Rajiv Malhotra's new
book, 'Academic Hinduphobia', is a serious commentary on the ineptness of the
so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions of power and prestige at
American universities and is a pleasant read, rich with anecdotes from the
author's personal journey.
By Koenraad Elst
Rajiv Malhotra is the
belated Hindu answer to decades of the systematic blackening of Hinduism in
academe and the media. This is to be distinguished from the negative attitude
to Hinduism among ignorant Westerners settling for the “caste, cows and curry”
stereotype, and from the anti-Hindu bias among secularists in India. Against
the latter phenomenon, Hindu polemicists have long been up in arms, even though
they have also been put at a disadvantage by the monopoly of their enemies in
the opinion-making sphere. But for challenging the American India-watching
establishment, a combination of skills was necessary which Malhotra has only
gradually developed and which few others can equal.
In the present book,
Academic Hinduphobia (Voice of India, Delhi 2016, 426 pp.), he documents some
of his past battles against Hinduphobia
in academe, i.e. the ideological enmity against Hinduism. We leave
undecided for now whether that anti-Hindu attitude stems from fear towards an
intrinsically better competitor (as many Hindus flatter themselves to think),
from contempt for the substandard performance of those Hindus they have met in
polemical forums, or from hatred against phenomena in their own past which they
now think to recognize in Hinduism (“racism = untouchability”, “feudal inborn
inequality = caste”).
In this war, American
academe is linked with foreign policy interests and the Christian missionary
apparatus, and they reinforce one another. Hindus have a formidable enemy in
front of them, more wily and resourceful than they have ever experienced
before. That is why a new knowledge of the specific laws of this particular
battlefield is called for.
Demonization
Rajiv Malhotra correctly
lays his finger on the links between Christian traditions and present-day
Leftist techniques to undermine India. Many Hindus think that Western equals
Christian, but this is wrong in two ways: not all Christians are Western, and
not all Westerners are Christian. Yet, secular and leftist Westerners are
nonetheless heirs to Christian strategies and modes of thinking. Thus, many of
the Christian Saints have a narrative of martyrdom, and usually, it is that
which made them Saints. The early Church deliberately spread or concocted
martyrdom stories, for it empirically found these successful in swaying people
towards accepting the Christian message.
Today, this tradition is
being continued in secularized form: “Western human rights activists and
non-Westerners trained and funded by them, go around the world creating new
categories of ‘victims’ that can be used in divide-and-conquer strategies
against other cultures. In India’s case, the largest funding of this type goes
to middlemen who can deliver narratives about ‘abused’ Dalits and native
(especially Hindu) women.” (p.219)
Here, Malhotra prepares
the ground for his Breaking India thesis, where different forces unite with a
common goal: to deconstruct India’s majority culture and fragment the country.
At the same time, he sketches the psychology of the Hindu-haters, explaining
why they have such a good conscience in lambasting Hinduism and trying to
destroy it. They like to see themselves as the oppressed underdogs, or in this
case as champions of the oppressed, in spite of their privileged social
position and their senior position vis-à-vis the born Hindus who come to earn
PhDs under their guidance.
Among those confronted
here are Sarah Caldwell, David Gordon White, Deepak Sarma, Robert Zydenbos and
Shankar Vedantam. Note the names of some Hindu-born sepoys. The term “sepoy”
for Hindus trying to curry favour with their white superiors needs to be
nuanced a little bit. In colonial days, it was black and white: Britons trying
to perpetuate and legitimize their domination, and Indian underlings trying to
prosper as much as possible in the British system. Today, American Indologists
are also partly influenced (esp. in their furious hatred of Hindutva) by Indian
secularist opinion, but then this has, in turn, been oriented in an anti-Hindu
sense precisely by the earlier cultural anglicization of the elites during
colonial times. Anyway, in the present context, it is indeed Americans leading
the dance and Indians trying to keep up.
