypes

and asked for a rewrite by an "insider."

 

"For pretty much all the religious traditions in America, most of the

people studying it are insiders," said Sanu. "They are people who are

believers. This is true for Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.

This is not true for Hinduism."

 

In January, fresh controversy along the same lines erupted over a book

by Macalester College's Laine, "Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic

India," which explored the life of a 17th-century icon of the Hindutva

movement.

 

After Laine suggested in his book that Shivaji's parents may have been

estranged -- an assertion that upset Hindus who see them as nearly

divine -- a history scholar in India who had collaborated with Laine

was roughed up and smeared with tar by members of Shiv Sena, a Hindutva

group. Another nationalist group called the Sambhaji Brigade stormed

the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in the city of Pune, and

destroyed priceless manuscripts. The reason? Laine had done research

there .

 

"No one in Pune today will defend my book, not my friends, not my

colleagues, because they are fearful," Laine said. "Oxford University

Press pulled the book because they are fearful of physical violence.

There will be a chilling effect on what topics you choose to do."

 

Many Indian scholars have rushed to the defense of the American

authors. They say the controversy over the books is part of a larger

pattern of political violence against scholars in India.

 

Doniger blames the Internet campaigns. "Malhotra's ignorant writings

have stirred up more passionate emotions in Internet rs who

know even less than Malhotra does, who do not read books at all,"

Doniger wrote in an e-mail. "And these people have reacted with

violence. I therefore hold him indirectly responsible."

 

Dwarakanath Rao (no relation to T.R.N. Rao), a Hindu psychoanalyst in

Ann Arbor, Mich., said Doniger had written moving interpretations of

Hindu texts that made them accessible for the first time in North

America.

 

"I just do not hear disrespect," he said. "I hear a woman who,

frankly, is in love with India."

 

 

India Inc.

 

Malhotra said he began his campaign after visiting African American

scholars at Princeton University, who told him that it had taken the

civil rights movement before black scholars were allowed into schools

to tell their own history.

 

Hindus were only following in the footsteps of blacks, Jews and the

Irish, he said, likening his campaign to a consumer struggle: "It's no

different than Ralph Nader saying we need a consumer voice against

General Motors."

 

Malhotra disavowed the violence -- he called the attackers "hooligans."

He said he has campaigned against the Hindutva agenda and opposed the

Internet petition against Courtright. "I know I am championed by the

Hindu right but there is nothing I can do about that," he said.

 

Indeed, Malhotra's critique seems to have less to do with religious

nationalism than public relations. Doniger and other academics are "an

inbred, incestuous group that control a vertically integrated

industry," the former telecom entrepreneur said. Unlike other critics'

objections, Malhotra's is not that outsiders have written about India

-- he has himself encouraged many Americans to study India -- but that

the books have harmed the image of what he calls "India Inc."

 

"In America," he said, "everything is negotiable -- you have to

negotiate who you are and how they think of you." Previously, Malhotra

waged a campaign against CNN for coverage that he charged was biased

toward India's rival, Pakistan. A foundation he has launched is

dedicated to "upgrade the portrayal of India's civilization in the

American education system and media."

 

This approach does not go down well within the academy. "We are not in

the business of marketing a nation state," said Vijay Prashad, an

international studies scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in

a recent Internet debate with Malhotra. "That is the job of the

ambassador of India, not of a scholar."

 

McGill's Sharma, a practicing Hindu, countered that the academy had

never been neutral, objective ground. Trends in academia have always

been governed by shifts in public opinion: "The recalibration of a

power equation is an untidy process."

 

But if the controversies are only about influence, Doniger said, there

was little use in discussing the merits of the various books, or her

Encarta essay on Hinduism. "It does not matter whether the article

published under my name was right or wrong," she said in an e-mail.

"The only important thing about it was that I wrote it and someone

named Sharma did not."

 

© 2004 The Washington Post Company