Principally, Malhotra
focuses on different episodes in the one controversy that made him a household
name in Indology circles: exposing Wendy Doniger’s brand of roundabout and
candid-sounding anti-Hindu polemic. By his much-publicized example, he has
galvanized many Hindus into actively mapping the battlefield and even coming
out to do battle themselves against the mighty and intolerant Hindu-watching
establishment. There is no longer an excuse for the all-too-common Hindu
attitude of smug laziness hiding behind the spiritual-sounding explanation
that, instead of our own effort, the law of karma will take care of everything.
The book is a pleasant
read because the described characters are variegated and the events on the
ground are swiftly advancing all while the ideas are being developed. For
understanding the entirety of its message, I can only advise you to read it, it
is really worth your time. Here I will limit myself to a searchlight on a few
passages.
Wendy’s
psycho-analytic free-for-all
One of the faces of
academic “Hinduphobia” is the flippant eroticizing discourse about Hindu
civilization developed by Chicago University’s Prof. Wendy Doniger, continued
by her erstwhile Ph.D. students and eagerly taken over by prominent media like
the Washington Post. Here, Malhotra first of all amply documents the reality
and seriousness of the problem. Imagine: a number of professors who are not at
all qualified as psycho-analysts and would be punishable if they applied their
diagnosis to a living human being, feel entitled to psycho-analyse a Guru like
Ramakrishna or a
God like Ganesha.
Thus, Jeffrey Kripal’s
thesis about Ramakrishna (Kali’s Child) is, according to a quoted Bengali
critic, marred by “faulty translations”, “wilful distortion and manipulation of
sources”, “remarkable ignorance of Bengali culture”, “misrepresentations” and a
simply defective knowledge of both Sanskrit and Bengali. (p.101) He has, like
too many academics, the tendency to “first suspect, then assume, then present
as a fact” his own desired scenario, i.e. “that Ramakrishna was sexually abused
as a child”. (p.105) A closer look at his errors could make the reader
embarrassed in Kripal’s place, e.g. mistranslating “lap” as “genitals”, “head”
as “phallus”, “touching softly” as “sodomy” etc. Kripal’s whole scenario of
Ramakrishna as a defiler of boys is not only unsubstantiated, it provides not
only a peep into Kripal’s own morbid mind; it is also, in this age of cultural
hypersensitivity, a brutal violation of Hindu and Bengali feelings. If it were
an unpleasant truth, it had a right to get said in spite of what the concerned
communities would think, but even then, a more circumspect mode of expression
and more interaction with the community directly affected, would have been
called for. But when it comes to Hindus, riding roughshod over them is still
the done thing.
Similarly, Paul
Courtright develops his thesis about Ganesha’s broken trunk being a limp
phallus, and of Ganesha being the first god with an Oedipus complex, on the
basis of what is clearly a defective knowledge about the elephant god. The lore
surrounding Ganesha is vast, and does not always live up to Courtright’s
stereotype of a sweets-addicted diabetic. He has some stories in Hindu
literature to his credit where his phallus is not exactly limp. Indeed, I
myself am the lucky owner of a Ganesha bronze where he is doing it with a
Dakini.
Wendy Doniger herself is
now best known for the numerous errors in her book The Hindus, an Alternative
History, diagnosed in detail by Vishal Agarwal. Known among laymen as a
Sanskritist, her shoddy translations of Sanskrit classics have been criticized by
colleagues like Michael Witzel, not exactly a friend of the Hindus. In a normal
academic setting, with word and counter-word, where the peer review would have
included first-hand practitioners of the tradition concerned, Doniger’s or
Kripal’s or Courtright’s gross errors would never have passed muster. It is
only because the dice have been loaded against Hinduism that these hilarious
distortions are possible. It is, therefore, a very necessary and very
reasonable struggle that Malhotra has taken up.
The RISA list
When I wrote my book The
Argumentative Hindu (2012), I seriously wondered whether to include my
exchanges with the RISA (Religion In South Asia) list about the dishonourable
way listmaster Deepak Sarma and the rest of the gang overruled list rules in
order to banish me, and how many prominent Indologists actively or passively
supported their tricks. I didn’t consider my own story that important, but
finally I decided to do it, just for the sake of history. Future as well as
present students of the conflicting worldviews in India and among
India-watchers in the West are or will be interested in a detailed illustration
of how mean and how pompous the anti-Hindu crowd can be in defending their
power position.
Here we get a detailed
report on a much more important RISA debate that took place in 2003, and as it
turns out, it was indeed worth making this information available. A lot of
anecdotal data become known here, useful one day for the occasional biographer,
such as the interesting tidbit that Anant Rambachan, with whom Malhotra crossed
swords in his book Indra’s Net, was an ally back then (p.210). More
fundamentally, and affecting the whole Hindu-American community, we note Paul
Coutright’s turn-around to a sudden willingness for dialogue with the Hindus
about his erstwhile thesis (p.211). The reason that mattered most in the
prevailing Zeitgeist, was that “American Hinduism is a minority religion in
America (…) that deserves the same treatment that is already being given to
other American minority religions – such as Native American, Buddhist or
Islamic – by the Academy. The subaltern studies depiction of Hinduism as being
the dominant religion of India must, therefore, be questioned in the American
context.” (p.213)
On the other hand, in all
sobriety, I must also note how, in spite of that hopeful event, very little has
changed. Recent incidents, some concerning Malhotra himself, confirm that the
exclusion of people because of their opinion, the systematic haughtiness
because of institutional rank (“Malhotra is not even an academic”, a sophomoric
attitude unbecoming of anyone experienced with how progress in research is
made, and by whom), the intellectually contemptible use of “guilt by
association”, are all still in evidence in Western Indologist forums. He notes
an improvement in the general mood as a result of the debate: “For the first
time in RISA’s history, to the best of my knowledge, the diaspora voices are
not being branded as saffronists, Hindutva fanatics, fascists, chauvinists, dowry
extortionists, Muslim killers, nun rapists, Dalit abusers, etc. One has to wait
and see whether this is temporary or permanent.” (p.215)
So far, the impression
prevails that the mood has not changed much. We saw this in 2015, when Malhotra
was accused of plagiarism. A detailed look at the case exonerated him and
actually made the whole controversy rather ludicrous, yet otherwise moderate
voices on the Indology and the Indo-Eurasian Research lists (I can’t speak for
the RISA list, but it contains the same people) all ganged up against him. They
acted very indignant over something that, even if it were true, would only be a
trifle, immaterial to the debate at hand. It is this persistence of the same
anti-Hindu attitudes that makes this book more than a historical document: it
teaches Hindus what to expect today if they challenge the Indological
establishment.
In 2003, one factor was
perhaps that a BJP government ruled in Delhi and, in spite of its so-called
“saffronization” of the history textbooks, refuted in practice all the
apprehensions about “Hindu fascist” rule which the same Indologists had uttered
in the 1990s. Remember, they had predicted a “Muslim Holocaust” if ever the BJP
would come to power (and have never had to bear the consequences of their
grossly wrong prediction in the field of their supposed expertise). Even
ivory-tower academics had to be aware of that feedback from reality. Then
again, this consideration ought to prevail even now, with Narendra Modi opening
many doors internationally and not at all living up to the hate-image which
many India-watchers had sworn by in the preceding years. Yet, “Hinduphobia” is
still with us.
Phobia
The major flaw in this
book is its title. I object to political terms ending in -phobia, normally a
medical term meaning “irrational fear”, as in arachnophobia, the “irrational
fear of spiders”. As far as I know, the first term in this category of political
terms borrowed from the medical register, was homophobia, the “irrational fear
of homosexuals”. First of all, the word was wrongly constructed. Literally, it
means “fear of the same”, i.e. “fear of the same sex”, whereas men criticizing
homosexuality are not usually afraid of men. In fact the words targets people
who disapprove of homosexuality, no matter what their rational or emotional
motive. The term or connotation “sexuality” is missing (you might try
“homophilophobia”), and the targeted “disapproval” is not the same thing as the
stated “fear”, nor as the intended “hate”. Still, the neologism won through
thanks to the bourgeoisie’s sheepish acceptance ot it.
Next came Islamophobia,
literally “irrational fear of Islam”, intended to mean “hatred of Islam”, and
in effect targeting “disapproval of Islam”, “Islam criticism”. This term was
first launched in the 1990s by the Runnymede Trust, a British Quango dedicated
to fighting racism. It was taken over by many governments and media, and
especially promoted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It is an
intensely mendacious term trying to criminalize the normal exercise of the
power of discrimination. The targeted critics of Islam need neither fear nor
hate Islam, their attitude may rather be likened to that of a teacher using his
red pencil to cross out a mistake in a pupil’s homework. But again, a mighty
promotion by powerful actors made the word gain household status.
On this model, the term
Hinduphobia was coined. At bottom, we have to reject this term as much as we
rejected the use of psychiatry against dissident viewpoints in the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, an
irrational anti-Hinduism is a reality. It is precisely through comparison with
Islam that this becomes glaring. Whenever a group of people gets killed in the
name of Islam, immediately the politicians concerned and the media assure us
that this terror “has nothing to do with Islam”. In the case of Hinduism, it is
just the reverse. Of any merit of Hinduism, it is immediately assumed that “it
has nothing to do with Hinduism”, whereas every problem in India is
automatically blamed on Hinduism, from poverty (“the Hindu rate of growth”) to
rape.
Thus, it is verifiable
that books may be written about “Jain mathematics”, but when Hindus do
mathematics, it will be called “Indian mathematics” or “the Kerala school of
mathematics”. Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar once praised India’s
inherent pluralism, enumerated its well-attested hospitality to refugee groups,
and then attributed all this not to Hinduism, but to “something in the air
here”. In missionary propaganda and in
the secularist media, it is always emphasized that “tribals are not Hindus”;
except when they take revenge on Christians or Muslims, because then the media
report on “Hindu rioters”.
This obsessive negativity
towards Hinduism needs to be named and shamed. Now that the bourgeoisie has
interiorized terms like Homophobia and Islamophobia, it is clear that the
neologism Hinduphobia belongs to a language register they will understand. Once
heightened scruples prevail and linguistic hygiene is restored, all three terms
may be discarded together. But until then, the use of Hinduphobia in
counter-attack mode is a wise compromise with the prevailing opinion climate.
Koenraad
Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn
and to dissent. After a few hippie years, he studied at the KU Leuven,
obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a
research stay at Benares Hindu University, he did original fieldwork for
a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in
1998. As an independent researcher, he earned laurels and ostracism with
his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular
state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and
Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. - See more at:
http://www.pragyata.com/mag/defence-against-hinduphobia-205#sthash.zq8Eu3UN.dpuf
Koenraad Elst (°Leuven
1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a
few hippie years, he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in
Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu
University, he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism,
which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998. As an independent researcher, he
earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam,
multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya
temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy.
Courtesy: Pragyata
Rajiv
Malhotra's new book, 'Academic Hinduphobia', is a serious commentary on
the ineptness of the so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions
of power and prestige at American universities and is a pleasant read,
rich with anecdotes from the author's personal journey.
- See more at: http://www.pragyata.com/mag/defence-against-hinduphobia-205#sthash.VLyofQmx.dpuf
Rajiv
Malhotra's new book, 'Academic Hinduphobia', is a serious commentary on
the ineptness of the so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions
of power and prestige at American universities and is a pleasant read,
rich with anecdotes from the author's personal journey.
- See more at: http://www.pragyata.com/mag/defence-against-hinduphobia-205#sthash.VLyofQmx.dpuf
Rajiv
Malhotra's new book, 'Academic Hinduphobia', is a serious commentary on
the ineptness of the so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions
of power and prestige at American universities and is a pleasant read,
rich with anecdotes from the author's personal journey.
- See more at: http://www.pragyata.com/mag/defence-against-hinduphobia-205#sthash.VLyofQmx.dpuf
Rajiv
Malhotra's new book, 'Academic Hinduphobia', is a serious commentary on
the ineptness of the so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions
of power and prestige at American universities and is a pleasant read,
rich with anecdotes from the author's personal journey.
- See more at: http://www.pragyata.com/mag/defence-against-hinduphobia-205#sthash.VLyofQmx.dpuf
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